this is bbc news. the headlines: nepal has begun a day of national mourning for the victims of sunday's plane crash, the country's worst airline disaster in three decades. at least 68 people died when the flight from kathmandu plummeted to the ground as it approached its destination, the tourist town of pokhara. ukraine has suffered its heaviest bombardment by russian forces in several weeks, with more than 100 missiles fired into the east of the country. at least 30 people were killed and many more injured when a residential block was bombed in the city of dnipro. california has endured its ninth successive storm in a 3—week period in which at least 19 people

have been killed. a metre of fresh snow has fallen, and many areas remain under threat of flooding. president biden has declared a state of emergency, freeing federal aid for the state. those are our top story this hour. now on bbc news, it's time for hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk, with me, zainab badawi. i'm just outside colombo, the capital of sri lanka. this beautiful island nation has been plunged into its worst economic crisis for more than 70 years. it led to widespread protests and forced the resignation of the president last year. and all this after a long—running civil war in which around 100,000 died. i'm at the home and studio of one of sri lanka's most influential artists and activists, jagath weerasinghe. can sri lankans put behind them their bloody past

and forge a new and united future? jagath weerasinghe, welcome to hardtalk. i'm happy to be here. sitting here in your home, which is also your studio, i wonder how far you've been influenced as both an artist and an archaeologist by sri lanka's past? i'm totally influenced by that. i'm totally, yes. everything i do has something to do with the past of sri lanka and the idea of the past, that we keep performing in the present. yeah. but it's notjust sri lanka's past, it's a particularly bloody past that you choose to focus on. why? that is what i call the history of the present. you know, we have a long

history coming from, like, fifth century bc, and, you know, there's this great history of sri lanka or south asia. but the 20th century history is i call the history of the present, which is...defines myself and my art and my thinking. lalith manage, who is co—director of an arts "you cannot talk about weerasinghe�*s "work without talking about the history of the land." but can you only create your best art through that terrible lived experience of sri lanka? what about using the power of the imagination to create positive works of art? you know what? you see, i'm a buddhist, sri lankan, born and bred here, went to a buddhist school and my parents were buddhist and we lived, grew up with buddhist temples. then in 1983, when the southern

sri lankans, mostly buddhists, began to attack innocent tamils in the country, and i saw it happening right in front of my eyes. i could not make sense of it. you know, what i was experiencing, what i was seeing was so horrible, i had no words to understand it. because i'm part of that problem — you know, these are the buddhists, these are the sinhalese, of my group, my community, attacking these tamils. so that was the turning point. and i realised that we justified those attacks, that violence, by way of a particular past and a particular history and the idea of the religion. it is the 1983 blackjuly riots in the southern parts of sri lanka, in colombo, which escalated the war. that attack on innocent tamils in colombo, in wellawatte, which i saw. you're referring, of course, to 1983 when the civil war broke out between the tamil tigers separatists. and the tamils make up

about 15% of the population in sri lanka, 22 million people, and they are hindus. and the majority sinhalese are buddhists and they make up 70% of the population. but why do you feel that you, as a sinhalese buddhist, share some of that guilt? because there were many innocent sinhalese who had no part in this violence. good point. you see, i'm an innocent sinhalese in that sense but, you see, soon after my graduation from the university, i was working in this wonderful buddhist site called dambulla golden temple as a trainee murals conservator. so i'm preserving these ancient murals. so on this particular day, i was coming to colombo

and i walked into this — this bloody event and actually, those things that i tried to preserve at dambulla and what was happening right in front of my eyes could not reconcile. they could not live together. and for a moment i thought what was happening is inevitable. that was the thing that changed me. could not reconcile. i said, like, "how could i think that it is inevitable?" because, you see, i realised that when you are confronted with a reality that you cannot really describe, you have no language to describe it, you try to escape from it by coming out some kind of a preposition. so that told me that you are a coward — there is this nationalist seed in me or ethnonationalist seed in me that prompted me to think like that. it's from that point that i began to think like this. you were very alive to the possibility of violence because, in 1978, before the war broke out, you were... yeah. ..arrested or taken by state thugs and taken to an office of the ruling party at the time and you were held and tortured... yeah. ..for around ten hours.

yes, yes, yes. and you say that that was an event that changed your life in a drastic way. yeah. how? yeah. two things has changed my life. first was that 1978 thing. because my father worked in the supreme court, he was an interpreter and the acting clerk of assize or whatever, so i grew up in a family that believed in... ..in justice system and order. then i, myself, get kidnapped. i could not think about it. i could not think that that could have happened to me. so that was the... i would say that's the first time that i really lost my way of thinking of being a citizen of this country. with the 1983, i lost being a sinhalese and a buddhist. because the sinhalese and buddhists could do this kind of this much of violence to some innocent people.

so clearly in your work, you've been very much a loud critic of state violence, as you put it, against the tamil community and it's led perhaps to a growing isolation for you from your own sinhalese community. i mean, has it given you a kind of crisis of identity? yes, it is. it is. like, you know, but you see, what we did was then we made up a collective of artists. we kind of buttressed ourselves in this artist collective called theertha, which lalith manage, that you referred to, was part of it. so we made our own world, you know, to deal with this. and lalith manage says about the arts collective that you, and i quote, "wanted to drive home the point

"that the political and the religious connection "is problematic and undesirable to the nation." yes. what do you mean by that? you know, we are supposed to be a democratic society. we are supposed to believe in consensus, building agreements, you know, all these things, but when you bring in religion, and history in a particular way, into contemporary politics, it always ends up giving rise to divisions and violence. by way of religion and the past, you justify violence in the contemporary, in the moment you live. that is what i was attacking all the time. so this is what i mean by that. you know, violence is always divine and celestial. we have a very celestial reason, orfor the sake of the motherland or this island, which buddha visited three times — you are doing all this to preserve and protect that island. so you bring the past and the religious ideas into democratic politics, it ends up being... ..giving more to violence.

you're very critical of the buddhist clergy, and buddhist monks in sri lanka have always had a very engaged way of dealing with politics, they, even some of them are in parliament and advisers to governments and so on. and just hanging behind you, there is one of your works which is called celestial violence, and knives made of aluminium, tied up with rope which is in the colour of saffron, depicting the kind of saffron coloured robes that monks wear. but i mean, is that fair? i mean, there are a lot of monks, buddhist monks in sri lanka, who do a lot of very good work giving alms to the poor and so on. oh, yes, sure, sure. and there are really good monks, you know, a few of my friends, friend monks who are for reconciliation, who understand the problem. but then there is a small, vocal, vociferous group that imposes their ideas onto the people.

and in elections and electoral campaigns, this is those politicised, institutionalised religion that i am very uncomfortable. because i'm a buddhist — i have a right to be critical about my religion. you know, i have all the right, notjust monks. i can interpret my religion because i have inherited that right. so i used that to question the monks when they... butjust a few monks? you just said yourself that it's just a minority and this is a theme that is infused quite a bit of your work. but these are the most powerful ones, most vociferous, vocal. you know what happens in this? like, you know, when extremists are always a small number, but they are very vocal and they are also part of a system that supports them. you see... you see, the tamil people of this country has,

in my opinion, a simple request — let us sing the national anthem in tamil. imean... but there are so many people, especially buddhist monks... some of the buddhist monks, not those great ones. ..who are against it. but i cannot in my wildest dreams think why. i mean, why don't we allow that? because this is... i think i'm a nationalist in a primordial sense, but i'm not an ethnonationalist. yeah. but i mean, you keep on saying the tamil community, but let's be honest, the tamil tigers, the ltte were very violent in their methods and they killed moderate tamils and they also killed innocent sinhalese civilians. and you yourself have said there are many different interpretations of the past. so do you not perhaps, both in your work and your comments, overlook the fact that during the long running civil war in sri lanka, there were atrocities committed by both sides? as we know, you know,

organisations like international crisis group would reported these kind of atrocities being committed by both tamils and the sinhalese. yes, true. but let me say, you see, when the war is on, going on, as an artist and a thinking person, i'm not there tojump on the bandwagon and going pro—war. that's not my... my critical citizen thinking would not allow me. no, but i said you're blaming the sinhalese and perhaps absolving some of the tamils of also committing atrocities during the war. 0h, sure, yeah. so we are not endorsing the brutality of the ltte, but the emergence of ltte and the tamil grievances is a historical one in the 20th century, you see? so because sri lanka was governed by... ..mostly by sinhala buddhist southern leaders, so the tamil grievances and the tamil anger deserves the historical sympathy. crushing them is a different issue. i'm not about talking

about that. i'm talking about the rights of the tamils and for their grievances and how we marginalised and disenfranchised them in many different ways. i have so many tamil friends and students because it is from them that i get... ..i look at the problem — it's not through the ltte i'm looking at the issue. 0k. but you paint and you draw, you also make installations and you have a particular focus on shiva, and you use these pictures as a kind of metaphor for attempts by successive governments in sri lanka to crush the uprising, as you have said. so what are you trying to depict through such works? two things. you see, my work has a very cultural specific meaning behind them. at the same time, i'm also trying to enter into a bit transcendental idea of violence. you see, shiva is a great god, you know. you know, it's a beautiful

image of dancing shiva. but he's dancing with sound and smoke, but he's suppressing ignorance, which is very nice. so in this picture you're referring to, shiva has got his foot on the chest... yeah. on that... there's a particular name for that... ..of that person. ..that person. but, you know, well, he's doing... it's a benign gesture he's doing but it's still violence. and then you bring that idea, you do warfor peace kind of argument, but then you bring that into the 21st century, into democratic politics, it ends up in violence only. because i... with this thing, with this dancing shiva thing, what i'm trying to tell the world is don't bring religion too much into democratic politics, because it never... will never help you. it will always support violence in the end. it will justify. yeah. and this theme of conflict is one that recurs a lot

in your work and one particular idea you have is around, "who are you, soldier?" and you've got a painting of a featureless face of a soldier. and i wonder whether you feel that that is an idea that resonates very much today when we look at russian soldiers, for instance, fighting in ukraine. 0k. see, about the soldier, you know, there is a... you see, i grew up, i have friends who've gone to the army and become soldiers, and i became an artist. see, during the war, there was this idea of portraying the soldier as a killing machine. i thought, "no, you cannot do that." a soldier is also a victim of a system. and we call our soldiers... that means when you die, you go to...get celestial... ..some celestial place. so you die for the motherland. so no, isaid no.

that's a very... it's such a bad thing. it's such a... it's a way that you take his personal suffering from the idea of the soldier. yeah. so, "who are you, soldier?" is a question that you can never answer fully because you cannot condemn soldiers as such. of course, there are soldiers who would have done war crimes or whatever. but soldier as an idea is a very enigmatic existence. you cannotjust condemn them. so you depict the soldier almost in a sense as a victim fighting somebody else. we have taken his identity away from him. and other victims, of course, in the long running civil war were the parents of young people, a lot of men who just disappeared. and you have a particular picture of women in saris, mothers with empty speech balloons to kind of depict how their voice has been oppressed. and i want to put to you what the sri lankan booker prize winner shehan

karu natila ka says. in his novel the seven moons 0f maali almeida, he says he went back to the civil war in sri lanka, because he said talking about contemporary sri lanka politics is not the safest thing at the moment. so do you still feel that there is this kind of suppression of speech, freedom of expression in sri lanka today? you see, there is and... the answer is both yes and no. it matters in the way how you say that, what kind of words you use, and from what kind of a network you are doing it, in a way that... i was never threatened for my art as such. there were many people who thought that i am doing sacrilegious work. i'm so glad that you brought up shehan karunatilaka's work here because i think i'm very much like that guy he portrays in his novel. you know. that's the photographer who's killed and maimed and thrown

into the water and it's... because it's very complex. i never lie about my complexities. but i also don'tjust live with my complexities. you see what i mean? but is there a lack of freedom of speech in sri lanka today? because there was a report by the us state department at the end of last...of 2021 saying that these rights are restricted. i don't feel it, not many people feel it but, once again, it depends what you are saying. see, like, my critique is not the government. my critique is a system of which we are also beneficiaries. that's why, you know, you ask me why i am critiquing the sinhalese. because that's what i know. that's what i... that is the system that is... but is that system working for anybody today? i mean, you know, you look at what's happened in sri lanka last year, a series of protests marching on the presidential palace. the president rajapaksa is forced to flee the country

and resign. people really struggling to cope with the cost of living crisis, inflation at least 50%. you know, people can't afford to send their children to school. so... no, it is not working. yeah, yeah. it's not working for anybody now? yeah, we are caught between a rock and a hard place. you know, we don't know where to go now. yeah, it's... it is. but you know what i'm saying to my colleagues as well, you know, don't separate the state from the people. the people and the state are working together and brought this country into this level. it's not just politicians. but they're all victims now. they're all suffering. and this is the point i want — sorry — to put to you, which is in those protests, we saw buddhists, sinhalese, hindu, tamils, muslims, christians, all marching together in unison. even the saffron—robed monks, buddhist monks, saying, "enough. we need to have a government that's responsible, "that's not guilty of mismanagement." so the point i want to put to you is perhaps could we see sri lankans working together

for a future as sri lankans rather than, "i'm from this community or that community." yes, this is what the... but, you know, this is what... i may not have articulated my idea. this is exactly what i am saying. yes, we have that potential. we showed that potential in our art as artists, like, you know, working with artists from jaffna, with tamil artists, muslim artists and all that. and our performance art, you know, played an important role in the recent protest. yeah. the that is the main achievement of protest — the possibility and the potential that we have as a nation. but, you know, we need a lot more discussions, critical intervention into our own thinking for it to become a reality in the future. you know, blaming the politicians is not going to take us far into the future because there is a whole class of bureaucrats who are graduates of sri lankan universities. you know, they are also part of this corrupted, you know, system. university professors like me,

we are beneficiaries of that system, you know. i do not want to go much into it, like, you know... one problem in our society is all our documents that govern the system is very despotic. there is no space for participatory democracy for anyone. you take the... but aren't things better now? hasn't the government learned its lesson? you saw the president resign, the prime minister became president, president wickremesinghe, and the hold that the rajapaksa family had on the state institutions in sri lanka, is that a thing of the past? i mean, you mentioned the role of artists in forging a future, and that's what saskia fernando, who owns an art gallery here... and what saskia says is that, "artists in the country have found an opportunity "to use their art for greater purpose "in response to the country's "economic and political turmoil." so can people like you be

in the vanguard of this new sri lanka where people demand a better government to deliver them a happier and more prosperous future? yes, i think we are. actually, you know, this is a really good question. it takes me to what i'm really looking at now. i'm proposing the government to change the higher education system in a way because... you know, i have a colleague, whose name is suren raghavan, he's a minister of higher education here, and we are working together because, you know, when you look at sri lankan problem is, you know, we... it's the humanities and social sciences. we teach those very important disciplines, and science, in a very, very backward way, like in the 19th century. so we need critical thinking introduced into our curriculum at the universities. you know, it boils down to the problem of higher education in this country.

a lot of people, when they think of sri lanka, can imagine this beautiful tropical island which has attracted visitors throughout the centuries. but its recent past has been one that's been ridden with conflict, as we've been discussing. and even in 2019 there was a bomb which killed more than 200 people. do you believe that sri lanka can become better known forjust peace and prosperity and put its conflict—ridden past truly behind it? yes. you see, in the recent protest, we saw the convergence of different groups of people and acting together. you can have so many critiques and problems with it, but it showed a particular potential. well, i think the older generation of politicians will have to give away or use space to the younger generation... ..that. .. ..who would think critically and take the country into future.

but what my point is, has always been — you need good education for that. and that's what i expect from the current government. jagath weerasinghe, thank you very much indeed for coming on hardtalk. my pleasure. thank you so much for having me. thank you. hello there. the first half of the month was very wet. it was also very mild. but the weather this week is going to look very different. it's going to be cold and frosty, going to have some icy patches around and the risk of some snow. predicting where the snow

is going to fall is going to be quite difficult, mind you. these are the temperatures we start with on monday morning. coldest in the north with clearer skies away from those snow showers. icy patches around in the morning. we've got this wet weather in the south—east. now, it's mostly rain but there could be some snow over the downs and the risk that we could see some snow to lower levels as well. it is going to pull away. cloudy for a while across eastern england with one or two showers. otherwise, we see some sunshine coming through but we'll keep some wintry showers coming in to northern parts of northern ireland and most of the snow in that chilly wind across the north of scotland. temperature—wise — well, struggling, typically around 3—5 degrees. a cold day. and those temperatures will fall quickly after dark. another frost in most places monday night into tuesday morning. the risk of snow in the far south—west has lessened. most of the wet weather looks like it's going to be in the channel. that allows more wintry showers to feed into northern ireland, over the irish sea into north west england and north wales. it doesn't look quite so wet in the north—west of scotland on tuesday and many places

will again have a dry day with sunshine, but temperatures only around three or four degrees. we're still in cold air tuesday and into wednesday as well. that area of low pressure gets close to the north—east of scotland, bringing some stronger winds here and the threat of some snow. otherwise, the winds more northerly, so northern scotland in the firing line, northern ireland and around some of these irish sea coasts. many other areas likely to be dry and sunny but another chilly day, perhaps not quite as cold — 4—6 degrees, but still a cold day with some sunshine. how long will the cold weather last? well, there are weather fronts trying to push in from the atlantic but they seem to be slowing down and ahead of that, we've got a ridge of high pressure actually building in on thursday that will kill off most of the showers. many places will have a dry day with some sunshine again. we start to see some of that cloud coming into the far west, bringing some damp weather towards the south—west of england. but ahead of that, temperatures are still sitting at 4—6 degrees. so, for the next few days, different sorts of hazards, really. it's cold, it's going to be frosty. there's signs of milder weather, though, coming in, but probably not

until next weekend.

this is bbc news. i'm sally bundock with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. a day of national mourning begins in nepalfor the victims of a plane crash, in which it's believed all 72 people on board died. global leaders arrive in davos for the opening of the world economic forum. this year's theme is cooperation in a fragmented world. president biden asks if america will choose "love over hate" as he speaks at martin luther king's church in atlanta to mark the celebration of the civil rights activist�*s life. romanian police expand their investigation into social media influencer andrew tate, assessing allegations he ran