Credit Card Crackdown : 7 Tamils in the Gang

Credit Card Crackdown

Police nabs Ring leader and six others

Gayan Kumara Weerasinghe

The arrest of six suspects last week has exposed a major international credit card racket in which suspects have drawn millions of dollars using forged credit cards, police sources reveal.
The Special Police Investigation Team of the Criminal Investigation Department last week arrested six suspects on a tip off by a police informant.
Six suspects (all Tamils) including their alleged ring leader Ajith were arrested, when they were a floor tile sales shop at Nawala Road in Colombo, where they used forged credit cards to swindle money from bank accounts of foreign multi millionaires.
The Officer in Charge of the Special Police Investigation Unit, on receipt of this information consulted his superiors, DIG D.W. Prathapasinghe and the unit’s Director DIG Sisira Mendis who instructed the OIC to conduct a full investigation as frauds relating to Credit Cards of foreigners, specially those belonging to British citizens have become a menace to the extent of the Foreign Affairs Ministry officially informing the CID to take necessary action.

How it operates

As narrated by the police informant, this racket operates in the following manner: The gang of racketeers work in collaboration with the shop owner. They agree to use forged credit cards in the machine. The local cards which are forged, contains data stolen from the original owner. These data are obtained stealthily by using a reader which copies the number when the original card is used by its owner.
There are employees in shops and filling stations frequented by foreign multimillionaires who pass crucial information of the original card holders to members of the culprit teams.
At the tile sales shop at Nawala Road, a credit sale does not actually take place. Only a credit sale is being recorded. When a specific amount is being withdrawn from the ATM (using a Credit Card), the amount is shared by the culprits, including the shop owner. This racket of swindling money from the bank accounts of foreign multimillionaires had been going-on for the past three years.

Higher vigilance

This international large scale Credit Card racket was magnified when recently the wife of a Conservative Member of the British House of Representatives became a victim by losing a large sum of sterling pounds. Conservative MP Andrew Fellows raised a voice in the British Parliament to alert foreign countries of this racket and as a result the Foreign Affairs Ministry of Sri Lanka alerted the Sri Lankan Police Department to be vigilant on this issue.
With the arrest of the six gangsters including its leader at the Nawala Road tile sales shop the police recovered 20 forged credit cards in their possession.
The suspects were questioned at length by the CID. Following interrogation the gang leader Ajith’s palatial residence at Alutmawatha Road, Kotahena and three other similar houses belonging to Ajith in the same neighbourhood were searched and a further 200 forged credit cards were recovered by the police team. In addition the police took into custody a jeep worth Rs.20 million parked in the garden of one of his houses.
Ajith was one of the poorest in the area a few years ago until he suddenly became fabulously rich within a matter of three years. He began to live a luxurious life and frequented casino clubs with innumerable young women around him, but kept an illegal mistress in her mid forties in spite his being a young bachelor of 29 years of age.
Out of the other 5 suspects taken into custody along with Ajith, two are Tamil residents of Trincomalee; two are Tamil youths of Kotahena area while the other was a Tamil resident of Hatton. Investigating officers suspect that the two Tamils residents of Trincomalee are having links with the LTTE because they were in possession of photographs showing themselves in jungle military kits and carrying LMG T56 machine guns.
Investigations in this connection are continuing under the same Special Police Investigating team.

 

Lakbima News

Human rights situation in the country::Report part III

Ranawaka took over SU after ousting
Gunasekera by thuggery worthy of the LTTE

East became playground for rival extremists

Too weak to capture power, JHU needed
a deal with a potential winner

Acrimonious exchanges between JHU  and PNM

UNP MP Lakshman Kiriella speaking during the emergency debate in parliament on March 5 spoke of the human rights situation in the country and tabled the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) Special Report No.29.

The report dated February 21 is titled The Second Fascist Front In Sri Lanka – Towards Crushing The Minorities And Disenfranchising The Sinhalese.

The authors of the report are the current recipients of the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights.

The Deputy Secretary General of Parliament, Dhammika Dassanayake contacted by The Sunday Leader and asked whether a report that is tabled in parliament and not expunged is covered by privilege responded in the affirmative stating, “If it has been tabled it becomes a public document.”

  SSR  today publishes the third part of the report without comment given that it is a document tabled in parliament. The second part was published last Sunday.

Fascism is commonly understood as ‘a system of government characterized by strong, often dictatorial control of political and economic affairs, and often by warlike nationalism and brutal suppression of political dissidents and ethnic minorities’

(Wordsmyth English Dictionary). The extremist forces behind the Government may be termed a second fascist front, giving pride of place to the LTTE, which as a functioning organisation showed these characteristics from the early 1980s.

All extremist forces in the Sinhalese South, the JVP, JHU, MEP and sections of the SUP, share much in common in ideas (the inexorable Sinhalese Buddhist character of Sri Lanka and opposition to a federated North-East) and objectives (e.g. Sinhalisation of the East). Particularly the JVP and JHU owe a good deal to the Jathika Chintanaya (National Ideology) movement of the mid-1980s. Formulated by Gunadasa Amarasekera and Nalin de Silva, it gave shape and form to scattered ideas that had motivated Sinhalese exclusivism for many decades. It critiques political institutions and systems (Marxism in particular) imported from the West, sees Sri Lanka as in essence Sinhalese whose genius is to be realised by a unitary state establishing its lost Buddhist ethos.

Like most writings of this ilk, ex-Trotskyite Prof Nalin de Silva’s, though arcane, have a mesmeric quality for the young and impressionable, viz.: “The western Judaic Christian culture knows only of one consistency, defined with respect to two valued formal logic

and only Newtonian bodies and mathematical structures respect this logic. Even quantum particles and bodies have no respect for two valued formal logic.” (The Island 1 Oct.03)

His obscurantism and intolerance of minorities and their sense of identity is also expressed in the same article: “It is unfortunate that since the Dutch period the demography in the Jaffna peninsula has been changed with the importation of labour for the tobacco cultivation from South India, and since then the western Christian colonialists have been successful in driving a wedge between the Sinhala Buddhists and the imported Tamil Hindus and creating and using a Tamil racism against Sinhalathva in this country.” It is history plucked out of thin air and violent in its realisation.

When advocates of ideologies, whether Marxist or Nationalist, are heedless of the core values of humanity, they closet themselves in very narrow interpretations, against the demands of responsible humanity. In canvassing their ideas they ultimately appeal to what is low and base in people. Humanism has no barriers, nor is it a preserve of the West. It is indeed very sad if those who are counted intellectuals among us do no better than breed hatred, intolerance and blindness to ‘others’, and their feelings, in the name of countering Western ideology.

Kanishka Goonewardena wrote (‘National Ideology’ in a Buddhist State’ Himal, Oct.07): “In spite of obvious historical and cultural differences, there exist some remarkable parallels between the ideological forms and epistemological claims of Jathika Chinthanaya, Hindutva and National Socialism: their emphases on harmony, community and nature; and their critiques of materialism, modernity and socialism… These groups desperately needed a community with which to identify, as well as an enemy to identify against, both of which were powerfully forged in these cases – as the ,fate of Sri Lankan Tamils, Indian Muslims and German Jews demonstrate.”

With so much in common, why are the Sinhalese extremist forces heavily at odds with each other and in the late 1980s even killed one another? Nalin de Silva sees both the SLFP and JVP as children of Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only revolution of 1956 and as two groups that critically need one another. He was among those greatly pained when the JVP after agreeing to the DPA manifesto on the basis of which to support SLFP leader Mrs. Bandaranaike’s presidential candidature in late 1988, went on a violent binge and ensured her defeat and in February 1989 made an attempt on her life. The SLFP had illusions even after the JVP assassinated Mrs. Bandaranaike’s son-in-law Vijaya Kumaratunge in early 1988.

Political genealogy is awkward business for those who never repented their legacy of terror and conveniently undergo reincarnation as champions of anti-terror. Champika Ranawaka who is described as Jathika Hela Urumaya’s (JHU’s) chief ideologue and a right hand man of the President told the Daily Mirror (2 Feb.07) that he left the JVP in 1986 – “When they were taking [a] violent approach I left”. By this claim he whitewashed his association in the JVP’s terror including the abduction and murder of socialist student leader Daya Pathirana. We quote from ‘Politics of the South 2000 – 2005′  by Asanga Welikala and David Rampton:

“Some of the current figures in the current JHU (namely the Venerable Athureliya Rathana Thera, Champika Ranawaka and Udaya Gamampila) were once JVP organizers and were active during the 1980s agitation against the Indo Lanka Accord. At that time Ranawaka and Rathana were both ideologically aligned to Jathika Chintanaya and (as Inter University Students Federation leaders) to the JVP … However Champika Ranawaka was to play an integral role in the split with the JVP on two issues. First Ranawaka had a dispute with Wijeweera over the JVP’s ideological path, declaring Marxism dead and urging the JVP to wholeheartedly embrace nationalism as its central ideological engine – a line Wijeweera refused to countenance. Second, the JVP’s refusal to support Mrs. Bandaranaike’s candidacy for the 1988 presidential election triggered the final split between the JVP, Jathika Chintanaya and SLFP-aligned unions.”

In the 1990s, Ranawaka became active in the National Movement Against Terrorism (NMAT), a parent of Sihala Urumaya (SU). S.L. Gunasekera backed by professionals, university dons and retired army officers held the leadership of SU. At the October 2000 parliamentary elections the SU secured a single national list seat, which the faction led by Ranawaka took over after ousting Gunasekera by intimidation and thuggery worthy of the LTTE. However SU was no winner when it came to elections.

The change came in December 2003, when President Kumaratunge had paralysed the UNF (UNP) government of Ranil Wickremesinghe and was obliged to hold elections. Ven. Gangodawila Soma died naturally of a heart attack in St. Petersburg where he went to receive a degree. Sihala Urumaya and Ven. Ellawela Medhananda of its associated monks’ organisation JSS started a campaign insinuating that Ven. Soma was killed by a Christian fundamentalist conspiracy. A number of churches were attacked. Seizing the opportunity, the JHU was formed fielding all JSS monks for the April 2004 elections, SU ‘donating’ itself a vessel in service of the JSS monks. It won nine seats in its short run.

The JHU was a wild card from the start, ensuring the victory of the UNP candidate for speaker against the JVP-backed, SLFP-led government’s. It took Ranawaka’s long experience as a party infighter to bully, kidnap (once an MP monk who voted for the Government’s candidate for speaker who was forced to resign), fight Ven. Dhammaloka’s attempts to keep power a monopoly of monks, getting thrown out from his secretary’s post by Dhammaloka (who then left the party and campaigned for Ranil Wickremesinghe at the 2005 presidential election), before asserting himself in the party.

On the rival track to the JHU and NMAT, the National Patriotic Movement was preceded by the Organisation to Protect the Motherland (OPM) launched at a meeting in Maradana (Colombo) by Ven. Elle (Alle) Gunawanse on 15th January 2003. This was when Ranil Wickremasinghe was prime minister and had in talks with the LTTE agreed in Oslo to a federal settlement. Gunawanse had earlier been patronised by Gamini Dissanaike and President Premadasa.

Opposition bigwigs attended the meeting to endorse Gunawanse’s simple argument that the North-East which Jayewardene merged under Emergency Regulations in 1987, should now (15 years later) be de-merged as the Emergency had lapsed under the ongoing peace process. Leading persons at the meeting were Opposition Leader Mahinda Rajapakse, Ratnasiri Wickremanayake, Dr. Gunadasa Amarasekera and Nalin de Silva from Jathika Chintanaya and Tilak Karunaratne from the Sihala Urumaya.

The next stage was on 1st October 2003, when Elle Gunawanse as convener of the meeting following a march from Kandy, inaugurated the National Patriotic Movement (PNM). Gunawanse accused Prime Minister Wickremasinghe of trying to divide the country. Among the participants were SLFP parliamentarians including Anura Bandaranaike, Dr. Gunadasa Amerasekara and JVP propaganda secretary and parliamentary group leader Wimal Weerawanse. Sihala Urumaya declined to participate.

The hostility within the extremist camp as represented by the PNM and JHU could be seen in their acrimonious exchanges. Jathika Chintanaya’s Nalin de Silva opposed the JHU monks contesting the April 2004 elections independently of the SLFP (PA)-JVP alliance as a divisive move. After the JHU upset the Speaker’s election, de Silva (Lankaweb 24 Apr.04) accused the JHU of being a plant of the Uijathika (alien) forces: de Silva said the JHU `were financed by Thilanga Samathipala and his brother,

Edirisinghes of Swarnamahal, and were given prominence in media that belongs to Thilanga, [UNP leader] Ranil Wickremesinghe’s brother (TNL), Swarnavahini of Edirisinghe and Maharaja’s MTV… the monks were put forward by non-national forces only to hoodwink the Buddhists.’

Going back to 7th August 2000, monks who later were closer to the PNM, including Bengamuwe Nalaka, Muruththettuwe Ananda and Maduluwawe Sobitha, were having a protest meeting against Kumaratunge’s proposed constitution at Abhayarama Temple in Narahenpita, when a bomb went off injuring some. Reports at that time suggested that supporters of Sihala Urumaya that had not been invited exploded the bomb.

Too weak to capture power, the JHU needed a deal with a potential winner, both naive and pliable. This, the JHU, even as Champika Ranawaka staged his coup within, found in Mahinda Rajapakse and moved quickly in August 2005 to cut short Kumaratunge’s presidential term by an appeal to Supreme Court. A solid base of legal authority held the term ended in late 2006 (P. Rajanayagam with citations in Sunday Observer 8 Feb.04).

The Chief Justice who needed new allies obliged the JHU. A pact was quickly made with SUP presidential candidate Rajapakse who ditched the SLFP’s twelve-year stand on a federal settlement to the ethnic problem. Ranawaka became Minister of Environment in January 2007. The East tragically became the playground of rival extremists.

Human Rights :: Sri Lanka :A Real Story of an innocent Couple

By Qadri Ismail

Human rights is the last resort of the hopeless.

Its liberal advocates do not  see it that way. They find it heroic, the foundation of a new international order that will, when established universally,  guarantee secure lives for everyone, everywhere – from Tibet to Timbuktu. But would the subaltern, the oppressed – the target of human rights – necessarily agree?

Take the following story. (Its details have been fudged to protect the innocent from the brutality of the Rajapakse regime and its paramilitary partners.)

A Tamil man was abducted by the military, at a checkpoint, somewhere in northeastern Sri Lanka recently, witnessed by many civilians. His wife inquired at every nearby military camp, but they denied having or ever detaining him. Someone advised her to contact a paramilitary group. They work closely with the government, she was told, and so could help. Desperate, she did. (This would be the EPDP or TMVP.) They noted her details and promised to investigate.

A few days later, members of this group abducted the woman and raped her.

Her husband is still missing, presumed killed by the military.

Seeing no other option, she told her story to a human rights organization.

The point should be obvious. The western powers and their human rights groups would have nothing to complain about if the Rajapakse regime did not treat its citizens – mostly the Tamils, but also Muslims and, increasingly, Sinhalese who resist – with systematic brutality. For the case of this woman and her husband is not isolated. It is not something  ‘collateral’ that occurs, inevitably, regrettably, in the course of fighting a war on terror.

Her rape, if not her husband’s murder, was planned, deliberate. As was the mass expulsion of Tamils from Colombo last year, a move the odious defense secretary advocated and defended publicly. As were the killings of Franklin Raviraj and T. Maheswaran – both MPs who spoke eloquently, often in Sinhala, in the Sinhala media, against the horrors of this government.

As is the ongoing expropriation of Muslim land in Amparai district by the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources the legalized violence against Muslims is not the unintended consequence of the war against the LTTE. Neither is the recent spate of attacks against Rupavahini employees.

The counter-argument that the LTTE does similar things, while true, is an incredible response. Is the government’s best defense that it is like a terrorist group?

The Rajapakse regime understands its mandate as promoting the greed and bloodlust of its thugs – whether in the cabinet or defence establishment – not the welfare of its citizens. Indeed, it has demonstrated that Mahinda Chinthanaya could be reduced to just one idea: if the people are not  quiet while we pillage the south, bombard the north and pacify the east, our thugs will terrorize them.

If our people, then, with nowhere else to turn, take these matters up with – to put it bluntly – white people, are we to blame them?

Space for the intervention of western human rights groups in Sri Lanka only becomes open in a political vacuum. This space should have been occupied by political resistance, the left. But, quite apart from the ineptitude of the current UNP, our left parties have, over the last forty years, largely surrendered to Sinhala nationalism.

For, despite the valiant efforts of the LSSP to remind us recently, through the republication of old speeches, that comrade Colvin warned, in 1956, that one language (‘Sinhala only’) would lead to two nations, the same Colvin also said, opposing the DC Pact in 1965: “Dudleyge badey masala vadey.” The same Colvin, in 1972, authored a constitution making Buddhism effectively the state religion. Our left never recovered from such surrender. Indeed, in asserting that one could sell out the minorities and still call oneself left, it only made itself an example for the JVP to emulate.

I do not hold the left responsible for the horrors of the Rajapakse presidency. But what is it doing abetting them? Whose good is served by D. E. W. Gunasekera and Tissa Vitharana sitting with the government?

The complicity of the left, the lethargy of the UNP, helps justify the western human rights argument that, in the absence of the space for resistance in Sri Lanka, they must intervene. Since we cannot save ourselves, the west will save us.

This is a version, a revision, as my teacher Gayatri Spivak argues in her new book, Other Asias, of the old colonial notion, “the white man’s burden.” Read any classic work of liberalism – John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, for instance – and you will see that civil society, as a concept, is inseparable from civilization. To Locke, the savage – that’s us – was incapable of instituting civil society because she lacked the capacity to civilize herself. That is how civilization, the establishment of civil society for the savage, became the justification for colonialism, an alibi for political domination and economic exploitation. In that precise sense, Sri Lankan ‘civil society’ groups are the consequence, continuation, of colonialism.

Things are not quite the same today. The white man, and woman, is still on a mission to save us. This time, however, a lot of us – whether in Sri Lanka or the west – are actively helping them. Some do so sincerely, enthusiastically, convinced that the west is right, that human rights is an unqualified good thing. (Before we rush to criticize this position, we should remember that Marxism also came from the west. The famous opening line of The Communist Manifesto exclusively addresses Europe.) Some do so for the perks, the money. (But then we should not  forget, as Rajan Phillips reminded Sumanasiri Liyanage on this very question: people who take money to wage peace are infinitely preferable to those who make money from war.)

Some of us do so critically, sometimes stifling ironic smiles. For the self-righteousness, tone-deafness, of human rights folks – whites usually, but not exclusively – in the west can be quite amusing. Not to mention the hypocrisy of western diplomats. Do we need mention, once again, that the Sri Lankan Prevention of Terrorism Act was modeled on the British – who were oppressing the Northern Irish at the time? And what gives any U.S. ambassador, anywhere, the balls to lecture anybody on human rights or democracy – when its own president was first elected by the Supreme Court and it continues to hold prisoners, in Guantanamo, without due process? When George W. Bush, in speech after speech, justifies torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”). And still supports perverse Pervez Musharraf.

The west needs to be educated. That the history of human rights is intertwined with colonialism. That their credibility will decline further every time they continue to use a double standard. For, surely, no U.S. backer of human rights could be taken seriously if they are also – like just about every senator and congressperson – unreconstructed supporters of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people. That they need to acknowledge, and legislate, social and economic rights as equally important as political rights.

At the same time, the non-west needs to change, too. China is the first example that comes to mind. But the Indian treatment of Kashmiris is not very different from the Sri Lankan treatment of Tamils. Muslims in Gujarat and elsewhere live in as much fear as Tamils in Colombo.

But it does not follow, while we wait for these things to happen, that we shut up and let the Rajapakse regime wage a war against the Tamils and, more generally, democracy. I mean: what plausible argument can the president fabricate to justify his continued violation of the 17th amendment? In his insistence that he, as president, is above the law, Mahinda Percy Rajapakse sounds exactly like George Walker Bush.

In its undisguised racism, its brazen brutality, its pathetically insecure inability to take even the mildest criticism, the sheer volume of its corruption, its utter ineptitude, its intimidation of the population at large, the Rajapakse regime is approaching the J. R. Jayewardene as the worst in our history. It is a sad feature of our moment that, like the SLFP then, the southern political opposition now is virtually non-existent. It is, if anything, even sadder that the Tamil opposition, today, has taken the monolithic, viciously murderous, exclusivist form of the LTTE. No one has let the Tamil people down more than they. 

In this context, the only ethically effective space of resistance to the Rajapakses has, for better and worse, become that of human rights activists; and I do not  just mean folks in Colombo. In Mannar, Jaffna, Vavuniya, Mutur and Batticaloa, ordinary people resist the Rajapakse ruffians and its paramilitary predators daily – in the name of human rights. We know their efforts count because the government screams hysterically in response. Or arrests those who publicize their work, like J. S. Tissainayagam, guilty only of the crime of expressing his opinion.

I am not an uncritical supporter of human rights. But if given a choice between just two alternatives – the Rajapakse regime and human rights activists – I will back the latter any day. They are in the business of tending lives. The Rajapakses, of destroying them. They are the human wrongs of Sri Lanka.