Disinformation, Devolution & The Presidency

By Dayan Jayatilleka -October 1, 2013

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

There’s something amiss with the tale that Justice CV Wigneswaran should take his oaths as Chief Minister before the Governor and no other; certainly not the President.

Watching the well-made, well researched and gripping movie Madras Cafe, and conscious of its gaps and oversimplifications, I was reminded that I have lived through those times and events as peripheral participant-observer, ranging from the run-up to the Provincial Council election to the assassinations of Rajiv and Ranasinghe Premadasa. That’s how I know that the first Chief Minister of the Northeastern Provincial Council took his oaths at the President’s House in Colombo and before President JR Jayewardene, though the rest of us Ministers of the NEPC were indeed sworn in by the Governor, ex-army commander Gen Nalin Seneviratne in Trincomalee.

That day at the President’s House, President JRJ almost wrecked my well earned revolutionary credentials. I had just been amnestied having spent three years in la vida clandestina (to  borrow the title of the  youngest Minister of Fidel’s first Cabinet, Enrique Oltuski’s revolutionary memoir) having been indicted on fourteen counts under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.  From the corner of my eye I saw Chief Minister Vardarajaperumal gesturing frantically towards me and when I looked, it was President Jayewardene patting the space next to him on the sofa. When I walked over he declared “I was a friend of your father’s before you were born”.

I don’t know who advises the President these days but I have a shrewd suspicion as to who provides ‘intelligence’. Just how intelligent those briefings are, is best evidenced by President Rajapaksa’s answer to Al Jazeera interviewer James Bays, who quoted something I’d written on the Weliweriya shootings and mentioned me by my previous designation. The President replied that I was with “a powerful NGO”. Now that is entirely without foundation in empirical fact—which is to say it is utterly untrue. I neither am not a member of, nor am I ‘with’ any NGO, local or foreign, powerful or weak and I would dearly love to know the name of the one that the President believes I am affiliated with. The last NGO I belonged to was thirty years ago, and has long been defunct (an anti-racist organization called MIRJE).
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President And BBS Echo Statements About Dayan

October 2, 2013 

President Mahinda Rajapaksa who in a recent Al Jazeera interview charged that his former Ambassador to the UN in Geneva was now fulfilling the political agendas of a powerful NGO, was echoing the sentiments expressed not long ago by the Sinhala hardline Bodu Bala Sena organisation.

The President and the BBS

President Rajapaksa on being confronted with the text of a comment written by former Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Dayan Jayatilleka, his personal political appointment during the Al Jazeera interview shot back that the ex-Ambassador was saying political things because he was now a member of a NGO, a charge Jayatilleka denies.

A few weeks ago in a full length serial feature in the Global Mail, the author Eric Ellis wrote that Bodu Bala Sena General Secretary Galagodaaththe Gnanasara who called Jayatilleka a “mad, bad person” who “gets funding from various people, Christian and other groups, to speak against Buddha, with NGOs.

“So Dayan Jayatilleka is mad? I ask Gnanasara. “A very bad man he is,” Gnanasara says. “They are funded. You look at their background. Are they Buddhist? There are some groups created by the church and they want to destroy Buddhist culture. His (Jayatilleka’s) background is not Buddhist, Milinda is not Buddhist,” Ellis wrote in his Sri Lanka feature.

The statements by the Bodu Bala Sena and the President on Jayatilleka’s involvement with a NGO raises questions about campaign of misinformation regarding Government critics.