Dayan Jayatilleka served as advisor when President Premadasa strengthened LTTE with heavy arms
Dias
Rendering Unto Caesar. Vijitha Yapa Publications, Colombo, 2004, pp.
300-304.
At the meeting with Premadasa at Sucharita two of the group’s members
Edward Ratnasabapathy and Sivagnam who had come down from Jaffna for
that purpose, indicated to Premadasa that on the instructions of the
LTTE they would assure Premadasa that they would call off their
boycott and help support him in voting against the impeachment motion.
At the time I thought it was very unusual that the LTTE would wish to
protect Premadasa and see that he continued as president. It served to
indicate that even though overtly conflict was ongoing 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 peace negotiations with them, provided them
with arms to fight the TNA 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 some time to serve?
Jayatilaka and the police say the Tigers did it. ‘He generated hope to
the Tamil community,’ says the presidential adviser. ‘The Tigers had
to kill him. They are clearly the prime suspects. But according to
Justice Minister Hameed, ‘it is still not clear who was responsible
beyond a shadow of a doubt.’ By the end, there were a lot of people
who hated him enough to kill him...
Asiaweek
On the day he died, 68 year-old President Ranasinghe Premadasa woke up
at 4 am, as he had through most of his 40-year political career. He
did his yoga, and at 5:15 he read the newspapers. At 7:30 he called
his public relations officer and asked him to collect the ‘facts and
figures’ that reflected his record since he became president in 1988.
He would use it to address the ruling United National Party’s annual
rally on the Galle Face Green, on Colombo’s ocean front. ‘I want to
tell the people how I guided the nation,’ he said.
At 11:30 Premadasa, meticulous as ever, went to inspect the procession
of party faithful he would lead to the green from Colombo’s Sugadadasa
Sports Stadium. Life-size posters of the president lined the route of
the march. Security was light, despite an army announcement that a
Tamil Tiger hit squad had slipped into the capital. At Armour Street
the president jumped out of his Range Rover to ask his supporters to
line up to begin the procession [if his jump had been spontaneous then
it was awkward for a LTTE suicide bomber to schedule.]
Early in his career Premadasa was befriended by several powerful
businessmen. One was S. Rajendram, the Tamil founder of the Maharaja
Organisation, today one of the country’s richest groups. Another was
Sinhalese land developer A.K. Dharmadasa. Both prospered under the
UNP’s economic liberalization program. More recently Dharmadasa and
Maharaja’s son Killi became known in business circles as ‘the forces’.
They had access to Premadasa’s close confidant, Secretary of Finance
R. Paskaralingam, a Tamil who was considered the second most powerful
man in the country...
UNP politicians used the emergency rule to take out political
opponents, while Premadasa turned a blind eye. Some say he gave the
orders.
One such case was the murder of journalist Richard de Zoysa. Police
suspected as de Zoysa had friends among the JVP students at Colombo
University, the movement’s urban base. On the night of Feb.18, 1990,
Ronnie Gunasinghe, a senior superintendent for police and a confidant
of Premadasa, was having drinks with Deputy Defence Minister Ranjan
Wijeratne. At one point, says a senior police officer, Wijeratne
called Premadasa and told him of a plan to pick up the journalist
[neither tea planter Wijeratne nor policeman Ronnie Gunasinghe had
served like Dayan Jayatilleka as an infiltrator of the Left]. The next
day de Zoysa’s tortured body was found floating off a beach south of
Colombo. Wijeratne was killed in a car bomb explosion in March 1991.
Gunasinghe died with Premadasa in the explosion last week.
By February 1990 the carnage was over and Premadasa had won the war in
the south. But Indian troops were still entrenched in the north,
bogged down in a fight with Tamil Tigers. Premadasa, however, had
secured a ceasefire with the Tigers. According to Presidential adviser
Dayan Jayatilaka, Premadasa ordered the Sri Lankan Air Force to
evacuate to safety the wife and daughter of the Tiger leader
Velupillai Prabhakaran from their jungle hideout. He then ordered the
military to deliver heavy arms to the Tigers to use against the
Indians and rival Tamil groups.
In thirteen months of talks in Colombo, Premadasa offered the
guerillas more than any other Sinhalese leader had. The Tigers used
the time to regroup, while the Sri Lankan army was confined to
barracks. In June 1990, four months after the Indian troops withdrew,
the Tigers accused the president of ‘saying one thing and doing
another.’ War broke out again, and Premadasa was blamed. ‘Every time
one of my Far men gets his leg blown off,’ said an army captain in
1990, ‘I think of our president...’
Eastern Economic Review: Who killed Premadasa?
His government had been widely blamed for the assassination eight days
earlier of popular opposition leader Lalith Athulathmudali, a former
UNP minister who had tried to topple Premadasa in 1991 through an
impeachment motion in parliament. When it failed, the rebels were
expelled from the UNP and parliament, and formed their own Democratic
United National Front (DUNF) to continue the challenge. A gunman
killed Athulathmudali on 23 April at a campaign meeting for elections
on 17 May to seven of Sri Lanka’s nine provincial councils, the first
test of his new party’s appeal. The authorities also attributed this
killing to the LTTE, and produced a body dead of cyanide poisoning to
prove it.
Scepticism was widespread, and anti-government violence broke out
during Athulathmudali’s funeral. Anonymous leaflets sent to foreign
embassies alleged that a government minister had hired two
professional killers to do the job
Hamish McDonald, May 13, 1993, pp. 18-19 May 12, 1993, pp. 21-24
('Sudumahattaya' of the Borella-Rajagiriya underworld subcontractor
area of JRJ, Premadasa and Sirisena Cooray was produced in Court as
firing the handgun.)