By Rohana R. Wasala

Continued from April 26, 2026

Below is the last paragraph of Part III published eleven days ago:

Be that as it may, his (i.e., president Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s)  efforts are apparently expended on appeasing the handful of racist Tamil separatists and the few religious extremists hiding safely in plain sight, taking refuge within the larger peaceful Tamil, Catholic, and Muslim mainstream minority communities. The latent resurgence of political (Tamil separatist) and religio-political (Catholic and Islamist) extremism has become a complex social, political, and security issue for the Sinhalese Buddhist majority Sri Lankan state. This problem gets more complicated by the interventionist attention that is focused into its internal affairs by competing global and regional superpowers in the geostrategically supersensitive Indo-Pacific, where Sri Lanka is located, especially by the powerful Western countries that have taken in large Tamil diaspora populations. The Buddhist majority community is not totally free from its own variety of extremists. The agitating monk activists like Balangoda Kassapa Thero and Galaboda-aththe Gnanasara Thero who criticise the Walk for Peace having misunderstood its genuine purpose, are examples; they are doing a great disservice to the genuine causes they are trying to bravely champion. 

Part IV begins here:

The egregious attempt to link the nationalist political leaders and some prominent members of the defence forces who served under them to the horrific Easter Sunday suicide bombings carried out by IS Jihadists in 2019 (as established by the American Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI)I, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), and the British Scotland Yard/Metropolitan Police, and by Sri Lanka’s own Intelligence services) is based on some alleged exposures made by a shady character/in fact, an absconding wanted criminal suspect evading justice in his home country Sri Lanka according to social media sources called Hanzeer Azad Maulana, to the British Channel 4 TV. (The director of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of Sri Lanka Police Department Shani Abeyesekera was reported to have gone to France to meet with Azad Maulana, who is alleged to be actually living in Switzerland at present seeking political asylum there; Abeysekera’s intention is said to be to get Maulan’s assistance with his plan to indict the Rajapaksas in connection with the Easter Sunday bombings).

 Now, the British Channel 4, though publicly owned, receives no public funding and therefore, is required to earn its revenue through its commercial activities. As is well-known, one of the ways it earns income is by commissioning, producing, and broadcasting fake documentaries for high-paying clients. To mention a few examples that AI provides for this: Ghostwatch (1992), Brass Eye (1997-2001), A Very British UFO Hoax (2003), Accused: The Hampstead Paedophile (2015) and Will AI Take My Job? (2025). 

Sri Lanka has been at the receiving end of Channel 4’s engagement in its disinformation business. Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields (June 2011) and its follow-up, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished (March 2012) were flaunted at the time as ‘award winning investigations’ produced by the British ITN Productions  for Channel 4 TV. Watching Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields in June 2011 broadcast in Australia by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) on its Four Corners programme, I at once realized that it was a collage of stock footage and news reels depicting purposely acted out scenes supporting Channel 4’s made-up story of alleged Sri Lankan Army atrocities against captured Tamil rebels and innocent Tamil civilians. These films were carefully analysed by Sri Lankan IT experts and revealed to be fakes concocted with the assistance of lying Tamil economic refugees seeking asylum in the West after the military defeat of the separatist movement in Sri Lanka in 2009. 

Channel 4  aired a documentary film entitled ‘Sri Lanka’s Easter Bombings: Dispatches’ as an episode of a long running, so-called investigative series, featuring the above named Azad Hanzeer Maulana on September 5, 2023. Maulana was presented there as a whistleblower (Never mind, he was more than four years too late, for whistleblowing in this case). He had served as spokesman for Sivanesaturei Chandrakanthan alias Pilleyaaan, a former rebel child soldier turned politician, who later became the leader of the Tamil Makkhal Vidutalai Puligal party.  Maulana was depicted as exposing high level complicity in the 2019 Easter Easter Sunday bombings, based on his prior active association with Pilleyaan. In the 2023 Channel 4 (pseudo)documentary, Maulana implicated high-ranking Sri Lankan officials in the heinous crime by claiming that they were participating in a plot to create instability in the country prior to the November 2019 presidential election  and facilitate the return of the Rajapaksa family to power.

But, at the time of the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019, Pilleyaan was in prison because he had been arrested in October 2015 in connection with the 2005 murder of former Tamil National Alliance (TNA) MP for Batticaloa, Joseph Pararajasingham. Pilleyaan was in prison from October, 2015 to November 2020 under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). So there was no way he could have gotten involved in the Easter Sunday bombings plot in order to facilitate the Rajapaksas’ return to power in November 2019 (in the form of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s election as president). 

The reason for GR to be targeted by anti-nationalists (nostalgically harking back to the successful 2015 regime change plot) is not far to seek in my opinion. He played a decisive role in defeating Tamil separatist terrorism, and has earned the wrath of the unforgiving Eelamists. They believed that the executive presidency was the greatest obstacle to their separatist project. The final goal of Kumar David, the proponent of the ‘single issue common candidate’ platform for the 2015 regime change presidential election, was the complete abolition of the executive presidential system, as stated before. He had arbitrarily decided that the executive presidential system centralized power in the president. 

The immediate objective that he suggested was for the common candidate to win the election and soon after to abolish the executive presidential system and just ‘go home’! He wanted to unify the divided opposition against the Rajapaksas whom he hated. To this end, KD insisted that there should be no departure from the course he had proposed and that it should be included in the election manifesto of the opposition coalition, the New Democratic Front (the NDF led by Ranil Wickremasinghe’s United National Party) that fielded Maithripala Sirisena against the then incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa, leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. Apparently, KD was not taken seriously at that point; so he wanted others who shared his insistence on the abolition of the executive presidency to withdraw support for Sirisena in 2014 (which obviously, did not affect the final election result that went in favour of the latter).  

To return to president Anura Kumara Dissanayake wooing the Catholic Church, he, as stated at the beginning, extended an official invitation to Pope Leo XIV, Pope Francis’s successor, to visit Sri Lanka, presumably on a date that suits the latter. Incidentally, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican Secretary for Relations with States, visited Sri Lanka in November 2025 to mark the 50th anniversary of the formalization of diplomatic relations between it and the Holy See. He met with President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya on November 4, 2025. They discussed their common purpose to reinforce cooperation between Sri Lanka and the Holy See as sovereign states. The Vatican Secretary conveyed Pope Leo’s intention to visit Sri Lanka. So, president Dissanayake’s invitation was probably in response to that papal wish. On the 2025 visit, Archbishop Gallagher visited St. Anthony’s Shrine in Kochchikade, which was one of the sites of  the 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bombings, and celebrated a Solemn  Mass of Thanksgiving at St. Lucia Cathedral in Kotahena, Colombo. 

There have been only three papal visits to Sri Lanka since then, and all three after 1970, in which year the United Left Front (ULF) coalition led by Mme Sirimavo Bandaranaike, having won a landslide electoral victory, formed a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution, and subsequently proclaimed the country a republic in May 1972: the first visit was  by Pope Paul VI in December 1970, the second by Pope John Paul II in January 1995, two months into the first term of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s presidency, after seventeen years of UNP rule, and the third by Pope Francis in January 2015, soon after  Maithripala Sirisena’s swearing in as president. The Republican Constitution introduced in 1972 replaced the previous Soulbury Constitution, the legal framework which had established a British model based parliamentary system of government with its bicameral legislature (House of Representatives and Senate) and its institution of a Prime Minister who was responsible to Parliament and who headed the executive, while the monarch served as the ceremonial head of state; the Soulbury constitution had also provided special safeguards for minorities through its Section 29. 

The Soulbury Constitution remained operative from 1948 until it was replaced in 1972. Its replacement must have been viewed with concern by the minorities. A lasting hangover of discontent among minority groups with the republican change of 1972 seems to have persisted to this day. While the majority Sinhalese Buddhist community saw the change as an affirmation of total independence from British colonial rule for all  the communities, certain racial and religious minorities, usually under the influence of opportunistic politicians, tended to interpret it as the beginning of an era of discrimination against them by the Sinhalese Buddhist majority, leading to an erosion of their human rights. Heads of state elected from the left of centre nationalist camp, of necessity, because of or despite the country’s constitutional guarantee of the foremost place for Buddhism (Article 9) without prejudice to the rights of other religions, have always made a special attempt to reassure the  successive Popes that Sri Lanka is firmly committed to look after its Catholic community without any discrimination; they have also adopted a similarly peaceable, even dovish, diplomatic approach towards global Hindu and Muslim states. 

After Pope Paul VI visited Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1970 at the beginning of the United Left Front government of Mme Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the country established diplomatic relations with the Holy See in September 1975. Following Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1995, President Mahinda Rajapaksa met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican in June 2012 and received his counsel about post-war reconciliation and shared his positive view of the local Catholic community’s role in national development.. Pope Francis’s visit in January 2015 coincided with the inauguration of president Maithripala Sirisena, heading the Yahapalana administration that resulted from the 2015 regime change effected through external intervention, as generally held by informed political observers. 

Sirisena had decamped from his long-time colleague and leader Mahinda Rajapaksa’s United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA), but soon returned to assume its leadership, and lure Rajapaksa to be his ally in order to win the parliamentary election, but, in a lowly below the belt act of betrayal, vowed not to give him premiership even if the UPFA were to win the largest number of seats in the then imminent parliamentary election; Sirisena played this trump card of his in an election eve speech when the time allocated for electioneering had expired. In another wily stratagem (probably thought up by the external regime changers) in 2018, Sirisena severed the UPFA from the so-called unity or national government of the Yahapalanaya, which allowed it to run its dysfunctional course to the end. 

No amount of disinformation and misinformation can change the fact that the Yahapalana authorities failed to prevent the deadly Easter Sunday suicide bombings staged by Islamist jihadists just six months before that eventhough prior warnings including names of specific individuals and places, and times from foreign and local intelligence sources had been received well in advance.   

The 2005-2015 decade saw exceptionally rapid overall development of the country despite the ravages of separatist terrorism and the undermining efforts of oppositional saboteurs. Sri Lanka successfully transitioned to a lower-middle-income country status around 2010, and by 2014, it was actively pursuing the goal of reaching the upper-middle-income status following robust growth, with the economy growing at an average of 6%-7.4% (based on World Bank figures) following the end of the civil conflict in 2009. The economic surge was driven by construction services and industrial shifts. The end of the 30 year insurgency was soon followed by sure signs of increasing income and improving infra structure, leading to significant poverty  alleviation. Unfortunately, the main architects of that comprehensive national development, the Rajapaksas then at the helm, indulged in naive dynastic politics and nepotism, and apparent soft-pedaling on corruption by cronies and became easy prey to global hegemonic powers that identified them as inimical to their geopolitical agendas. 

From pre-historic times, Sri Lanka’s geographical location in the Indian Ocean has been the most decisive factor in shaping its economy, culture, and politics. For about two thousand years it acted as a vital trade hub on the maritime Silk Road, connecting China, India, Persia, Egypt, and even Rome. Just as Sri Lanka faced seventeen invasions from South India over that long period, which she defeated, she survived the depredations of three mercantile nations from Europe during the last five centuries. Lingering apparitions of those  ancient demonic powers are forming a coalition of destabilizing fifth columnists in the form of racist Tamil separatists and Christian and Islamic religio-political extremists arraigned against the  island state located at a strategic point in the Indian Ocean re-named by the powers that be as the Indo-Pacific; the new name signifies a major geopolitical shift linking the Western Pacific and Indian Oceans into a single strategic maritime system in order to contain the rising China.

Continued