{"id":246597,"date":"2026-03-28T17:12:50","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T11:42:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=246597"},"modified":"2026-04-02T09:28:41","modified_gmt":"2026-04-02T03:58:41","slug":"bases-blue-jeans-shia-islam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/bases-blue-jeans-shia-islam\/","title":{"rendered":"Bases, Blue Jeans & Shia Islam\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

By\u00a0Manuka Wijesinghe<\/a>\u00a0\u2013<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Manuka Wijesinghe<\/p><\/div>\n

\u2018The Iranian\u2019s are playing chess, while Trump is clueless\u2019, a recent news caption stated, regarding the US president\u2019s erratic warfare in Iran. Indeed, it does seem that the sitting US president is clueless, but is he? Or, does he appear clueless to one who only sees Iran. For that what cannot be ignored is that the playbook for Iran\u2019s destruction is the same playbook as in Palestine, of Lebanon, of Syria. It is the deliberate and the methodical obliteration of the cradle of ancient civilization and religious history.<\/p>\n

If, assuming the US president is clueless, where are those Americans who inherited the baton of British Imperialism? That baton which made and unmade national leaders for overt Nationalism or suspected Socialism, the truth being, not political credo but their refusal to execute Imperial and Manifest Destinies of those who received the reins of empire. For example, the refusal to grant rights for the operation of British military and naval bases in recently independent colonies.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The strategic island of Cyprus\u2019 first independent president, the Archbishop Makarios\u2019 efforts to terminate the British base resulted in a coup d\u2019etat which ousted him. It resulted in Turkey\u2019s invasion of Northern Cyprus and the eventual division of Cyprus into Turkish and Greek Cyprus. Having seized the north, Turkey, a NATO member, granted the US the rights to establish a military base in Northern Cyprus while Britain maintained their base in the south. It is from the British base that the Americans are currently conducting their deadly against the Republic of Iran.<\/p>\n

Ceylon, had a similar history. During the second world war, after the fall of Malaya, Ceylon was identified as an important location for the British control of the Indian Ocean and a Royal Navy base was established in Trincomalee and British troops stationed, for Ceylon was the empire\u2019s main source of rubber which was essential for the manufacture of tyres, gas masks and other military equipment.<\/p>\n

In 1942 Singapore fell and the Japanese navy launched an operation against the British naval fleet based in Trincomalee. They did not succeed and the Japanese kamikazes were deterred. But, on the 3rd<\/sup><\/span> of March, the Japanese forces occupied the Andaman Islands, and British focus on Ceylon was intensified upon which the Allied headquarters of the South East Asia command was located in the hill capital of Kandy. The Ceylonese thus became targets in another\u2019s war.<\/p>\n

A few years later, in 1948, Ceylon received her Independence. But the British base remained. Why did DS Senanayake, Ceylon\u2019s first Prime Minister allow it? Browsing through some old papers I found a book of newspaper articles contributed to the \u2018Island\u2019 by one Amita. One article that caught my eye. It was titled the \u2018Farsightedness of DS\u2019<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n

One day, Muhandiram Pedrick Wakwella, a front line UNP er had come to the Prime Minister\u2019s home, most agitated and said to him, \u2018What is this Sir, these Leftist fellows are going around the country telling that the Independence we got was a fake one.\u00a0 <\/span>They are saying that no independent country will ever permit any foreign country to have a military bases on their soil. But we have permitted the British to have bases here. So, where is our Independence, they ask? They say when Britain gets involved in a war, we will get dragged in too.\u2019<\/p>\n

Thereafter DS had replied, \u2018Pedrick, the Tamils want a share of the national pie, Ponnambalam, Chelvanayakam, Suntheralingam and even Peri Sundaram and Thondaman. They are educated and cultured men. They will fight for their rights in parliament and political platforms. They believe in Gandhi\u2019s principles. Now, there is a new threat, a very dangerous threat.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Who is that sir?\u2019 Pedrick has asked.<\/p>\n

\u2018SWRD Bandaranaike\u2019, DS replied. \u2018Don\u2019t underestimate the man. With this cry of \u2018Sinhala Only\u2019, the due place for Buddhism, a place in the sun for the common man, he will one day unleash forces that cannot be controlled. He is going to rouse communal and religious passions that will make this country go up in flames. Men will go crazy and it will be the rule of the mob. And the Tamils are going to be its target. And, in a few years hence, a new kind of Tamil youth is going to emerge, sick of the supineness of their old leaders, these Tamil men, without the education and the culturedness of their fathers, will go for an armed showdown with the government and its forces. They are going to play hell and there is going to be a blood bath\u2019<\/p>\n

Thereupon Muhandiram had asked him, \u2018But sir, what does this have to do with the bases?\u2019<\/p>\n

Thereupon DS said, \u2018My dear Pedrick. We have an agreement with the British. If there is any aggression from without or WITHIN, they have to come to our rescue. When violence and rebellion breaks out in the north and the east, we can ask the British troops in Trincomalee to halt it. They are obliged to protect the democratically elected government in Ceylon. And Britian will pour in men and arms until the rebellion is completely routed. So heaven protect this country if some misguided super patriot ever asks the British to quit and hand over the bases back\u2019\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, we did have a Tamil uprising more than thirty years later. But how could DS have predicted its inevitability, then? Did he have prophetic powers? His assumption was not based on past experience for we, that is the Sinhalese and the Tamil had shared this island, without mutinies, since known time. Furthermore, the last several kings of the Sinhalese had been Tamils kings. They had ruled, honouring the majority religion, from the seat of Buddhism in the Kandyan kingdom, with the complete acceptance of their subjects, despite the difference of faith. We had never needed an outside force to protect us from each other, why now?<\/p>\n

Hence, what one needs to ponder is if DS has been subjected to British brainwashing, which Britain had done, most successfully, with their selected elite in the colonies. Part of the indoctrination protocol of British Colonialism was to convince the new elite that the inevitability of Independence was uprising of minorities against majority rule?\u00a0 <\/span>Or vice versa, like in the case of the new Arab states carved up from the former Ottoman empire?<\/p>\n

Divide and Rule was British policy. And Independence\u2019s legacy. The Tamils had no reason to rise against us if our leaders would rule as they had, before the advent of colonialism. We spoke two languages, but had a shared geography, tradition, culture and many aspects of faith.<\/p>\n

Though DS was in British stooge, the man who followed him, SWRD Bandaranaike differed. He was ardently committed to non-alignment and a staunch supporter of Egypt\u2019s Gamal Abdel Nasser and defended his right, at the United Nations General Assembly, to nationalize the Suez Canal company and to take the Suez\u2019s control from the British and the French. Thus, SWRD went against Britain and Israel. One year after the Suez affair, on the 15th<\/sup><\/span> of October 1957, Ceylon\u2019s Prime Minister, SWRD Bandaranaike nationalized the British base in Trincomalee and brought complete Independence to Ceylon. Less than two years later he was assassinated.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, although SWRD ceased British military operation in Ceylon, Ceylon was unable to return to the peaceful state of ethnic coexistence as prior to Colonialism for the Ceylon Civil Service which Britain had created to administer the colonies, continued, after Independence, to executed public policy in the colonial legacy of \u2018Divide and rule\u2019. In its spirit, it was none other than SWRD\u2019s own advisor Neil Quintus Dias, a civil servant who Neville Jayaweera, the former government agent of Jaffna describes in his book as, \u2018the epitome of a colonial civil servant and a pukka sahib. He could neither speak nor write Sinhala well. He was arrogant and aloof. A man of wealth and birth, he played tennis with charm as a member of the Colombo tennis club for the Colombo gentry, he regularly lunched at Galle Face hotel with his favourite digestive liquor, gin and tonic\u2026.he was committed to his extreme nationalism\u2019<\/p>\n

Neil Quintus Dias, was a creation of Empire, not of Ceylon. A Sinhala Buddhist neophyte who masterminded SWRD\u2019s political victory by engineering his ultra nationalist \u2018Sinhala Only\u2019 campaign. Thereafter he began to establish Buddhist dominance in the Public Services and local government services. Upon SWRD\u2019s death, as the chief advisor to his widow, the new Prime Minister, NQ began the militarizing of the north with the deployment of Sinhala speaking forces which led to the gradual alienation of the Tamils.<\/p>\n

Neville Jayaweera further states, \u2018NQ Dias revealed to me his extraordinary vision of a series of events that were bound to happen in the near future. He was convinced Tamil insurgency would develop into an armed struggle in the next 25 years and the government should be prepared to deal with it now\u2019<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, DS had the same vision. If every man in government has the same vision, and these men were not prophets, and their vision is not based on historical analogy, what one must realize is that their visions are nothing but the doomsday aggregation of colonial ideology. NQ and DS, respectively, as a civil servant and as colonial collaborator, had been fed a diet of Tamil uprising.<\/p>\n

Anyway, with the loss of Ceylon\u2019s naval base, the Allies had no more naval bases in the Indian ocean and a plan was hatched, between Britian and the US to obtain an Indian ocean base. So, in the 1960s, through legal manipulation, the island of Diego Garcia, the largest island of the Chagos peninsula was separated from Mauritius and brought under a brand new British proclaimed entity called, the \u2018British Indian Ocean territory\u2019, and given to the United States for the creation of a joint military and naval base.\u00a0 <\/span>The island had a native population, but they were inconsequential, even subjected to nuclear testing. But it was austerities that caused them to take boats to Mauritius for the purchase of essentials and their subsequent return prohibited for not being in the possession of a special British Indian Ocean territory pass.<\/p>\n

Their islands had been sold to the Americans by Britian.<\/p>\n

Thus, an indigenous population which had lived on those islands for centuries were forcibly removed for being a security threat to the joint military command. The manipulation, lies and corruption; even of the international court of criminal justice before which the islanders appeared is described brilliantly in Philippe Sands\u2019 book, \u2018the Last Colony\u2019. Additionally, the Australian journalist John Pilger has made excellent documentaries and books called \u2018Stealing a nation\u2019, on the plight of the Chagos islanders.<\/p>\n

Since the early sixties, the Chagossians have been homeless refugees. They belong to no sovereign nation for their islands were annexed into a high security zone called the \u2018British Indian Ocean territory\u2019 and the Chagos archipelago\u2019s largest island, Diego Garcia, used as a US military base. This base was used for the gulf war, for air strikes against Afghanistan. Against Iraq.<\/p>\n

These American and British bases are being used for the rampant destruction of an ancient world, those which still have, not just tradition and faith but has also preserved the cultural and aesthetic heritage of the entire human race. They are being made into rubble. Mesopotamia died when the united west destroyed Iraq. They repeated it with Syria. Its oldest city Aleppo, with its limestone architecture is gone. Now, they are finishing off the last bastion of beauty to drag it too, even as a cadaver, into the ugly club of Globalization, where the map of the world is dotted with Mc Donalds, Seven Elevens, Wendys and Starbucks. It is said that seeing Isfahan is like seeing half the world. A city founded by the Safavids who made mystical Shia Islam the empire\u2019s faith. If faith equals beauty, can one fault faith? Perhaps the rational west and its paranoid Zionists have no eyes for beauty, no ears for Persia\u2019s poetry? Nor the aesthetic sensitivity to appreciate art, music and architecture; the pinnacle of human genius. Is the will for destruction all that has been programed in the manufacture of the rational and scientific creature?<\/p>\n

After great effort by the Chagossians, in 2019, it was ruled that the dismemberment of colonial territories before independence was a violation of the United Nations charter and that the Chagossians had the right to return to their islands. Britain ignored it.<\/p>\n

Yet, in its immediate aftermath, in the same year, the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) Agreement, a legally binding treaty was up for signing with Sri Lanka. It was an arrangement made between the US authorities and the Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, in view of the fact that if US loses its naval base in Diego Garcia it would require an alternate base and that would be Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, massive public protest stopped it.<\/p>\n

*To be continued\u2026\u2026<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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