brand logo

Sirisena Cooray: Beyond psychology

18 Dec 2021

By Deepthi Kumara Gunaratne  Former Minister Sirisena Cooray passed away last month, on 30 November, at the age of 90. A man surrounded by so much myth in political literature, yet his life and times remain without a proper analysis. In the 87-89 period of insurgency in the South, how was his role assessed? To provide some context, since 1987, the J.R. Jayewardene regime was unable to control the country’s then ongoing civil war. The reason for this was a lack of understanding of the political dimension of the war.  In early 1989, Ranasinghe Premadasa became President, and Rohana Wijeweera and Upatissa Gamanayake, leader and second-in-command of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) respectively,  were assassinated later that year, ending the insurgency in the South. The biggest challenge for political parties in Sri Lanka was recognising who was really involved in politics. For example, in 1989, arguably the worst period of the insurgency, there was a widespread belief among the public that Ranjan Wijeratne was the ideological operator of the insurgency. The other party in the struggle, the JVP, also believed this rumour.  During the insurgency in the South, in which the Sinhalese were divided, the ideological mechanism was not easy to handle. By 1989, the Premadasa regime realised that opening camps and checkpoints all over the country was a futile endeavour. Suppressing isolated incidents from time to time was also unproductive, as was the attempt to neutralise strikes. As a result, a new centre called “ops combine” was established, also known as the “Combined Command Centre”. Maj. Gen. Norman Vaidyarathne became its military leader and Ranjan Wijeratne became the political authority. Their main strategy was to suppress the insurgency using “small teams”. Under the programme, four soldiers and a corporal in a vehicle roamed the streets and arrested suspects. Comrade Chulananda Samaranayake, in his memoirs, wrote about one such incident. This is a counter-strategy taught at the American Military Academy. The goal is to intimidate the lower members of the anti-government movement, but it does not frighten a society.  Neither God’s law nor human law applies to intimidating a society. For that, the devil’s law must be found. This law was invented by Cooray. He called his theory “cutting diamonds from diamonds”. He did it on the basis that something can be destroyed by using the same thing. The military intelligence service including Gen. Vaidyarathne, and Sirisena Cooray spent the day intoxicated; one of the captured middle-level leaders distracted them by telling unspoken stories about the other. With that, they briefly gained access to the main targets in the chain. Cooray was well aware that man is not a psychological animal. Because a man’s unconscious is related to the other, he or she is related to the other in desire and example. Man, then, is a network, not a home (one entity). For example, Vaidyarathne and Cooray knew that Kadurupokuna (1989), the armed leader of Colombo, would not betray their confidant, D.M. Ananda. So, what they did was to release some ad hoc information about D.M. Meanwhile, D.M.’s personal affairs were also used in the process. The strategy proved right, and it did not take long for D.M. to fall into the trap.  To any leftist and progressive intellectual, Sirisena Cooray is a simpleton. However, what is the truth that has escaped the intellectuals who are fascinated by reality in general, including the JVP? Where did not only the JVP leader, but also an anthropologist like Bruce Kapferer, go wrong about the building block of Sinhala thinking?  According to the JVP leader, the people working in the state’s repressive apparatus, including the Army, are Buddhist-minded people with softness in their hearts. According to Kapferer, the Buddhist showcases his cruelty through torture paintings and sculptures in the temples he saw as a child. Therefore, what happens in the end is that the Buddhist meets the Buddhist.  Mindful of the myths of the JVP leader and the savvy anthropologist, Sirisena Cooray and Gen. Vaidyarathne showed us that the intellectual examination of the rural Sinhala man is shaped by Western war films, detective stories, and pastoral films about revenge and torture. Additionally, Sirisena Cooray was a former Colombo cinema manager. He used a rural youth who had watched western films to destroy the JVP’s rural youth. Accordingly, Cooray, who was no racist, defeated racism in the 1980s through Western thinking. Therefore, his cruelty against racism is not a pathological one, but an advanced ideology. As soon as the JVP leadership collapsed in November, “ops combine” was disbanded because the Premadasa regime had a programme to attract the masses. After 2009, the country lost such a political programme. Instead, it was replaced by a “family”. As a result, the country was destroyed.  “Existentialism” – the ideology that there are no objective and universal fair values and that each person should create values for himself by living fully and responsibly in action and at all times – of the 80s is dead in the new millennium. What reigns now is perversion. The challenge for us now is how to create a new existentialism that provides relief to the poor without racism, in a world without Sirisena Cooray.


More News..