Diane and Dayan

Reading Nick Cohen’s excellent article on Diane Abbott, reminded me of my checquered relationship with Dayan Jayatilleka.

Why Westerners hate the West

Speaking at a “peace conference” Diane Abbott said the Ukraine war was “a Nato campaign against Russia”. She beleives that “Nato is engaged in a war which is now striking deep into Russian territory, provoking widespread calls for retaliation against Nato countries.”

Dayan did sterling work as Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the UNHRC in Geneva back in 2009. At that time, I was writing articles for Le monde Diplomatique and other publications trying to explain to a western audience why most people in Sri Lanka, including most Tamils, appreciated the fact that the Mahinda Rajapaksa government, whatever its many faults, had decisively ended the brutal 30-year civil war and reduced the Tamil Tigers to a spent force.

I offered my humble support to those like him, Godfrey and Amar Gunatilleke, Rajiva Wijesinha, Malinda Seneviratne, Gomin Dayasri, David Blacker and Michael Roberts who were resisting the pro-LTTE propaganda fostered by foreign NGOs and western governments. I joined with those who tried to counter false accusations of human rights violations peddled by the West. I joined with those who resisted the forces of separatism and condemned foreign intervention in the sovereign state that was and still is Sri Lanka.

Many Sri Lankans picked up on my articles and commented and shared. Dayan himself mentioned them in his articles. I was invited to many seminars and think tanks. I met Dayan and found him to be warm and supportive. We shared the same taste in music and I donated some old Mojo magazines which I delivered to his home where I met his wife. At one point he was suggesting we do a radio show together playing our kind of music. I assumed we shared much the same leftish political views Dayan was constitutionally unable to write an article without mentioning Gramsci or Marx. In fact, he had been much further left than an armchair socialist such as myself. He spent much of the 1980s as an armed, underground far-left revolutionary militant in Sri Lanka. Influenced deeply by Fidel Castro. Jayatilleka abandoned his elite academic career to organize an armed struggle aimed at overthrowing the state.

By 1989, he permanently abandoned his revolutionary doctrines to become a mainstream political advisor to President Ranasinghe Premadasa. After his stint in Geneva, he went on to be Sri Lanka’s ambassador in Paris. In 2018, he was appointed and assumed duties as the Sri Lankan Ambassador to the Russian Federation, by President Maithripala Sirisena.This caused controversy because Dayan was now seen as a supporter of Rajapaksa and an aopologist for war crimes.

In the early years of the “Yahapalana” government (2015–2017), Jayatilleka was one of Sirisena’s harshest critics. He viewed Sirisena as a puppet of the United National Party (UNP) and Western powers, arguing that his administration was betraying Sri Lanka’s sovereignty. The relationship warmed significantly in 2018 as Sirisena’s rift with Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe widened. The two men bonded through their common loathing of Ranil.

I was invited to Dayan’s leaving party before he left for Moscow. He was his usual warm and friendly self, but I was surprised by some of his comments. I thought perhaps he was joking. He expressed an admiration for Steve Bannon. After this event, I had a a great deal of engagement with Dayan on Facebook. He spent a lot of time on Facebook while he was being paid to represent Sri Lanka in Moscow. He continued to express some surprising views, supporting Brexit, seeing good points in Trump, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.

In diplomatic engagements, such as with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, (who had been ambassador in Colombo and speaks fluent Sinhala) Jayatilleka described Sirisena as a “good and trustworthy friend” of Russia, working to solidify the President’s image as a strong, non-aligned leader. Others referred to Sirisena as “the village idiot”.

Lavrov is on the left of this picture

Dayan publicly praised Putin’s leadership style and foreign policy, defending Putin’s worldview in diplomatic circles even before the invasion of Ukraine. After the invasion, he published an article in the Sri Lankan newspaper the Sunday Island in February 2022 called Putin’s Pushback: The Context Of Russia’s Ukraine Move.

https://island.lk/putins-pushback-the-context-of-russias-ukraine-move/

“It is when Russia was best disposed towards the West that every Russian apprehension about its own security was brushed aside and the borders of NATO rolled-up towards the Russian border. Worse, this was the time that the West actually double-crossed Russia and the UN Security Council.”

He followed the same argument peddled by John Mearsheimer. “In short, the map does not show Russia moving towards the West but a hostile military alliance NATO moving towards Russia, even in periods where Russia had a policy and leaders soft on the West. Putin’s latest move is tactically offensive but strategically defensive. It is not the initiation of a process but a response to it. Putin didn’t start it. He means to contain it.”

I responded thus:

https://thuppahis.com/2022/03/03/putins-aggressive-adventurism-dents-jayatillekas-readings-of-the-ukraine-confrontationmaelstrom/

“Prominent figures, known as Putin-Versteher (Putin-understanders), in Germany are being accused of bringing shame on the country and themselves by trying to explain or justify the Russian leader’s actions. The tabloid Bild described some politicians as “Putin Streichler” (Putin caressers) who ignored widespread evidence of Putin’s crimes.”

“The Good Doctor seems to have a tin ear for mundane reality. What have Ukrainians done to bear the brunt of Putin’s anger? His article is about large amorphous entities like NATO and ‘The West’. The breakable, brittle individuals are invisible, beyond the Good Doctor’s capacity for human feeling. Everyone else is seeing those pensioners standing in front of tanks.”

“I search in vain in Dr Jayatilleka’s article for any trace of empathy for the people of Ukraine. What have they done to deserve Putin’s wrath and his bombs? In fact, in a rather short article he covers Yugoslavia, Syria, Sri Lanka, China, Iraq, Libya, Georgia, Russia and, of course, there is space for a cameo walk-on for his other hero Fidel Castro. There is not much about Ukraine itself in the article and there is certainly no explanation of what the country did to get itself attacked.”

In one of our exchanges, Dayan advised me to be more like Frank Furedi.

https://pcolman.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/knowing-left-from-right/

I told him that I find Furedi sinister because he and his acolytes in the LM Network, including the online magazine Spiked, are associated with extreme right-wing allies and espouse extreme right-wing views garbed in spurious left-wing attire. Jenny Turner wrote in the London Review of Books about “the LM network’s habit of supporting freedom of expression for all sorts of horrible people.” The LM Network calls its critics “McCarthyites”. Furedi claims that his stance springs from the tradition of the “anti-Stalinist left”. All very progressive, no? There is a good deal of lexical ambiguity in the use of words like ‘progressive’ and ‘left’.

I leave the last words to Nick Cohen: “... you make the West the root cause of all the world’s problems. It’s a racist position because it denies agency to non-Western peoples and rulers. This mindset is unable to admit that Putin and Russian imperialists are perfectly capable of invading their neighbours for their own dark reasons. They can only do it if the supposedly all-powerful West provokes them.”

I have not ascertained what Dayan’s position on Ukraine is today.