The state run Daily News in an abusively worded editorial today slammed the Government’s former Ambassador to the UN in Geneva Dr. Dayan Jayatillake, accusing him of praying for a repeat of the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983 in order to destablise the ruling Rajapaksa administration.

The editorial comes in the wake of an opinion piece penned by Jayatillake in which he warned that state media was threatening Tamils in Colombo with violence by publishing a ‘point of view’ by columnist Jayantha Gunesekera who warns that the TNA’s demands for police powers could incite communal hatred towards Tamils living in the capital.

Rajpal Abeynayake

“No, there will never, ever, be a July 1983 in this country again, no matter how many Dayans want it to satisfy their own personal bloodlust in pursuance of their own petty pathological hatred against a regime that they now despise for piffling personal reasons,” Daily News Editor Rajpal Abeynayake said in his 15 August Editorial.

The Daily News also stated that its columnist Gunesekera, who Dr. Jayatillake said in his piece he had never heard of before, was a President’s Counsel and a former Secretary of the Bar Association.

The state run newspaper’s editorial page that has taken to vilifying Government critics and rights activists in near profane language accuses the former Ambassador of having “wet dreams” about another Black July.

“This much can be stated without an atom of hesitation. Dayan could hope and entertain wet-dream desires for a July ’83 for all he wants, but it is over our dead bodies here in this newspaper, and of course over the dead bodies of any person in authority in this regime that a single Tamil in this country is going to be harmed so much as by a pinprick,” Abeynayake’s Editorial said.

It compared the ex-Diplomat to Chicken Little, the children’s story character who believes the sky is falling because an acorn fell on his head, because Jayatillake had also warned in a previous article that India was poised to invade Sri Lanka.

Clarifying its columnist’s article, the Daily News Editorial said that Gunasekera had simply written that Provincial Councillors by their recent behaviour are not the best persons to wield police powers. “In their hands police powers could endanger the property of Tamils in the Western province not in the way of a pogrom but in the way of politically empowered high handed intrusions into personal spaces and property — as Provincial Councillors and other lower rung politicians have been notorious for in places such as Deraniyagala, in recent times, for example,” Abeynayake wrote.

Taking the abuse one step further the editorial concludes:

“Need we say more about who, by way of cynical, manipulative misrepresentation, really wishes for a Black July ’83 in this country? D can stand for donkey, and yes, it can also be for diabolical.”

Dr. Jayatillake who previously served as Sri Lanka’s PR UN to Geneva during the controversial 2009 period was also appointed Colombo’s Envoy to France where he recently concluded his posting. He has become a vocal critic of the Government since retirement, authoring particularly scathing critiques about the regime’s attempts to scuttle the 13th Amendment, apathy towards ethno-religious fascist movements and rampant militarisation.