The assassination of Janaka Perera, shook the nation last week. The LTTE, which in recent times had not been able to do anything that really could make people stand up and take notice, was able to do so by killing Janaka Perera who had become a soft target after taking to politics. There was one story that the late general used to tell his friends – that if your time had come, you had to go and nothing could prevent it. The example he gave was that of his own father, who while out on a walk, had been run over by a vehicle but had survived. Years later, he had died of complications resulting from a fall in the bathroom.

That was Janaka Perera. He was the most complete and total family man that this writer has ever known, yet when it came to the nation even his family came second. He was the stuff that heroes were made of. The last time I spoke to him, he was referring to the people of the NCP as ‘my people’. He died doing what he liked to do. He had always had political ambitions. From his point of view, going out while still in the limelight, was better than dying of old age in bed. He was 62 years-old, but retirement and coasting along until the end of his days, was never on his mind. Farewell my friend, may you and your wonderful wife, Vajira, rest in peace.

The UNP leader got to know of the assassination within minutes of the incident. He swung into action detailing party general secretary Tissa Attanayake and MPs John Amaratunga and Palitha Range Bandara to explain matters to the public at a press conference. Later Wickremesinghe summoned Tissa Attanayake, Vajira Abeywardene, Ravi Karunanyake, Joseph Michael Perera, Rukman Senanayake and John Amaratunga to discuss the situation arising from the assassination. It was discussed at this meeting that Janaka Perera had made a complaint to the Anuradhapura police station that he was under threat by the LTTE and requested security. But this call had gone unheeded. It was also discussed that Gotabhaya Rajapakse had declared that Perera’s name was not on the LTTE hit list and therefore it was not possible to provide him with security. When the UNP parliamentary group met, many parliamentarians were of the opinion that the government kept the door open for this assassination and that they cannot escape blame.

It was Attanayake who was sent to Anuradhapura to attend to the needful with regard to the bodies of Janaka Perera and his wife. It was decided to bring the bodies to Colombo for embalming and at Attanayake’s and Wickremesinghe’s request, the Prime Minister had expeditiously provided a helicopter to bring the bodies to Colombo. With regard to taking the bodies back to Anuradhapura to lie in state, there was some confusion resulting in the two bodies and the accompanying relatives spending nearly four hours at the Ratmalana airport. When the air force authorities refused to let the party into the airport, and calls were going back and forth between the stranded party and Tissa Attanayake, Perera’s eldest daughter had rung up Minister Kumara Welgama who was a family friend. Welgama had immediately phoned Gotabhaya Rajapakse who was then in Russia. He had then phoned the president, who had checked and found that a chopper was not available and he had immediately sent a police escort to take the bodies to Anuradhapura by road.

It is certainly true that the Rajapakse government has been less than accommodating of Janaka Perera. When President Rajapakse was elected to office in 2005, Perera was Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to Indonesia. Last year, he was suddenly recalled without any reason being given for his removal. This was the start of the chain of events which led to Janaka Perera taking to politics. So let’s start at the beginning. Who was responsible for throwing Perera out of the foreign service? The general belief is that it was Gotabhaya Rajapakse who had pushed for Perera’s removal from the position of Ambassador. But at the time of his removal, Mangala Samaraweera was the foreign minister, but he has never commented on why Perera was removed. It couldn’t be that he failed to notice it, because Perera was the most high profile individual serving in any Sri Lankan mission overseas.

That was the time before Palitha Kohona was appointed foreign secretary. Mr Palihakkara had retired and an acting secretary was in charge of the ministry. Since Mr Mangala Samaraweera is now in the opposition, the public would like to know from the former foreign minister whether it was really Gotabhaya Rajapakse who ordered that Perera be recalled from Indonesia?

After leaving the government, the Mangala Samaraweera/ Sripathy Sooriyarachchi duo accused the government of everything including having a secret pact with the LTTE. But they never accused the government of having removed the Ambassador to Indonesia who had done so much to block arms shipments from the Indonesian archipelago to the north of Sri Lanka. When he got wind of the news that he was to be removed from the position of Ambassador, Perera sent a letter to Samaraweera, outlining all that he had done in stymieing the LTTE in Indonesia. But nothing happened. The strange thing is even after both Samraweera and Perera ended up on the same side, Samaraweera continued to maintain that silence on Perera’s removal. Samaraweera was always a man who resented interference in his ministries. One of the main reasons why he fell out with president Rajapakse was because the president insisted on appointing Kohona as foreign secretary. In such a context, for Samaraweera not to raise even a whimper if Gotabhaya Rajapakse or even the president had been trying to tell him whom to recall and not to recall, would seem strange.

The story of Janaka Perera’s removal from the ambassadorial position he held still needs to be told; and the person who has to start is the then minister of foreign affairs. If undue pressure was brought on him by the defense secretary to have Perera removed, then this is the opportune moment to come out with the truth. What really happened? Was Perera sacked at the behest of either the president or the defense secretary or was it a common decision of the government in which Samaraweera also concurred? If the inexplicable silence continues, then one has to assume that it was Samaraweera who sacked Perera.

Even though it is unclear as to who is really responsible for Perera’s removal, it is undeniable that the Rajapakse government was remiss in not providing him with security commensurate with the threat he faced from the LTTE. Some time after he was removed from his ambassadorial post, a meeting between the defense secretary and Janaka Perera had been arranged at Minister Karu Jayasuriya’s house and the two army officers who had been in military operations together in the past, had at least partially, ironed out their differences. They were both serving soldiers at a time when rivalry and factionalism in the army was at its height. Gotabhaya Rajapakse was under General Vijaya Wimalaratne and Janaka Perera was at that time a rival of Wimalaratne’s. Besides this, Janaka Perera was never known to be self effacing and he would be always loud in his own praise.

He was in the habit of referring to himself in the regal third person, and these things tended to rile his peers and some of his immediate subordinates. Perera was popular among the lower raking officers and ordinary soldiers because he genuinely looked after their welfare. It was with his peers and those immediately below him that the issues arose. Both Gotabhaya Rajapakse and the present Army Commander Sarath Fonseka were exactly in the category of army officer who would find Perera’s tendency to speak highly of himself irritating. Both of them cannot be counted among Perera’s many admirers. Perera’s tendency to hog the limelight would have left individuals like Gotabhaya and Fonseka who were also involved in the same operations as Perera, asking themselves, "Well he did everything, so we did nothing?" As the Sunday Leader commented on editorially when Perera was made the UNP’s chief ministerial candidate for the NCP, "Janaka Perera was not everybody’s cup of tea."

It was in the context of these rivalries and resentments dating back to the 1980s and 90s, that the meeting had been arranged between Gotabhaya and Perera at Karu Jayasuriya’s residence. One of the agreements that was reached was that a licensed revolver would be given to Perera for his protection. Perera was then resident in Australia but visited Sri Lanka regularly. The paperwork for the promised licensed revolver took months whereas it could have been done in a day or two at most. Eventually the paperwork was completed. During this period, Perera had set up a foundation to help the families of disabled and dead armed forces personnel and he was conducting programs in various parts of the country whenever he was in Sri Lanka. During one of these visits to Sri Lanka, Perera gave an interview to the Sunday Leader where he had expressed the view that the strategy of capturing territory was wrong because it caused too many casualties and that what should be done was to use small groups to eliminate terrorists.

This interview sent the uneasy rapprochement that had taken place at Karu Jayasuriya’s house, completely awry. Whatever resentment that both Gotabhaya and Fonseka may have been carrying from years back came boiling to the surface, and Sarath Fonseka issued an order banning both Colonel Jayavi Fernando and Janaka Perera from entering army camps. Many of Perera’s friends see this as the main reason that drove Perera to getting into politics through the UNP. The obvious reason was that the present defense authorities did not want Perera propagating the view that the war strategy was wrong. This point raises certain questions. Can’t experts who have dissenting views express their ideas freely, especially when matters of national importance are involved?

In the 1990s, General Lucky Algama was scathing in his criticism of Ratwatte’s war strategy. He used to call operation Jaya Sikurui which was launched to open up a land route to Jaffna, "The highway of death". But Ratwatte never banned Algama from entering army camps. In any case Algama probably had never entered an army camp since he retired and had no desire to do so either. Even if he had been denied entry, Algama would have been unconcerned. But in Perera’s case, he was hurt to the quick by the ban. One of Perera’s shortcomings was his inability to put himself into the shoes of other people. Had he been commanding the Army and some other retired officer had criticized his war strategy, Perera too would have taken steps to ensure that confusion was not spread among the rank and file. In an organization where everything hinges on unquestioning obedience, a dissenting view could be debilitating.

When Perera was in the army, he used to speak his mind on matters of strategy. He has clashed even with Anuruddha Ratwatte on this score. That kind of internal battle goes on even now. But it’s different when a retired officer begins to question strategy from outside. It then becomes a political issue. It should be noted that even in the 1980s and 1990s when rivalry and factionalism was at its height in the military, all conflicts were among serving army officers. It was never a case of insiders vs outsiders. Perera’s fault was that he expected ‘enlightened freedoms’ where none could realistically be expected. He expected to be freely able to disseminate his opposing views without some attempt on the part of the authorities to restrict his access to the target group.

Even with regard to his security after he took to politics, the expectation was that the government would provide additional security for an opposition politician to go about his business with confidence. Most governments would provide just the minimum security arrangements that would be mandated by law and nothing more. Even the UNP government of 2001-2004, was no different. There is the celebrated instance of Lakshman Kadirgarmar continuing to enjoy the same security that he enjoyed as a minister. But then Kadirgarmar was Wickremesinghe’s conduit to president Chandrika Kumaratunga, and it was the dead rope that Kadigarmar gave Wickremesinghe that had the latter convinced until it was too late that Kumaratunga would not dissolve parliament.

These however were special arrangements. It is very rarely that one can find a government enlightened enough to provide extra security to a political opponent bent on defeating them. During the UNP government, Kadirgarmar was seen as a person who was helping the government survive. To have gone into politics, expecting your opponent to provide you with adequate security simply out of the goodness of his heart, is expecting too much from people. When he was asked by the UNP to contest as the chief ministerial candidate of the NCP, I advised him not to accept it because he has no chance of winning and the campaign would expose him to the LTTE the way Lucky Algama was. When I realized that he was going to contest, despite my advise, the last bit of advise I gave him was not to touch that defense spokesman post that the UNP wanted to give him because if he starts an argument with the defense authorities about the war, he not going to win that either.

I told him not to get into the trap of talking to UNP audiences about the war because if he tells them that the government is winning, that would demoralize the UNP and if he tells them that the LTTE was winning, that would direct the resentment of the whole country towards him. I told him to steer clear of the war issue in the campaign and if in his view the war strategy was wrong, then let the serving officers raise that question because it is their lives that are on the line. An officer who knows that he is going to get killed in a week’s time because of somebody’s harebrained scheme will always speak up before he goes down. This last bit of advise he took, and there was no repetition of the points he made in that Sunday Leader interview referred to earlier during the NCP campaign.

After his assassination, the UNP has been trying to make political capital of his death. From the beginning the attempt was to lay the blame for the killing on the doorstep of the government on the grounds that he was not provided with adequate security. It certainly is true that the government never provided him with security cover commensurate with the risk he faced from the LTTE. But it was the LTTE that killed him. This whole attempt to suggest that it was the government that got him killed through the TMVP and that Karuna was nominated to parliament as a reward to killing Janaka Perera is a case of throwing a red herring across the trail. Posters have appeared all over Colombo invoking curses on those who failed to provide adequate security to Perera. But those posters don’t mention the LTTE anywhere. Herein lies the problem. Everybody is being blamed except the culprit. This is the biggest insult that Janaka Perera has had to suffer – the inability of the party that he supported to directly lay the blame on those responsible for his death.

The UNP is now following Chandrika Kumaratunga’s example where instead of blaming the JVP for killing her husband, Vijaya Kumaratunga, she blamed Premadasa. These are the games that politicians play with the corpses of party men. The general public is not going to be any the wiser for listening to this nonsense. The bottom line is that these suicide bombings and assassinations have to stop. The UNP has once again clearly proved that they are incapable of confronting the LTTE. They fear to even mention the LTTE in relation to Perera’s killing. It’s not just Perera that the UNP has lost to the LTTE, but Ranjan Wijeratne, Lalith Athulathmudali, Gamini Dissanyake, and President R.Premadasa, to mention just a few. The UNP is in fact in the present plight because the LTTE wiped out its leadership.

It is high time that this nonsense stopped. But the UNP has time and again proved in the past fourteen years that it does not have the guts, the will or the ability to take on the LTTE. Their inability to mention the LTTE in speaking of Janaka Perera’s killing, is symptomatic of this mentality. If one poses the question as to who will wipe out those who wiped out Janaka Perera, the answer will be that it is the very people who delayed his firearm license and failed to provide him with security. If one’s motive is to put an end to the evil that swallowed up Janaka Perera, then one has no choice but to throw one’s weight behind the very people who did not provide him with security, because they represent the last chance that this country has of seeing an end to this problem.

One should not miss the wood for the trees. This is Sri Lanka. No government can be expected to go out of their way to provide special security for a political opponent who is bent on defeating the very government he requests security from. The government will provide security for such politicians only if it is in the law as it is in the case of the parliamentary opposition leader, who is entitled by law to the same security as a cabinet minister and a stipulated number of back up vehicles.

Since the present government, like all other governments before it, is made up of pruthagjanas (ordinary unenlightened people) it was unrealistic to expect them to provide special security to a political opponent, especially one who posed the biggest challenge to this regime after it was elected to power in 2005. When I made several desperate attempts to get him to back down, that was because of the assumption that he would not have government security. Instead of banking on what could not realistically be expected, Janaka Perera could have had his own security arrangements. As a man who has dealt with terrorism all his life, I find it difficult to forgive General Perera for having held a meeting in the compound of a house without assigning at least some party catchers if not private security personnel to check those entering the premises. Like Minister Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, he turned himself into a sitting duck for no reason. In the cabinet on Wednesday, speaking of the attack on Janaka Perera, the president commented "That’s what is going to happen to all of us if we are not careful." And he had advised the ministers to be attentive of their personal security. The very next day, minister Maithripala Sirisena had a narrow shave in Borelesgamuwa.

The war of words between the JNP and the JVP continued last week. When the JNP politburo met last week the main item discussed was the assassination of Janaka Perera. Wimal Weerawansa stated that the JVP was now making evasive statements with regard to the assassination, designed to shield the Tigers and that JVP MP Vijitha Herath had said "Whoever has carried out this assassination has done the wrong thing". Parliamentarian Achala Jagoda said that the JVP which had aligned itself with Elephants first had now gone to the extent of safeguarding the Tigers.

The entry of Karuna Amman to parliament was another significant event that occurred last week. When the JVP politburo met last week, MP K.D. Lal Kantha said that the Rajapakse government which had been robbing the people’s money, had now started robbing parliamentary seats as well. Vijitha Herath, MP, said that some parties are trying to portray Karuna’s entry into parliament as an expansion of the democratic space in the country.

But if that was the motive, they could have removed some other national list MP and given that place to Karuna. The JVP, it should be noted, is not on principle against Karuna’s entry into parliament. Their only grouse being that they have been deprived of a seat which they considered theirs. The possibility is that had it not been their seat that was given to Karuna, they too would have joined the crowd that gathered to welcome the reformed terrorist to parliament.