The Lionel Bopage Story: from an ex-rebel that walked away to that he walked away from

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The Lionel Bopage Story: from an ex-rebel that walked away to that he walked away from.

Nov 20

Posted by VK

The Lionel Bopage Story: Rebellion, Repression and the Struggle for Justice in Sri Lanka by Michael Colin Cooke comes at a crucial juncture in Left Wing representation of the nation’s history. On one hand, the political party of which Bopage was a key member – the JVP – has had an intra-party explosion of a sort and is in the process of relaying itself in terms of its policy, ideology and membership. Then, again, the political present against which the book is released is intense with “repressions” – political, social, cultural, (non-state) ideological etc – and a strained sense of justice are generally felt by citizens who choose to see the existence of such. Our political transactions remain “struggles” alright; largely muffled struggles by a strategic weakening of “alternative voices” and modes of such representation.

The Lionel Bopage Story: A journey through Serendipity’s not so serendipitous times By Professor N. Shanmugaratnam

The Lionel Bopage Story: A journey through Serendipity’s not so serendipitous times

30 November 2011, 12:53 pm

By Professor N. Shanmugaratnam
‘A biography by its very nature’, writes Michael Colin Cooke, in setting the scene for the Bopage Story, ‘reveals a life not only of an individual but of the society and times of that individual.’ A person’s life story, however, can be told in different ways. A biography may be rich in minutiae and fail to go sufficiently beyond the more immediate social context of the subject.

Cooke deserves to be commended for the way he has approached and narrated the biography of an extraordinary individual, who is intensely political and strongly committed to the creation of a better social order. The young Lionel Bopage dared to engage in struggle with passion. Imprisonment and torture were not the only price he paid for challenging a system which he believed was unjust and hence had to be changed. He was not afraid to self-criticise and re-assess his and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)’s political past and leave that party to which he gave his youthful years, and choose other means to continue the struggle. He completed his university studies in engineering while serving his sentence in a Lankan prison.
Compelled to be an exile, he continues to be a political activist, commentator and scholar with strong links to the land of his birth. The personal and the political are so intimately linked in his life. In telling the story of this man, Cooke takes the reader on a journey through the different phases of Lanka’s rather turbulent post-colonial political history. The Bopage Story is about ‘rebellion, repression and the struggle for justice in Sri Lanka ’, as the title says. It is an absorbing story that should not be missed by anyone interested in Lankan politics and the daunting challenges of building a left alternative in the country. I am happy to hear that the book is being translated into Sinhala and Tamil as well.

Professor Sisira Jayasuriya review in Groundviews

http://groundviews.org/2011/11/28/rebellion-repression-and-the-struggle-for-justice-in-sri-lanka-the-lionel-bopage-story/

Bopage's Biography launched in Melbourne

Wednesday, 16 November 2011 10:33

Lanka News Web

The biography Rebellion, Repression and the Struggle for Justice in Sri Lanka – The Lionel Bopage Storywritten by Michael Colin Cooke was launched in Melbourne at the Readings Bookshop in State Library Building in Melbourne.

Councillor Gaetano Greco of Darebin City Council opened the proceedings byexplaining how the project came about. A series of initial conversations with Lionel eventuated into an account of Lionel’s political life through the prism of socio-economic and cultural developments of post independent Sri Lanka.

Professor Damien Kingsbury of the Deakin University launched the book by highlighting its key aspects, in particular, how the elite of the country dominated the political discourse and the economic levers of society to such an extent that the country fragmented periodically into civil war and insurrections. He also noted the bravery of Lionel in the face of imprisonment, derision and exile in pushing for social justice.

Lionel started by reminding the audience of Marx’s dictum: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under the circumstances chosen by themselves but under the circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

THE LIONEL BOPAGE STORY (WRITEN BY MICHAEL COLIN COOKE) Agahas Publishers, Colombo, 2011 Dr James Jupp AM, Australian National University 2 November 2011

THE LIONEL BOPAGE STORY

(WRITEN BY MICHAEL COLIN COOKE)

Agahas Publishers, Colombo, 2011

Dr James Jupp AM,

Australian National University

2 November 2011

I did not meet Lionel Bopage until he was settled in Australia.  But I was very familiar with his name and fame.   In 1972 I was researching Sri Lankan politics in Colombo, shortly after the eruption and failure of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) rebellion of the preceding year.  In 1978, in my book Sri Lanka Third World Democracy, I included a full chapter, assessing that rising as Sri Lanka’s first revolution in more than a century.  Since then the whole country has been embroiled in a civil war with the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) and has lost the reputation it once had as a peaceful democratic society.

Part of my research included obtaining and studying the transcript of the trial of JVP leaders, including Lionel Bopage who later became the JVP secretary between 1979 and 1984.   This was provided to    me by an official of the United States embassy, who I took to be from the CIA.  It is a vital document   which I have, unfortunately, lost in the passage of time.  Hopefully these records remain, as they are essential to understanding what Lionel and his comrades thought they were doing.   But now we have another major source in this account of his life and beliefs, detached from the continuing conflicts and problems of his homeland.