by P K Balachandran, Hindustan Times, September 8, 2004
Bradman Weerakoon, International Affairs Advisor to former Sri Lankan President, R Premadasa, has cast doubts on the popular notion that it was the LTTE which assassinated the President
In his racy book entitled “Rendering Unto Caesar” (Sterling Publishers, New Delhi, 2004) Weerakoon says that there are questions in regard to the assassination which have remained unanswered, giving room for other possibilities.
President Premadasa was killed, allegedly by a LTTE suicide bomber, when he was on a May Day padayatra at Armour Street, in Colombo in 1993. The police and the media said that the assassin was one Babu, allegedly a LTTE plant in Premadasa’s household. Babu, it was said, had approached the President pushing his bike, and the President had not objected as he was a known man.
Weerakoon says that the photograph of the mangled bodies of those killed in the blast unmistakably showed a dark, tall man with tousled hair with his crumpled bicycle among the dead. Some thing like a tape recorder with detached wires appeared strapped to his upper chest leading to the theory that it was the bomb.
But the face was not that of Babu that the media was showing, Weerakoon says.
“I had never seen or heard of Babu until the police revealed the man. I used to be a frequent visitor to Sucharita (the President’s residence) and found it strange that the name Babu had never come up earlier, either in my hearing or to my vision,” he submits.
“It was said that Babu was planted by the LTTE and that the assassination was carried out by the LTTE. However, there was no charge against anyone instituted in the courts, as would have happened in the case of any homicide, and certainly in the case of the President of the country,” Weerakoon points out.
Premadasa’s daughter, Dulanjali, also had doubts about the theory trotted out by the police and the media. She had instantly called for a public commission of inquiry into the assassination. “But no such commission was set up”, Weerkoon asserts.
According to him there was no “open indication that the LTTE was after Premadasa as target number one,” as Eelam War II, which was on at that time, was a low intensity one.
The LTTE had indeed killed Sri Lankan leaders at this time, but these were all military men like Maj Gen Denzil Kobbekaduwa and Rear Admiral Clancy Fernando, Weerakoon points out.
“Once in Geneva, when I met Lawrence Thilagar (one of the political leaders of the LTTE), whom I had kept in touch with on Premadasa’s instructions, and asked him point-blank, why they killed Premadasa, he denied any knowledge of it,” Weerakoon recalls.
According to him, the LTTE had been making overtures to Premadasa just prior at the assassination and, therefore, it was unlikely that the killing was the handiwork of the LTTE.
To give the context at this point, the period in question was politically very trying for Premadasa. He was facing a very grave threat to his political career in South Sri Lanka, among the majority Sinhalas. There was an impeachment motion against him in parliament inspired by his rivals.
At that time, a pro-LTTE Tamil militant group called Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS), was in parliament with nine MPs, as a proxy of the LTTE. EROS was threatening to withdraw from parliament as the relationship between the government and the LTTE was worsening due to Eelam War II which had begun in June 1990.
But suddenly, Weerakoon received a request from EROS for an urgent appointment with the President.
At the meeting with the President, two EROS leaders, Edward Ratnasabapathy and Sivagnanam, said that “on the instruction of the LTTE,” they would support him by voting against the impeachment motion.
“At that time I thought it was very unusual that the LTTE should wish to protect Premadasa and see that he continued as President,” Weerakoon recalled.
But explaining the apparent incongruity, he writes: “It served to indicate that even though overtly, conflict was going on between the LTTE and the government troops, as far as the LTTE was concerned, Premadasa was still the politically safer bet on the Sinhala side. After all, he had opened political negotiations with them, provided them with arms to fight the TNA (Tamil National Army set up by the Indian Peace Keeping Force prior to its withdrawal in 1990) and had tried to bring them into the mainstream of the Sri Lankan polity. Why then the sudden urge to kill him on the first day of May 1993, when he had still sometime to serve?”
Weerakoon observes that one week before Premadasa’s killing, suspected LTTE gunmen had killed Lalith Athulathmudali, a bitter opponent of the President. The killing had triggered a wave of hate, not against the LTTE, but Premadasa, because it was thought that the real killers were Premadasa’s henchmen.
“The question that some people were asking at that time, had to do with the connection, if any, between Lalith’s assassination and that of Premadasa’s,” Weerakoon remembers.
He then goes on to say: “In the absence of a public commission in which questions of the kind mentioned above may have been probed and answers found, Premadasa’s killing will continue to be regarded as another of the unsolved murders of this particularly murky period of our modern history.”