Over years of conflict the government has increasingly adopted a position that it alone should have a monopoly on information. A part of the military strategy was to create a single version of truth. The LTTE for its part claimed to be the sole representative of the Tamil people and from that position to be the single source for the true situation of the country and its history. The war was of arms and of interpretation. People were called to stand at one or the other of these two polarities.
Society has for the most part accepted the claim of the state to be the sole arbiter of what is true and false. Those who run the media also usually comply with demands to reproduce and disseminate government propaganda. Those who do not comply are threatened.
In this way, a cynical attitude has developed regarding the concept of truth. Accusations against the government are described as the conspiracies of international agents or opposition figures. No critic is regarded as a person with genuine intentions. At best he or she has unintentionally fallen into the traps set by people whose sole aim is to destroy the nation.
When the distinction between truth and falsehood is cynically disregarded, it leads to a lack of interest in information itself. People cease expecting to know the truth of anything. This cynicism then seeps down to the minute details of life. People do not know what to believe about a death even in their very neighbourhood. Was it natural, or a murder? Was it done for a political purpose or for no purpose at all? Was it suicide or some trick? Who knows?
Government spokesmen deny allegations of gross human rights abuses and accounts of crimes by replying simply that they have not seen any evidence of such incidents. They can take for granted that no one will really come forward to state whatever they know, either because of fear or out of a sense of sheer futility.
The extent to which propaganda has overtaken the truth can be found in an episode around a letter from Justice P.N. Bagwati, the chairman of the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP), which was established to observe investigations into recent grave human rights abuses in Sri Lanka. Justice Bhagwati wrote his letter of to the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, in response to the meeting of a number of members of the IIGEP with the president to discuss and clarify some of the issues arising from the public statement of the IIGEP, announcing its resignation from the monitoring mission due to the government’s disregard for the group’s mandate. In his letter, Justice Bhagwati wrote that
I would like to point out to Your Excellency that if you would kindly look at the Public Statement at the relevant part you will find that IIGEP has not accused the Government of Sri Lanka of any lack of political will insofar as the functioning of [Commission of Inquiry into serious rights abuses] is concerned. What has been recited in the Public Statement is about “IIGEP’s apprehension regarding absence of political will”. IIGEP has never alleged that there was absence of political will on the part of the Government of Sri Lanka. It was merely an apprehension which was voiced by IIGEP in view of the facts before them.
IIGEP of course could not voice anything more than a mere apprehension because it was not within their jurisdiction to find whether there was absence of political will on the part of Government of Sri Lanka or not. That was not within their terms of reference which were confined merely to observing whether the proceedings before the Commission of Inquiry were transparent and in accordance with the international principles and norms.
The government propagandists thereafter used this letter to create the false impression that the IIGEP had retracted its April 15 final report (available online at http://www.ruleoflawsrilanka.org/resources/IIGEPnbspSTM.pdf). Nowhere in the letter is there any such retraction, neither of the apprehension of the lack of political will on the part of the government to uncover the truth, nor over conflicts of interest in the role of the Attorney General’s Department or the problems of witness protection. The letter itself was not reproduced in the propagandists’ materials or in the media in Sri Lanka.
Among the leading propagandists using the letter for this purpose was the secretary general of the government’s Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process, Dr. Rajiva Wijesinha. The role of the so-called peace chief throughout this and other recent episodes has been to spread the official version of truth. In a statement responding to comments on the letter by another member of the IIGEP, Sir Nigel Rodley, Wijesinha accused Rodley of “sanctimonious bluster” and of not understanding the IIGEP’s mandate.
Wijesinha particularly objects to the use of adjectives. He writes in response to the work of the AHRC that, “Basil Fernando cannot conceive of abuses, they have to be gross, a crisis must be acute, a situation must be abysmal, helplessness is utter. The adjective ‘political’ is applied to lunacy, realism, intellect and disasters, plus another half dozen or so words.” In reply Fernando wrote,
The problem about adjectives is that when describing situations of the collapse of the rule of law it is difficult to find words that can adequately describe the actual depth of the tragic situation. Like some natural tragedies, for example the recent experience of the tsunami or manmade tragedies by way of wars and civil wars, language becomes an inadequate tool to describe the experience. One has unfortunately to rely on adjectives, which fall far short of expressing the enormity and human and social consequences of such tragic experiences. However, Rajiva Wijesinha, in his role of Squealer [from George Orwell’s Animal Farm], objects to these adjectives for a very simple reason: he has to make out that no really big problems exist in Sri Lanka. His role is to deny or trivialize or understate the situation that the country is actually facing.
Orwell’s argument in “Politics and the English Language” is that the bad language used is a result of the failure to think clearly. That is really the problem that one has to address in thinking about the continuing catastrophe in Sri Lanka. What I mentioned in my column is that there is a degeneration of the political intellect in the country and a lack of capacity to develop political realism that some of the political leaders in places like Nepal and Cambodia developed as a result of the sufferings caused by a prolonged crisis. Even bad leaders who have themselves contributed to the civil war in these countries realized that, even from the point of view of their own self-interest, some outside help was needed to bring an end to the ongoing civil war. The help obtained from the United Nations did not and could not solve all their problems. But it did help to bring the violence and civil war to an end. It is on those issues that clear thinking is needed in the country. And of course if one has opted to play the role of Squealer, then one has to abandon even the wish to think clearly.
The point here is not that the situation in Sri Lanka is equivalent to that previously or presently in either Cambodia or Nepal. No country in conflict is the same as another. But the consequences of prolonged conflict on one place can be studied usefully for the purposes of understanding those in another. The effects of prolonged conflicts on notions of legality in particular deserve special study.
In this respect, Cambodia and Nepal are examples of how an outside intervention helped to create a beginning for some kind of recovery, however fraught, while in Sri Lanka the downward spiral has continued despite attempts at such intervention over some years.
Wijesinha is himself aware of the downward spiral. For many years he has been writing books and articles on the erosion of democracy in Sri Lanka. Among his best are the detailed analyses of J.R. Jayawardene’s contribution to the collapse of democracy via the executive presidency and other measures when he because the first executive president. Unfortunately, Jayawardene’s scheme is continuing with greater vehemence now, and, sadly, even some critics of that scheme such as Mahinda Rajapakse and Rajiva Wijesinha have also become its agents, as executive president and peace secretariat chief respectively.
Wijesinha also knows that questions of the sort raised by the IIGEP are not new to anyone who has followed the decline of the legal system in Sri Lanka. For a person who wrote a book entitled Declining Sri Lanka, the outcome of the IIGEP’s work could not have caused any surprise. Therefore, his expressions of outrage in response to this type of international intervention can only be understood as part of his role as master propagandist-cum-peace chief.
Wijesinha also writes about the emotional language of what he calls the foot soldiers of the human rights army. The choice of this expression is no accident. He is a spokesman for the real army, therefore he sees his opponents in the same form. Like Don Quixote, Wijesinha as propagandist needs to invent armies that he can fight and conquer.
As propagandist he has also acquired the capacity to speak unemotionally about, for example, the massacre of 17 aid workers belonging to Action Contre La Faim. His comments on the issue to the effect that this French aid agency was itself responsible for the deaths caused embarrassment even to his employer, which through the foreign affairs minister clearly stated that his comments did not represent the view of the government. An appeal to be unemotional while talking about mass disappearances, extrajudicial killings, torture and lawlessness implies that one has to accept these things rationally as the unavoidable consequences of conflict, and as inevitable features of the security apparatus on whose behalf he is working.
This is quite a different Wijesinha from the one who once wrote emotionally about the killing of his schoolmate, Richard de Zoysa. In that article he exposed everyone involved in the killing, including the role of the then Attorney General, Sunil Silva, regarding the subsequent inquiries. Perhaps his school chum deserved different treatment from the aid workers as he was also a member of the aristocracy to which Wijesinha also thinks he belongs, and whom he likewise represents as propagandist. The elite are of course quite unemotional when talking about the disappearances, killings and torture of people belonging to classes in the south, north or east whom they have either never met or hope not to meet.
In a letter of 8 January 2009, Fernando addressed Raijva Wijesinha in his capacity as secretary in the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights as follows:
As a servant of an institution called the Executive Presidency that has ruined the parliament, the judiciary, the executive itself and all the public institutions of the country, you share the same guilt as anyone else who has contributed to the destruction of the Sri Lankan state and the spread of anarchy and lawlessness…
All sorts of pettiness found in your letters indicate the type of mind that can participate in the political hooliganism that has ruined Sri Lanka. No issue of importance concerns you. The issues of witnesses being killed or intimidated would upset anybody who had even the slightest understanding of the rule of law and the administration of justice. You, however, have been a propaganda agent to justify witness assassinations and witness intimidation. After all, to ‘poo poo’ all complaints and allegations about human rights abuses is your job and therefore you may claim that could not have done otherwise…
As we are writing this letter the news of the shooting of Lasantha Wickramatunga was brought to my notice. This, without doubt, is the work of your political clique and as a Sri Lankan I accuse you also as being complicit in the shedding of his blood. Of course, it would be foolish on my part to ask you to initiate inquiries into this attempted assassination. However, for the purpose of record I am bringing this matter to your notice as an issue on which you are officially obliged to act. I am doing this to forestall a future accusation that the matter was not brought to your notice.
As the issue of the attempted assassination requires my attention I will stop this letter at this point. My last reminder is a letter that I wrote to you personally when you falsified a personal conversation I had with you in Cambodia. That letter is available on my website for future reference. At that time I called you a liar. Despite of that we did try to communicate with you officially although we knew that you are neither willing nor capable to do anything on complaints about human rights except to deny the very existence of human rights abuses in the country. Therefore your threat that you will have no further communication does not invoke much concern on our part, because your position as an apologist for the government and our position as persons concerned with human rights are incompatible. There never was any real communication and there cannot be any now. But as a matter of routine and out of the sheer tradition in human rights, anyone holding a title relating to human rights will be informed about human rights abuses in the country and we shall send our letters to you or anyone else that might hold your post in the future. We are fully aware that you can do nothing more than to pass it to an officer and that, that officer will not respond.
