The Difference Between The Sri Lankan State, Prabhakaran And Wijeweera By Rajan Hoole -May 23, 2014 Rajan Hoole The 1990s: The Culture of Untruth and a Perilous Vacuum – Part 8 The Culture Of Untruth For the failure of the process of accountability, the new government can only be partially blamed. It is unrealistic to expect politicians to carry through a seemingly thankless task while the vocal members of the public are either hostile or apathetic and the ‘independent press’ was launching tirade after tirade. In its editorial comment on Two years of the PA, which appeared as the lead item, the Sunday Times of 18th August 1996 attacked the PA Government in an unprecedented manner. It accused the Government of mismanagement, and, in an obvious reference to the commissions of inquiry, of failing to unite the country. It ended with the Cromwellian expression, ‘For God’s sake go’. Let us take what the Sunday Times editor wrote under the name Migara in the Weekend of 4th November 1982 after Jayewardene’s victory at the presidential election and his concoction of the ‘Naxalite Plot’ to detain key members of the opposition. He wrote, “The abortive October Revolution by political bankrupts did not take place. The voters of Lanka made a wise decision to avert such a crisis.” We know how Jayewardene united the country. This gives us some idea of the degree of honesty behind these tirades against the PA government. Anything approaching such attacks would have been unthinkable under Jayewardene or Premadasa. An article by ‘Police Correspondent’ in the Sunday Times of 16th February 1997, accused the PA government of letting the LTTE off the hook for Athulathmudali’s murder and in turn wrongly blaming good police officers of complicity. It concluded thus: “We will peddle this [distorted] thinking until the south of Sri Lanka gets subverted, and becomes a subject state of the Tamil Confederation.” The primordial fears of the Sinhalese public were being played upon, while carefully avoiding an independent examination of the evidence. We will go into this in the next chapter.                                                                                    Read More