Premadasa’s Appeal To The JVP And The LTTE
Rajan Hoole
1989: The Eclipse of the JVP and the Perplexity of the Left – Part 1
“The cause of all these evils was the lust for power, arising from greed and ambition…The leaders in the cities, each provided with the fairest professions, on the one side with the cry of political equality of the people and on the other of a moderate aristocracy, sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which they pretended to cherish. Recoiling from no means in their struggle for ascendancy, they engaged in the direst excesses. In their acts of vengeance they went to even greater lengths, not stopping at what justice or the good of the state demanded. But they made party caprice of the moment their only standard, and invoked with equal readiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority of the strong arm, to glut the animosities of the hour.
“Thus morality was in honour with neither party, but the use of fair phrases to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in the quarrel or because envy would not suffer them to escape.”
- Thucydides, on the civil war at Corcyra (Corfu) (427 BC), from his History of the Pelopponesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BC)
Premadasa took his oaths of office as the new president from the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy – a practice inaugurated by Jayewardene – on 2nd January 1989. It was also early in the New Year that attacks on SLFP candidates along with their supporters commenced, and commenced with a vengeance. They were easy targets since they had not faced this before and were unprepared.
In the closing months of 1988 grass-roots SLFP supporters featured on hit lists provided by UNP agents, and were killed off as JVPers with the SLFP hierarchy hardly showing any signs of being aware of it. But this time party meetings and candidates were attacked by the JVP, and SLFP candidates had to be protected by the security forces. A notable attack was that on the SLFP meeting at Hingurakgoda on 8th February 1989 when Mrs. Bandaranaike was on the stage. She narrowly escaped and was taken away by helicopter.Read More
To be continued..
*From Rajan Hoole‘s “Sri Lanka: Arrogance of Power - Myth, Decadence and Murder”. Thanks to Rajan for giving us permission to republish. To read earlier parts click here
