…THOUGH NOW I WAS DATING NOT ONLY AJITH BUT AJAY TOO.

(Actually I was not dating Ajith then, but can’t a girl dream?)
Published in my column in The Nation ‘The Painted Goose’ on January 22, 2012

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

In the afternoon of 10 October 1987, sound of shelling was once more heard in Jaffna barely three months after India enforced peace in Sri Lanka with the Indo-Lanka Accord. Most Jaffnese (records UTHR) couldn’t believe that it was the IPKF shelling them and thought it must be the SL army. But it wasn’t. It was the IPKF. On 4th October, 17 tigers travelling in a fishing trawler to or from Tamil Nadu were apprehended by the SL Navy. On 5th October, 2.00 p.m., those 17 men, who had been taken by the IPKF from the Naval base to the Palaley air base, were visited by Balasingam and Mahattaya. At the exact same time, Major General Harkirat (Harry) Singh, Commander of the IPKF, who was in Trincomalee (under orders to ‘deny the airport to the SL forces’), was getting a message; “At 2 o'clock I get a message, why is the G-o-C IPKF interfering in the 'constitutional activities of Sri Lanka? These were the exact words. This message came all the way from the force headquarters in Madras. And, 'Please lift your siege in Jaffna, let the Sri Lankans do what they want to.'”

Avenging

By late evening that day, the message bore fruit; “Our troops withdrew, the Sri Lankan troops charged, and these fellows swallowed cyanide. Those who chewed, they died on the spot, those who swallowed were saved.” According to General Harry, 13 chewed that day. Only 4 swallowed. That night the LTTE started avenging those who chewed. During the night of 5th October, the LTTE liquidated one Sinhalese baker (poor, elderly, forced to leave Jaffa in ‘83’, had come back with the dawn of the ‘87’ peace to restart his only livelihood in Chunnakam), two Sinhalese cement makers (the GM and deputy GM of Lanka Cement Ltd., come to restart the cement plant at KKS ), 8 Sinhalese soldiers (been in LTTE captivity, hopeful appeals had been made to the LTTE for release with the dawn of the ‘87’ peace) and one Sinhalese cop (serving in the VVT police station re-opened with the advent of ‘87’ peace, beaten to death with a wooden pole by Soosai and another while having a drink in the local bar). The liquidating just continued in the following days until a civilian (Sinhalese) death toll of around 200 was achieved according to BBC reportage. This included 4 Rupavahini crew members, who having been abducted in Jaffna went AWOL presumed dead, 35 long term Batticaloa (Sinhalese) residents who were gunned down, Chief of STF, Batticaloa, Nimal Silva and GA Batticaloa, Mr. Anthonymuttu killed in a landmine explosion while travelling in the same vehicle.

Operational parameters

Meanwhile, in yet another part of the forest, J.R was urging the Indian Defense Minister and the Indian Army Chief of Staff to act. Some say he even dared to articulate the possibility of re-deploying the SL army in the event of no action by the IPKF. On 7th October the IPKF had been issued directives defining their operational parameters. On 10th October 1987, ‘the war resumed, just as Prabhakaran had predicted’, though now the LTTE was fighting the peacekeepers instead of the government troops. I have paraphrased Niromi de Soyza to show up the other worldly relevance of her 2009 Telegraph statement.

“The war resumed, just as Prabhakaran had predicted, though now we were fighting not only the government troops but the peacekeepers, too.” may indeed have relevance and drip with truth in some world other than this one. The bit about Prabhakaran predicting the resumption of war however, has relevance even in this world. To every 100 inept astrologers, who wait passively for their predictions to come true, there is one enterprising astrologer who predicts something and immediately proceeds to kick destiny into shape to make that prediction happen. Prabha was one such.

Prediction

When he predicted in the early days of the Accord, that the war would resume, did he also envisage the government troops joining in? It’s possible. Prior to October before the war resumed (just as Prabhakaran had predicted) there had been scenes that were simply throbbing with potential. On 18 September 1987, the IPKF looked on while a mob attacked and set fire to the Point Pedro police station. The festivities ended with the policemen being made to walk to the nearby camp with their belongings on their heads, trailed behind by a crowd shouting abuse. That same day, the abusive crowd scenario had been duplicated in front of the SL Army camp in VVT and a single drunk soldier had stood in front of the crowd returning the abuse before being dragged inside by an officer.

Given this latent, simmering hostility to the Sri Lankan Forces and given that in a very real sense the SL state and the SL forces were the ultimate enemy of the LTTE, the IPKF being just an interlude and a fling, could it be…isn’t it possible that…of course that’s it! Eureka, Niromi de Soyza’s Telegraph statement and the Throsby statement can totally be justified!

Look at them statements; “The war resumed, just as Prabhakaran had predicted, though now we were fighting not only the government troops but the peacekeepers, too.” and “when I joined, the Indian forces had arrived and the tigers had chosen to fight the Indian forces as well as the Sri Lankan forces”. When Niromi joins the government troops with the IPKF in a single harness via the ‘not only-but also/as well as’ construct and subjects these two harnessed entities to the common verb ‘fight’, she is merely trying to convey the ultimate and enduring adversarial equation between the tigers and the SL forces while at the same time expressing the new equation with the IPKF. Whew, what a relief!

Not only-but also/as well as

But is it? All you Niromi defenders on the web, who genuinely bought into this explanation need to catch the earliest time machine into your pasts and get your younger selves better English teachers (who can correctly lay down the parameters of the not ‘only-but also/as well as’ construct) together with memberships in good libraries (where you can read those parameters demonstrated in living language across the whole gamut of human experience). Or, alternatively you could look at the model situations below and savour the existential absurdities and the internal contradictions caused when the above parameters are deployed by the linguistically challenged.

“Ajith was the ultimate love theme in my life. I have always loved him and probably always will.. But then suddenly we were …drawn asunder by outside forces. Not that I ever stopped loving him but we were not an item anymore. I was lonely and Ajay was …there. He was Ajith’s friend, reminded me of Ajith and I dare say, I even saw him as a stand in for Ajith. I dunno, whatever, the inevitable happened.
My love life resumed just as my mother had predicted though now I was dating not only Ajith but Ajay too.”

“The cancer in my rectum was in remission. But I was smoking a lot. I couldn’t seem to get through the day without twenty cigarettes. My doctor was expressing grave doubts about my ability to continue in a state of wellbeing while smoking so heavily. And so it came to pass.

My physical sufferings resumed, just as my doctor had predicted, though now I was fighting not only the cancer in my rectum but emphysema, too. Thankfully my cancer was still in remission and did not contribute to my physical sufferings. I don’t think I could have managed to fight emphysema of the lungs and cancer of the rectum at the same time.”

Someone who says ‘When I joined, Monica had arrived and my boss had chosen to date her as well as Jane’ is unmistakably painting ‘my boss’ as a minor Casanova. Protesting much later that boss was no Casanova, that Jane was his steady girl friend who was temporarily unavailable/estranged when the Monica thing was on, will only make you look silly. Similarly the 2009 Telegraph and the 2011 Throsby statements unmistakably label Niromi as an IPKF war virgin who has no awareness of the most unique aspect of that unique episode in our country’s history.

Occupational Force

Between 1987 and 1990, for the first time after the British left, part of this country was under a foreign Force. It was a palpable reality. When president Premadasa presumed to order the IPKF about in December 1989 with his ‘please be confined to your lines or else we will consider you an occupational force and deal with you’, Lieutenant General Kalkat had flashed this reality at him in the same way a cop flashes his badge; “So when the ultimatum was conveyed to me, I conveyed back that as per the Accord, the North-Eastern province is under the IPKF. I am responsible here for the safety of the entire region and if there was militant activity by anyone, any force I would respond. And that if my forces are attacked by anyone I would respond. That is as far as you can go, but it conveyed the meaning of what it meant.”. Even much earlier on in his tenure, Lt. General Kalkat had been compelled to flash his badge when he discovered unscheduled SL army presence in his territory; “…Israeli assistance was for the Sri Lankan special force. Their training camp was on the edge of Batticaloa district, my soldiers had discovered it. And I straight away took up the matter, if they don't leave in 24 hours, my soldiers will deal with them. And in 24 hours they left the place lock, stock and barrel, both Israeli trainers and Sri Lankans.”

Defining the side

It is into this occupied landscape that Niromi de Soyza blunders in with her Telegraph and Throsby statements, her weird pre-publicity blurbs raving about the Sri Lankan Army 'ruthlessly ambushing small platoons of young girls' two days before Christmases of 1987, her book with ‘government forces’ enticingly emblazoned on the back cover and her one-on- one interview accounts carrying tales of playing ‘catch me’ with government forces in the jungles of Wanni and having to deal with the viciousness of the Sri Lankan armed forces together with the brutality of her fellow Tigers in the course of the violence she’d become part of by picking up a gun.

Among a sea of web comments trying hard to insist that bull-shit is icing, there was one commenter called Vijayaraghavan Sakthivel who said; “…Is this what all that academic achievement, all that culture and all that poetry described by DBSJ has produced? A 40 something individual, who would go in front of the world and say things about a highly documented period even a kid would be able to prove wrong? Where is the intellectual sophistication, the general knowledge or the good sense education is supposed to produce?” Ageist and sanctimonious perhaps. But bracing and refreshing too.

The overwhelming impression I have of Niromi de Soyza is as someone who urgently needs some robust good sense shaken into her. When she cries in public(as she is reputed to do without fail), ‘get a grip’ are the words demanded by a context where there are tigresses who lost limbs much more recently than 23 years ago (one such is now playing disabled volleyball for Sri Lanka). So Niromi, it has been fun doing research on and around you. We will be watching your future career with considerable interest. No one expects you to play ball for Sri Lanka, but whichever side you play for, it’s imperative to ‘get a grip’.

References-
• India’s Vietnam. The IPKF in Sri Lanka: 10 Years On
• http://www.uthr.org/BP/volume2/Chapter2.htm
• http://www.uthr.org/BP/volume2/Chapter1.htm
• http://www.uthr.org/BP/volume1/Chapter9.htm

Are you saying the LTTE weren’t a Sri Lankan Force?

Published in my column in The Nation ‘The Painted Goose’ on January 8, 2012

By Darshanie Ratnawalli

The LTTE were technically Sri Lankan Forces too. They are on record in non- Sri Lankan sources as having had amputations performed on people to stop them from leaving no-fire zones. A book, which announces that Sri Lankan forces amputated people’s limbs to stop them from leaving no fire zones will be technically correct too. One can issue statements explaining how the author did not write ‘Sri Lankan Government Forces’, merely ‘Sri Lankan Forces’ and what’s wrong with so and so’s comprehension that he fails to see that the LTTE were Sri Lankan Forces too.

Luckily perhaps for our sanity, Niromi’s story in Sri Lanka stops in 1988 (in her own account she was shot of the LTTE as well as Sri Lanka by 1988). If the saga had gone on past 1989, we’d have to endure arguments that ‘for a young LTTE cadre to describe the LTTE as Government Forces would not be unusual at all as given the collaboration between the LTTE and the SL government against a common undesirable; the IPKF, the LTTE either considered themselves as an extension of the SL Government forces (or far more likely) considered the Government Forces as an extension of themselves.’ (The collaboration started somewhere in October 1989 according to General Kalkat in ‘India’s Vietnam’ )

Even though Sri Lanka was deprived of Niromi’s colorful presence in 1988, before the meaning of ‘government forces’ could ‘branch out’ too much, we are not scot free of creative interpretations. The Tamil people it seems saw the IPKF as doing the dirty work of the Government and there’s nothing incongruous in describing the IPKF as ‘government forces’ as the back cover of Tamil Tigress does.

“Two days before Christmas in 1987, at the age of 17, Niromi de Soyza found herself in an ambush as part of a small platoon of militant Tamil Tigers fighting government forces in the bloody civil war that was to engulf Sri Lanka for decades…”

Lot of people I know checked into private mental homes on the day this argument hit the cyber space, so that they could bang their heads on the padded walls and scream in relative privacy and safety. They have now come out all calm and point out that, though the major players of the Elam wars during the various temporal phases were bound to each other in ever changing relationship equations dictated by expediency, no merging of identities ever accompanied these changes; that the contexts involved were too hugely incompatible and irreconcilable for these identities to ever merge in living, natural language. The IPKF was too much the instrument of an overlord, meting out a client dispensation to a subjugated state to ever become ‘Government Forces’ in Sri Lanka, while the LTTE had rejected their Sri Lankanness and the ‘Government’ far too irrevocably (collaboration notwithstanding), to ever become a Sri Lankan or a government force .

Another argument rolled out to sanitize the ‘Government Forces’ on the back cover is that while Niromi’s honest hand produced the words ‘ Indian government Forces’ for the back cover copy, some other hand belonging to a less informed Allen and Unwin editor deleted the word ‘Indian’. On this one most people were able to do without the padded cell and state with the aid of a tranquilizer only, that ‘Indian government forces’ were a linguistic anomaly for the IPKF in Sri Lanka. ‘Government’ was a superfluity after the word ‘Indian’, which never appeared in actual communications because a nongovernmental Indian force was never part of the equation.

The best one so far is that ‘the government forces- guerilla forces dichotomy’ allowed the term ‘government forces’ to be used for the IPKF when they were the adversaries of a guerilla force. However in language, the key is context, context and context and ironically it’s Niromi herself, who hands us the contextual key to interpret the words ‘government forces’ when she wrote in 2009 that “The war resumed, just as Prabhakaran had predicted, though now we were fighting not only the government troops but the peacekeepers, too.”

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, D. B. S Jeyaraj (if he has published this Saturday’s installment) will now have hit the 15 000 word count in his Niromi saga. Pitted against this abundance are 47 measly words in simple, straightforward English written and uttered in Niromi’s own hand and voice respectively.

“The war resumed, just as Prabhakaran had predicted, though now we were fighting not only the government troops but the peacekeepers, too.”

-2009, Telegraph

“…when I joined, the Indian forces had arrived and the tigers had chosen to fight the Indian forces as well as the Sri Lankan forces”

- 2011, interview with Throsby

They are so unobtrusive and so easy to overlook. In that respect they are like all slips. In detective stories, people only make one critical slip (which is nevertheless enough to alert the clever detective). If you are Niromi de Soyza however, you make one monumental slip in writing and two years later make the identical slip verbally. If your attention had wandered (as it will) while reading through the 4521 words of the 2009 Telegraph story or between the points 18.45 and 19.02 in the 2011 Throsby interview, you would miss these slips (In fact no one in my acquaintance did spot these slips before I pointed them out). But once spotted they (the slips) sing. They sing out pure like the ring of genuine Waterford crystal and grab your attention amidst the tin clatter of words produced by Monsieur D. B.S Jeyaraj.

For a long while, the Telegraph statement and the Throsby statement (as they will go down in history) were dodged and remained unacknowledged by all Niromi defenders on the Net and Press, reminding me of a historical novel about Charles II I had read in school. In it, there’s a scene where Catherine of Braganza, Charles’ Portuguese bride is advised, before she sets sail for England, by her mother, the queen of Portugal, on how to deal with Charles’ mistresses. “You must never acknowledge these women or let on that you know about their relationship to your husband” or words to that effect. Similarly write reams and reams validating and affirming Niromi, cover all other contentious issues, but…silence on the ‘IPKF alongside the government troops’ motif, as if it was sotta beneath their notice.

Even Michael Colin Cooke, apparently Lionel Bopage’s biographer, who wrote ‘The singer might change but the song remains the same: A critical look at Roberts and Sarvananthan ‘outing’ Niromi de Soyza’ was no different. Having dissected the back cover ‘government forces’ he gets struck by curious amnesia about the Throsby statement, which was certainly available to him through the one article by Dr. Michael Roberts, which he seems to have perused in replying (there was a newer article by Roberts, which had he read it would have presented him with the Telegraph statement too and the 2009-2011 consistency.) But, deadlines, you know. You just can’t afford to read everything.

But eureka, around 30th December, 2011, finally, the Throsby and Telegraph statements were acknowledged and a feisty defense mounted. Only I can’t tell you this week. The word count you know. Wait till next week, it’s good.