{"id":143356,"date":"2024-08-04T15:48:19","date_gmt":"2024-08-04T22:48:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=143356"},"modified":"2024-08-04T15:48:19","modified_gmt":"2024-08-04T22:48:19","slug":"decolonizing-history-and-fiction-in-post-ethnic-sri-lanka-beyond-cold-war-tropes-of-dark-natives-and-white-malice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2024\/08\/04\/decolonizing-history-and-fiction-in-post-ethnic-sri-lanka-beyond-cold-war-tropes-of-dark-natives-and-white-malice\/","title":{"rendered":"Decolonizing History and Fiction in Post-Ethnic Sri Lanka: Beyond Cold War Tropes of Dark Natives and White Malice"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

Fair is foul and foul is fair\u201d\u2014 William Shakespeare, Macbeth<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why are there no Booker Prize-winning novels about mundane multicultural families that inter-married for generations, shared religion\/s, language\/s, histories, and co-existed for centuries, while living in relative harmony in Ceylon\/ Sri Lanka?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the trope of \u2018dark natives\u2019 engaged in endless, chaotic violence an international literature prize-winning bestseller that masks white mischief, including sanitized, techno-scientific AI guided hybrid warfare in a post-Truth world awash in distracting Culture Wars?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Susan William\u2019s brilliant and brave book White Malice\u201d is subtitled The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa\u2019. Her analysis may well apply to Eurobond debt trapped Sri Lanka, Pakistan and other Afro-Asian post\/colonies, where National Endowment for Democracy (NED), funded protests and regime change operations have unfolded recently. NED is known as the second Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversely, why are there very few prizes, literary or otherwise, for brilliant cross-over social science researchers and journalists like Phil Miller, author of the book Keenie Meenie:The British Mercenaries who got away with war crimes\u201d in Sri Lanka, Oman, Afghanistan, and other parts of the post\/colony. Or, perhaps we should call it the post-Covid-19 Eurobond and International Monetary Fund (IMF) debt-trapped, Afro-Asian neo-colony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Located at the center of the Indian Ocean World, a tropical monsoon paradise isle, long deemed an unsinkable aircraft carrier\u201d and hence perpetually in the cross-hairs of great power rivalry, Serendip, Taprobane, Ceylon, Sri Lanka, has so many stories to tell beside tired and trite narratives of \u2018ethno-religious violence\u2019 — a grand narrative that launched 41 years ago with the staging of \u2018Black July\u2019 1983 as Cold War turned hot in the Global South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond Literary Prize Politics and Raj Nostalgia Festivals<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Literary prize politics and the merits of Shehan Karunatilleke or V.V. Ganashanathan\u2019s novels aside, why not invite the brilliant and brave American journalist, Vincent Bevins to speak at the Galle Literary festival? Or ask Phil Miller in place of rose-tinted British Raj Nostalgia favourites -the flip side of the dark natives\u2019 violence and corruption stereotype? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bevins is the award winning author of The Jakarta Method\u201d, about the US Central Intelligence Agency\u2019s (CIA), and British secret service MI-6\u2019s Cold War killing sprees across Asia, Africa and Latin America against communists, socialists and the Red left that helps contextualize some of the armed conflict evident in de-colonizing Ceylon\/ Sri Lanka, and elsewhere in the Afro\/Asian post\/colony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phil Miller and Vincent Bevin\u2019s brave books, both published in 2020, read better than a lot of fiction, and are based on recently de-classified documents, including the US State Department, Asia Foundation, the Foreign Office and British Archives. Most important and fascinating in both Bevin\u2019s (and Miller\u2019s) books are the interviews with people who lived through GLADIO-style Cold War clandestine violence and purges against Communists, Socialists the Left and Trade Unions in the de-colonizing Global South \u2013 a subject to which we shall return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Keenie Meenie\u201d is based on Miller\u2019s Doctoral research at the University of London, Bevin\u2019s he Jakarta Method\u2019 details the 1965 anti-Communist violence and regime change in Indonesia, and helps contextualize patterns of violence evident in de-colonizing Ceylon\/Sri Lanka and other Afro\/Asian and South American post\/colonies, subjected to Cold War Proxy Wars– given Washington\u2019s Domino Theory\u201d that Communism would sweep through Asia after the fall of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They help us connect the dots of apparently local and internal\u2019 \u2018Leftist terrorists\u2019, ethnic, religious and nationalist violence to the wider global Cold War strategy of fanning proxy wars to ensure continued colonial divide and rule policies, while weaponizing religious, linguistic and cultural differences in the Afro-Asian post\/colony, by the US-led war machine which maintains a surveillance network of more than 800 military bases around the world at this time to safeguard Euro-American and allied corporate financial, economic and security interests including in off-shore tax havens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millers \u2019s book helps locate the South Asian Cold War proxy war that certainly unfolded in Sri Lanka — between India, regional hegemon, and the Capitalist West backed and penetrated United National Party\u2019s (UNP), President J.R Jayawardena regime in Colombo after 1977– when \u2018Yankie Dickie\u2019 as JR was nick-named), came to power. The proxy war between the neocolonial West and India escalated after the staging of the 1983 pogrom\/riots in Colombo that opened the door to British, US\/Israeli intelligence agencies and mercenaries who also provided protection to the President.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus too, we may read Sri Lanka\u2019s ethnic conflict\u2019 as another South Asian Regional Cold War proxy war: India, allied then as now with then Communist Russia\/ the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), had already fought a war with US-proxy Pakistan\u2019s \u2018Garrison State\u2019 on its western border and assisted the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, (formally, East Pakistan). India was hence fearful of another US military base being set up in her Southern backyard- the coveted Trincomalee deep sea habour, over which The British and French had once fought a bloody battle seeking to extend surveillance and control over Indian Ocean trade routes. Hence, Indian intelligence agencies through the Research and Analysis wing (RAW), funded and trained Tamil militant groups including the Liberation Tigers (LTTE), in the northeast– to deter the pro-US Colombo regime from any such adventure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lifting the Veil of Islanded Ignorance<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with Yale University historian, Eugen Ford\u2019s Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America\u2019s Secret Strategy in South Asia\u201d, Miller and Bevins help lift the veil off long-cultivated islanded ignorance among Colombo\u2019s academic, political, and business intelligentsia about the wider geopolitical Cold War dynamics that contextualize Sri Lanka\u2019s spasms of conflict among Leftists, ethno-nationalists and the State, as well as, the pogrom\/riots of 1983 and the war that followed. This includes the weaponization of linguistic and religious identity politics in collusion with and funding for politicians in the geostrategic post\/colony \u2013still struggling for real independence from the UK-US Raj.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America\u2019s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia\u201d (Yale University Press; 2017)\u2019 based on analysis of de-classified Asia Foundation and State Department documents tells the story of the use and abuse of religion\/s and religious networks of influence to stave off \u2018God-less\u201d Communist, socialist and left movements. Ford traces the weaponization of Buddhism by the CIA via the Asia Foundation in order to contain Communism, as well as, de-colonization struggles in Southeast Asia, including Burma, now Myanmar and Sri Lanka– emanating from Theravada Thailand, where SEATO the Southeast Asian NATO was set up head-quartered. This work parallels work by historians who have traced a similar weaponization of Islam in West and Central Asia against Communist and Socialist national liberation movements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jakarta Method-style \u2018lists\u2019 of homes and business to be targeted were used in the Pogrom of 1983 in Sri Lanka. Likewise, the forms and aesthetics of violence associated with the killings in university campuses during the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna <\/em>(JVP), uprising in 1971, and 1988-89 echo patterns of violence in Universities across Indonesia during the CIA-backed anti-communist purges of 1965.The pogrom\/ riots of 1983 and subsequent bouts of armed conflict in Sri Lanka attenuated close ties among the Sinhala and Tamil speaking communities that had live in proximity for centuries and inter-married for generations in urban areas and coastal regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on impeccable research these excellent books by Bevins\u2019, Ford and Millar help us connect the dots of apparently local and internal\u2019 Leftist terrorists, ethnic, religious and nationalist conflicts in Sri Lanka to the wider Cold War strategy of fanning regional proxy wars in the post\/colony, to ensure neo-colonial divide and rule policies, while weaponizing religious, linguistic and cultural differences. This to protect the economic and security interest of a retreating UK Empire and the rising US empire at the end of World War 2 in the Global South.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GLADIO style \u2018stay behind\u2019 operations ensured continued colonial divide and rule proxy war in the decolonizing third world. After, all the US-led war machine maintains a network of more than 800 military bases around the world at this time to safeguard Euro-American and allied corporate financial, economic and security interests including in off-shore tax havens. And they were not growing roses and waterlilies in these military bases. \u2018<\/p>\n\n\n\n

White Mercenaries and whiter Malice: Grenades in Cocktail Glasses<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phil Miller book which exposes the role of the British secret services in the post\/colony.  lifts the veil of secrecy about the role of British mercenaries and Special Operations Forces that structured 30 year of armed conflict in the geostrategic island. It reveals another dimension of how the global geopolitical arena of Cold War in South Asia structured an apparently internal conflict in Sri Lanka<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Phil Miller\u2019s book opens with the arrival of Britain\u2019s Keenie Meenie Mercenaries, ex-SAS officers in the island in 1983.  The Keenie Meenie or KMS mercenaries (now Saladin London) were in the country to help set up and train the Sri Lankan Special Task Force (STF), later accused of war crimes, also with Israeli intelligence MOSSAD agents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miller describes how villagers in Batticaloa, Eastern Province who were bombed from the air called the Keenie Meenie white mercenaries, who flew the military helicopters- Mossadu\u201d. Ironically some of the same villages from the highly multicultural Eastern Province later became refugees in Britain. The STF training Camps were overseen by Ravi Jayawardena, son of the US-backed President J.R. Jayawardena. Ravi who was a marksman, remarkably, later became a Buddhist Monk in Thailand and dawned Robes for a short time, before migrating to Australia, and then returning to Sri Lanka. Was he the agent of his own destiny or \u2018caught in webs of belief\u2019 and structures of power that others had spun?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mossadu was the local name for the foreign (white) mercenaries a la Israel\u2019s intelligence agency, The British Mossadu\u2019 also participated in dropping grenades in cocktail glasses taken from the Officer\u2019s Mess in Trincomalee Harbour on innocent civilians according to a British Diplomat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the role of Indian Intelligence agencies in Sri Lanka\u2019s ethnic war\u2019 is well known, also given the \u2018Indian Peace Keeping Forces\u2019 intervention 1987-90, the role of British agents was a well-kept secret. So too, the shadowy role of Israel\u2019s Mossad, which had leaked out in a book by an Israel Intelligence officer that led to the \u2018The Mossad Report.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Western Special Forces and mercenaries entered Sri Lanka as part of a proxy war on India in the geostrategic island nation, given India\u2019s alignment with Communist Russia\/USSR.  India\u2019s intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), operations had included setting up of Tamil militant groups in northeast Sri Lanka\u2014in order to ward off any US military base in Trincomalee in a geostrategic theater called Sri Lanka. The setting up of the Voice of America Station in Iranavilla after JRJ came to power clearly set off alarm bell in Delhi.The Weaponization of linguistic tensions among Sinhalas and Tamils began after the US-backed President J.R. Jayawardena came to power, unseating the Socialist Delhi-aligned Sirimavo Bandaranaike regime in 1977.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mossadu\u201d Weaponizing Religion? Staging a Buddhist-Islam Clash of Civilizations?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long sustaining ties among Tamils and Muslim communities in the Eastern Province were systematically targeted and damaged during counter-terrorism\u201d operations in the second decade of armed conflict when Israel\u2019s Mossad ran riot. The STF training camps were located in the highly multicultural Eastern Province, where Mossad agents, highly experienced in Israeli State counter-terrorism\u2019 operations against Muslim and Christian populations in Palestine weaponized religious differences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Inter-and intra-religious conflicts proliferated. Staged massacres such as the Kathankudi Mosque and retaliations led to the mass expulsion of Muslims who had once fought alongside the LTTE against the State, in 1991, from Jaffna and the northern province. The counter-terrorism operations run by white mercenaries and Special Operations Forces also aimed to divided and weakened the LTTE\u201ds Eastern and Northern command.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miller provides a detailed account about the sundering of close ties between Muslims and Tamils in the East. Mossad continues to this day to be present in Batticaloa operating among Muslim communities where Saudi slush funds circulate among politicians. A characteristic of Mossad attacks is targeting Christian communities and then blaming Muslims, in order to create \u2018cascades of violence\u2019 as also happened recently in the occupied Golan Heights when a children\u2019s playground in Majdal Shams, a Druze (Christian), area was targeted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the mysterious ISIS-claimed Easter Sunday attacks in 2019 the even more mysterious Zion Church in Batticaloe was targeted, seemingly, an own goal mission. Four Chinese marine scientists were also killed in the attacks at Kingsbury Hotel and a joint research expedition with the National Aquatic agency (NARA), on a Chinese research vessel Shi Yan-3 was then aborted. The incoming US ambassador, Elizabeth Horst, is on record stating at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year that it is the highest priority of the US government to prevent Chinese research expeditions in Sri Lanka! The CIA and Mossad work closely together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mossad agents were and are also present in many coastal areas and the Surfing Zones of Arugam Bay along Sri Lanka\u2019s strategic Indian Ocean coastline that was also hit by undersea nuclear explosions that triggered the Indian Ocean Tsunami Disaster in 2004 off the Coast of Aceh, Indonesia as Cold War on China heated up the Indian Ocean region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hence, too the local refrain among multicultural border communities in Sri Lanka where I did ethnographic research in the late nineties, that the armed conflict was Someone Else\u2019s War\u201d, and the UTHR book of the same name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Connecting the Dots: From Gladio to SEATO, Cold War Economic Shocks in the Post\/colony<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is remarkable that the worst \u2018ethno-religious\u2019 violence, such as the Pogrom of 1983 happened in Ceylon\/ Sri Lanka when liberal pro-Western, United National Party (UNP) governments were in power. Hybrid shocks like July 1983 debilitated the economy, triggered out-migration and brain drain, and enabled deep penetration of government institutions by external intelligence and other economic experts\u2019 also for neoliberal economic reform. This included penetration of the security and legal systems, NED-funded civil society and research organizations in the post\/colony, as well as, cover up \u2018investigations\u2019 to conceal the external Masterminds\u201d or mahamolakaru\u201d of hybrid-war style Disasters like the 2019 Easter Sunday Carnage, also to enable Disaster Capitalism as Naomi Klein termed it in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism\u201d.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Global-local networks of crime and intelligence game the narrative ex-post a System-Shock and effectively conceal the Mastermind, increasingly AI driven complex systems analysis. At this time Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has set up an office in the Office of the President of Sri Lanka to game the Data and the Narrative — in the wake of the staged Default and IMF takeover of Sri Lanka\u2019s Economic Sovereignty and Policy Autonomy in April 2022, claiming that the country was \u2018bankrupt\u2019 simply because it lacked \u2018exorbitantly privileged US dollars\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Gladio \u2018stay behind\u201d model used in Europe were certainly used in Ceylon \/ Sri Lanka which remained a British Dominion until 1972, as elsewhere in the Afro-Asian post\/colony where Assassinations, Coups, protests for regime change and other Shock to Make the Economy Scream\u201d were carried out as part of Cold War proxy wars by retreating Western imperial powers anxious to retain their influence, economic and security interest in the post\/colony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gladio was the code name for a multi-country, anti-Communist operation that ran in Europe after World War 2, when the UK and the US decided to create “stay-behind”  paramilitary organizations with the official aim of countering and containing Communist Russia\/ Soviet Union also through sabotage<\/a> and guerrilla warfare<\/a> \u2018behind enemy lines\u2019. Gladio\u2019s clandestine “cells” were stay-behind (SB)<\/a> units, created with the experience and involvement of former Special Operations Forces Officers. Operation Gladio is detailed in the important work of Swiss Historian, Daniele Ganser titled Gladio: NATO\u2019s Stay Behind Army\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with Gladio operations, Partition and or ethnic conflict to Divide and Rule was the other tried and tested exit-strategy of the British Empire to ensure continued influence in the post\/colony to imperial economic and security interests. This pattern is particularly evident in South Asia and Palestine which were partitioned ensuring Britain\u2019s continued sway beyond putative Independence in 1947. Ceylon of course remained a British Dominion\u201d albeit with the fa\u00e7ade of \u2018Independence\u2019 until 1972 when the country really achieved Independence with the adoption of the First Republican constitution under a Socialist Government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Institutions like the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), similar to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe, as well as, ASIO were also set up to contain Communism during the Cold War. As well, they served to stem de-colonization, self-determination and Independence movements, and sustain Euro-American interests in the post\/colony. SEATO was set up in 1954 by US President Eisenhower and headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand, to run internal proxy wars in South and Southeast Asia, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma, even as Buddhism and Islam were weaponized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eisenhower would later warn the American people and incoming president John. F. Kennedy who was assassinated in what is widely believe to be a Secret Service inside job in September 1963, about the US military business industrial complex being the greatest threat to Democracy in America (rather than Communist Russia or China).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the CIA authorized Story of SEATO[i]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freedom must be defended in every quarter. Each collective security organization has its own character. SEATO, NATO, CENTRO, and other groups have been designed to meet particular situations in various parts of the world for the threat of Communism is worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In September of 1954, the United States, France, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan had formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO. The purpose of the organization was to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region given the \u2018Domino Theory\u2019 regading the spread of Soviet influence. So too, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), formerly known as the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO) and also known as the Baghdad Pact, was a US led military alliance of the Cold War in West Asia. It was formed on 24 February 1955 with Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The alliance was dissolved on 16 March 1979.  ASIO was set up in Australia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In such a context, the JVP and LTTE conflicts with the de-colonizing State in Sri Lanka ensured the socio-economic under- and de-development of the strategic Indian Ocean island<\/strong>.<\/strong> What emerged was an economic development model of and for colonial dependency on the Imperial West, for markets and products, sans technology transfers. The \u2018economic reforms\u201d inaugurated when J.R. Jayawardena came to power with the riots of 1977 to \u2018Make the Economy Scream\u2019, like the ISIS-claimed terror which hit the country in 2019 .in the form of hybrid economic war attacks on hotels and tourism also laid the ground work for the current IMF USD-Eurobond Default and purported \u2018bankruptcy\u201d of Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are not growing roses and waterlilies in those 800 US military bases around the world!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TO BE CONTINUED: Operation Colombo in Santiago de Chile: Cold War Disinformation and Economic Gas lighting<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[i]<\/a> The Story of SEATO 2002  https:\/\/www.cia.gov\/readingroom\/docs\/CIA-RDP83-00036R001100170006-5.pdf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake Fair is foul and foul is fair\u201d\u2014 William Shakespeare, Macbeth Why are there no Booker Prize-winning novels about mundane multicultural families that inter-married for generations, shared religion\/s, language\/s, histories, and co-existed for centuries, while living in relative harmony in Ceylon\/ Sri Lanka? Is the trope of \u2018dark natives\u2019 engaged in endless, chaotic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,189],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dr-darini-rajasingham-senanayake","category-189"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143356"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143356\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}