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A ‘Billo’ revival?

With nearly two thousand violent incidents so far, this has become the most violent election campaign since the extreme violence registered during the UNP’s last tenure in power.

This year’s election death toll of 23, however, pales into insignificance in comparison with the up to 500-deaths-a-week extreme levels during the Presidential elections in 1988, and the Parliamentary elections of 1989.

While this year’s fatality rate may seem insignificant, it certainly is not to those who lost their lives and their kith and kin. In that sense, this relatively low level of violence under the PA’s rule - in which more PA supporters have been killed than anyone else - is as morally unacceptable as the extreme peaks of political violence during the Presidential and Parliamentary elections under the UNP in which many thousands of people were killed or ‘disappeared’.

As the Government, the PA should be able to maintain law and order even if the death-dealing gangs that have done most of the killing are gangs of Opposition political parties which are outside its political influence.

During the blood-soaked days of elections under the UNP Government, the country was used to the fact that those with Governmental power committed the worst atrocities including election-time killings. That was because State-sponsored violence became the normal course of events under the UNP with death squads roaming the countryside over the years and the even more extreme violence during elections was only a peaking of what generally occurred.

Today, however, the performance of PA Government-linked gangs, which are accused of five killings (the LTTE is believed to have been responsible for the sixth fatality), seems amateurish in comparison with the death-dealing operations of UNP-linked gangs which are accused of killing 15 PA supporters. Is this a revival of the old ‘Billo’ expertise?

Even if it is, the PA, as the Government, cannot crack-down on the more active UNP-linked death squads without first showing an example and suppressing the mayhem on its side.

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