Too Old To Be A Terrorist

| by NILANTHA ILANGAMUWA
( April 6, 2014, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) We came to
know the news about the President Rajapaksas new move of banning selected organizations
and people who are associated with them. Around 16 groups were banned and over four
hundred people, almost every one of them of Sri Lankan Tamil origin, were black listed.

The news came just after I had finished my long interview with the Rev. S. J. Emmanuel who is
the President of the Global Tamil Forum, the foremost unarmed group in Tamil Diaspora. Also
some active Diaspora members calling for self-determination to the Tamil people in the country
were carefully selected by the government for the proscription. I have no clue whatsoever as to
how much, they maintained in their bank accounts in Sri Lanka, or how much in other assets
they have stored. The prime target of the government is to freeze their assets which may fulfill
the short term dreams of those behind the move. Many people have been arguing about this
new move of the government but there is hardly any explanation based on facts, on the real
agenda behind the decision.
What next?
The government is likely to carefully monitor all transactions between local entities and those
who are now on the black list. Therefore the government is expected to start plinking local
people to get media attention and eradicate these desperate people just to cater to Rajapaksa
politics in the country. This will be a great idea to keep the Sinhalaese patriotism alive. But
Rajapaksa may have another agenda too, behind the scene. This is the regimes most important
strategy just two years before the next presidential election. Apparently he has declared that
there will be no election till 2016, but these words like the Chinese production come without
guarantee, as he may have very well generated, planned and cultivated ideas for calling an early
election to minimize the margin of loss. He is afraid on two fronts. The first is the eventual

progress of the Tamil political diagram which has been pragmatically flying around the globe
after the elected chief minister assumed duty in the Northern Province, in which the ruling
party constantly lost the political intelligentsia. The second front concerns political
consequences that he is facing in the South where Sinhalese Buddhists are taking off from
Rajapaksas cunningly charted road.
President Rajapaksa seems to have thought that Sinhalese Buddhists tend to stay trapped in the
day time in the same trap in which they were necked in the night. In fact the theory is
formidably correct. He was skillful enough to use the same arguments under the patriotism
cover with different incidents to accomplish his personal desires while the countrys needs were
always secondary to him. And he has carefully selected people around him from the Tamil and
Muslim communities who are personally greedy to feed the public with the message that he is
the only man who is concerned about true reconciliation. In addition to that he talked in Tamil.
These are all tricks not bigger than the worms in the rotten egg, which appears to be good so
long as it doesnt crack. But after the recent Provincial Council election has seems to be
alarmed by the reality of political pungency, while the third UN resolution was a crown of
thorns on the head of President Rajapaksa.
In this reality he moved to ban some selected Tamil groups and named them as terrorist
organizations. This has ridiculed even the term of terrorism, though it has no definite definition
but the word does connote a basic structure to define terrorism in the wider world. It
indicates impact and requires criteria to name any group as of terrorist origin. Many political
movements which have military wings and have conducted violent attacks on civilians qualify
to be called terrorists in the particular jurisdiction. But whether this knowledge, based on facts
was deployed equitably when certain other groups were recently banned by the Rajapaksa
government is doubtful.
However, the Canadian Court just a few weeks ago convicted a terrorism expert who called one
of the groups in the Tamil Diaspora a front of the LTTE: The Toronto-based Canadian Tamil
Congress filed a defamation case against a Sri Lankan born terrorism expert for linking it to the
LTTE, and in his judgment, Justice Stephen E. Firestone of the Ontario Superior Court of
Justice in Toronto agreed. He awarded $37,000 in general damages and imposed $16,000 in
legal expenditure. The list and names of the groups and people published by the government
clearly included the group which won the case against the terrorism expert. In that sense it
could be concluded that the whole process is controlled by a few men to address their personal
difficulties with those on the terrorism list.
If there is a real reconciliation process the government should have looked for areas of mutual
understanding instead of making pariahs of those lobbying in international political circles.
This kind of unnecessary political motivation is neither good to the ruling party nor to the
people. This is a form of self-isolation instead of engaging in the battle of political ideology, in
this hour of need.
The Rev. S. J. Emmanuel who is an exiled priest and active person even at his late age is also
now a terrorist, according to the Rajapaksa government. The government may have a kind of
rationalization or justification in naming people as terrorists but serious outcomes of the short

term decision can be damaging and it may open another path to the deadly conflict. When I was
asking, The Rev. Emmanuel about the governments decision, he simply replied, Ministers and
Ambassadors are inviting me to visit Sri Lanka when they meet me in Geneva, but once they
returned to the country, they call me a terrorist.
However, as far as I understand at least, Father Emmanuel is too old to be a terrorist. True, no
one would dispute this if I flag up the basic notion of Marxism, History repeats first as
tragedy, then as farce.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa edits the Sri Lanka Guardian and he also an editor of the Torture: Asian
and Global Perspectives, bi-monthly print magazine. He is the author of the just released nonfictions, Nagna Balaya (The Naked Power), in Sinhalese and The Conflation, in English.
He can be reached at ilangamuwa@gmail.com