Those addressing the gathering were Minister for Science and Technology, Tissa Vitharana MP; the historian Santasilan Kadirgamar; a representative of Eelam Peoples Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF-P) leader T. Sritharan, Bandula Chandrasekera of the Energy Forum; Gamini Jayaweera of Pussellawa Mithuru Sevana; Boralesgamuwa Urban Council member Oliver Perera; and E. B. Shanta and Hemachandra Perera of the Resource Centre for Community Groups.

Upali Cooray and Sri Lanka solidarity activism

by B. Skanthakumar

Upali Cooray, who passed away on 21 August 2009, was a revolutionary socialist; trade unionist; anti-racist; partisan of anti-colonial and national liberation movements; human rights lawyer; university teacher and much more.

Having moved to London in the late 1960s, he became a leading Sri Lanka solidarity activist, beginning with the campaign to free political prisoners jailed before and after the Sinhala youth uprising of April 1971, and extending his support to the struggles of Tamil youth for self-determination before and after the 1983 ‘Black July’ riots.

Here, I wish to recall his contribution to Sri Lanka solidarity activism in London, during and after the second Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection of 1987-1991, which is when and where we first met.

In Sri Lanka, the United National Party regime presided by Ranasinghe Premadasa was in power and appeared unassailable. The parliamentary opposition was weak and divided, the mass media muzzled, dissent silenced by illegal arrests, abductions and extra-judicial killings, and emergency laws strangled civil society.

The self-acclaimed ‘patriots’ of the JVP were terrorising and assassinating public officials, politicians, trade unionists, and leftists supportive of the pro-devolution element of the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord. Within a few short years, anywhere between 40 and 60 000 Sinhala youth were exterminated as ‘subversives’ by state security agencies, peaking at 1,000 a week in 1989.

Outside of Sri Lanka little was known, and even less understood, of this tragedy. At the time, international attention centred on the war that had raged since 1983 in the Tamil-majority North and East, and the military operations there of the misnamed Indian Peace-Keeping Force.

Within the island, those who protested the bloodbath in the South were isolated and besieged: denounced as “terrorists” for inconveniently talking of democratic and human rights, and “traitors” for allegedly causing disrepute to the security forces through sharing information on human rights violations with Amnesty International among others.

A seasoned initiator of single-issue campaigns and broader coalitions, Upali Cooray spearheaded the establishment in London of the Committee for Democracy and Justice in Sri Lanka (CDJ) in 1989, joined by among others Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaranatunga, who was then in self-exile following the JVP’s assassination of her husband Vijaya.

CDJ’s demands were three-fold: justice for the families of the ‘disappeared’; protection of democratic rights whether violated by State or non-State actors; and resolution of the ethnic conflict through political and not military means.

It was a rare space where progressives, ethnic and ideological tensions notwithstanding, would meet, share information, debate and organise in solidarity with Sri Lanka. CDJ also hosted discussions with visiting Sri Lankan oppositionists, often at the Red Rose Labour Club in North London or Conway Hall in Central London.

In October 1990, Upali was instrumental in organising a fact-finding delegation of European parliamentarians and lawyers led by Christine Oddy MEP to Sri Lanka.

The delegation met and were briefed by, among many others, the opposition politicians Mahinda Rajapakse MP and Mangala Samaraweera MP who were de-facto leaders of the Mothers Front, an association of family members of the ‘disappeared’.

The mission report, along with the names and details of almost 1,500 victims and an analysis of their cases, was published in London in September 1991 by Friends of the Disappeared in Sri Lanka, another organisation inspired by Upali.

Shortly before its publication, Mahinda Rajapakse – bound for Geneva to attend the UN Sub-Commission on Human Rights – had been detained at the international airport, and affidavits on ‘disappearances’ collected by the Mothers Front confiscated from him.

That incident underscored the value of this documentation and the importance of its dissemination. Upali was clear-headed on the nature and limits of the European Parliament and the United Nations; however he was looking beyond these institutions, hoping that the report’s publication would “encourage more people to support the efforts of the courageous few men and women in Sri Lanka who continue to fight for human rights …”

Another important initiative of his was the London conference on ‘Human and Democratic Rights in Sri Lanka’ organised by CDJ in November 1993. This large meeting at the University of London Students Union brought together activists from Sri Lanka, with exiles and expatriates from across Western Europe.

Among the speakers from Sri Lanka were Kamala Peiris, Lucien Rajakarunanayake, Ainsley Samarajiwa, Joe William and Javid Yusuf. Presentations were invited on child rights, labour rights, media freedom, constitutional reform, peace initiatives, and security sector reform, and later edited by Upali and published as In Place of the Spiral of Violence (London, 1994).

As Upali observed in the introduction to that collection: discussions on democratic and human rights inside and outside Sri Lanka were polarised on ethnic lines, and had evacuated the concerns of marginalised groups and classes. Only an all-island mass democratic movement would, he argued, “end the spiral of violence that has plagued our country”.

Two dissenting Tamil participants at the conference were subsequently murdered by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, exercising its self-elected role as “sole, legitimate representatives of the Tamil people”: Sabaratnam Sabalingam in his Paris apartment in May 1994, and Loganathan Ketheeswaran (as he then preferred) at his Dehiwela home in August 2006.

When we last met, in Colombo in April, it was evident that after 26 years of brutality and suffering visited on Sri Lanka and its peoples, the war was in endgame. Upali was already thinking ahead of the democratic tasks unfinished, the fight for justice and social transformation shelved for a generation, and the patient renewal of the Left beginning from political education of the youth.