By Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake –

There are remarkable patterns of history, organized violence, and Disinformation between events leading to the pogrom and forced population displacements in Sri Lanka in 1983, and British occupied Palestine, 35 years earlier when the Nakba unfolded amid Cold War escalating in Europe.

Both, Ceylon and Palestine were British occupied in 1948, and both got faux independence that year as the British officially left but stayed behind to stage Gladio Style “Stay Behind” Operations and Shocks in the post/colony; These included riots, protests, coups, assassinations such as SWRD Bandaranaike in 1959,  with the CIA and MI-6 as happened to Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Chile’s Socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973 for regime change and destabilization of the Global South struggling to de-colonize and be Non-Aligned.

While the Crown Colony of Ceylon morphed into a British Dominion with pageantry and pomp for its bemused natives on February 14, 1948, the violent birth of the state of Israel followed exactly three months later on May 14, 1948 amid the Nakba in Palestine with thousands killed and millions forcibly displaced.

As the British mandate expired and its military withdrew in May 1948, Zionist militias, many trained by British occupation forces, divided and partitioned a culturally mixed Palestine to birth the Jewish State of Israel. This, to secure the Suez Canal and expiate Europe’s guilt for its Nazi Gas Chambers and the extermination of six million Jews at the end of World War 2.

The violent partition of British India into West and East Pakistan had happened a year earlier in 1947. Pakistan was increasingly rendered a US-CIA Central Intelligence Agency ‘Garrison State’, while India aligning with the Socialist Block and Russia.

Cold War Proxy War in South Asia: Weaponizing Identity Politics

A regional Cold War was developing in South Asia in parallel to the Cold War between the Western Capitalist Allies US, UK, Western Europe, and Communist Block led by Russia (1945-1991), or NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. India had been partitioned by the retreating British in 1947 and allied with the Global Left, while Pakistan became a base for the Western Block.

By then, the racialization of religious and linguistic cultural differences and the weaponization of ethno-religious identity politics to divide and rule the post/colony and buttress British claims to racial superiority and government were in place, As the Cold War between the Western Allies against God-less Communists escalated across the de-colonizing Global South, Gladio style. “stay behind” operations were staged across Asia, Africa and South America, as much as in Europe against Communists and Socialists. This was to protect the economic and security interests of the retreating European empires against socialist and communist led National Independence and decolonization movements across Asia, Africa and South America.

With the wisdom of hindsight and new research based on de-classified documents, it is clear that both Palestine and Sri Lanka, geostrategic countries at the cross-roads of global trade routes were subject by the same forces and neocolonial secret agencies including British MI-6 and Zionist Mossad networks specialized in Gladio operations. It is not an accident that Bernard Guffler the US special Ambassador in Sri Lanka, who was familiar with Gladio Operations in Germany, was present at the residence of Socialist Prime Minister, SWRD Bandaranaike, just before he was assassinated on September 25, 1959.

Similar Catastrophes and Shock Doctrines – assassination, coups, pogroms, staged riots and protest for regime change and forced displacement of populations to divide mixed cultural geographies and histories, un-mix populations and construct partitions and divided histories unfolded– of course in collusion with local political elites and their networks. Much of this was accomplished with funds from the International Development Aid gravy train.

Because of its geostrategic location at the Center of Indian Ocean energy, trade and Submarine Date Cable routes, Sri Lanka, South Asia’s wealthiest country by all metrics except the exorbitantly privileged US Dollar, still suffers from being  an international aid “Donor Darling’”: Currently the scenic island is trapped in an Colonial Club de Paris and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Eurobond debt trap  and the Chabad- Lubovitch ‘Spider Web’.

Recall that, Ostrovsky quoted Penny Jayewardene, wife of Ravi Jayewardene, the son of President JR Jayewardene who was involved in setting up of the Special Task Force (STF) -Mossad-KMS- training camps on how World Bank Funds that were earmarked for the Mahaweli Development Project were diverted for covert operations and the setting up training bases in the Eastern Province.

Proxy Wars against De-colonization

With the wisdom of hind sight and new research based on de-classified documents available in the British Archives and US National Security Archive it is now clear that Sri Lanka’s so-called ‘internal ethnic conflict’ triggered 43 years ago in July 1983 was part of a much wider geopolitical jigsaw puzzle of Cold War regional Proxy Wars across the de-colonizing Global South. These included both Palestine and Sri Lanka. Of course, the July 1983 Nakba had elements of the Jakarta Method (1965), detailed in Vincent Bevin’s book, adapted to Sri Lanka.

The ethnic conflict research and Human Rights research industry which was part of Cold War Area Studies in the American Academy served, often inadvertently, to promote racialized narratives about dark natives engaged in perpetual ethno-religious violence in the post/colony. These islanded, colonial and Orientalist histories reeked with Raj Nostalgia and buttressed narratives of “internal” ‘ethnic conflict’ that concealed the external geopolitical forces, actors and networks involved in Weaponizing identity politics.

The Weaponization of ethno-religious identity politics entailed the same external actors who preached liberal democracy and human rights, literally providing weapons and training to State run paramilitary outfits to promote internal ethno-religious violence, and Dirty War terror and torture house operations.

Contrary to our everyday lived multicultural histories, social reality, and mixed cultural geography, a story of permanent ethno-religious violence in the post/colony and the concomitant superiority of British rule with its mask of liberal democracy and human rights was constructed through the Ethnic Conflict Research and Peace Building Industry.

This too, is how we were Gaslighted into believing in our inferiority and inability to govern ourselves, or as Franz Fanon termed the colonial condition– Black Skin-White Mask. The ethnic conflict research industry was in turn part of Cold War Area Studies grant programs in the American academy, connected to the FBI and CIA, and funded by the State Department and later USAID. It included human rights, democracy and peace building, trauma and reconciliation, literature and film production. As University of Chicago Historian, Bruce Cumming noted in an influential article titled “Area studies and international studies during and after the cold war” in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars:  “The evidence suggests that the Ford Foundation, in close consultation with the CIA, helped to shape postwar area studies and important collaborative research in modernization studies and comparative politics that were later mediated through well-known Social Science Research Council (SSRC) projects.

Sri Lanka’s 30 year armed conflict waxed and waned between cycles and bouts of international peace building as part of a regional Cold War Proxy War waged between India then close to the Soviet Socialist Block led by Russia against the Western allies, seeking military bases in the geostrategic island nation– then as now.

Sri Lanka’s Cold War Proxy War

In a nutshell, India set up, trained, armed and funded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil (LTTE), and other Tamil militant groups in the north, after the pro-American JR Jayewardene regime came to power in 1977. India then allied with the Soviet Socialist Block feared, then as now the prospect of foreign US and UK military bases in her backyard. The Mahaweli Development Project had already got going, with population transfers roiling the Eastern Province near the Trincomalle deep sea port.

India was not successful in staving off foreign bases in Sri Lanka. The staging of the July 1983 Pogrom after President JR Jayewardene came to power in 1977, enabled British and Israeli military ‘advisors” to enter the county and set up long desired bases in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. This was under the guise of the British Keenie Meeni mercenaries and Israel’s Mossad providing security to President JR Jayewardene regime to fight the Indian RAW-backed LTTE. Bases were set up purportedly to fight the LTTE in 1984, overseen by his son Ravi Jayewardene. Much of this history is contained in books by Phil Miller on the Keenie Meenie mercenaries, Herman Gunaratne / Malinge Guneratne who worked with the Mahaweli Authority resettlement program in Trincomalee, and corroborated by Victor Ostrovsky in his book “By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer’.

The cover up investigation of Ostrovsky’s revelations about Mossad’s activities in Sri Lanka, done by a former Justice Wadugodapitiya PC is demonstrably flawed and contrary to the facts including those revealed in a hagiographic book on Ravi Jayewardene, titled “The Unassuming Legend” that details visits to Israel and a soujorn as the Buddhist monk in Thailand. Not so coincidentally this was when the CIA through the Asia Foundation was weaponizing Buddhism as detailed in Yale University historian Eugene Ford’s book: Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asia” published in 2017.

Recall that back in 1959, Socialist Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike was assassinated by a ‘man in robes’ at a time when Asian religions (Buddhism and Islam), were being weaponized in the course of what the scholar Dianne Kirby has termed the ‘Religious Cold War” in America. This was in order to fight ‘Godless Communists’ in the de-colonizing Global South, including by American Evangelical Christian Zionist networks.

The cover-up investigation into the 1959 assassination of Prime Minister Bandaranaike which retrospectively reads like the plot of Peter Greenaway’s clever film. “The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover” was done by Britain’s Scotland Yard!

The Mahaweli Development Project: Colonialism by Other Means?

Israeli operatives had already started work in Sri Lanka in 1977 through the Agriculture Sector and Mahaweli Development scheme which saw populations transfers setting the stage for massacres in the area to spread its tentacles along with the British MI 6. This was the backdrop to July 1983, triggered by clandestine external actors with deep historical knowledge of the country’s cultural diversity and experienced in weaponizing ethno-religious identity politics in collusion with local political elites and their cronies.

Tamil civilians in Batticalo used to call the British KMS mercenaries “Mossadu” as Phil Miller details in his book ‘Keenie Meenie: the British Mercenaries who got away with War crimes”. The 1983 riots had elements of the Jakarta method. Lists of Tamil homes and businesses to be attacked had been complied and some Trade Unions in the Colombo Port and Senior Government Ministers were implicated in the violence.

Skilled in unleashing violence and reigning it in, the unmaking of ties among the Tamils and Muslims of the Eastern province clearly was the handiwork of Mossad operating with and training the State’s Paramilitary Special Forces in the Eastern Province.

Subsequently as Indian Peace Keeping Forces moved in and took over the Northeast Province, the British KMS mercenaries and Mossad’s operations and bases to train the STF moved to Southern Sri Lanka where Dirty War double game operations unfolded with a re-branded and resurgent anti-Indian JVP in tow.

It is now clear that the 1989 period of Dirty War with the JVP and STF both penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies with established history in Sri Lanka, ensured prolonging their sojourn in Sri Lanka with paramilitary outfits they had trained in terror, torture house ops. disappearences including Batalanda etc. as the Cold War in Europe reached its end in early 1990. Subsequently, President Premadasa ordered the Mossad out of Sri Lanka, and he was killed.

Remarkably it is alleged that, Sir Ivor Jennings, the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya had earlier suggested the Ceylon may be an appropriate terra nullius (an empty land or territory), for the Zionist settler colony. Ceylon like Palestine was portrayed as more or less empty of people and hence suitable for European Jewish occupation and settlement – then as now given the Chabad houses. After all the colonized dark natives hardly counted, and were eminently disposable in the colonial administrator’s Orientalist imagination. The British government however chose Palestine, closer home and more geostrategic given proximity to British Oil’s Persian (Iranian) Oil fields, the Suez Canal, and the ‘Holy Land or Jerusalem. Mercifully Ceylon and her hapless natives were spared but Britain in retreat was intent on ensuring its economic and security interests everywhere. This, increasingly in partnership with the rising American Empire.

As Cuming notes: “With the end of the Cold War, U.S. government/intelligence priorities have focused much more openly on what has probably been the underlying priority all along: protecting US. interests and power in the world. A major part of this is promoting US.-based global corporations and exports, with the free market “world without borders “as the accepted paradigm for economic development. For US. research institutions supporting government/intelligence priorities this involves collapsing the diversity of human experience into an assumed universal self-interested desire for material development. Even without the Cold War, then, there is a need to separate academic and government functions so that there can be truly free inquiry and opinions, with the opportunity to explore a diversity of paradigms.

At this time British and Israeli secret services continue to work together notes Carlos Cruz Mosquesa. Investigative journalists from Declassified UK have uncovered the fact that the British government, which claims to be working with Israeli leaders toward a cease-fire, has supported them with a staggering five hundred military intelligence flights over Gaza during the twenty-one months of violence. That is aside from direct arms supplies to the Israeli Defense Forces who are accused of war crimes. The attempts to halt the genocidal violence unleashed on Palestinians coincide with Western nations’ efforts to protect and support Israel and those responsible for war crimes. While the United States’ unconditional military support remains the most important for Israel, much of the Western world is also complicit.

Given histories of European imperialism and related divide and rule policies, de-colonizing countries in Asia, Africa and South America, often had tensions between majority and minority communities which were negotiated and accommodated over time. The tensions that escalated into armed conflict and dirty war scenarios in de-colonizing Global South countries were due to external geopolitical actors Militarizing tensions by providing arms training and funding in order to Weaponize internal ethno-religious identity differences in the post/colony. This to secure their neocolonial economic and security interests as happened after Ceylon morphed into a British Dominion in 1948, and even beyond. While the Socialist SWRD and Sirimavo Bandaranaike regimes were in power from 1956-1977, external interference was covert and through the opposition JVP, rather than capture of State institutions aside from the attempted coup of 1962.

The deep infiltration and penetration of local and national institutions, law and order and investigative institutions under the guise of foreign Development Aid, training and so-called ‘capacity building’ programs were and are an inherent part of the Weaponization of identity politics– both with State and non-state including civil society sector, actors and networks.

The impunity of Zionist Chabad houses operating in all parts of Sri Lanka to service Israeli tourists and Defense Forces despite local protests at this time is indicative that the infiltration and penetration of National intelligence and investigative Institutions by external geopolitical actors and intelligence agencies, which escalated after the July 1983 Pogrom continues to this day. This was also evident at the end of the Aragalaya protest operation to stage Sri Lanka’s first ever Sovereign Default and Regime Change when violence and destruction of property targeting government and Ministers unfolded. The culprits remain free and there has been little interest in investigation. So too the chilling killing of Mr. Dinesh Shaftter primary witness in the Central Bank Bond scam case against Ranil Wickremesinghe and others.

With the wisdom of hindsight. it is now clear, 42 years after our July 1983 Nakba that the Western veneer of liberal democracy and human rights had us fooled along with the well-funded ethnic conflict research and Raj Nostalgia history industry that has islanded Sri Lanka. This despite expanding NATO military bases around the world, now totaling 750 plus in more than 80 countries to promote Human Rights and Neoliberal Democracy, while supporting clandestine Dirty War operations in the Global South against leftist de-colonization, national Independence and liberation movements. This was much like Gladio Operations in Europe against communists, all of which served to advance the economic and security interests of the Euro-American empire- then as now.

Part I – Our July 1983 Nakba & The Ethnic Conflict Research Industry

[1] https://adst.org/Readers/Ceylon-Sri%20Lanka.pdf De-classified State department documents also WIkileaks for detail on Guffler.

[2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14672715.1997.10409695

[3] For a Sovereign State and God’s Secret Agent 3

[4] https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780333993989

[5] https://www.defenddemocracy.press/these-global-south-countries-barred-arms-transfers-to-israel/