Contributors: Nilantha Ilangamuwa April 18, 2012
Cartoon by: - Indika Dissanayake -
Cartoon by: - Indika Dissanayake
Let each man say what he deems truth, and let truth itself be commended unto God!
– Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
The traditional New Year 2012 (Buddhist Era 2555/2556), which was celebrated last week, has been brought to the people through the broken window of the White Van, which symbolizes the machinery of the Government’s way of dealing with dissent. Most regimes have their own symbol to create and spread panic among the people so they can easily succeed in their unlawful activities through constitutional amendments. The present regime introduced the White Van in 2005 after they started the military campaign against the LTTE. As the LLRC report highlighted, the White Van Syndrome has resulted in the abduction of numerous people in the Northern and Eastern provinces which were dominated by the Tamil paramilitary groups like the TMVP and the EPDP. Later it came to the South, mainly to Colombo and the suburbs. Today there is no secret behind the White Van in relation to who is involved and what it is for. But the Government continually denies their involvement like an ostrich hiding its head in sand.
– Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
The traditional New Year 2012 (Buddhist Era 2555/2556), which was celebrated last week, has been brought to the people through the broken window of the White Van, which symbolizes the machinery of the Government’s way of dealing with dissent. Most regimes have their own symbol to create and spread panic among the people so they can easily succeed in their unlawful activities through constitutional amendments. The present regime introduced the White Van in 2005 after they started the military campaign against the LTTE. As the LLRC report highlighted, the White Van Syndrome has resulted in the abduction of numerous people in the Northern and Eastern provinces which were dominated by the Tamil paramilitary groups like the TMVP and the EPDP. Later it came to the South, mainly to Colombo and the suburbs. Today there is no secret behind the White Van in relation to who is involved and what it is for. But the Government continually denies their involvement like an ostrich hiding its head in sand.
Abductions, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings are not a new phenomenon in post-independent Sri Lanka, and it has a long gruesome history. Recently, a weekly amusing political documentary which was telecasted on the private channel in Colombo raised a point that; “there are hundreds of burnt or half-burnt dead bodies throughout the country when the UNP was in power, but now you can’t see that kind of nightmare.” A reply was, “Now even we can’t find dead bodies of victims of abduction.” As this writer pointed out a few weeks back, today our country is enjoying tragedies as comedy. Our social wisdom for creation has contracted into a puny mind of cheap politics. Our literature has been sold for antithetic goals which have ruined the nation, over the last few decades. An idea of a nation has been compressed into a frame of racial nihilism, which had guided the entire nation into nightmares. We searched our identity within those nightmares like people trying to see shadows in the dark. What we were unable to understand is that there will be no freedom when an extensive ideology, dominated by parochial objectives and paranoid politics, prevails. In other words, our arts, tradition, history and identity have been destroyed by these paranoid politics and replaced by the kind of inconsequential, artificial stuff, which they are introducing as the system. In another words, today this country is in a situation where these objectives of paranoid politics have stolen our entire history and rewritten it.
