By
C.A.Chandraprema
On the day that the Joint Opposition held their Hyde Park rally, Minister Sarath Fonseka was also in the news having requested the President to give an amnesty to the LTTE operative who was an accomplice in the attempt to assassinate him inside army headquarters. This was hailed by some quarters as an exemplary act on his part which would make a major contribution towards reconciliation. Other security conscious individuals however were less enthusiastic about it because this particular LTTE operative had not just tried to assassinate Sarath Fonseka but had also been involved in carrying out many other operations in Colombo.
Yet there is the fact that most of those who were actually involved in terrorist operations unlike the armchair Eelamists know the practical difficulties and the hardships involved in living the life of a terrorist and would be unlikely to go through the difficulties of reviving an outfit like the LTTE again. There is the possibility that even the most dangerous LTTE terrorists may just opt to fade away and lead a normal life if they are released. By now many of these operatives would have seen the way the Tamil people themselves reacted to ex-LTTE cadres. When N.Vithyatharan the former editor of Uthayan tried to field a list of ex-LTTE cadres at the last general election, they were all rejected outright by the people. Those who have been enthroned once again after the demise of the LTTE are the armchair Eelamists and not the young idealists who fought for their ideal.
The magnanimous request by Sarath Fonseka to release the LTTE suspect who tried to assassinate him sits oddly beside his maiden speech in parliament just last week, where he demanded that a war crimes inquiry with the participation of foreign observers be set up to examine war crimes allegations against the Sri Lanka army. He even demanded a separate inquiry into the alleged ‘white flag’ incident. The question is why is he asking for amnesties for dangerous LTTE operatives while calling for investigations against members of the very army that he led? One would think that even handedness would require him to ask for a general policy of forgiving and forgetting with amnesties for all those involved in the conflict from both sides.
Minister Fonseka’s speech in parliament had other contradictions as well. In a broadside against former Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa he said that after migrating to the USA, Gota had been working as a tinker for about two years and that during this period a mutual friend had given a bicycle to Gota to get to work and one day the latter had come back complaining that the bicycle had been stolen. When his friend had chided Gota that he should have locked the bicycle Gota had said that he had in fact chained it to a ladder and that the thief had taken both the ladder and the bicycle! Fonseka’s point was that an individual who could not protect even his own bicycle could not win a war even though Gota had got books written about the way he had won the war.
Certainly Fonseka’s description of this episode was very entertaining. But in talking about Gota not being able to protect his own bicycle, Minister Fonseka is opening himself up for a much less funny and infinitely more embarrassing counter charge. When Gota lost his bicycle he was only a tinker in a foreign land and obviously did not even have a water pistol to protect himself and his bicycle. But when Fonseka was the army commander with tens of thousands of armed soldiers at his command, he was subjected to a suicide attack inside his own headquarters. Months before that attack took place, the State Intelligence Service had been issuing warnings to the army that there could be an attack within army headquarters because the security arrangements were so lax.
The ceasefire was in operation at that time and due vigilance was not practiced properly even in the high security zones. When the army kept ignoring these warnings the SIS had got one of their female officers to go into army headquarters through all the security checks with some mangoes hidden in her person to demonstrate how easy it was to pass through the security checks without detection of undeclared goods. Even this warning was ignored and significantly when the suicide attack on Fonseka took place it was by a female suicide cadre who had managed to get the suicide vest past the check points in exactly the same way that the female SIS officer had. The upshot of all this is that the then Lt General Sarath Fonseka became the only army commander in the world to be personally attacked by the enemy inside his own headquarters!
That certainly is much more embarrassing than having your bicycle stolen when your station in life was that of a civilian tinker in a foreign land. After he became a politician, Fonseka used to take the battered car in which he was attacked on the back of an open truck as an exhibit. But that may have been counterproductive because it would have reminded the public that this attack on the then army commander took place inside his own headquarters. Not that Gota also does not have to answer for similar negligence. Ranjan Wijeratne was assassinated while on his way to work. He would take the same route at the same time and he was therefore a sitting duck for an LTTE vehicle bomb. Despite that example, after becoming defence secretary Gota also took the same route at the same time to work and he too was subject to a very similar vehicle bomb attack. Fortunately, the LTTE had for the first time miscalculated the amount of explosives necessary to break the bullet proof glass and that is why Gota survived whereas Ranjan didn’t.
If the LTTE had succeeded that would have been the absolute height of ignominy for two defence establishment heads to be killed in exactly the same manner. At least in Gota’s case, he seems to be aware that it is an insult to have been attacked according to an old script written for Ranjan Wijeratne. So he has the good sense not to talk about the LTTE attempt on his life. But Fonseka in his manifestation as a politician seems to be oblivious to the fact that it is the height of ignominy for an army commander to be personally attacked by the enemy inside his own headquarters.
Lt General Cecil Waidyaratne resigned from the position of army commander in 1993 after the Pooneryn debacle which resulted in what was at that time a horrendous loss of life and a huge loss of armaments including two battle tanks. That debacle took place mainly as a result of negligence on the one hand and a lack of soldiers to defend the sprawling complex properly. The present writer at that time tried to persuade General Waidyaratne not to resign on the argument that if he resigns, the blame for the attack will be passed off on him and the causes for the negligence and shortcomings that led to the debacle would never be addressed. But Waidyaratne was adamant that he should resign. As an Armoured Corps officer what really broke his spirit even more than the loss of life was the fact that the terrorists had driven away two main battle tanks from the Pooneryn camp.
General Waidyaratne died in late 2001 about eight years after he resigned from the position of army commander. Till the day he died whenever he reminisced about the past and came to the loss of those two tanks, he would get worked up into a towering rage just as he did on the first day he heard about the loss of the two tanks. He was a proud old school style soldier and the good name of his regiment meant a lot to him. Till his death he was never able to get over the loss of those two tanks. But the loss of those two battle tanks took place in a camp deep within the conflict zone. It is difficult to even imagine how he would have reacted if he had been personally attacked inside his own headquarters in Colombo! What is difficult to reconcile is the fact that Fonseka is asking for clemency for a terrorist who had insulted him (and the country) in such a gross manner while at the same time demanding investigations against the military personnel who helped him to salvage his self respect at the risk of their own lives.
Courtesy:Sunday Island