WHO WILL CHE CHOOSE, REALLY?
Sunday 24 June 2012
The president last week visited Cuba, and significantly he dropped-by to see the living relatives of the late Che Guevara, the charismatic leftist guerilla idol who championed the Cuban revolution along with Fidel Castro.
Strange, some would say. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s political party has a history of quelling a so called Che Guevara insurgency in 1971, which was of course a JVP uprising led by Rohana Wijeweera who imbibed his revolutionary fervour in the Patrice Lumumba University in the USSR.
But the beret wearing Wijeweera modelled himself after Che Guevara, and in 1971 therefore, the youth who rose up to topple the then Sirimavo Bandaranaike government were called ‘Che Guevara karayas.’
Mahinda Rajapaksa has no doubt been a champion of underdogs worldwide, most notably the Palestinian leadership fighting for a state of Palestine in Israeli occupied territories.
But he has rarely been a champion of leftist revolutionaries, though his relationship with China is solid, and he has in tow with him Wimal Weerawansa — who has latterly turned a Hugo Chavez admirer after newspapers such as ours corrected the distorted picture that many ‘liberals’ in Sri Lanka have about the Venezuelan leader as some kind of tin-pot dictator. (We know Wimal Weerawansa gets a great percentage of his political inspiration – at least for the good things he does – from this newspaper, and we raise our hat to him for that!)
Those who lay claim to the Che Guevara brand at home, are those who would say that Mahinda Rajapaksa and Wimal Weerawansa both belong to the oppressor
class that Guevara himself would have reviled – even fought against.
Merits analysis
Nobody needs to accept the JVP claim without argument, but as with every political claim, the JVP’s contention merits some analysis as well.
This week particularly, the apparent claimants to the Guevara legacy, Sri Lankan variety, be they pretenders to the title or not, would claim that in Sri Lanka there is some re-enactment of sorts of what happened when Castro prowled through the jungles of Cuba in a quest to overrun the Batista regime of oppression.
In Hambantota, Katuwana – two JVP activists, ‘Che Guevara karayas’ – were killed last week, in gunfire which the victims’ party claims came from government sponsored hit-men.
This claim of course is heavily disputed by the regime, but the question is whether the regime that has close connections with the Castros, the Guevaras and the Chavez’s is, as the claimants to the Guevara mantle in this country say, suppressing the voices of the unwashed masses?
Ah, and about Chavez, now, that is almost another matter. The president and his retinue, after the Cuba and Brazil visits, are to be hosted by the mildly ailing Chavez in Venezuela.
This means there is no doubt about the purpose of this visit – it is to say, we are comrades with the bloc of nations that does not deify the West.
It is also to say that the regime is comrades in arms with the regimes that are identified as those that are left leaning, ‘peoples’ and proletarian inclined.
Is the Sri Lankan regime this way inclined? Wickramabahu Karunaratne will say not. It is because several governance issues get in the way of the image of the government. The Katuwana issue is one in a string.
No doubt the JVP will make political capital out of it – and the party has all the right to, considering that two of its young party operatives have died in the incident. In any event, it seems that for far too long, a character who was creating mayhem, was getting away scot free.
This of course does not behoove well at all for a government that is cultivating its image as proletarian. Certainly, not in an area in which the original claimants to the mantle of Guevara, and the Chavez/Castro ideological project have for long considered home turf, i.e.: the JVP has always had grassroots support in Hambantota.
True, this support is heavily dented now, and has gone the way of the Rajapaksas, the new claimants to the Guevara/Castro legacy. But, between old and new, it would be almost comic to the departed Guevara, etc., from their celestial mokshas, to watch this rather risible tug o’ war for their legacy in a far off island.
Sunday 24 June 2012
The president last week visited Cuba, and significantly he dropped-by to see the living relatives of the late Che Guevara, the charismatic leftist guerilla idol who championed the Cuban revolution along with Fidel Castro.Strange, some would say. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s political party has a history of quelling a so called Che Guevara insurgency in 1971, which was of course a JVP uprising led by Rohana Wijeweera who imbibed his revolutionary fervour in the Patrice Lumumba University in the USSR.
But the beret wearing Wijeweera modelled himself after Che Guevara, and in 1971 therefore, the youth who rose up to topple the then Sirimavo Bandaranaike government were called ‘Che Guevara karayas.’
Mahinda Rajapaksa has no doubt been a champion of underdogs worldwide, most notably the Palestinian leadership fighting for a state of Palestine in Israeli occupied territories.
But he has rarely been a champion of leftist revolutionaries, though his relationship with China is solid, and he has in tow with him Wimal Weerawansa — who has latterly turned a Hugo Chavez admirer after newspapers such as ours corrected the distorted picture that many ‘liberals’ in Sri Lanka have about the Venezuelan leader as some kind of tin-pot dictator. (We know Wimal Weerawansa gets a great percentage of his political inspiration – at least for the good things he does – from this newspaper, and we raise our hat to him for that!)
Those who lay claim to the Che Guevara brand at home, are those who would say that Mahinda Rajapaksa and Wimal Weerawansa both belong to the oppressor
class that Guevara himself would have reviled – even fought against.Merits analysis
Nobody needs to accept the JVP claim without argument, but as with every political claim, the JVP’s contention merits some analysis as well.
This week particularly, the apparent claimants to the Guevara legacy, Sri Lankan variety, be they pretenders to the title or not, would claim that in Sri Lanka there is some re-enactment of sorts of what happened when Castro prowled through the jungles of Cuba in a quest to overrun the Batista regime of oppression.
In Hambantota, Katuwana – two JVP activists, ‘Che Guevara karayas’ – were killed last week, in gunfire which the victims’ party claims came from government sponsored hit-men.
This claim of course is heavily disputed by the regime, but the question is whether the regime that has close connections with the Castros, the Guevaras and the Chavez’s is, as the claimants to the Guevara mantle in this country say, suppressing the voices of the unwashed masses?
Ah, and about Chavez, now, that is almost another matter. The president and his retinue, after the Cuba and Brazil visits, are to be hosted by the mildly ailing Chavez in Venezuela.
This means there is no doubt about the purpose of this visit – it is to say, we are comrades with the bloc of nations that does not deify the West.
It is also to say that the regime is comrades in arms with the regimes that are identified as those that are left leaning, ‘peoples’ and proletarian inclined.
Is the Sri Lankan regime this way inclined? Wickramabahu Karunaratne will say not. It is because several governance issues get in the way of the image of the government. The Katuwana issue is one in a string.
No doubt the JVP will make political capital out of it – and the party has all the right to, considering that two of its young party operatives have died in the incident. In any event, it seems that for far too long, a character who was creating mayhem, was getting away scot free.
This of course does not behoove well at all for a government that is cultivating its image as proletarian. Certainly, not in an area in which the original claimants to the mantle of Guevara, and the Chavez/Castro ideological project have for long considered home turf, i.e.: the JVP has always had grassroots support in Hambantota.
True, this support is heavily dented now, and has gone the way of the Rajapaksas, the new claimants to the Guevara/Castro legacy. But, between old and new, it would be almost comic to the departed Guevara, etc., from their celestial mokshas, to watch this rather risible tug o’ war for their legacy in a far off island.
