Twenty-five years ago, on 13 November 1989, the Sri Lankan government announced that Rohana Wijeweera, an extreme-left Sinhalese nationalist leader of two failed insurrections, had died in police custody - in unclear circumstances.
"I heard about the death. Of course it was not unexpected, I knew it was coming," recalls his friend, lawyer and election agent, Prins Gunasekara, speaking to the BBC history programme, Witness.
Even as the Tamil conflict flared up in the north the island had been wracked by violence in the south. Wijeweera's Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), or People's Liberation Front, killed those who rejected its ideology - and was crushed by the state.
Charismatic and powerful
So who was Rohana Wijeweera?
Born in 1943 into a rural communist family in Sri Lanka's deep south, "he was not wealthy, nor did he belong to a high caste", one-time colleague Victor Ivan wrote after his death.
"His parents were poor, ordinary people."
He travelled the USSR and developed an admiration for Stalin. But, with his flowing hair and red-starred beret, he mostly styled himself on the hero of the Cuban revolution Che Guevara.
"He was a very charismatic, powerful speaker - he could speak for three or four hours without notes," recalls another one-time lawyer of Wijeweera's, P Rajanayagam. That meant that his message struck a chord with many poor rural-dwellers.
But Wijeweera also had an ethnic element to his message. Ceylon, as it was then, was an ethnically mixed island but had no common, over-arching language. And Wijeweera's natural base was among the majority Sinhalese - people who had been educated in Sinhala at school or university, but had no jobs and blamed the system.
In 1971, while in prison for activities against the state, Wijeweera tried to direct an insurrection. The revolt failed miserably, but several thousand JVP members were killed by the government.
'Kill the brutes'
In 1982 Wijeweera contested the presidential election, with Gunasekara as his agent. In speeches he accused politicians of "tearing up" the people's rights.
He came a distant third. By the late 1980s the JVP was banned and he was plotting a new, ferociously violent insurrection. The party argued that attempts to make peace with the Tamil Tigers were selling out the Sinhalese.
Prins Gunasekara says it was the president that provoked the JVP by telling his security forces to "kill the brutes".
Those in the JVP or suspected of involvement "were being picked up, tortured and killed", he says.
The JVP killed monks, academics, union leaders, even a popular politician-film-star, Vijaya Kumaratunga, whose wife Chandrika later became president.
"The JVP had these kangaroo courts where they sentenced people to death and then would send an assassin to kill that person," says Priyath Liyanage, editor of BBC Sinhala. "On the government side there were death squads, torture chambers. It became a nation of terror in 1989."
In the green jungles and rice fields, among the Buddhist temples and on campuses, the state wreaked its revenge, says Mr Gunasekara.
"The pro-JVP elements were arrested, beheaded, and their heads were put on poles and planted around a lake in the University of Peradeniya [in the city of Kandy]. So when they see it they know this is what happens if you are pro-JVP.
"In my own electorate there were one or two places where they used to bring young men, shoot them and set on fire."
(BBC)
