COLOMBO — Colombo welcomed on Tuesday a
Sri Lankan author
winning Britain’s Booker prize, despite his novel focusing on the island’s
civil war — in which government forces stand accused of atrocities.
اضافة اعلان
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of
Maali Almeida is centered on a dead war photographer and gambler who, in the
afterlife, seeks to expose the brutality of the conflict, which claimed at
least 100,000 lives.
Booker Prize judges called it a “whodunnit and a
race against time, full of ghosts, gags, and a deep humanity”.
Government spokesman
Bandula Gunawardana congratulated Karunatilaka for the award on Tuesday, saying
his “great achievement” had “brought honor to the country”.
Colombo’s forces have been accused of killing at
least 40,000 minority Tamil civilians in the final months of the drawn-out
separatist war that ended in May 2009.
Successive governments have refused to investigate
war crimes by both government forces and Tamil separatists, and Colombo is
currently facing international censure for failure to ensure justice.
Gunawardana — who is also the media minister and an
author and a film producer himself — did not directly answer a question about
accountability, but told reporters that in the late 1980s alone, around 60,000
had died.
Attackers “came into houses and got journalists to
kneel and killed them”, he said, adding: “Because of threats and intimidation,
intellectuals left the country.”
He had himself been blocked by the army from making
a movie on the 1990 assassination of journalist Richard de Zoysa, he added.
“The new government will not try to stop it if this
book is being turned into a film,” he pledged.
White van killings
Accepting the award from
Queen Consort Camilla in London on Monday, Karunatilaka expressed hope that his
country would learn that “ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism
have not worked and will never work”.
At least 44 Sri Lankan journalists were killed or
disappeared during the island’s internal conflicts — a leftist uprising and the
Tamil separatist war — between 1971 and 2009, according to media rights
organizations.
At least 14 of them were killed or went missing
under the presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, whose brother Gotabaya was accused
of being the architect of notorious “white van abductions” that preceded the
extrajudicial killings of dissidents.
Gotabaya became president in November 2019, but was
forced to resign in July this year after months of protests over the country’s
worsening economic crisis and allegations of corruption and mismanagement.
Karunatilaka hoped that his book would still be in
print in 10 years, but that it “will be in the fantasy section of the
bookshop... next to the dragons, the unicorns (and) will not be mistaken for
realism or political satire”.
He is the second author from the island to win the
award, following Sri Lankan-born Canadian Michael Ondaatje’s victory in 1992
for “The English Patient”.
Aside from the £50,000 (JD40,000) prize, winning the
Booker can provide a career-changing boost in sales and public profile.
Colombo bookshops were out of stock of the book on Tuesday,
with several saying they had ordered more copies in anticipation of a run on
them.
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