As I write this, Indian security forces are still fighting terrorists in Mumbai, the financial capital of India and centre of its glamorous film industry. Over a hundred people are dead, gunned down by young men in a crazed Columbine style shooting of unarmed civilians. A previously unknown group called the Deccan Mujahedeen have claimed responsibility. With the choice of this name-the Deccan valley being a large plateau in India-these guys are sending a clear signal: they are sons of Mother India. And they are not alone: a string of bomb blasts over the last year in Delhi, Ahmadabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, and Uttar Pradesh was claimed by another home-grown group calling themselves the Indian Mujahedeen.

India is the largest democracy in the world. They’ve got several hundred languages, they’ve got every major world religion in residence and originated four of them; they are multi-cultural and multi-ethnic, with a male Prime Minister of the minority Sikh religion and a female President. This is a kaleidoscope of people, all very proud of their individual cultures, and yet also very proud that they are one nation under one flag. This is the land held up as proof that no matter how large, how populated, and how diverse a country may be, democracy works for everyone; democracy protects everyone. So what the hell is going wrong now?

One of the terrorists spreading carnage at the Oberoi Hotel told Indian television via telephone: “Muslims in India should not be persecuted. We love this as our country but when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody? Release all the mujahedeens, and Muslims living in India should not be troubled.” What is he going on about?

In 2002, over two thousand Muslims were massacred in the state of Gujarat. It was called a spontaneous communal riot, but the weight of evidence suggests that it was a premeditated attack against the Muslims organized by local authorities and politicians. The attack was particularly severe against women, with organized rape and mutilation of women and female children-”when our mothers and sisters were being killed, where was everybody?”

The violence in Gujarat bares many resemblances to the landmark event in our own battle against terrorism: the 1983 anti-Tamil riot. It too was called a spontaneous communal riot, but as with Gujarat the weight of evidence suggested premeditated action by the then government. It is alleged that the government minister Mr Cyril Matthew organized gangs made up of the Jathika Sevaka Sangamaya to systematically target Tamil houses and businesses using voter lists which they had conveniently got access to. In Gujarat too, voter lists identified the Muslims and the chief minister Narendra Modi was accused of instigating and encouraging the attacks, and of being wilfully negligent in providing relief to the victims. The 1983 anti-Tamil riot swelled the ranks of militant groups in Sri Lanka with youth determined to exact revenge, and evidently the Gujarat riot has had the same effect in India.

Our response to 1983 was to ignore it and pretend that it was an isolated and spontaneous incident, rather than accept that there were deep-seated injustices perpetrated against the minority even prior to 1983. India did the same: investigations were sabotaged, no one was held accountable. Few saw the broader context of the problem: the ever-simmering violence in Kashmir, and the fact that the Indian economy-laudable though it is-had left out many Indians, many of whom felt that they had been systematically neglected because of their minority status.

To see what is happening in India today is to look in the rear view mirror of what we did wrong in Sri Lanka. When we suffered terrorist attacks, we blamed it on foreign interference, namely India. India does the same today: the Prime Minister in a televised message blamed a “group based outside the country”. Both countries have failed to realize that the root of the problem is not outside our shores; the problem lies within. Messages from the Indian public are scrolled continuously on NDTV, most of them blaming the government for inadequate security and calling for a severe crackdown on terrorism (as if they weren’t already trying all this time). Not one message asked the question: “what drove these Indians to do this to other Indians?”

In the interests of combating terrorism, it won’t be long before anti-terrorist squads ask Indians with Muslim names questions like:  what are you doing out so late? Do you have a legitimate reason for walking near that hotel? How can you prove that you live in this city? If you’re not from here, what reason do you have for being in this city? It won’t be long before Indian Muslims are arrested simply for being Muslims, and asked to prove that they are not terrorists. As for the public, the great majority will applaud these actions. They’ll say it is unfortunate, but it is necessary. We know this because we have seen it all before.

One of the police officers killed by the terrorists in Mumbai was an ‘encounter specialist.’ This is a euphemism for government assassins who shoot dead alleged gangsters and terrorists without bothering to collect evidence. Our equivalent would be the ubiquitous white vans that make ‘suspected terrorists’ mysteriously disappear and keeps adding to the tally of bodies that wash ashore or turn up in ditches. How does the public know they really are terrorists? We know, and that’s all that matters-who needs evidence anyway? In India these ‘encounter specialists’ are glorified by the media and cinema as heroes. Murderer equals hero. Isn’t that the same logic used by terrorists?

So here’s a word of advice from a Sri Lankan to our big neighbour. Don’t go down the path we have taken. Don’t be tempted to sacrifice the freedom of another for your own safety. Be smarter than us. Look within and find the disease that is causing this fever called terrorism. For now, your terrorists seem to be ad hoc groups of lethal young men. With every attack in your country a new terrorist group with a new label takes credit. That’s how it starts. The day will come when a determined and motivated leader manages to coalesce the many fingers of extremism into a hard-hitting fist, with an ideology as compelling as it is evil. When that happens, you will pay a price in blood and sorrow for generations to come. We know this because we have seen it all before.

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It ain’t over till the fat laddie swings

It ain’t over till it’s over, or as the Americans put it, in a reference to the opera, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings. The Mahaveera Day 2008 speech by Velupillai Prabhakaran, one of the world’s most notorious and certainly tubbiest terrorist leaders, demonstrates that there can be no solution to Sri Lanka’s conflict so long as he remains alive and active, and has not been brought to justice. In our case it ain’t over till the fat laddie swings.

In the first place the man is an outrageously unrepentant liar and assumes that everyone suffers from amnesia. In his speech he says that “It may be noted that during the long history of our struggle, we have not conducted any act of aggression against any member state of the international community”.  Let us forget for a moment that Sri Lanka is a member state of the international community, a fact that is proved by his complaint in the same speech, of the military and diplomatic assistance that Sri Lanka has obtained from members of the international community on precisely that basis. The man obviously believes that the assassination by suicide bomber of India’s former Prime Minister and (at the time) leader of the Opposition, Shri Rajiv Gandhi, former chairperson of SAARC, son of legendary former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and grandson of the iconic first Prime Minister of independent India, Shri Nehru, is not “an act of aggression against any member of the international community”!

In the second place he lies about the history of negotiations, about the absence of an alternative. There were alternatives for the last two decades or more. In September 1987, the Sri Lankan -or Sinhala, as he would put it-armed forces in the North and east had been confined to barracks, the Indian peacekeepers were the buffer between the Sinhalese and Tamils, and an Interim administration covering the Northern and eastern provinces had been created by Executive fiat. Of the twelve seats on that council, seven, including the chairmanship, were offered to the LTTE, and yet Prabhakaran refused. He opened fire on the IPKF by October 10^th that year.

Jump cut to 2003. He had arrived at a ceasefire in 2001, not because he was winning as he claims in this speech (doubtless referring to the Katunayaka attack) but because, several months after Katunayake, the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols of the Sri Lankan Special Forces had begun to pick off his command structure-in short because he was taking some hard hits. In April 2003, forty plus states and multilateral agencies were to attend a donor conference in Tokyo to which the LTTE had been invited. Taking exception to its non-invitation to Washington DC, (to the sympathetic nods of Colombo’s academics and coffee club cosmopolitans) it chose to boycott the Tokyo meeting.  No other terrorist or insurgent movement would have done so. Instead, any other movement would have gone to the meeting, used it as a platform and protested its non-invitation to Washington. Prabhakaran did not, because he wants all or nothing and thinks that he, his cause and his movement are entitled to such special status.

Following the LTTE’s pull out from that last “peace process”, Tiger spokesman Anton Balasingham declared in writing that there had been no agreement to explore internal self-determination amounting to federalism within a united Sri Lanka. This provoked the usually mild and compliant Norwegians to release the minutes of the sessions at which this agreement had been arrived at. 

If federalism was what he wanted, Prabhakaran had a clear choice:  not walk out of the CFA process, not renege on the understanding to explore federalism and not enforce a coercive boycott of the Presidential election of 2005 at which the opposition candidate, in collaboration with the sitting (but outgoing) President, was committed to a bipartisan consensus for a federal constitution. 

This is one of Prabhakaran’s many consistencies: the sabotage of any possibility of reform, the assassination of reformists, the foreclosure of reformist alternatives, and then the Big Lie of the absence of alternatives as an excuse to continue or resume large scale armed violence and terrorism.

The other consistency echoes and re-echoes throughout his speech this year. This is the reiteration of a fundamentalist case. There is Tamil land, from ancient days, and there is Sinhala land. The Sinhalese have no right to be present on the Tamil land. Axiomatically the Tamil land must translate itself into an independent sovereign country, Tamil Eelam. There is not the slightest glimmer of any possible solution, however far-reaching, within a united country, a single Sri Lanka.

The international community which boycotts and blockades the elected Hamas administration in Gaza because it does not recognise the right of existence of the state of Israel must eschew all contacts with Tamil separatism which does not accept the bottom line that that any solution - however radical — must be within the borders of the legitimate sovereign state of Sri Lanka.  

Prabhakaran’s speech reiterates the zero sum character of the game. There is nothing in that discourse that is negotiable. It leaves the state only two alternatives:  Capitulation and withdrawal or fight on to reunify and reintegrate the whole territory of this small island.

In his speech Prabhakaran clearly indicates where he places his bets: Tamil Nadu, and through Tamil Nadu, India, and Tamils the world over. It is a pan-Tamilian appeal, with hints of a Greater Tamil Eelam as single psychological space, if not an immediately political one.

The Mahaveera speech 2008 coincides with the multiple terrorist attacks in Mumbai. There is a pernicious theory which distinguishes between international terrorist networks of “jihadis” and terrorist causes which are home grown and have territorial aspirations. This is nonsense. Every terrorist organization has some territorial referent, whether it is Kashmir or Palestine. As Prof Robert Pape’s research (his data base contains every single terrorist act committed any where in the world going back decades) concludes, every terrorist cause, especially every terrorist cause that deploys suicide killers, sees itself as fighting for the liberation of some territory from some alien domination or presence in one or more geographic location, be it the Taliban, Al Qaeda (US troops on Islamic soil including in Saudi Arabia), Islamic Jihad or the Tamil Tigers.

It is not that no distinctions are observable or legitimate as between various armed movements, but these boil down to the distinction between those who resort to the witting use of lethal violence against non-combatant targets and those who avoid such use. That is the distinction between terrorism on the one hand and armed insurgency, guerrilla warfare, or armed liberation struggles on the other. Terrorism is a method. It is deployed in the service of an array of causes and springs from an array of inspirational sources or distortions of such sources.

Terrorists are not necessarily those who only target civilians. Most terrorist organizations target armed forces at one time or another, while also going for non- combatant “soft targets”. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the various “jihadi” organizations in areas of Pakistan and Kashmir, attack variously the armed forces of the US and its allies, Pakistan and India-but this does not exempt them from the appellation of terrorist because they also kill the unarmed and the innocent.   

Terrorists learn from each other just as medical researchers or athletes or musicians do. They learn from each others’ example and behaviour, tactics and techniques. This is quite irrespective of the differences in their causes and ideologies. South Asia is one of the world’s most volatile and dangerous regions, not least because of the presence of nuclear weapons. Ethnic, religious tribal and kinship ties move across state borders. This draws states into the internal affairs of others. If the states of South Asia do not adopt a consistent policy towards terrorist movements; if there is no united front of states against terrorist movements, all states and societies in the region will suffer, with deleterious consequences for far-flung areas of the globe including the most powerful and affluent.

Prabhakaran is one of the best known names in South Asian and global terrorism. The LTTE is a well-known terrorist “brand”. The fate of the LTE will send a signal throughout the region and the world. Prabhakaran’s speech demonstrates that he is unrepentant in his maximlaism, fanaticism and political fundamentalism.  He displays once again and even more than before, the syndrome that most fanatics do: that of Hubris. Hubris, as we know from the ancient Greeks, attracts Nemesis. Prabhakaran and his Tigers have left us no choice if we are to save this island from being split apart on ethnic lines and descended upon by pan Tamil expansionism. Nemesis is awaiting Prabhakaran in the form of the spearheads of the Sri Lankan armed forces, fighting in the mud and rain, but closing in. It must never be forgotten though, that Kilinochchi is the penultimate prize. This war can only end the way it did in Angola with the death of Jonas Savimbi and in Chechnya with the death of Djokar Dudayev and Shamil Basayev. It can only end in the jungles and townships of Mullaitivu where Prabhakaran retreated and recovered from the IPKF and then from the Sri Lankan army after Riviresa. Let none, no factor or force, internal or external, stop or delay Prabhakaran’s rendezvous with Nemesis.

(These are the personal views of the writer). 

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On 4th February 2008, as the government celebrated the 60th anniversary of our independence from Britain, it struck me strongly that we Sri Lankans are going round in circles. For some time it has been obvious that ordinary political science terminology and analysis are insufficient and reason inadequate to the strange and twisted trajectory of our country. Sights and insights that stimulate deeper thought on these points are captured in Stephen Champion’s book of photographs, Lanka War Stories, the best account I know of the recent history of our tortured nation. This small essay cannot be an ordinary review because these are images of my own experiences; they trace the life of my generation. I remain inside the book, not a commentator but a participant.

In the late ‘80s, when I was studying GCL courses in southern Sri Lanka, we were in the midst of two civil wars. In the North the minority Tamils were fighting to liberate themselves from the oppressions of the majority Sinhala state. In the South, the exploited under castes and classes sought to be free from the social injustices of that majority society by taking power themselves.

We have a tradition, I believe from the Portuguese, of reciting poems for seven nights of mourning after a person has died. During my teenage years the poems we heard every day were the screams of the bereaved, amidst the smell of bodies burning in the streets or lying on pathways at the edge of fields or forests. This situation transformed us; we had to learn to survive. So we walked past the dead bodies concentrating hard on our studies, avoiding the sights, trying not to know what was going on around us.

A small magazine of the time, Ravaya (Voice), carried a photograph of a little boy leaning against the post of a roadside fence, his head bowed. In front of him lie two mutilated bodies, awkwardly strewn, burned, chopped and distorted. Suddenly, I was the boy standing there, unable to look at what I had already seen. From this moment I could no longer ignore the horrors going on around me. There was no indication of where the photograph had been taken or by whom. For ten years I tried to find out who it was.

(c) Stephen Champion, All rights reserved

Although the photographer did not know it, this image (reproduced here on page 121) became iconic. It has been reappearing for twenty years; used - abused - by different political parties whose campaign posters promise: if you vote for us this will never happen again. Eventually I discovered that the picture had been taken by Stephen Champion; a person who has been photographing Sri Lanka for more than half my lifetime, a person who was important to me long before I knew him. His work is important to all of us who have survived - when so many thousands have not - because he has documented what our generation has been living through, the worst years ever in our country’s history.

Outsiders have been mapping, drawing, documenting and photographing Sri Lanka from the times of Ptolemy, Huin San, Fhahian and Iban Battuta, through the European colonisations by Portuguese, Dutch and British, until the present day. Sri Lanka is an exotic and beautiful island, colourful, drenched in strong tropical light during the day and pastels at dusk. A seductive paradise for the early travellers and for the tourists of today; this exquisite setting is also ravaged by tragedy, as bitter in its pain as it is beautiful in the blessings of nature.

Stephen is one of four leading contemporary photographers of Sri Lanka - the others being Nihal Fernando, Dexter Cruse and Dominic Sansoni - whose work most effectively conveys the beauty of our island and the events of our times. Dominic Sansoni’s skill is in his eye for the colours of Sri Lankan life; whether taking beautiful or tragic images, his concern is always with the colours. Dexter Cruse’s great ability is in capturing incidents, significant moments; and Nihal Fernando is the master photographer of Sri Lanka’s exquisite beauty.

Stephen Champion’s work is totally different from these. Although a photograph can only capture a single moment in the flux and process of life, for me Stephen Champion’s images do more than this. The moment is there, but so too is its context, caught not only in the perceived space but also in time; so that each image is emblematic of matters larger and deeper. A prism, the image conveys not just one but several planes of meaning, experience, emotion, reality. The drama of the picture is more than its beauty or its incident; it is the drama of something incomplete that emerges from a specific past and continues into its future. These dimensions of time are outside the moment of the picture but resonant and incandescent in its telling instant. Stephen’s images are often angry and outraged; they are also sarcastic, satirical and ironic. They make an argument, state a view, evoke a discourse; they challenge and insist upon engagement and response. This is not an easy encounter.

The design of the book immerses us in the Sri Lankan situation; this is not just about the Sri Lankan war, it is about Sri Lankan life. Stephen’s lens finds monks meditating in their hermitages, official, rebel and paramilitary killings, displaced people, soldiers, police, mothers, widows, teenage lovers, teenage fighters, bordellos, hospitals, rice paddies, environmental pollution and many other juxtapositions of militarism and ordinary life, of normality and the abnormal, of the brooding paralysis of permanent trauma.

Most of these images are arranged in pairs that show how beautiful the country is and how brutal, how innocent and how violent, how mellow and how melancholy. The landscape, the seascape, the living and the dead are juxtaposed with a poignancy that reveals dimensions deeper than their contradictions. Even the orange chosen for the endpapers and the title is semiologically resonant, because for Buddhists this colour symbolises the essential and eternal truths of their religion - wisdom, strength and dignity.  Subtly, obliquely, these pictures show how inadequately such Third World realities are conveyed or understood using conventional political or sociological analysis. The complexity of this terrible, unmagical realism can only be sensed through nonverbal means.

Let me mention a few more individual photographs. On page 30, a dead body lies on the ground covered by a sarong. Across the middle of the picture is a woven palm leaf fence. On the other side of the fence kids play, jumping and frolicking, watched by other children and smiling adults. They do know the body is there, it is easy to see; but the corpse is not one of theirs, so they are not concerned. This is daily life.

On page 39, we see “School children on parade, Independence Day, Colombo”. Along the Galle Face, as far as the eye can see, children are marching towards us on the beach. From an army jeep in the foreground, soldiers watch the schoolgirls in white dresses, white socks and white shoes, with their long black plaits, swinging their arms in military unison.

(c) Stephen Champion, All rights reserved

To satisfy the international community countries must have elections to demonstrate their democratic credentials. On pages 130 and 131 of Lanka War Stories there are two photographs of Sinhala graffiti from the time of an election in the late ‘80s. The one on the left reads, “If you vote in the election you will be killed”. The one on the right, “If you do not vote in the election you will be killed”.

(c) Stephen Champion, All rights reserved

We are trapped inside such moments, our daily sights and sorrows. They drain us of wisdom, strength and dignity until consciousness becomes a vacuum. Stephen’s photographs record how stark and total our losses have been and continue to be. They also show the forces responsible. Sinhala and Tamil nationalism, Buddhist fundamentalism, political mismanagement, caste, class, gender and ethnic hostilities, failures of the left, arrogant and corrupt aristocracies, propaganda fantasies that idealise futures which can never be - all these have left us ungrounded, focused on dreams, mirages and hopes whilst we descend ever deeper into our vortex of catastrophes.

Stephen Champion has produced two books in the past twenty-two years: Lanka 1986-1992 and Lanka War Stories. His images make it clear that we are going in circles. The past reproduces its patterns in the present and cycles its way into the future; a past whose tragedies our elders have unwillingly bequeathed to us, as we shall unwillingly bequeath them to the next generation. But are these photographs more than mirrors and memorials? Could they be windows that can open us to a better understanding of ourselves?

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Book review of:
Palitha Perera Samaga Sajeeva Lesin
(Live with Palitha Perera)
Surasa Books, Colombo; 2008

‘What does Palitha Perera know about culture? He’s just a cricket commentator!’

That’s how a senior banker reacted when veteran broadcaster and journalist Palitha Perera’s name was proposed as script writer and narrator for a TV documentary series on Buddhist temple murals in Sri Lanka. When Palitha heard this, he realised how, in the minds of many Sri Lankans, he was pigeon-holed into a single niche. This prompted him to write his first book, capturing highlights of a long and illustrious career of over 45 years during which he has straddled multiple spheres of radio and TV broadcasting, cricket commentating, sports journalism, arts and culture. And blazed new trails and left his mark in several of them.

However, Palitha Perera Samaga Sajeeva Lesin (Live with Palitha Perera; Surasa Books, Colombo; 2008) isn’t another ego trip of a book, the kind that senior journalists have been churning out in recent years. It’s not written in the ‘been-there, done-that’ style of self importance. True, it has a rich sprinkling of autobiographical details expressed in Palitha’s lucid, entertaining writing style. But in recalling men and matters, and his own multiple roles in shaping events, he is both modest and moderate — hallmarks of his professional career.

His reminiscences provide some unique insights into our broadcasting history for nearly half a century. He chronicles little known facts and praises unsung heroes. In doing so, he offers a ringside account of the progress — and decline — of state broadcasting in Sri Lanka from the early 1960s to the present.

Having commenced its regular transmissions in December 1925, just three years after the BBC, Radio Ceylon was the first broadcasting service in Asia. By the 1950s, it had built up a reputation for being one of the finest in the region — this was still the case when young Palitha Perera joined in 1963. Only a decade earlier, it was an overseas broadcast of Radio Ceylon that Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay heard when they turned on their transistor radio soon after conquering Mount Everest. They joined millions of others from across the Indian subcontinent who regularly tuned in to these broadcasts, which at its peak had an audience many times the population of Ceylon.

How times have changed! The once popular, trusted and influential state-owned radio in Sri Lanka has been completely sidelined in the past 15 years. A cacophony of privately owned channels now crowd the airwaves — almost all on the FM band — and compete with each other to inform, entertain and sometimes titillate 20 million Sri Lankans. The product of media liberalisation undertaken from the early 1990s, these channels have taken the radio medium closer to their listeners by talking in a more colloquial language, putting ordinary people on the air and adopting other populist methods.

Innovation stifled
Yet, as Palitha diligently documents in his book, many innovations can be traced back to the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), successor to Radio Ceylon. For example, the country’s first FM service, called City FM, was introduced by SLBC in November 1989 with Palitha as its pioneering director. The now common practice of allowing listeners to phone in to live radio shows was started by SLBC Educational Service in 1995, initially as a tentative experiment.

Rather unfortunately, the grand old dame of Torrington Square never had a chance to aspire to her true potential. Early on, our political parties realised the power of the airwaves and never allowed SLBC to evolve into a public service broadcaster that it was meant to be. Over the years, governments of different political colour and hue persistently misused the station for their narrow, partisan needs. State broadcasting in Sri Lanka is misinterpreted as government broadcasting which in turn is reduced to shameless propaganda.

This perversion is at its worst in the news bulletins, which over the years have become daily chronicles of the head of state and powerful ministers, never mind the real news. To find out what was really happening in their own country, discerning listeners used to turn to foreign radio stations on shortwave, especially the BBC. As soon as SLBC’s decades-long monopoly ended, audiences migrated — and advertisers quickly followed. SLBC stays on the air today largely thanks to Treasury (i.e. public) funding.

It is one of history’s little ironies that the country’s leading mental hospital was once located at Torrington square in the buildings that were later assigned to SLBC. Having cut my own teeth in broadcasting at SLBC, yet never a great fan of that institution, I have often wondered what dogged curse made that location progress from mad house to whore house. For prostituting the airwaves is what state broadcasting in Sri Lanka is best known for, then as now.

The institution’s saving grace has been a handful of dedicated and versatile broadcasters who fought excessive bureaucracy and political interference to serve their true masters: the listener. Palitha Perera is a fine example of this now rare and endangered species. Trained in the finest traditions of public service broadcasting in Germany, UK and United States, he stood up for his journalistic integrity and professionalism at SLBC when these values were decaying all around him. When he couldn’t stand it, he resigned in October 1997 with his dignity and reputation intact.

Cartoonist Wijesoma saw it coming: this first appeared within a month of Rupavahini’s inauguration (courtesy: The Island)

Palitha’s book is a reminder of many opportunities we collectively missed in post-independent Lanka to harness the airwaves for building and uniting the nation. Perhaps he had no such grandiose intentions when he finally put pen to paper. He just tells fine, authentic and moving stories as he has always done, first on radio and later on television. These are drawn from his many and varied experiences with personalities as diverse as Martin Wickramasinghe, Gamini Fonseka, Rukmani Devi, H M Gunasekera (all of them no more) as well as living national treasures like Amaradeva and Nanda Malini.

First draft of history
Journalists write the first draft of history. Their hurried, often transient reports are invaluable eye witness accounts for historians. Palitha’s book revisits some key moments in our island’s recent history and records for posterity aspects that might elude traditional historians. And he gently chronicles a few occasions when he made history himself.

Among other feats, Palitha holds the distinction of having been the inaugural announcer on two Sri Lankan TV channels - Rupavahini (15 February 1982) and TNL TV (21 July 1993). For several months in 1994, he hosted the country’s first political interview series (Pilisandara) on TNL TV where he adopted (British broadcaster) David Frost’s style of penetrative questioning.

In his time, Palitha has interviewed dozens of public figures from Presidents and prime ministers to social activists and trade unionists. He is always prepared and well informed. He remains calm and friendly at all times, yet is dogged in his questioning. This style has exposed many a hypocrite and charlatan — one academic turned politician even complained to the head of state about the ‘audacity’ of this man who cannot be manipulated!

But it was as Sri Lanka’s pioneering cricket commentator in Sinhala that Palitha has had the greatest impact on our culture and society. In his youth, he played inter-school cricket and was also an avid listener of test cricket commentaries on BBC World Service radio. This background no doubt helped him when he was tasked to do the first ever ball-by-ball live radio commentary in Sinhala in March 1963, just three months after he joined Radio Ceylon. That historic broadcast covered the Ananda-Nalanda annual cricket encounter, which was played at the Colombo Oval (later P Saravanamuttu Stadium).

It took several years of hard work and persistence for Sinhala commentaries to become popular. In 1972, Palitha invited and involved a witty school master named Premasara Epasinghe, thus sparking off one of the most enduring partnerships in Sri Lankan broadcast history.

The book offers an authentic account of how Sinhala cricket commentaries found its own place in the sun. Early challenges included coming up with the right Sinhala terms for the very English game. Having found scholar-proposed technical terms completely unsuitable, he developed his own vocabulary which he delivered in his uniquely passionate style influenced by the BBC’s legendary commentator John Arlott (1914-1991).

Here we have, straight from the original source, the story of how cricket became the de facto national past-time, if not our national addiction or religion! Like it or hate it, cricket is an integral part of our popular culture. Radio (and later TV) cricket commentaries take much of the credit (or blame, in some people’s view) for building up this uncommon fervour that occasionally unites our otherwise utterly and bitterly divided nation. Many of our national players acknowledge being inspired by cricket commentaries of Palitha and Epa.

With his deep, clear and friendly voice, Palitha has enthralled millions of cricket fans with commentaries on matches at every level. What’s remarkable is that he has done this for two generations and still keeps batting, slowly moving towards his own half century. This book offers only a few glimpses of what must surely be a treasure trove of memories. It’s with nostalgia that Palitha recalls the less frenzied times in the 1960s and 1970s when big money had not yet arrived and cricket was played for fun and passion. Achieving Test status in 1981 changed all that forever.

Rebel tour
Shortly afterwards, Palitha became the first journalist in Sri Lanka to be questioned by the Police Criminal Investigation Department (CID) over a media report relating to sports. It was his probing of cricket and politics that earned him this dubious distinction.

For over two hours on 19 April 1984, he was grilled about a controversial story he wrote for the leading current affairs magazine Kalpana about the Sri Lankan rebel cricket tour to South Africa. The tour, which took place in October - November 1982, rocked the cricket world and scandalised the country’s Cricket Board. The rebel players, headed by first Test captain Bandula Warnapura, were promptly given a life ban (revoked years later).

Although the tour and its political fallout had been covered extensively in the local and international media, Kalpana editor Gunadasa Liyanage, a fearless investigative journalist, felt the rebels’ side was still under-reported. He commissioned Palitha to uncover the ’story behind the story’. Kalpana’s February 1984 issue featured indepth interviews with Warnapura and tour organiser Tony Opatha, as well as profiles of all participating cricketers.

The explosive story sold out quickly, and brought up some unpleasant truths about the state of Sri Lankan cricket. This prompted the Board’s then Chairman (and powerful Mahaweli minister) Gamini Dissanayake to complain to the CID, triggering the criminal investigation. It was suggested that Palitha might have been bribed by the rebel cricketers (who were paid handsomely by South Africa). Then, as now, the knee-jerk reaction to media exposures is to harass (or shoot) the messenger.

It’s only now, more than two decades later, that Palitha reveals details of his close encounter at the notorious ‘fourth floor’ of the CID. The interrogator turned out to be a fan, which diffused tension. Palitha answered all his questions, reacting sharply to the recurring query on who paid him to write the story. Yes, he was paid for the articles, Palitha said — it came from the account of Kalpana magazine, which was sponsored by the state banks. But no, he would never solicit or accept any other money for media coverage ‘even if I had to beg on the streets’. For good measure he added: ‘I consider it the most degrading question ever asked of me’.

The investigation ended there, and no charges were pressed. Palitha continued in his job at SLBC with no harassment. In fact, he writes affectionately about Gamini Dissanayake and then SLBC chairman Livy Wijemanne. They were true gentlemen who bore no grudges, he says.

I find Palitha to be the same. In more than 400 pages, I couldn’t find a single grudging remark. He is a sensitive, dignified man who was unfairly treated, or simply sidelined, on many occasions during his 35 years of loyal service to state broadcasting. He looks back with amazing equanimity at how men with less talent and fewer principles rose to high echelons at the houses of ill fame that are SLBC and SLRC. Reading his book reminded me of Lincoln’s famous words: “With malice toward none, with charity for all…let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”

A freelance broadcaster for the past decade, Palitha carries on his life’s mission of enriching our airwaves. He sure knows there’s much unfinished business, and miles to go before he can sleep.

Nalaka Gunawardene blogs on media, society and culture at http://movingimages.wordpress.com. Having been a regular presenter and guest at SLBC for years, he resolved in 1996 never to set foot there again.

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The first film I was taken to – even before I began schooling– was an Elvis movie, so I welcome the news that the best performing single in the history of the US charts is Elvis Presley’s “A Little Less Conversation A Little More Action”. Not only would this hold as regards the global economic crisis, a slightly revised version would constitute sound advice as regards terrorism in the volatile South Asian region: “A little less of double standards, a little more action”.

South Asia is correctly regarded as the most dangerous area on earth. It is the point of origin of the terror attack of 9/11 upon the United States. It is the scene of terrorist movements which launch attacks within almost every South Asian state. It is the theatre of cross border terrorism, sometimes suspected to be state sponsored or sponsored by this or that faction of this or that state. It is the zone inhabited by two states with nuclear weapons. It is an area of concern with regards to the proliferation of nuclear fissile material.

Underlying all these contradictions is a social tapestry in which ethnicity and religions spill over existing state boundaries. Terrorism in South Asia stems from two sources: poverty/inequality, which leads to radical terrorism and identity politics which results in terrorism related to ethnic, ethno-linguistic or ethno-religious issues/causes. While one may sympathize with movements that revolt against socio economic oppression and exploitation, what is at issue here are those of strategy and tactics. Strategy inasmuch as movements take up arms against elected governments where there are peaceful means of change; tactics because many of these insurgent movements wittingly target unarmed civilians, and therefore are terrorist in the strict sense of the term.

If any state can claim that a problem of terrorism /counter terrorism sourced in issues of collective identity are not strictly the internal affair of another sovereign state because there is a domestic spillover, that argument would hold true all round. If for instance the Sri Lankan Tamil issue is not exclusively a domestic matter of the sovereign independent state of Sri Lanka because there are those across the waters whose emotions are aroused on the basis of kinship, then does that argument go for Pakistan’s concerns over Kashmir, and if not why not? And if one is irritated by the consistent raising of human rights issues in Kashmir, it should be easy to understand Sri Lanka’s irritation over what it considers gratuitous remarks on human rights issues in the North and East.

If state sponsored cross border terrorism is bad in one part of the region then it was bad in every part of the region whenever it took place, such as the 1980s. If the sponsorship of so-called jihadi terrorism in the cause of Afghan counterrevolution and anti-Sovietism was responsible for blowback in the societies of the sponsors, so also did the sponsorship of terrorism in Sri Lanka blowback tragically on its sponsors—and will do so again, perhaps in different form, if repeated.

If it is reasonable to expect (and pressure) Pakistan to crack down irrespective of pronounced domestic sentiments, on a rooted insurgency, it cannot be wrong for Sri Lanka to crack down on the Tigers irrespective of pro-Tiger sentiment elsewhere.

If it is assumed that it is wrong for sections of one South Asian state’s security or intelligence apparatus to be soft on a cross border insurgency based a perception of strategic utility or flowing from a strategy of denial to rivals, then such a policy should be denounced if practiced by any South Asian state.

We are all in this together; us states I mean. Either we conduct ourselves on the basis that the stability of all states of the region is inextricably interlinked and indivisible, or we continue with the Hobbesian assumptions and the zero sum games. This is a dangerous neighborhood for zero sum games. All states have a vested interest in the suppression of terrorism. All states have a vested interest in making their borders sacrosanct and not subject to negotiation. All states have an interest in defending the principle of sovereignty. The Tigers cannot be considered a sacred cow simply because fanatics in Tamil Nadu have a deep seated attachment for their cause.

The Tigers are a globally known terrorist brand. If, despite their heinous campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations, they are saved by an externally imposed ceasefire or are welcomed to the negotiating table, that will send out the wrong signal worldwide in this Information Age: if you have a constituency that is fanatical enough, you can manipulate the differences between established states (including established democracies) and suicide bomb your way to recognition if not redemption. Is that the signal the world community wants to send out? On the other hand if the Tigers go down to defeat militarily, then a contrary signal goes out: a democratic state can defeat a terrorist army however strong and determined.

Which of the two signals do the major powers and the superpower wish to send out? South Asia and indeed the world need a clear cut victory over terrorism somewhere in the region. Sri Lanka is the closest to furnishing such a victory. To adapt Lenin, Sri Lanka is the weakest link in the chain of terrorism.

In his 60 Minutes interview on November 14th, the first major interview after his election victory, President-elect Barack Obama had this to say: “I think it is a top priority for us to stamp out al Qaeda once and for all. And I think capturing or killing bin Laden is a critical aspect of stamping out al Qaeda. He is not just a symbol, he’s also the operational leader of an organization that is planning attacks against US targets.”

Substitute Prabhakaran for Bin Laden, the Tigers for Al Qaeda and Sri Lanka for the US, and there you have the Sri Lankan stand. In the interests of regional stability which impacts directly upon global stability, the states of South Asia must adopt a stand on terrorism that is bereft of glaring contradictions and hypocrisies, and states outside the region including major powers and the sole superpower must adopt positions on terrorism which are consistent throughout the region, not widely variant and even contradictory from one terrorist-afflicted country to another.

These are the strictly personal views of the author.

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