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Rohini Hensman is absolutely right when she asserts (in an article published in www.groundviews.org titled ‘Why are the Vanni civilians still being held hostage?’) ‘If there are elements in the government and armed forces working to destroy the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, it is incumbent on all of us who love our country to resist’.  I would not limit the resisting to ‘elements’ in the government or the armed forces though.  We know that the LTTE was not ‘government’ and not ‘armed forces’, for example. And we know that a lot of NGO personalities and even free media advocates were vociferously trying to destroy Sri Lanka, even though people like Nimalka Fernando of failed-state fame and Eelam-speak now unabashedly utter the word ‘motherland’.  They were resisted and that resistance played an important role in defeating the LTTE. They will be resisted today and tomorrow as well.

I don’t know about how ‘socialist’ Sri Lanka is, but it is certainly more of a republic than it used to be. Is it democratic?  Well, we are living under the violent shadow of the 1978 constitution and therefore ‘no’ is certainly a legitimate answer.

Rohini takes legitimate umbrage at certain statements made by high-ranking officials and politicians.  Whether such statements reflect official policy is of course not clear, especially since other officials and other politicians have made statements that contradict these.  If ‘official policy’ is best reflected by what the President says then I believe there is no reason to get worked up. Being alert, though, is important and for this I do applaud Rohini.

But as I said getting carried away is not useful.  For example, she calls the regimes of J.R. Jayewardena and Ranasinghe Premadasa ‘Sinhala nationalist’, never mind the fact that they were jointly responsible for the massacre of some 60,000 plus ‘Sinhala nationalists’, helped considerably by another ‘Sinhala nationalist’, Rohana Wijeweera.  Then she conjures up images of tyre pyres, mutilated bodies on the roadside, on waterways and so on.

She reduces the war to a product of alleged discrimination against and persecution of minorities, the PTA and Emergency Regulations.  No word of extremist Tamil nationalism, no word of terrorism here, strangely.

The ‘going overboard’ is nicely laced with the by not utterly boring ‘horror stories’ of the IDP camps. Rohini is so ‘overboard’ that her rant warrants full quotation:

Around 280,000 of the civilians who have suffered so much already have been kept prisoners behind barbed wire in camps where conditions are in many cases abysmal. It is clear that the government is unable to provide for them adequately, yet those with relations outside who would willingly look after them are being denied the right to join their families. If others want to check up on their homes in the Vanni or start rebuilding them, no one on earth has the right to stop them. This denial of the fundamental right to freedom of movement is especially cruel for families which have been split up, and are thereby denied the possibility of reuniting, or even finding out what has happened to their loved ones. It is lethal for those who are physically vulnerable; senior citizens were supposed to be released after a court found that many had died of starvation and more were dying daily, but the sick and injured, pregnant women, and mothers with babies are also vulnerable. With the monsoon, it is likely that gastrointestinal diseases will kill thousands. Why, then, are these unfortunate people being penalised like this?

I spent most of last weeks in these camps.  The conditions therein are certainly not luxurious but they are a far cry from ‘abysmal’.  If providing facilities that ensure 3 full meals a day, more than enough drinking water and water for bathing, medical services, toilets, schools, banking and postal services, and the influx of all manner of relief items courtesy the general public, business undertakings, INGOs, NGOs and UN agencies amounts to something that can be described as ‘abysmal’, then Rohini should check the dictionary meaning of the word.  They even have electricity and television, things that thousands living in formerly threatened villages did not have, do not have and are unlikely to have in the near future.

This is not the United States of America. This is Sri Lanka.  A third world country.  Given all this, the performance of the Government, I found quite contrary to what I expected considering the comparison of these facilities to Hitler’s concentration camps, startling.

It would indeed be cruel if split families are not allowed to reunite.  Reunification is a process that the Government is pursuing with utmost energy.  It is indeed lethal for those who are physically vulnerable, i.e. the elderly, the children, the sickly and pregnant mothers.  Lethal, yes, if there was no sympathy to their situation and if adequate measures are not in place.  The truth is, they are being looked after to the best of ability.  As for what the monsoon may or may not do, those in charge of these facilities are taking all precautions possible, including the shifting of camps to better locations, constructing better housing facilities and making sure that all amenities mentioned above are also available.

Rohini believes that one day would suffice to screen people.  Well, I suppose she has the brains to detect an LTTE cadre at the snap of a finger. Or the knowledge. I don’t know.  All I know is that it took two years to identify those responsible for the assassination attempt on the Defence Secretary and that two of the suspects were found in one of the camps.  It is better, given history, for the Government to be cautious.

The Government has already decided to allow those over 60 years of age to leave these camps, to go live with someone who undertakes to care for them or to enter a home for the elderly set up by the Social Services Department.  I think the Government could do better and give such people the right to leave, to live with friends or family, to take up residence in a home for the elderly or end up on the street if that is what they wish.  Perhaps the Government will.

Rohini asks ‘Why can’t camp inhabitants go out to look for missing relatives, or receive visits from friends and relations, or their homes if they want to?’  Well, just imagine close to 300,000 people leaving their camps and walking all over Cheddikum looking for friends and relatives!  Imagine the chaos.  Imagine the fallout of such an exercise.  Imagine what it would do to the logistics of feeding these people, attending to their medical and other needs?  Easy to say.  And as for receiving visits from friends and relations, this is happening Rohini. Everyday.  In all camps, except of course in those facilities where LTTE surrendees are being held.

The Government cannot treat children as suspects either. I don’t believe the Government is. On the other hand, this does not mean the Government can open the gates and ask all children to leave. It would be easier for the officials because it would halve the IDP population. Things don’t work that way. Children stay with parents.  Even under the harshest conditions and in this case, these are not abysmal conditions and they are not the harshest conditions imaginable.

There are security concerns and these naturally shape the diga palala of democracy, Rohini ought to understand.  Just because the LTTE leadership is no more, this does not mean that a brainwashed LTTE operative will not blow up a bus if given half a chance.

Rohini believes ‘democracy’ is about allowing people to go wherever they like, check out their homes, live on the streets if they so wish and so on.  Just imagine what would happen if the Government allowed such a thing.  The Government would be blamed for Ramalingam Rasiah losing his leg in a landmine explosion. The Government would be castigated for violating human rights because little 2 year old Meena Kumari died of hunger.  Our bleeding-heart I/NGO personalities would have a ball with the story.  They would roll out reams of commentary lamenting the state of affairs.  Nimalka Fernando would drop ‘motherland’ like a hot potato and take up the failed-state cry.  Others would re-activate the R2P agenda.  And Rohini Hensman would take up new cudgels for the restoration of ‘democracy’.

So let us keep perspective.  Let us not go overboard, if not for any reason, because it compromises our ability to resist real threats to democracy, whatever the sources may be, government, military or anti-Sri Lankan elements masquerading as political commentators, free media advocates or humanitarian workers.

The onus is certainly on the Government to make sure that the resettlement process is brought to a speedy conclusion, that those who are resettled have all the facilities they need, and that they are able to elect the representatives of their choice.  I believe the Government is doing most of what is possible.  We should agitate for the Government to do its best. We don’t help our cause by being dramatic, being disingenuous, by being uneducated about what is happening or by letting our imaginations run riot. We are hardly the democracy that we deserve, but we will remain where we are if we are not honest and if we prefer the dramatic to sobriety.

• Sri Lankarsquo;s IDP camp Manik Farm is what it is (but what is that?)



• Forgotten IDPs from the North



• We are nobody’s childrenhellip;



• GRIEVANCES OF AN IDP



• From the tigerrsquo;s den to an open prison

Minorities

may enjoy

clean living

in freshly cleared

forest patches,

welfare villages

with amenities

such as latrines

and tents,

gated communities.

June 28, 2009

Part of the Writers Under Siege collection on Groundviews. For more information, click here.

• Equal Treatment



• Forgetting, Mullaitivu



• Dancing In Sympathy (Mullaitivu)



• For Mr K with love



• The world in your Inbox - The Groundviews e-newspaper

Where do we start? With renovation, I suggest. The only available starting point is modest and realistic reform, namely the implementation of the 13^th amendment to the Sri Lankan constitution, because it represents the broadest available consensus between the Sri Lankan state and a section on non-Tiger Tamils as well as the Sri Lankan and Indian states. It represents the triangular intersection of the anti-Tiger elements of the “Tamil armed resistance” (as Kethesh Loganathan used to call it), and the Colombo and New Delhi governments.

The day after our Thirty Years War ended this year, a top level Indian delegation paid a call on the President and the joint press statement that ensued ( May 21^st) not only contained a commitment by the Government of Sri Lanka to implement the 13th amendment but to explore possibilities of a further movement through dialogue.

The why of it is that 70 million Tamils will not go away from the demographic makeup of India; a significant percentage of them will always be concerned about the fate of their ethnic kin in Sri Lanka, constituting a political factor that no government at the centre will ignore. Furthermore, no government at the Centre will risk a significant degree of alienation of Tamil Nadu, on the basis that the latter does not care about the fate of Sri Lanka’s Tamils. We Sri Lankan Sinhalese could very well argue that it is none of their or anybody else’s business but our own, but that is just not the way the world works. As Mervyn de Silva wrote “in the age of identity, ethnicity walks on water”. Look at the intervention or counter-intervention of Russia on behalf of the South Ossetians in the face of a Georgian military offensive. (The Indian conduct of 1987 was a perfect precursor of this). The 13^th amendment is the concrete expression of the Indian concern balanced off with Sri Lanka’s sovereignty. Several scholarly texts, from different viewpoints, shed light on this nexus and its evolution. I refer to those by KM de Silva, Shelton Kodikara, John Gooneratne and Urmila Phadnis.

Sovereignty not only has to be asserted, it has to be defended and defensible. Sri Lanka cannot defend its sovereignty against all comers from all points of the compass, North and South, West and East. It can defend its sovereignty only by power balancing in a multi-polar world. Starkly put, if we lose India, we even lose the Non-aligned Movement, and (as we saw in 1987) we are left naked.

Any attempt at erasure of the 13^th amendment will only open the door to greater not lesser concessions because we shall be dealing with a globalized world and the Obama factor as well. Between 1987 and today falls the breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia, the dawn of the new century and the information age, the emergence of Obama etc. In short, it is better not to re-open the issue of the 13^th amendment because we could find that the point of equilibrium stops above and beyond it.

There are minority grievances and there are minority aspirations. The latter are neither imaginary nor unwarranted. That which Virginia Woolf asserted on behalf of women writers is true of human beings in general: A Room with a View. It is part of the human condition that every individual requires an irreducible minimum of space in which to assert one’s distinctive identity and grow, without domination or interference from others. Every civic group needs political and cultural space. That is the bedrock argument for some measure of self rule or autonomy. It is rather different in the United States or France, where the Constitution does not privilege the culture or religion of any community, and there cannot be said to be – nor are there claims to being – a dominant ethnic, or ethno-religious community. The US is a melting pot, a classic case of cultural fusion and change, while the French Republic is sternly secular, with neither veils nor crosses allowed in schools.

Some states and societies are a hybrid, such as India, which has a secular Constitution, a pluralist society (the Prime Minister is a Sikh, the most powerful politician is of Italian origin, the most powerful political family is mixed race) but also provides sufficient space for its constituent communities in the form of a quasi federal system and linguistic states.

Tamil grievances remain from 1951, (if not from DS Senanayakae’s Pan Sinhala Cabinet) when Senator Nadesan voiced his dissent over the National Flag. We are far from a situation in which society is integrated, discrimination is aggressively tackled and the state is neutral between communities. In such a context, where one individual is not the equal of the other and one community has more privileges than the other, it is the case the world over, that collectivities with their distinctive identities and inhabiting recognizable geographic areas over long periods, tend to seek some political space and measure of self rule/self governance.

I cannot think of any state in the world, and I work among 193, that does not hold that Sri Lanka’s Tamils deserve and require equal rights in practice, as well as some autonomous political space, be it devolution of power to autonomous regions or provinces ( as in Britain or China) or something more. I repeat, the 13^th amendment is the most modest and economical of these arrangements as far as the majority goes.

The 13^th amendment may not solve grievances, but certainly addresses them. Does the Parliamentary or Presidential system solve the grievances of the Sinhalese or the majority of ordinary people or the poor? Obviously not, but this does not lead to the conclusion that these institutions and practices should be dumped in the trash-can because they simply devolve power to politicians and Ministers. They must be retained because, as Churchill said of democracy, they are the worst, save all others.

Political accommodation and reconciliation are not possible on the basis of majoritarian unilateralism. It requires a consensus, a common denominator between the communities. It would be difficult for the Sinhalese to find any of their fellow Tamil (and Muslim?) citizens who could be accommodated short of the implementation of the 13^th amendment at the very least. If someone could name a single Tamil political party or leading personality who is willing to settle for anything short of the 13^th amendment, I would be pleasantly surprised. What he or she will discover is that even purely domestic political accommodation between the communities/ethnic collectivities is impossible other than on the basis of the 13^th amendment at the minimum.

There is a major distinction between Sri Lankans being at the centre of sorting out Sri Lankan problems, and Sri Lankan problems being capable of sorting out exclusively by Sri Lankans. That is the kind of isolationist position I have never held. My unit of analysis has always been the world system taken as single whole, a complex unevenly structured totality, and this is all the more relevant now that we are faced with the threat of a global protracted struggle with Tamil secessionism. If the battlefield is global, our analysis cannot be purely local. Sri Lanka’s sovereignty must be defended mainly by our efforts, but cannot be defended solely or exclusively by them, and must be defended by a broad united front or concentric circles of alliances. Full if graduated implementation of the 13^th Amendment, i.e. the fullest possible devolution of powers within our Constitution, is an essential part of the minimum political programme on which such a global united front can be built and sustained.

Narrow nationalism is an inadequate basis for the defense of the national interest, which is why the greatest of nationalists or more correctly, patriots, were also the greatest of internationalists. An example would be Fidel Castro who never tires of quoting Cuba’s 19^th century national hero, Jose Marti as saying “Homeland is humanity”. And Ho Chi Minh, (the Vietnamese nation’s beloved “Uncle Ho”) who reminded us that “Nothing is More Precious than Independence and Freedom” but also recalled (as a founder of the French Communist Party and the Communist International) the correctness of Frederick Engels’ dictum that “Freedom is the recognition of necessity”. I commend the full implementation of the 13^th amendment at least as a tough-minded Engelsian recognition of necessity as both prerequisite and corollary of freedom.

Prof Senaka Bandaranaike discerns a pattern in ancient Sri Lankan history of being ahead of the rest of the subcontinent on occasions, but never being able to achieve a decisive breakthrough and sustain it. This happened at least three times, he once said in a lecture I attended. We now have another chance. It is as if we have obtained a second Independence, when we were ahead of the game in the rest of Asia but we then blew it. Let’s not blow it yet again.

These are the strictly personal views of the writer.

• TAMIL NADU, THE INDIAN MODEL AND DEVOLUTION



• A military pathway to nation building



• Aftermath of the Victory: whither Sri Lanka?



• Tamil politics tomorrow: Options, challenges and pitfalls



• Peace in Sri Lanka: Negotiating with the Northern ‘Separatistsrsquo;?

History

The LTTE commenced as a guerilla force and over time developed its own conventional fighting capability by having a ground force, a navy and a rudimentary air force. It had a strong local and diasporic base and a vast fund raising network. The LTTE targeted attacks on civilian, political, security individuals, religious symbols and civilian groups, particularly in the south. Its initial aim was to fight against the Sinhala discrimination and the government security forces. In the process it began to kill members of other Tamil groups and repress its own Tamil community. The LTTE was ruthless in removing diversity of opinion within the Tamil community by armed force, not by political means. Thus many leaders of the Tamil bourgeois parties[1] and left parties and groups[2] were eliminated. The ruthless repression of any political opposition to it alienated many working people in the areas under the LTTE control.

I believe that the LTTE’s defeat was brought about by its military strategy and tactics based on terror and over reliance on conventional force, its violent attempt to become the sole representative of the Tamil people; misreading of the international balance of forces and a lack of progressive economic or political policies. It simply believed that imposition of a separate Tamil state was the only response to the discriminatory policies of the successive governments against Tamils. It substituted ethnic struggle for class struggle. As a nationalist movement it could have survived by either compromising with the capitalist class or resorting to mass struggle, but it did not do either. The political support of the Sinhala workers and the other oppressed people for the nationalist struggle of the Tamil people gradually diminished. The methods of the LTTE enormously helped the Sinhala ruling elites to whip up anti-Tamil chauvinism to protect the privileges and interests of the ruling elites.

War Preparations and the LTTE

When the security forces of the GoSL went to war in 2006, they were well-trained and enjoyed superiority in firepower and mobility. They built up their force levels on land, in the air and at sea en masse to ensure success against the LTTE. Evidently, the LTTE failed to read this turnaround taking place in the capabilities of the Security Forces and adapt its military line of action accordingly. Instead, it stuck to a conventional warfare mode that was doomed to fail although it inflicted many casualties on the advancing government troops.

When the LTTE floundered in the Eastern Province in 2006, offering only limited stiff resistance, the regime made up its mind to go all the way against the LTTE.

Is the war over?

Elimination of the top leadership of the LTTE with many of their cadres assassinated or dead may not represent the total end of the LTTE. The post-Pirapaharan era of the LTTE may represent a departure from the strategy and tactics of terror previously adopted by the LTTE.

The GoSL and the LTTE have declared that the war is over. Does this mean that the GoSL will devolve political power to the North and the East? Those who lean towards the left and Tamil groups within the GoSL believe it will devolve power at least to the extent granted by the 13th amendment to the Constitution^[3]. Those who lean towards the right within the GoSL believe it will not devolve power at all. Those who are outside the government are similarly divided. Given the sorry history of devolution in the country it is hard to believe that the optimists will succeed. The extreme nationalist forces within the GoSL have already commenced their campaign against any power devolution.

The GoSL has stated that the state of emergency and Prevention of Terrorism Act would remain in force for some time to come. The eastern province has been firmly under army control since mid-2007. There are army checkpoints in the town centre, armed thugs prowl the back streets and reports of abductions and disappearances continue. To quote the Defence Secretary, ldquo;The war is like a cancer. Even after curing a cancer, there is a period for radiation treatment. It is the same with the war on terrorism.rdquo; Meanwhile the President in his victory speech has adopted a new doctrine following on the path of Bush doctrine. While inviting investments in the north and the east, while talking of a home grown solution to the political situation, there are no minorities in the island, he said. He branded the population into two categories: those who love the country and those who don’t.

Media Freedom

The GoSL’s vendetta against anyone critical of the war, particularly in the media continues. Targeting journalists for “treason” indicates a broad offensive against human rights bodies and non-government organisations, which have been branded as “terrorist sympathisers”. The methods used are not limited to arrest and prosecution as evident from the assassination of Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sunday Leader, who was posthumously awarded UNESCO World Press Freedom Prize 2009. As in numerous other cases, the police have made no arrests yet. Most of these threats seem to target international organisations that exposed to a limited extent the exterminationary tactics used by the GoSL. Only three days back, the Centre for Policy Alternatives[4] received a 1989 type of threatening letter demanding compliance with the GoSL programs. Disappearances seem to continue. On June the first, Poddala Jayantha, General Secretary of the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association was abducted by a gang who came in a white van, severely assaulted and later released.

Access to camps and war ravaged areas

Despite many requests by the international community, the GoSL has continued to refuse full access to the areas destroyed by the war and to the hundreds of thousands of displaced Tamil civilians interned in the so-called welfare villages encircled by barbed wire and security forces.

The Economic repercussion

Sri Lanka spent and will continue to spend a significant part of its gross domestic product on the war effort, thus exacerbating its dependence on the world capitalist system. The very high military expenditure has significantly contributed to a weakening economy, rising cost of living, inflation, unemployment and an impending economic collapse. The GoSL hopes to survive by relying on massive foreign loans. It is using the “war victories” as a mechanism to divert attention from the crises the country is faced with. The next pretext will be in the form of ldquo;an emergencyrdquo; caused by the rapid deepening of the countryrsquo;s economic crisis and an eruption of working people against the imposition of new burdens. The broader fear in Colombo ruling elite is that the military defeat of the LTTE will be followed by a wave of political unrest and social struggles. The GoSL has mortgaged the Sri Lankan state to the hilt to finance massive military spending and imposed the full burden of the war on the working class. Now, confronting the impact of an unprecedented global economic crisis for which it has no answers, the regime has no alternative but to use police state measures to stamp out opposition, particularly by working people.

Key political decisions are made by a military cum political unit rather than in parliament or cabinet. Unelected bureaucrats can make outrageous threats against diplomats and journalists. GoSL operates with complete contempt for the law, the constitution and the courts. Elements of the Sinhala majority in the south now want the President to be treated as the King of Sri Lanka. The government will boost its armed force, already one of the largest per capita in the world, from 200,000 to 300,000 within a population of around 20 million. The navy and air force each have around 30,000 personnel and the home guard another 35,000. All of the above will be used against workers, peasants and youth seeking to defend their rights and conditions.

The role of China, India, Pakistan and the US

The Global political and economic balance of forces has played a significant role in what is happening in Sri Lanka. All the major powers, with the United States in the lead, have backed the GoSL while turning a blind eye to its abuse of democratic rights. Britain and other EU countries also assisted the GoSL by selling military equipment in the last three years of the war, it was reported. If the US is now raising concerns, it is only because instability in Sri Lanka threatens broader American economic and strategic interests in South Asia, in particular the growing influence of China. This is of major concern to the Indian Government also.

The US and India are intent on countering Chinarsquo;s strategy. Thus under the guise of humanitarian concerns, India has sent a military medical team to Sri Lanka. Earlier the US proposed to send a Marine Expeditionary Brigade to northern Sri Lanka to evacuate refugees - an offer that appears to have been turned down. None of these moves is motivated by concern for working people in Sri Lanka who have born the brunt of 25 years of war. Rather the island is being drawn into the international rivalry that is intensifying as the global economic crisis deepens and foreshadows far more catastrophic conflicts.

Military defeat and Political defeat of the LTTE

Yet, the difference between defeating the LTTE militarily and destroying the LTTE politically does not seem to have been completely understood by many.

The GoSL would require enormous amounts of human, material and financial resources to be spent on maintaining its forces in the north and the east. The psychological effects caused by the war on society as a whole, including the Tamils and armed forces of all sides to the conflict will continue to be challenging and daunting, which will make the dream of political unity an ever receding mirage.

The Tamil psyche is hurt as never before. Their feeling of subjugation has multiplied with the end of the conventional war. Most Tamils perceive this war as an invasion to grab ‘their land’. Their sense of anger and resentment will remain for a long time. The war and its aftermath have accelerated the tensions and distance between the majority of the Sinhala, Muslim and Tamil diaspora. This has also brought the Sri Lankan national question to the forefront of international discourse, second only to the questions of Palestine and Darfur. It has become embedded in the maelstrom of conflicts that are currently inflaming large parts of Asia. The desperate and deadly situation faced by the many thousands of Tamil civilians interned in the camps will become a serious international issue.

These developments do not bode well for the GoSL or the Sinhalese, though Sinhala nationalist groups and the GoSL will try to put a positive spin on the situation. Almost all Sinhala nationalist groups seem to see this phenomenon as of a transient nature, which they believe would go away when the ‘massive’ infrastructure development programs for the north and east are jump started.

My simple question is: How could the capitalist ruling elites of the island, who have never been able to engender and sustain such development in the South of the island, be expected to undertake such a development in the North and East of the island?

Link to Class Struggle

From its very origins, the war has been bound up with the class struggle. At every point of crisis, the weak Sri Lankan bourgeoisie has whipped up anti-Tamil chauvinism as the means of dividing the working class and shoring up its hold on power. The war was launched in 1983 by a United National Party government amid a horrific wave of anti-Tamil pogroms. These were being carried out in response to a growing rebellion by the working class against the impact of the government’s free market agenda. Over the past three years, the GoSL has repeatedly accused striking workers and protesting students of being accomplices of the “Tiger terrorists”. Having been strengthened by the defeat of the LTTE, the most reactionary sections of the ruling elite will soon be calling for the crushing of the new enemy, the working people.

The LTTE’s defeat is primarily a political, not a military question. Its perspective of a separate capitalist state of Eelam has proven to be a deadly trap for the working people. Its sectarian outlook and attacks on Sinhalese civilians has only deepened the communal divide and played into the hands of the Sinhala extremists in Colombo. The LTTE’s plans for a separate state represented the interests of the Tamil bourgeoisie, not the Tamil masses, and always depended in the final analysis on the support of one or other of the imperialist powers.

The atrocities committed in Sri Lanka will serve as a warning to working people anywhere in the globe. As capitalism plunges into its worst economic crisis since the 1930s, the ruling elites around the world are reaching into the tool bag of political reaction to secure their rule. Anti-Tamil chauvinism in Sri Lanka finds its parallels in anti-immigrant xenophobia, various nationalisms and numerous forms of chauvinism based on religious, ethnic and linguistic divisions. These can also become the starting point for local and international wars. The only alternative to such barbarism will be to explore the path towards socialism.

Conclusion

In Sri Lanka, as elsewhere, cultural diversity and tensions were manipulated to divide and weaken the working people to preserve the interests and privileges of the ruling elite. In the process, the fundamental democratic and social aspirations of the people have been crushed. The military defeat of the LTTE has not resolved the fundamental issues that underpinned the conflict. It has shown that the territorial unity of the capitalist state can be maintained only on the basis of ruthless repression of the people using military force. Through such repression it has reinforced its defence of Sinhala nationalism. The socio-economic problems of discrimination based on language and nationality and poverty linger on.

The LTTE’s military defeat clearly confirmed that the struggle against imperialism and the fight to secure democratic rights can only be advanced on the basis of a program relying on the support of the working people of the world. The answer to discrimination and racial oppression lies not through a separate state, but through the broad unification of the oppressed people in a common struggle against it.

As I have indicated many times before, our stand in defending the democratic rights of the Tamil people against all forms of chauvinism and racism, was neither an expression of political support for the LTTE nor for separation, nor to bring about a Tamil capitalist regime in the north and the east. Rather it is an expression of our acceptance of the right of the Tamil people for self-determination and the necessity for building unity of the Tamil and Sinhala working people to defend their interests against exploitation and repression by the ruling elite which divides diverse communities along racial, religious and caste lines.

I believe that the way forward lies in the paradigm change Sri Lanka needs to go though, which is alien to its current political traditions of exploitation through repression and subjugation. Firstly the equitable distribution of the fruits of economic development and participatory democracy are essential for the society to progress, especially, when the majority of people are surviving from one meal to the other. Internationally, there is a widespread demand for a refashioning of the world economic order, an end to the unconscionable arrogance of the wheelers and dealers and a call for governments to be more accountable for the welfare of its people. Sri Lanka needs to understand this reality and act accordingly. Secondly, while recognizing the specific problems facing the Tamil community, the injustices faced by the Sinhalese, and Muslims and challenges they all face due to capitalist globalisation also need to be recognised and addressed.

Lionel Bopage is former general secretary of the JVP and former member of the District Development Council, Galle.Associated with the JVP since 1968, he resigned in 1984.He is currently a member of the Executive Committee, Friends for Peace in Sri Lanka, based in Canberra, Australia.

[2] Such as PLOTE, EPRLF and TELO.

[3] The Indo-Sri Lankan Accord of July 1987 led to the 13th amendment to the constitution under which the GoSL agreed to devolve some authority to the provinces. Provincial councils are directly elected for five year terms. The leader of the council majority serves as the provincersquo;s Chief Minister with a board of ministers; a provincial governor is appointed by the president.

[4] CPA is an independent, non-partisan organization which receives funds from international and bilateral funding agencies and foundations.

• Where We Are and Where To?



• The Abrogation of the CFA



• The LTTE is falling down. So what should the Government do?



• Dr. Devanesan Nesiah on post-war / post-LTTE Sri Lanka



• Are We Back on Square One?

I am thirsty. There is water, hundred yards away, but between the water and I is a queue hundred yards in length. I think of the consequence of drinking water. I will need to pee. There is a stinking toilet hundred yards away. But there is a hundred yard long queue for it. Something nice about quenching thirst and the urge to pee mdash; they can cancel out over short time scales.

‘What are your skills?’ asks the prosecutor. “I can simulate stochastic differential equations and find uncertainties in their solutions”.

“Ever read anything broader than that?” he mocks. “Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Stephen Jay Gould?”

“Yes, my Lord”, I say proudly, “I have read Asterix”.

“That’s good enough”, suggests the prosecutor, “establishes beyond doubt the accused is a prima facie intellectual”. Standards of proof!

Exhibit #1. It is from the rare books collection of Bridgetown library.

“Do you recognize this book?”

“Yes”, I say, “it is yaazhpaaNa vaipava maalai” (YVM) – authentic history of the Jaffna Tamils. Written in the eighteenth century, and documents a lot about the sixteenth. It is as authentic as the Mahavamsa.

Tale of two libraries, both where the potato farmer studied YaalpaaNa Vaipava Maalai. Arrows mark the rare books sections (Images scanned from Bridgetown Evening New and Tamil Times).

“There is a place this talks of, which you think is important?” prompts the prosecutor.

“Yes, the Amman kOvil grounds in Nallur”

“Tell us what happened there”

“Sixteenth century. Nallur king Changiliyan beat up the Portugese, killing 20000 Portugese”, I tell him with tribal pride, “A massacre, just like what the Sri Lankans did.”

“What?” he barks.

“Did you not watch 20-20 cricket mdash; Dilshan’s batting was a massacre, no?”

“20000 died”. What for? How many panangkoddai (palmyrah fruits) will be worth 20000 lives?”

“The point is”, I interject. “The Portugese weren’t fighting for the utility of panangkoddai. They did it for the ego of their generals and the pride of their king.”

“Wouldn’t they prefer to be living, eating panangkoddai?”

“Sure they would – but the choice wasn’t theirs; it was made in lands far away, by those who weren’t actually going to be at the amman kovil grounds, those from a different social class.

“But, mind you”, I add, “Ever tasted odiyal kooL? Well worth fighting for, no?”.

Audiatur et altera pars

“Back to the future – to this very same amman kOvil grounds in 1977?” suggests the defense counsel. “What happened there?”

“I was at an election rally. Thundering speeches, the best ever demonstration that logic, if you care to measure it on a continuous scale, has an inverse relationship to emotion”, I explained. “We’ll make slippers from their skins and drink their blood”, they shouted.

“Is this helpful”, I pondered. “Shouldn’t we be more cautious and responsible, even in the light of unfairness from the other side?” “True, the government acted chauvinistically”, I concede. “True, it had by then orchestrated structural violence in many ways and propagated hegemonic thinking. Governance was too centralized with no local say in matters. But is counter-nationalism the answer?” I was a wee bit too loud and that thug heard what I said.

“He wasn’t really a thug. He was a nice chap who couldn’t do calculus. In our society, calculus brought you glory. You got good exam grades, went to university, got a nice job and married a fat dowry. If you couldn’t calculus, you saw a dead end. This chap was a good sportsman, skilled at fixing things mdash; bicycles, water pumps and the like. He could have been the Jayasuria of those times, but no, not in our value system. Calculus or bust, it was. In frustration he asked why. A tribal solution was put to him. The S-tribe has taken the university places of the T-tribes, was that explanation. Corollary of our universal theorem: it is all the fault of the other side. S for the T, T for the S. Suppose ALL the university places were given to T-tribe. This chap still wasn’t going to get in! But he had no understanding of that, for his calculus wasn’t good enough. They gave him a model, he latched onto it.

Now that he had heard what I said, my calculus was useless. He charged to beat me up and elevated me to an NBU (nearly beaten up) level.

“How did you escape?” “My red sports bicycle – Raleigh brand, no”.

“Run, run”, I mocked, “as fast as you can; you can’t catch me; I got a red Raleigh bike”.

I heard this chap later joined, trained, fought and died. For what? I am left with a sense of emptiness when I think of this chap. I do not know why, but I do feel just the same about the Isuru aiya chap who lived next door, JVP in 1971, fought and died. What did they achieve? Where did we all go wrong – the dead and the living? Where do sets of intellectual guilt intersect? Is that not the common ground some seek?

My achievements didn’t stop at NBU. I got a friendly warning (FW), too. It was 1985, a Christmas party in Bridgetown, and came from the local fund-raiser, in response to a comment about kids who were dying in the war weren’t his children. “They are sacrificing for our liberation”, he had gloated, and yet regretting that his own child had got only three of the four prizes at school. Hypocrite!

“If you say such things, thambi”, he said in issuing his version of Fatwa, “you don’t know what these fellows might do—to you, your family back home”. Bugger! “These fellows”, were the ones for whom he wanted to collect money from me! They weren’t some “these fellows”, they were his fellows; his creations.

Prosecution calls a witness, but god that IS nuke! I see Sivananthan Sivasegaram, thermodynamics professor at Peradeniya. Siva was my hero. You know, knowledge is what remains when you have forgotten everything you have been taught? That applies perfectly. I have completely forgotten everything Siva taught me! Yet I retain knowledge for which I owe him lots. My hero stands against me. I shiver and sweat profusely in panic. Okkoma ivarai!

Exhibit #3 is an old issue of Tamil Times. Witness is asked to read some lines.

“Intellectuals in society have a wider role – to act as catalysts for change in the society”, he reads.

“Did you write them?” ”Yes I did”

“Think the accused has lived by these?” Obviously not!

“QED, my Lord ndash; quite easily done”.

Defense witness is called. My defense has its own nuke. In comes a lady with sharp dark eyes.

“Do you know her?”

“Yes, Rajani Thiranagama”.

“When did you last meet her?”

“A week before she left Liverpool to go back to Jaffna”

“What did you tell her?”

“Don’t go back, it is not safe, get a post-doc job here”

“I have a wider role”, she said, “a catalytic role, wider than just reading notes in class”.

“She is dead, acting that catalyst; you live staying quiet.”

“Precisely”, I scream. “That’s why I kept quiet. I was scared the same thing might happen to me. Remember I had already gathered NBU and FW!”

“Was it the fear of being beaten up or being shot? Were you such a coward?”

“Well no”, I confess. It’s my “injErungO appa” I am most scared of. She wouldn’t let me speak or write anything that might invite trouble.

I produce exhibit #4, the story of Julius Caesar. He had an “injErungO appa” in Calpurina, “Stay at home, I had a bad dream”, she had warned.

J. Caesar might not have met this fate, had he sent in a sick note to work. Image from BBC.

The judge directs the jury to return a verdict of guilt: “The accused, and those like him in the S and T tribes, failed to slow down the rise of nationalism. The case is well established. Sivasegaram defined the parameters. Thiranagama showed how to live it. This farmer failed to follow in those steps.”

I shake in fear. I sweat in the heat under the tent. I feel I am rolling from side to side. It is not voluntary. I am being shaken.

“Wake up”, I hear. “injErungO appa, enna kanavE kaaNureengaL”

Oh dear, a dream after all.

No tent, no thirst, no drink, no consequential urge to pee, no trial, but I can’t go back to sleep.

The jury might come back soon. They might find me guilty.

• Black July - My Story



• Blast Outside Eastern University Batticaloa



• The bear and my potato farm



• Personal experience of the Vanni today



• What Is The Future Of The Eastern University?

As Paul Berman once wrote, “somewhere in the world it is always 1941”. There comes a time in the life of every society when it is faced with an existential threat or challenge. It is the social forces or elements that rise up to this challenge and successfully overcome this threat that then have the power as well as the legitimacy to place their stamp on what comes after. Those who stood on the wrong side of history, or never rose to the occasion, or who abandoned the struggle partway, or simply failed; the defeated enemy, the collaborators, the appeasers and the fence-sitters — and these are not one and the same — all forfeit the chance to place their values, ideas and programs as the leading ones of the social order that follows the great test.

The truths are threefold. The truth is that the Tigers and the Tamil ultra-nationalists overestimated themselves and underestimated the Sinhalese, due to arrogance and racism. The last stage of the war saw a titanic clash of wills, between, on the one hand, the Tigers, the Tamil Diaspora and overseas Tamils from Canada to Chennai, their Western supporters and the Western media, and on the other, the Sinhala people, the armed forces, the Rajapakse leadership, a thin stratum of heroic Tamil rebels against Prabhakaran, and several friendly states. The Balasinghams wrote a book about the Tamil Eelam struggle with a neo-Nietzschean title, The Will to Freedom. The truth is that from a classically Nietzschean perspective, the Sinhalese Will to Power, i.e. to “prevail over” to “overcome” (which was Nietzsche’s meaning) on and over this small island, was and will in the final analysis always be, cannot but be, greater than that of the Tamils to secede. The truth is also that the Tigers, weakened by an Eastern Tamil rebellion, were defeated by a largely Sinhalese army, sustained by the Sinhala people whose collective will refused to break under decades of suicide bombings, body bags coming home to villages and assassinations of their leaders; the Sinhalese who, this time around, like the paradigmatic Silindu in Woolf’s Village in The Jungle, finally turned on their tormentors and blew them away.

If the social bloc that dominates the UNP wished a postwar Sri Lanka of their liking they should not have repeatedly blown the chances they had of defending the country’s territorial unity, integrity and sovereignty mdash; but blow them it did.

JR Jayewardene did want to win the war, though Lalith Athulathmudali did say that operations were intended to prove to the Tigers that they had no military option. JRJ was perhaps the only UNP president that wanted to win the war and tried to, but he and his administration did not have the basic capacity or intelligence (a) to suppress Black July ’83 (b) not to tamper with the rules of the democratic game to such a degree that it split the Sinhalese and destabilized the domestic situation and (c) to maintain the kind of political relationship with India that would have permitted it to win the war and pre-empted Indian pre-emption, so to speak.

The Premadasa presidency had an admirable degree of multiethnic, multicultural pluralism in its make up and dominant ideology but it allowed the war effort to be paralyzed by infighting within the officer corps and under-funded by bureaucrats with a possible bias or lack of commitment. It made the right decision in putting Gen Denzil Kobbekaduwe in charge of the military effort but it did not consider a military victory possible or, on balance, desirable. (I was possibly the only one in the Premadasa camp whose policy memoranda to him pushed for a military victory. This heartbreaking effort is reflected in my book The Travails of a Democracy: Unfinished war, Protracted Crisis, Vikas, New Delhi 1995).

The UNP’s final chance came with the Prime Ministership of Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe who opted for a lopsided Ceasefire agreement at a time when the balance of forces had turned dramatically against the LTTE due to the successful operations of the Special Forces LRRP and the global anti-terrorist shift due to 9/11. The CFA permitted the buildup of the proto state structure of the Tigers and humiliated the Sri Lankan armed forces.

The moderate, Westernized wing of the SLFP had its chance to win the war and re-mould Sri Lanka in accordance with its more reformist pluralist ideology but it threw the chance away. The re-taking of Jaffna was vitiated by the failure to cut off the LTTE’s retreat thereby permitting the Tigers to escape together with large number of civilians, base themselves in Mullaitivu, regroup and make a dramatic comeback. The strategy was one of taking territory rather than annihilating the enemy; recruitment was negatively affected by campaigns such as Sudu Nelum, Thavalama and the efforts of NIPU etc; corruption was rampant in the sphere of procurement. Above all, there was no commitment to a strategic goal of destroying the enemy but rather to one of driving the Tigers to the negotiating table. Worst of all, Karuna’s rebellion was double-crossed and Prabhakaran’s Sea Tigers allowed to violate the CFA and land in his rear area; General Sarath Fonseka was transferred from Jaffna and placed on the shelf in charge of the Volunteers ( the Sunday Island carried many pieces by me around the time and after, vigorously criticizing the decision and arguing for his placement at the helm of our army); and the tsunami weakened Tigers were sought to be given an administrative–financial authority in the form of the PTOMS, probably as part of a deal with the TNA which would give a third term to the incumbent.

These are not the only critics of the Rajapakse administration and the postwar outcome. Others include the local and foreign NGOs comprising self–proclaimed civil society; the Churches; and the non-Tiger Tamil dissidents such the UTHR and SLDF. Had Colombo’s cosmopolitan civil society not been so totally pro-appeasement, had the churches been visibly and audibly critical of Tiger totalitarianism and exercised greater internal discipline (instead of allowing some of its clergymen to opt for Barabbas, as Fr Bernard continues to do from Mindanao), had the Tamil dissidents worked for a united front of anti-Tiger Tamils which could have launched a resistance struggle in the rear of the LTTE or backed Karuna and Douglas Devananda, who were the actually existing alternatives to the Tigers, their criticisms - pious, petulant or patronizing - of trends in postwar Sri Lanka would not have so little social legitimacy and traction. (I recall the response of an award winning Indian journalist of Tamil ethnicity who wrote a book on the war, when I praised the UTHR-J reports: “yeah, except for that Church of South India tone of preachy Protestant moralizing!”)

None of this justifies any attempt by extremist lobbies to translate and degrade the victory of the Sri Lankan state, its armed forces and the people over the Tigers, a valiant victory which has the potential to be a liberation of all the peoples of the island from LTTE fascism, into an armed version, a militarized equivalent of 1956 or 1972 (the abolition of Section 29 and the formal enthronement of one language, religion and specific state form over others).Whatever their socially enabling and democratic aspects for the vast majority, both 1956 and 1972 contained for the minorities, a dimension of discrimination, domination and divisiveness.

No current critique, however trenchant, of postwar Sri Lankan trends approximates in its luminous perspicacity the following judgment:

“Separate identities have been sustained and fortified by deep antagonisms and wildly contested facts which extend over two millenia and more…Each fresh confrontation and every violent eruption becomes an instant invitation to an overpowering onrush of self-righteous recidivism, against which reason can only erect the feeblest defenseshellip; Having co-opted the clergy, can militant Sinhalese-Buddhism rely on support from the armed services, too?hellip; Now regional councils are coming up for air for the third (and last?) time. All the political parties are discussing the proposal, a shrewd… move to gain endorsement from a national consensus. But has political power already slipped out of the hands of politicians?”

Amazingly, these words appeared a shade over a quarter century ago in the pages of the Far Eastern Economic Review of January 26, 1984, pp22-23, and were written by Mervyn de Silva. Though a little late, I have wised-up sufficiently, not to doubt my father’s wisdom, but was this a description of some aspect of the reality at the time, or a latent tendency at any time given Sri Lankan society, history and mentality, or an early warning-cum-prediction? Only future history will tell.

The second driver of a more pluralist postwar outcome is the democratic system which includes the courts and above all, competitive elections. Municipal elections are imminent, Parliamentary elections are scheduled for the first half of next year and Northern provincial elections are unavoidably on the agenda. With proportional representation, the Tamil people will punch pretty much their demographic weight. Political space cannot but broaden, and the ensuing give-and-take is inevitable, eroding ideological blocs. Post-election, the postwar power bloc would be recomposed.

The third and final source is the external factor. Forget the unfair critics of Sri Lanka and those who tilt to the pro-Tiger Tamil Diaspora for one reason or the other. Those who stood by Sri Lanka during the war and its aftermath are crucially interested in political accommodation of the Tamil minority – with India being an obvious case in point, but by no means the only one holding this view. The statement of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization led by China and Russia, which has admitted Sri Lanka as a “dialogue partner” (my regular readers, going back to the Weekend Express column may recognize that I canvassed for affiliation since its founding almost a decade ago), mentions not only “independence and sovereignty” but also “the rights of minorities”.

It is the dynamic of interaction of these three factors within the anti-Tiger, “patriotic” universe, within the cosmos of the Sri Lankan state, within the power-bloc that won the war, which will make for pluralism, reform and possibly paradigm shift.

We shall need to pay heed to the views of our friends, local and foreign, as it becomes increasingly obvious that the Tiger army is destroyed but the Tiger movement or global network is still alive, a well-placed new generation of Tamil secessionists have been born overseas and have come of age, and though the war is decisively won, the protracted struggle with Tamil Tiger separatism on a world scale is hardly over. A long Cold War has just begun.

(These are the strictly personal views of the writer)

• An alternative grid map of political opinion serving the best interests of Sri Lanka



• Between Eelam and War: Wherersquo;s the solution?



• Tamil politics tomorrow: Options, challenges and pitfalls



• Looking at the grid of SL political opinion as a continuum



• For a Sri Lankan Nationalism

Throughout the last stages of the civil war, the government of Sri Lanka claimed to be engaged in a hostage rescue mission on behalf of civilians in the Vanni who were being held against their will be the LTTE. How far are its words borne out by its actions?

It is certainly true that the LTTE was keeping hundreds of thousands of civilians hostage and using them as forced labour, a source of child and adult conscripts, and a human shield from behind which they could engage in offensive operations against Sri Lanka’s armed forces. It has also been confirmed that in general the soldiers showed compassion to the escaping civilians, and some even risked their own lives to enable civilians to escape to safety. Although it was clear that for the political and military leadership, the aim of finishing off the LTTE involved sacrificing the lives and limbs of civilians, there did not seem to be any deliberate targeting of civilians during the war. Even the claim by some government spokespersons that shelling was necessary in order to free the hostages has some plausibility, given that the LTTE used the cessation of hostilities over the Sinhala and Tamil New Year to tighten its hold over the trapped civilians, not to release them.

However post-war, the picture gets more murky. Around 280,000 of the civilians who have suffered so much already have been kept prisoners behind barbed wire in camps where conditions are in many cases abysmal. It is clear that the government is unable to provide for them adequately, yet those with relations outside who would willingly look after them are being denied the right to join their families. If others want to check up on their homes in the Vanni or start rebuilding them, no one on earth has the right to stop them. This denial of the fundamental right to freedom of movement is especially cruel for families which have been split up, and are thereby denied the possibility of reuniting, or even finding out what has happened to their loved ones. It is lethal for those who are physically vulnerable; senior citizens were supposed to be released after a court found that many had died of starvation and more were dying daily, but the sick and injured, pregnant women, and mothers with babies are also vulnerable. With the monsoon, it is likely that gastrointestinal diseases will kill thousands. Why, then, are these unfortunate people being penalised like this?

Collective Punishment

Two reasons are cited by the government. The first is that it will take at least six months to make the areas from which they come habitable again, and therefore they have to be kept in the camps until then. This is a patently spurious excuse for denying them freedom of movement. Even if it takes six months to make the war-ravaged areas of the Vanni habitable, why can’t people who have homes or relatives elsewhere leave the camps? Wouldn’t this in fact reduce the burden on the government, and enable it to look after those who remain more adequately? Why can’t camp inhabitants go out to look for missing relatives, or receive visits from friends and relations, or visit their homes if they want to? This cannot possibly be the real reason why civilians are being imprisoned in internment camps.

The other reason given for holding them is that they need to be screened to weed out LTTE cadres who escaped with them. It is true that after hostages have been released, they are often screened to find out if any of the hostage-takers are among them. But normally, this takes just a few hours, and the hostages are released immediately after being screened. Even if the large number of hostages in this case means that the screening process would take longer, there is no conceivable reason why it should take much more than a month. By now, all the civilians, or at least most of them, ought to be free. From Day 1, a steady stream of civilians should have been given the right to freedom of movement, as they were screened and cleared.

Moreover, the reason why such screening is carried out is to prevent terrorists from escaping, rejoining their group, and carrying out future attacks. But in this case, the LTTE’s military capability has been destroyed, its top leadership wiped out; for a group that was identified completely with its supreme leader Prabakaran, and was defined by its military prowess, this means that it is finished. Furthermore, hatred engendered in these IDPs by the LTTE leadership’s utterly brutal treatment of them, especially at the end of the war, is the best guarantee we have that there is no chance it can be revived, regardless of what the pro-LTTE diaspora may think. In fact, as Anandasangaree has pointed out, their escape to government-held territory in defiance of LTTE orders was itself an act of resistance. If any militant group arises in the future, it will be a completely new one. So the benefits of apprehending a few hundred ex-LTTE cadres are far outweighed by the costs of detaining hundreds of thousands of innocent people without charge for an indefinite period and creating, possibly, thousands of future militants.

The fundamental rights petition filed on behalf of five IDPs held in camps at Kodikamam and Vavuniya made it crystal clear that they are being held against their will, and that this constitutes appalling cruelty to individuals still suffering physically and mentally from the trauma they had undergone. The IDPs came out cursing the Tigers and positively inclined towards the government forces which had helped them to escape, but with every day that they remain in detention, their hostility to the government will grow; they will feel that they have jumped out of one frying pan into another. If the new Chief Justice selected by the President delays or refuses to order their release, they will have every justification for feeling that the Sri Lankan state is holding them hostage.

Such collective punishment belies the government’s claim that it was trying to free the hostages, and makes it look as if it simply wanted to take them hostage itself. It contradicts Mahinda Rakapaksa’s statement that there are no longer any minorities in Sri Lanka by making it clear that there are minorities who do not share the right to freedom of movement and equal protection of the law enjoyed by the majority. As former Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva pointed out, this lays the groundwork for a new war, since comparable discrimination against and persecution of Tamil civilians played a major role in starting the war which has just ended. It thus insults the soldiers who risked and in many cases lost their lives to free the civilians from the LTTE, and makes a mockery of celebrations of the end of the war.

Indeed, it looks as if this is already the start of a new war: a war against Tamils. The longer Tamil civilians are detained in prison camps, the more disappearances and extrajudicial killings are likely to occur. Given that they are in the custody of an army commanded by Sarath Fonseka, who thinks that Sri Lanka belongs to the Sinhalese just as Hitler thought that Germany belonged to the Aryans, we can only fear the worst.

Moving Towards Dictatorship

There are strong indications that some elements in the government and armed forces do not want an end to the war but want to keep it going, or even expand it. The people of Sri Lanka were asked to sacrifice a great deal in the interests of defeating the LTTE, and we would expect that these sacrifices would now come to an end. We would expect at least two-thirds of the soldiers to be demobilised, so that the rest of the country does not have to pay for them any more; they could easily be employed at the same wages to do constructive work rebuilding the war-ravaged areas and upgrading infrastructure elsewhere, thus helping to attract investment into the country. We would expect the government to avoid practices which led to the war, such as discrimination against and persecution of minorities, and to repeal the PTA and Emergency Regulations which were used for the extrajudicial killing of thousands of Tamils as well as Sinhalese.

Instead, the very opposite is being done. Apart from the detention of hundreds of thousands of Tamil civilians and the failure to repeal the PTA and Emergency Regulations, we are told that the army, already doubled to 200,000 during the latter stages of the war, is going to be expanded by another 100,000! What earthly purpose could this serve? One purpose, clearly, is that it will enhance the power of military commanders and the Defence establishment, which would otherwise be reduced in peacetime. Presumably the military occupation of the North and East will be continued by the existing soldiers, treating citizens as aliens. But what will all the new soldiers do? Could they, conceivably, be deployed to the South, to crush any protests that might arise when people realise that far from being able to loosen their belts, they have to tighten them even more?

It would not be the first time this has happened. Let us not forget that the Sinhala nationalist regimes of Jayawardene and Premadasa, with some help from the Sinhala nationalist JVP, managed to kill more Sinhalese in the space of three years than the LTTE could kill in thirty. Are some elements in the government and armed forces planning a repeat of the tyre-pyres and mutilated bodies piled up by the roadside, clogging the rivers and washed up on the beaches? There are disturbing indications that the Rajapaksa regime is moving in that direction. The murder of Lasantha Wickrematunga, the fact that his killers were never caught, and the justification of it in a BBC interview by the Defence Secretary, was an indication that the death squads which had been operating in the North and East have moved South. Other attacks on journalists, the fact that those who reported the assault on Poddala Jayantha were themselves detained, images of Mahinda Rajapaksa as a godlike king, and the proposal to cancel the presidential elections, all suggest a regime in which democracy is rapidly being undermined.

If there are elements in the government and armed forces working to destroy the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, it is incumbent on all of us who love our country to resist. The lack of a viable opposition, given the UNP’s equally rotten record, is a drawback; but the courage of Anandasangaree and others in his Democratic Tamil National Alliance in resisting the President’s pressure to get the DTNA to join the UPFA gives us hope that one could be created. Tamil, Muslim and Left politicians who support a government that is detaining hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan citizens without charge are betraying their constituencies; they should withdraw their support to the government so that they are in a position to put pressure on it, and stand in solidarity with the DTNA. What is required today is a strong grassroots democracy movement throughout the country, out of which a new political leadership could emerge. The first priority of such a movement should be to defend the democratic rights of displaced civilians.

• It is a hostage crisis, stupid!



• Security Forces North amp; East Operations



• Open Letter to His Excellency the President of Sri Lanka and the leadership of the LTTE



• Aiyo!



• A difference of 3 days: V. Anandasangaree on the killing of Tamil civilians in the Vanni

Let me start with a brief description of the war that culminated in the destruction of the Tamil Tiger leadership along with its Tamil mini-state in Sri Lanka’s Tamil habitat.

Successive administrations in Sri Lanka succeeded in branding its nearly thirty-year war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as war on terrorism. This formula worked well in getting the foreign countries - to which hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled for protection - to ban the Tiger Movement and choke the flow of funds to the Tigers. Following the ‘9-11’ US tragedy, Sri Lanka nicely touted its war as part of Junior Bush’s ‘global war on terror’.

The Sinhala nationalist movement in Sri Lanka, on the contrary, correctly identified the Tiger leadership as the zenith of the Tamil minority’s struggle to establish its own Tamil state in the north and east.

The Sinhala/Buddhists saw the island as rightfully theirs. For them, the Tamil struggle is a continuation of the historic Sinhala/Tamil wars in a new form. The army commander, General Sarath Fonseka, in a recent interview articulated the Sinhala perception as follows: “I strongly believe that this country belongs to the Sinhalese; but, there are minority communities and we treat them like our people…we being the majority of the country, 74%, we’ll never give in and we have the right to protect this country…They can live in this country with us. But they must not try to, under the pretext of being a minority, demand undue things.” [My emphasis]

In a similar tone, the Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa said: “In any democratic country the majority should rule the country. This country will be ruled by the Sinhalese community which is the majority representing 74% of the population.” In the same vein, Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa, seeing the onrushing victory, said: “Soon the lion flag [VR: Effectively, the emblem of the Sinhala Buddhists] will fly from every house-top from Point Pedro to Dondra Head, from Colombo to Trincomalee.”

All three quotations above - from interviews and public speeches made by the top most personalities of the Sri Lankan state just prior to the final military victory – reflect the general mindset of Sri Lanka’s majority community that has primarily been fuelling the war all along, not terrorism. Terrorism was just a symptom both sides resorted to during the conflict.

Victory celebrations began to spread like wildfire in the Sinhala south shamelessly displaying the hubris of annihilating the Tamil separatists, rather than terrorism. Chief monks within the Buddhist clergy and the Sinhala press were openly referring to Mahinda Rajapaksa as the Sinhala king who should rule the country for good. Some are even suggesting turning the country formally into a Sinhala-Buddhist kingdom. Any sociologist who would study the post-war celebrations in the ‘Sinhala south’ would clearly see an entrenched supremacist mindset in action, nothing less.

All pre-war talks of ‘devolving power to the Tamils’ had vanished. The president was calling upon the people to discard the concept of ‘ethnic minority’ altogether and see everyone as a citizen of Sri Lanka.

However attractive this slogan may seem on the surface let me explain why this approach fails to appreciate Sri Lanka’s social realities; and how in practice this would amount to the defence of Sinhala/Buddhist domination in Sri Lankan politics.

The fundamental fallacy in the Sinhala-Buddhist perception results from the failure to distinguish between ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘minority nations’. The fact is: Tamils in Sri Lanka are a minority nation trapped within the post-colonial straitjacket of a unitary state. [Later I shall show there can be forms of unitary structures that are capable of accommodating trouble-free coexistence of more than one nation.]

Tamils are in many ways similar to Scots in Scotland or Welsh in Wales. Tamils don’t see themselves as an ethnic minority living in the Sinhala/Buddhist country, just as Scots don’t see themselves as a minority living in the English country. Both Scots and Welsh perceive Britain as a voluntary arrangement by three nations for mutual benefit. The English-dominated state, for instance, conceivably cannot ban the separatist Scottish National Party driving them underground, send an English army to crush Scottish separatism and hoist the English flag all over Scotland. Why not? Because, the political value systems in the west have evolved too far for that; the atmosphere isn’t conducive to such behaviour.

The Tamils have a very long history along with the Sinhalese, though the latter has been the dominant political and cultural force through out Sri Lankan history. When the western colonialists arrived in Sri Lanka [formerly, Ceylon] over four centuries ago there existed one Tamil kingdom and two Sinhalese kingdoms in the island which the colonialists systematically dismantled. The British finally defeated the last Sinhala kingdom in Kandy and imposed a unitary state structure uniting the island for administrative purposes. [Ironically, the last king of the Sinhala kingdom, Sri Vikrama Rajasinghe, who confronted the British forces, was a Tamil; and that indicates the present extreme form of the supremacist mindset is essentially a post-independence phenomenon.]

During the Colonial rule both Sinhala and Tamil cultures were brutally suppressed, and parallel revivalist movements erupted independently of each other in the 19^th century – in the Sinhala south to protect Buddhism and Sinhala culture while in the Tamil north to defend Hinduism and Tamil culture. These movements eventually snowballed into powerful anti-imperialist campaigns for freedom.

Unfortunately, these social realities and the robust aspirations of two nations were not reflected in the British-imposed state-structures at Sri Lanka’s independence. On the contrary, the British introduced a rigid unitary system paving the way for Sinhala domination that immensely contributed to future conflicts. There were no mechanisms for the Sinhalese politicians to fulfil the Sinhala-Buddhists’ justifiable economic, political and cultural aspirations without antagonizing the Tamils. [The so-called 29^th Clause of the first post-independence constitution to protect the ‘minorities’ - which was contemptuously discarded by the Sinhala majority eventually – was pathetically inadequate to protect the Tamils from discrimination.]

The post-colonial political system, in effect, motivated the Sinhala politicians to whip up anti-Tamil sentiments as the easy way to secure the majority’s vote base. This factor along with the dragging feudal consciousness in Sri Lanka proved to be a lethal combination.

The latter point, I think, deserves a brief explanation: In countries like Sri Lanka, capitalism did not organically evolve from feudalism. Unlike in Europe - where capitalism grew within the womb of feudal society systematically challenging all aspects of feudal consciousness and institutions - Sri Lankan capitalism was arbitrarily imposed by colonialists on a feudal society. Therefore, the feudal consciousness continued to persist in various forms. The Sinhala politiciansrsquo; pathological failure to politically solve the Tamil Question, I believe, is partly a result of that.

True, for a developing nation - battered by imperialism for centuries - the glorious memories of a bygone past may be useful to sustain a nation’s badly needed self-confidence. But, they could easily turn into a toxic force, as happened in Sri Lanka, when mixed with political structures that encourage racism.

In fact, the language and the symbolism used during the post-war victory celebrations could, I believe, provide fertile fields for anthropologists to study a very important social phenomenon. Virtually everyone in the Sinhala/Buddhist ‘camp’ - including the president, military leaders and government ministers - perceived the Tamil Tigers’ demise as the modern version of the historic defeat of the Tamil king Elara at the hand of the Sinhala/Buddhist king Dutugemunu.

The real content of the Tamil struggle, the war and the eventual Tiger defeat, however, is vastly different. As I have already explained, it is very much to do with Sri Lanka’s post-colonial state-structures’ inflexibility to even-handedly deal with the political, economic and cultural aspirations of two nations emerging from colonial oppression.

Clearly, the unitary state has been instrumental in pushing the two communities towards head on clash, rather than helping them to see the benefits of coexistence. The successive governments’ one-sided efforts to promote Sinhala language and Buddhism, for instance, turned out as blatant anti-Tamil discrimination. The Sinhala-dominated state’s biased approach against the Tamil regions in infrastructure development is visibly clear. Just like the colonialists who were only interested in developing their central economic hub, Colombo, and related areas, the post-independence governments also neglected the crucially important north and east in the distribution of national wealth. Consequently, the Tamil regions remained undeveloped forcing the Tamil youth to migrate to the Sinhala south for jobs, businesses and prosperity. Thus, the poverty-ridden Sinhala majority increasingly began to perceive the Tamils as a threat to their jobs and businesses. Accordingly, communal riots and anti-Tamil pogroms became a striking feature of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history.

Tamils’ non-violent campaigns for a federal state were brutally crushed by the successive Sinhala governments – a trend culminated in the banning of Tamil representatives from the parliament using draconian laws. The Tamil armed-struggle for a separate state was a direct result of the Sinhala state’s violent efforts to put down Tamils’ Gandhian campaigns. Tamil Tigers’ determined venture to build a Tamil mini-state and militarily protect it was a logical development in response to the Sinhala state’s violent approach.

Now that the Tamil Tigers’ mini-state strategy has been defeated, the Tamils internationally have responded with their new strategy to create a “transnational government” based on the numerically and financially strong Tamil Diaspora that may eventually raise a formidable ‘global’ challenge to the Sinhala state. Whatever the viability of the Tamil leaders’ high sounding objectives abroad, at least a solid movement could emerge to consolidate the Diaspora’s unprecedented energy erupted in response to the war. Thus, it may prove to be a powerful counterpart to the political developments in Sri Lanka itself.

Does the Sri Lankan government have the vision to handle the new developments by politically solving the Tamil question? Highly unlikely, I should say.

After the Tamil Tigers’ military defeat, Sri Lanka’s president Mahinda Rajapaksa made it amply clear that he is not going to devolve power to the Tamils as a separate unit living in the north and east of the island. As mentioned earlier, for him there are ‘no ethnic minorities’ in Sri Lanka to devolve power along ethnic lines. Tamils grievances could be addressed within the existing unitary structures, he said.

However, the Rajapaksa-friendly Tamil politicians - who are getting discredited among the Tamils by the day - and the international community keep pressurizing the government to give in on this issue. [Reportedly, at the recent UN vote on a ‘possible genocide probe’, the government has covertly hinted its readiness to implement an improved version of the 13^th amendment – the brainchild of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 - as a devolutionary package to the north-east Tamils. However, such misleading signals appear to be part of Machiavellian tactics to hoodwink the UN. The harsh reality is that the president is struggling hard to avert the devolution issue altogether paying lip-service to a possible ‘home-grown’ solution in the ‘near future’]

President Rajapaksa’s post-victory speeches indicate a pluralist vision of the Sri Lankan society in which members of diverse social groups develop their traditional cultures or special interests within a common civilization. Thus, he seems determined to avoid any solution along ethnic lines.

This approach seems attractive to many Sinhala intellectuals too, because of its obvious modernist connotations, as opposed to outdated nationalist prejudices. But, in a country like Sri Lanka with a ‘minority nation’ of highly evolved nationalist aspirations, the pluralist vision has many pitfalls as its post-independence experience has graphically illustrated to its detriment.

Even in an economically advanced country like Britain pluralism has not worked. How imprudent it is to believe pluralism to be the answer in a poor country like Sri Lanka after decades of brutal war to crush a minority nation.

Perhaps, it is time to learn a lesson or two from the architect of Sri Lanka’s unitary setup, Britain. How did Britain deal with Scottish and Welsh separatism? The London parliament offered a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly, both explicitly based on Scottish and Welsh right to self-determination. [The British proposals were put to the Scottish and Welsh people separately in the form of referendums for their approval]

Of course, Sri Lanka cannot copy the British answer to separatism from word to word. Sri Lankan situation is quite different. In Britain, for instance, the central administration is far more advanced than its counterpart in Colombo; therefore, whether the British Prime Minister is English, Scottish or Welsh is irrelevant where as in Sri Lanka, at present, a Tamil or a Muslim President is an unthinkable quantity. Also, still the English majority has not strongly felt the need to rush for a regional English Parliament, though the existing lopsidedness of the British state structures is widely being acknowledged.

Thus, the British solution cannot fit the Sri Lankan situation like a glove. What is important is to learn at least the general principles of a democratic approach to somewhat similar problems.

Let’s have a brief look at some relevant demographic and geographical features of the present day Sri Lankan society: Although the Tamils identify much of the northern and eastern provinces as their traditional homeland there are hundreds of thousands of Tamils, including the Tamil plantation workers in the upcountry, live among the Sinhala majority. [Note that the Muslims also use Tamil as their first language.] Also, a substantial section of Sinhalese and Muslims have been living in the Tamil regions for generations. Therefore, considering the deep rooted prejudices prevalent on both sides, it would be in the interest of all concerned to have radical changes in the central administration. In this sense, power devolution to the Tamil regions would be of lesser significance relative to the changes at the centre.

Moreover, geographically Sri Lanka should be seen as a single unit. The water distribution, for instance, is uniquely intertwined. The rivers that fertilize Tamil lands of the north and east originate from the hills located in the Sinhala midlands. Even the climatic zones of the island are distributed as parts of a single whole.

Culturally too there have been close interactions between the two peoples that have mutually enriched each other through out history. Virtually in all Buddhist temples there are shrines for Hindu gods. Most Buddhists are devotees of Hindu gods too.

Consequently, all communities’ long term interests would be better served by designing an island-wide political transformation whatever the shortcut measures needed to solve the immediate problems. Two hostile political entities side by side would be counterproductive for both.

Thus, a realistically creative solution, in my view, should have a mechanism for Sinhala and Tamil people to fulfil their cultural aspirations in their own regions through two regional parliaments while the highest level institutions of the economy, judiciary, defence, foreign affairs etc., are secured in an equality-based centre. In more simple terms, there should be a democratically-transformed Supreme Parliament to deal with issues related to the country as a whole, while two regional parliaments look after the Sinhala/Tamil cultural and other interests in their own regions. [For, clarity’s sake I shall avoid dealing with the special interests of Muslims and other tiny communities here.]

How to transform a Sinhala-dominated supremacist centre into a democratic and equality-based Supreme Parliament is the trillion dollar question. This is the key issue to be negotiated with the Tamil political leaders. The Europeon Union, for example, has been going through valuable experiences on similar issues, and if so many nation-states can continue to build mutual confidence on such a vast scale then a tiny island with a few races should be able to do that far more easily. But, without discarding the chauvinist mindset the whole thing is a non-starter.

To start with, the government will have to abandon the “no minorities” delusion. The truth is: with entrenched nationalist aspirations and prejudices of a post-colonial society the ‘pluralist solution’ will only amount to a reinforcement of the Sinhala Buddhist domination that continues to provoke the Tamil struggle to re-emerge in a new form.

Devolution of power to a separate Tamil Unit without touching the centre could also, in my view, further deepen the ethnic divisions along dangerous lines, particularly in the context of the growing regional rivalries between China and India. There is a serious possibility of the Sinhala-dominated centre turning into a Chinese puppet-state while a northern Tamil administration gets swamped by India’s regional interests. If this were to happen, the chances of Sri Lanka becoming a playground for regional power-politics are very real indeed.

But, is it realistic to expect the Sinhala political elite to change its Mahavamsa mindset and go for a radical transformation of the state-structure along the lines I have suggested earlier? I don’t think so. The government seems determined to stick to its militarist agenda of violently demolishing the Tamils’ cry for freedom. Therefore, all fascistic trends the government has been showing in the south so far are likely to grow worse in the coming period.

Alternatively, will the government – under international pressure – go for an asymmetric devolution of power to Tamils in the north and east as being demanded by the mainstream Tamil politicians in parliament? Such a move, in my view, is highly unlikely, because that could anger the southern Sinhala-Buddhist movement that perceives it as a Tamil tactic to split the country. The People’s Liberation Movement (JVP) with a strong base on the Sinhala side has been warning against any such move. This would amount to a betrayal of thousands of Sinhala soldiers who sacrificed their lives in defence of the country’s integrity, the JVP claims.

There are major problems with the 13^th Amendment which the anti-Tiger Tamil politicians might like to resolve. The North-East provincial council that existed until 2006 was just one of several councils in the country that exist at the mercy of the Sinhala-dominated centre. The centre can abolish them at will. Also, there are controversial areas such as policing - which the centre wants to keep in its hands ignoring the anti-Tiger Tamil politicians’ request.

Clearly, the 13^th Amendment is worthless unless asymmetrical power devolution to the Tamil Unit with extra laws to protect it from arbitrary central interventions is secured. Already, the centre has demonstrated its domination over the provincial councils by abolishing the north-west council on one occasion. Also, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka has recently nullified a cornerstone of the 13^th Amendment, i.e. the merger of the two Tamil-majority provinces, as unconstitutional. Thus, a fundamental aspiration of the Tamils, i.e. to unite northern and eastern provinces, is already in jeopardy.

Moreover, the Sinhala side firmly believes that an asymmetrical devolution of power to Tamils of north amp; east would only be a steppingstone for a Tamil state. This was a major factor in the deepening distrust between the two sides all along. And, now that the Tamil Tigers’ mini-state project has been militarily wiped out, it might be futile to expect the Colombo administration to create a north-east council free from centre’s control. President Rajapaksa’s constant lip-service to a ‘home-grown’ solution may well be a cover to dodge the mounting international pressure to devolve power to Tamils.

However, there are at least three reasons why the government would loose its nerve unless an acceptable political solution for the Tamils is presented soon.

Firstly, the government is increasingly becoming conscious that the military victory does not mark the end of the Tamil struggle. The government has succeeded in demolishing the Tigers’ ‘mini-state project’ only to pave the way for a changed form of struggle. Consequently, the security nightmare that plagued the country for so long is nowhere near ending. And the government will go on ‘disappearing’ every Tamil showing any sign of freedom-sentiments. This will only drive the politically conscious Tamils underground, making the situation increasingly difficult to tackle.

Secondly, Sri Lanka’s dithering economy - already overwhelmed by mounting debts - is showing signs of grave problems, and the potential for social unrest in the south is very real indeed. This could turn the post-war exuberance into its opposite in no time.

Thirdly, the presently raging debate within the Sinhala intelligentsia and the left movement as to the hollowness behind the military victory seems to be gathering momentum. It may well become the catalyst for a new awareness away from the mainstream supremacist mindset. And, there are politically conscious Tamil campaigners who see the significance of relating to the Sinhala progressives. A potentially formidable unity between the rising Tamil movement and the Sinhala progressive forces would be the last thing the Rajapaksa administration would like to see happening.

There’re good reasons for the growing frustration in the south. Many thought the Tigers’ military defeat would bring peace in a perceptible way. But, in the midst of victory celebrations the military commander Sarath Fonseka in a TV interview said he was going to expand the army by 50%, surprising everyone who couldn’t understand why peace needs more soldiers than the war. Also, extending the draconian anti-terrorist law in the parliament was one of government’s immediate steps in the post-war Sri Lanka. In brief, the military victory does not seem to have brought security to the country in a tangible way.

The developments within the Tamil community both inside and outside Sri Lanka are not conducive for peace at all. Inside Sri Lanka the Tamil anger seems to be reaching boiling point by the day. Perhaps, it’s worth quoting the Vavuniya Tamil legislator Suresh premachandra’s account given on June 14 in some length.

“250,000 Tamil civilians are held in camps. Over 1000 were killed. A large number was injured. Children have no parents. Mothers have lost children. Wives have lost husbands. Pregnant mothers and others lack healthcare. No houses; no water. Bathing is limited once in four days. No food; no toilets. One cannot go out since a Sinhala Army has surrounded them. No connection with the outside world. How can the people be happy?” he said. “In Jaffna, we cannot get out of the houses. Checkpoints are everywhere. 600,000 Tamils are ruled by 40,000 Sinhala Army. One cannot come to Colombo at least for an emergency. An air ticket is Rs. 20,000. A-9 road is closed. Roads in Jaffna are closed at any moment the Army patrols on them. Tamils are suppressed day by day.” And in a warning tone he added, “Both sides have the patriotism.”

In a mood of utter frustration he said: “Youths are arrested from camps. Parents cannot go to complain to police. Human Rights organizations are denied access. We cannot do anything. We are also not allowed. Six MPs including MP Srikanthan wrote a letter seeking permission to visit camps. But no reply. MP Kishore sought the President’s permission over the phone. Then the President asked him to join the government. I cannot go at least to my birth place. I cannot look into the welfare of people that voted me. This government is engaged in an opportunist politics violating the human rights and democracy.”

The Tamil MP was describing the situation in the Tamil north. The government says there’re thousands of Tigers at large in the south. Also, there are hundreds of thousands of Tamils in the south who live in fear, as second class citizens, and in constant worry about their relatives suffering in the detention camps. Thus, the question is: how long this state of affairs is going to last without blowing up?

There is no sign of pacification within the Tamil Diaspora either. Quite apart from the protests and lobbies, the think-tanks are busy debating the ways of rebuilding the Tamil campaign on a global scale. As already mentioned, the some Tamil leaders abroad have already begun forming the ‘transnational government’ and strengthening their global campaign. They may try and manoeuvre India’s growing nervousness over China’s systematic encroachment into her outskirts using Sri Lankan state’s predicament. On the other hand, even China – with its ‘global-superpower’ ambitions - may want to build its moral-image globally, and put pressure on the Colombo administration to get its act together.

Also, there are others who encourage the Tamils in the country to join progressive Left parties en masse and compel the Tamil political parties to come to a united front with the Left, anticipating a socio-political turmoil worse than the recent Iranian crisis. The deteriorating economic conditions in Sri Lanka, they think, would be the additional factor.

This last point needs some elaboration:

Sri Lanka is a tiny part of the global economy that is almost entirely dependent on exports and imports for its survival. There’s no viable internal market for capitalists to thrive on. Its foreign exchange earnings have been primarily centred on tourism, tea, garment/textile exports and the ‘export’ of labour mainly to the middle-east for the inflow of foreign exchange remittances – all of which have been drastically affected by the global recession. During the past few decades, easily available global credit facilitated Sri Lanka’s economic and political survival. The global credit crunch has badly affected the major pillars of the Sri Lankan economy causing unexpected problems for the economic pundits.

The war cost has been totally beyond the capacity of a poor country like Sri Lanka. The coffers are empty and the government is totally dependent on foreign loans and aid. The war forced the government to borrow untold quantities of domestic credit too that kept the central bank’s printing machines very busy indeed. Colossal amounts of paper money now circulating within the economy can be seen forcing the living costs to rise uncontrollably while the foreign exchange reserves have slumped to dangerous levels. The dragging global economic doom is not helping the situation at all.

Thus, the continuing triumphalist conceit could soon run out of steam. Economic catastrophe, social unrest and political dissent may well be on the cards. In such a scenario, I think, the spectre of possible link up of Sinhala/Tamil aspirations on a common platform, could become more real than many appreciate at present.

In conclusion, let me briefly mention the essence of the analysis: The post-colonial state-structure - initially floated by British imperialism - was the albatross that reinvigorated a dormant mindset. The political process since has now reached its logical end: a virtual Sinhala-Buddhist dictatorship. However, it has also created the conditions and the potential for a social revolution that could eventually bring about the real democratic transformation Sri Lanka is crying for.

• Is this the end of the Tamil struggle?



• For a Sri Lankan Nationalism



• A question to the government and the LTTE



• LOOKING INTO THE ABYSS



• An alternative grid map of political opinion serving the best interests of Sri Lanka

Apart from failing to use these historical instances of importance the Tamil leadership, beginning with the Tamil Congress, the Federal Party and most importantly the TULF, were successful in their inability in winning over Sinhalese confidence which further deepened the chasm of misfortune of the Tamil populous they were representatives of. The TULF’s role in exacerbating the situation when it ‘hinted at war and practised peace, leaving others to practice war’[1] thereby inducing a shift in the pawns of a deadly game that contended with nationalistic ideology, was causative in sealing the fate of the Tamil youth militancy.

As growing displeasure for the affectless elitist leadership grew amongst the masses, the militant groups began to reflect the class and caste divisions rampant in the North. The anger and hatred they felt towards this class/ caste inclination was gradually transferred onto the civilian population. A government steeped in the inability to respect the rights of the minority Tamils by interfering with the rule of law, the ambivalence of the Tamil leadership, a divided Left and increase in police brutality to counter the sporadic outbursts of the militant groups which had transformed into militant organisations under India’s auspices, all contributed towards the increase in support, the Tamil masses displayed for these militant groups and, their actions. Then July 1983 came, unleashing an unbelievable spate of terror in the lives of the Tamils and the horrifying events that subsequently unfolded stood as testament to the most horrific desertion of a State from a part of its citizenry, unforgiveable and unforgettable. The Tamils lost whatever confidence they had in their leaders and were forced to believe in the militants. A sad historic consequence and the most fateful of choices which laid the foundation for the decades-long strife that still continues to burn, under the ashes of a military finale.

The enemy within: Tamils, Muslims and Oppression

The implications of caste and the characteristic of Tamil nationalism in transcending its divisions have played a pivotal role in shaping the conflict in Sri Lanka. A look into these elements helps us understand the subtle nuances that underpin the conflict, often forgotten due to its overwhelming proportions of human tragedy. As Raghavan, Co-founder of the LTTE notes in a recent interview, ‘Tamil identity is only the outer layer and not the substance of the Tamil community’. The substance of the Tamil community is rife with divisions of caste and regionalism. ‘Class subsumed under caste’, opened up a festering wound that the Tamil militancy strived to heal during the initial stages of its confinement, by attempting to transcend its inherent divisions. Nevertheless, lessons from the past have unravelled that the militancy led by the LTTE, began to see ‘an enemy within’ in the likes of Tamil leadership and academics belonging to the higher strata of class and caste, which it began to systematically annihilate in the pretext of culling the traitors of the revered Tamil cause, a fatal mindset that deprived the Tamil community of moderates such as Neelan Tiruchelvam, and more recently Lakshman Kadirgamar and Kethesh Loganathan. This brings into focus the argument that the ultimate purpose of the Tamil cause was really the achievement of a classless and casteless Tamil Eelam, perhaps in the form of a Nazi Reich given Prabhakaran’s personal hero worship of Hitler.

Another unavoidable fact in relation to this argument is the immense suffering of the Muslims in the hands of the LTTE that began with their expulsion in 1990 from the North and other incidents of ethnic cleansing. To understand its link with this historical tragedy as well as many other repressive actions by the LTTE against the Muslim community, one must take a look at the socio-economic underpinnings that both connected and divided these communities from each other. The Tamils and Muslims share a linguistic commonality while each had its own distinct caste system; the Muslims are noted for their entrepreneurial skills while the Tamils particularly the Jaffna Tamils, ‘due to intensive missionary education dominated intellectual professions and public offices’[2]. So it becomes clear that the militancy felt equally threatened by the Muslim community and began to consider the Muslims as traitors. Farzana Haniffa in her essay, ‘Muslims in Sri Lanka’s Conflict’[3] notes that the LTTE’s and Tamil nationalists’ justification of the 1990 Expulsion was based on supposed security issues and the belief that the Muslims were traitors of the Tamil speaking nation.

The other issue that created an unfortunate consequence for the militancy as well as for a potentially collective agitation towards a political solution against State chauvinism, was the emergence of regionalism, that despite the growth and dominance of the LTTE, was later to strike a decisive blow, causative in bringing about the downfall of this much feared militant group, due to the defection of Karuna Amman, LTTE Commander of the Eastern province. Nevertheless, the stirring up of regionalism tensions came about much early in the history of the Tamil militancy with the first strains of it felt during the LTTE – TELO clash in Jaffna and similar manifestations in Batticaloa, the subsequent take-over of the EPRLF in 1986, and felt much stronger during negotiations of the ‘December 19 Proposals’, which envisaged separate provincial councils for the North and East. The Eastern Tamils were more open to the proposals while the Jaffna Tamils clamoured to negotiate for the best settlement thereby evoking a sense of betrayal amidst the Eastern Tamils by their Jaffna based leadership.

What next?: the role of India and the Tamil Diaspora

During the final phase of the military offensive, while lives were lost and maimed, the regional power politics of India and the international politics of the neo Tiger fascists in the Diaspora pulled the war away from the Vanni orbit. Sadly the machinations of these pressure groups both regionally and internationally mostly failed to push for an unbiased solution that would have saved the lives of many civilians who were trapped in the parched and bombed out bit of land. On May 16, 2009 Mahinda Rajapakse declares victory and on May 18 Velupillai Prabhakaran is confirmed as dead. The victory unleashes a crass celebration in the streets where the Sinhala masses rejoice of the end of decades-long strife while the majority of the Tamils are pensive and fearful of an even uncertain future, but many are indeed relieved to hear the end of the most ruthless Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The victors have also accumulated the limbless and the broken-spirited as spoils of war who sit in the confines of internment camps forever trapped by a contorted and unfair poltical destiny. On the other hand the diaspora support system of what remains of the LTTE, flounder in authoring conspiracy theories in relation to the end of the LTTE as a military force and the death of its larger than life leader.

India’s role in the business of Sri Lanka’s conflict is a very old one; the first step taken through the nurturing of the Tamil militancy, especially the LTTE, into militant organisations post Black July and in creating a preoccupation in the minds of the Tamil masses of an easily achievable Eelam under its auspices. Subsequently, India’s political solution to Sri Lanka’s burning question first came in the form of the Indo-Lanka Accord of 1987 which proposed the merger of North amp; East. While this solution remained attractive for the Tamils it was not inclusive of the Muslims. Nevertheless, the opportunity that this accord did present was not used by the LTTE as with the many other opportunities that subsequently came about, which reiterate the fact that they were only interested in realising their ‘goal’ through military means.

Political Masala: Tamil Nadu amp; the race connection

The Sri Lankan conflict has been a key factor in Tamil Nadu politics since the early 1980’s with a renewed and noticeable increase seen in mid 2008. In what may clearly be a precursor to the Indian General Elections which concluded recently, Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. Karunanidhi of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhakam (DMK) and his supporters which includes a sizeable number from the Tamil Nadu film industry, notably Director Seeman, have been engaged in political theatrics leaning heavily on the race connection, a mass magnet of immense proportions. To add fuel to the flames, Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), led by V. Gopalswamy (Vaiko), Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), led by Dr S. Ramadoss, new entrants Viduthalai Chiruthaikal Katchi of Thirumavalavan, the Tamil Nationalist Party of Nedumaran and Periyar Dravida Kazhagam have continued to vociferously voice pro-LTTE Tamil nationalist sentiments.

J. Jayalalitha of the Opposition party, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIDMK) came into the foray initially by quashing Karunanidhi’s inflammatory rhetoric with statements that seemed common sensible and practical. Nevertheless, election tides changed and Jayalalitha resorted to the populist track that Karunanidhi had used so far to stir up the Central government which maintained its diplomatically nuanced stance on the subject. Such is the state of what S.D. Muni in his essay[4] refers to as Tamil Nadu’s ‘emotive’ politics, constantly regurgitated as election propaganda, and fuelled by Rajapakse’s Government’s failure in the aspects of minority amp; civilian security and its indifference towards steering the growth of a parallel political process. Nevertheless, the Sri Lankan issue did not have a noticeable impact on the outcome of the 2009 Indian Elections. New Delhi continued to play its political moves safely by supporting Rajapakse’s military approach which Rajapakse successfully controlled by strategically shifting the Pakistan and China pawns.

Tamil Diaspora: the emergence of neo-Tiger fascists

Typically Diaspora communities consisting of immigrants, asylum seekers/ refugees and other minority groups who become ‘the other’, marginalised by the ‘new racist nationalism of contemporary Europe’[5] and the rest of the West, find solace in fuelling intra-state wars through long distance nationalism and pursuing the dream of a distinct homeland. As the rapid deterioration of LTTE’s leadership and its popularity amongst the civilians began to wane, the sharp escalation of long distance nationalism came into play and has been one of the driving forces behind the internationalisation of the conflict in Sri Lanka. But as for the thousands of civilians remained trapped in Vanni, the dream of an Utopian Eelam rapidly disappeared while they clung on desperately to maimed limbs and battered souls in a pathetic indifference to their compatriots worldwide who prostrated themselves for the revered ‘cause’; an all out show of self-immolation, satyagraha, Eelamist-patriotism and even a lesser virulent form of child abuse as they exhibited children in their school uniforms holding up placards and slogans that they could hardly comprehend, deliberately staining their immature minds with racism and vengeance.

Nirmala Rajasingam, former member of the LTTE, current activist in exile and one of the most consistent voices of dissent has comprehensively highlighted the key factors that sustain and shape the pro-LTTE support of the Tamil Diaspora in her recent essay, ‘The Tamil Diaspora: solidarities and realities’[6]. She talks of the Tamil Diaspora communities trapped by their attempts at preserving their ‘Tamil cultural and social heritage’, and who live a ghettoised life that the LTTE with its shrewdness has successfully infiltrated and strengthened its grip through a variety of intimidation tactics.

The future role of the neo-Tiger fascists of the Tamil Diaspora will be much more complex and ruthless as they strive to contain the shady dealings, evidence of intimidation and the ethics of their fundraising tactics. The current situation sans the LTTE as we had known for so long has begun to unravel the internal rifts, a portent of the power struggles which would be the characteristic of the future. Selvarasa Pathmanathan will guide these neo-Tiger fascists by dangling the proverbial carrot of transnational governance which they claim is a ‘novel experiment that has no precedance’. In the absence of a committed and alternative Tamil leadership the neo-Tiger fascists would strive to further suffocate the Tamils in a political wasteland in the coming years.

Looking Beyond: Devolution amp; post-conflict Democratisation

As the dividends of Sri Lanka’s conflict unfold, questions involving the process of a political solution and those related to post-conflict democratisation must be high on the agenda and in fact move parallel to the rehabilitation, reconstruction and resettlement process. So far the GoSL’s deliberate foolhardiness in failing to push through a political solution through the APRC process, its reluctance to treat the IDP issue with more humaneness and, its reluctance in opening up to both the local/international media and humanitarian agencies have fed into the minds of the Tamils and the rest of the world, a deep sense of doubt in terms of commitment and accountability. The post-war scenario remains the real test for the GoSL with it having to infuse into the Tamil community the quintessential hope of a speedy political solution while it works around the psychosocial rubric that surrounds the vast numbers of IDP civilians and ex-LTTE cadres. It is also timely that a suitable transitional justice process is formulated, with decisions clarified on amnesty, criminal prosecutions and the establishment of a Truth amp; Reconciliation Commission finalised, to render this transition meaningful. The recent call for investigations into war crimes in Sri Lanka by Ban Ki-Moon echoing Navi Pillay, UN Human Rights Commissioner’s raises some pertinent questions as to how the crimes of the LTTE will be prosecuted vis-a-vis the prosecutions from the GoSL side especially given the fact that the top heads of the LTTE have been annihilated.

As far as the democratic process is concerned the question of Tamil leadership and mainstream representation would have to be grappled with. With the recent experience of the supposed democratisation of the East and the lessons learned from this process, the GoSL’s failing to its citizenry is noteworthy in terms of the Pillayan-Karuna Amman symbiosis resulting in extra-judicial killings and disappearances, unease on the rise given the recent abductions of young school going children and their subsequent deaths; The GoSL’s implicit involvement in freeing Karuna from being tried for war crimes in the United Kingdom as an attempt at erasing any evidence that might expose its complicity with the same. Likewise when considering the other actors in the political mainstream such as members of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) and Douglas Devananda’s, EPDP, the vacua of an alternative political identity is stark. The question remains whether a post-war scenario would prove conducive for a political leadership that is not pseudo democratic but is realistically inclusive in its search for a consensus that includes other ethnic minorities, most importantly the Muslims, who apart from being an important minority group, has had an equal share of the brunt of the civil war and is thereby entitled to legitimate claims within the democratic process.

In order to set the wheels in motions towards a meaningful democratisation process it is important that conflict transformation takes place in its fullest sense. The political will to seriously commit to a solution to the minority question, an engagement with the main stakeholders and the ability to learn from past mistakes are paramount. Another important aspect worth reiteration is the role of the Diaspora in contributing to the process of identifying a political solution, the important role they could play in post-conflict judicial processes especially in terms of universal jurisdiction, as support for alternative thought processes; in strengthening civil society and, in awareness creation, must come into focus. There is much that can be learned from the experiences of Chile, Argentina, Haiti, Liberia and at present Cambodia in terms of the role their respective Diasporas’ have played in post-conflict issues notably, the judicial and truth-seeking processes[7].

[1] Broken Palmyra, Chapter 1, ‘Missed opportunities and the loss of democracy’

[2] Ameer Ali, Muslims and Tamil Eelam: The Muslim Factor in Sri Lankan Ethnic Crisis (Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, October 1997)

[3] Farzana Haniffa, Muslims in Sri Lanka’s Conflict, Society and the State, ISIM Review 19, Spring 2007.

[4] S.D Muni, India’s Tamil Politics and the Sri Lankan Ethnic Conflict, ISAS Brief No: 86, November 6, 2008, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.

[5] Koser amp; Lutz, 1998 (From Diaspora and Conflict: Locality, long distance nationalism and delocalisation of conflict dynamics, Joelle Demmers)

[6] Nirmala Rajasingam, ‘The Tamil Diaspora: solidarities and realities’, Open Democracy, April 7, 2009.

[7] Cambodian Diaspora Communities in Transitional Justice, Briefing Paper, March 2008, ICTJ, New York

• The ‘post-LTTErsquo; misnomer



• The LTTE – A Spent Force?



• The needs of the hour



• India, Sri Lanka and the Minority Question



• The Abrogation of the CFA

Both in life and death, Veluppillai Prabhakaran divides rather than unites the Tamils in particular, Sri Lankans as a whole. Therein lie the enigma of Prabhakaran (Thambi Anna to me), whom I first met almost thirty years ago in August 1979, and the Tamil Tigers.

“Assuming the LTTE finished is fantasy masquerading as fact”, exclaimed a self-styled ‘leftist’ academic (Sri Lankan born American), namely Qadri Ismail, on March 1, 2009. Qadri Ismail is not alone in fantasizing about Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers. Anita Pratap, a veteran Indian journalist, too fantasized about the invincibility and immortality of Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers in an article published on May 03, 2009 claiming that the Tiger is just “crouching”, not dying. Both Qadri Ismail and Anita Pratap are journalists by profession, though the former is a journalist turned academic lately; most journalists are very good at writing sensationalism and romanticism of the ‘other’ or the underdog.

Anita Pratap also tosses some contradictory claims in her writings for The Week dated May 03rd and 31^st. She claims that Prabhakaran has told her that he never launches any attack on a date that add up to number eight (08, 17 or 26) because he believed it to be unlucky. As a matter of fact, LTTE launched its first ever air raid in Colombo on March 26, 2007. Further, she claims that, because Prabhakaran’s son Charles Anthony does not believe in his father’s superstition he had sent a suicide bomber to kill Sri Lanka’s Army Commander on April 26, 2006 in Colombo. Again she was wrong; in fact the attempted assassination of the Army Commander took place on April 25, 2006. I hope by now the righteous ‘leftist’ and the adulatory journalist would have realised who really have been romanticizing about Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers.

“Strangely”, Prabhakaran’s death had left Vasuki Nesiah, a Sri Lankan born Tamil American academic, “numb”. Whilst concurring with her that death cannot be celebrated or glorified, I am immensely relieved that a psychopath and his army have been vanquished. Prabhakaran and the Tigers were cancer in the body politic of the Tamil community. To me, removing the cancerous cells in the body politic of the Tamil community is neither ‘poetic justice’ nor glorification of death, rather a necessity to preserve and protect life within and beyond our Tamil community. Vasuki, when a cobra or viper attempts to bite you, would you allow yourself to be bitten to death?

The enigma of Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers pricks the conscience of not only a few academics and journalists, but one of my siblings too who is a medical scientist. But, ironically, none of the foregoing persons have been uncritical of Prabhakaran and the Tigers in the past and present. Following is my sibling’s indictment of myself just past week.

“I am very sad that at a time of sorrow and hardship for fellow human beings of our race in SL you are writing such unwarranted matters that are published! I think we were brought up by our parents to have solidarity and unity. I wish you shut up and stop writing; it is unwarranted when the wounds are very sore. Everyone/organisation has mistakes and problems, so nit picking doesnrsquo;t help.”

“Please keep your mouth shut, and keep your opinions to yourself… because your judgements are very very poor.” warned a person from the Tamil diaspora in March 2009 and goes on to issue a fatawa against me, “You are an unwanted human in this world.” I hope this righteous person would have realised by now whose judgement was false.

However, I received a rare solace in March 2009 from a reader of one of my recent writings – “I am completely speechless. This would be the first time I have heard an ethnic Tamil known to me take a stand on facts, without justifying or demonising one ‘side’ or the other.” wrote a recent acquaintance.

Prabhakaran is dead! Long live the enigma of Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers!! May the souls of thousands of soldiers of the security forces and Tamil armed groups, dissidents and politicians of all ethnicities, Veluppillai Prabhakaran and his family, thousands of fellow Tigers and Tigresses, and above all countless civilians from all ethnicities (overwhelmingly Tamils) rest in peace!

Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, Ph.D. (Wales), M.Sc. (Bristol), M.Sc. (Salford), B.A. (Hons) (Delhi), is the Principal Researcher of the Point Pedro Institute of Development, Point Pedro, Northern Sri Lanka and Fulbright Visiting Research Scholar at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University 2008-2009. He is the author of From Liberation to Terrorism: The Rise and Demise of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka (forthcoming).

• Get your humanitarian paws off my country



• Like Slaves In Jaffna



• The Death of a Priest



• Remembering Sivaram



• The attack against Namal and the culture of impunity

The Sunday Times has a full page devoted to a rather long-winded story titled Lankarsquo;s dual track foreign relations. My interest here is not to debate Bob Raersquo;s real or perceived partiality to the LTTE, but to briefly look at the manner in which a lengthy excerpt from Raersquo;s wikipedia entry is used to frame a flimsy argument.

The Sunday Times notes that,

hellip;it was public knowledge that Rae had periodically made strong statements backing the Tiger guerrillas. So much so, there was some evidence in the cyberspace. The Wikipedia, the free, multilingual online encyclopaedia operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, among other things, has these few lines to say about Bob Rae:

ldquo;………Rae was a New Democratic Party (NDP) Member of Parliament from 1978 to 1982. Then he moved to provincial politics, becoming leader of the Ontario New Democratic Party from February 7, 1982 to June 22, 1996. He served as the 21st Premier of Ontario from October 1, 1990 to June 26, 1995, and was the first person to have led a provincial NDP government east of Manitoba.

ldquo;While in office, he brought forward a number of initiatives such as the Social Contract that were unpopular with many traditional NDP supporters. Raersquo;s subsequent disagreement with the leftward direction of the NDP led him to resign his membership and join the Liberals. He is known as a supporter of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), and has supported openly for a separate State for the Tamils in Sri Lanka by dividing the island in to two…….rdquo;

The Wikipedia account was naturally based on Raersquo;s involvement with Tiger guerrilla activity in Canada. Raersquo;s protagonists admit Some Liberal MPs in the past attended functions at which the LTTE was prominent, and Liberal governments resisted efforts to designate the Tiger guerrillas a terrorist organization.

Emphasis mine.

Bob Raersquo;s wikipedia entry as it now stands does feature any reference for or against the LTTE (at the time of writing, his entry was last modified on 13 June 2009 at 19:05hrs). The sentence quoted in the Sunday Times, that ldquo;he is known as a supporter of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), and has supported openly for a separate State for the Tamils in Sri Lanka by dividing the island in to twordquo; does not appear at all.

Bob Raersquo;s profile was first entered to Wikipedia on 23 June 2003. Upon further investigation, itrsquo;s clear that this sentence only appeared on Raersquo;s profile on Wikipedia on 11th June and was up there for less than 24 hours. The edit with this controversial sentence was made at 06.31 on 11 June and by 17.12hrs, it had been taken out.

In the seven years of Bob Raersquo;s profile has been on Wikipedia, I find it particularly revealing that The Sunday Times chose to quote an edit freshly made to his profile and up for less than 24 hours.

The sentence suggesting Rae was a support of the LTTE was added by an anonymous contributor at IP address 219.74.82.40 and edited by a user called Slaphappy, who also corrected other aspects of the edits made by 219.74.82.40.

The juryrsquo;s out on the use of Wikipedia as an authoritative source for professional journalism. I use it myself on a daily basis, but given how it can be manipulated and how the quality of entries varies wildly, itrsquo;s a source I use with caution. In an authoritative take on the uses and abuses of Wikipedia in the newsroom, Wikipedia in the Newsroom by American Journalism Review ends on the following note,

But whatever the verdict on Wikipedia, one thing should not change, says the New York Timesrsquo; Johnston: ldquo;No matter who your sources are, when you sign your name, you are responsible for every word, every thought, every concept.rdquo;

This is where the carelessness, at best, of the Sunday Times comes into play. Noting that ldquo;the Wikipedia account was naturally based on Raersquo;s involvement with Tiger guerrilla activity in Canadardquo; the Sunday Times bases its judgement on data that is hugely suspect and lacks integrity. Further, the strange coincidence of the very short-lived edit to Raersquo;s profile in Wikipedia precisely matching the lengthy excerpt in the Sunday Times suggest that there may be more than mere journalistic carelessness or ignorance at play here.

In using Wikipedia as it does, the Sunday Times showcases the danger of unprofessional journalism today, parading contested fact as verified information. Ignoring the nature of the web based source and framing the contentious excerpt from Wikipedia in the manner it does, the Sunday Times comes to a damning conclusion over Rae that is not based on any verifiable information. However, the point is that the average reader without the technical skills to investigate the Wikipedia entry would believe what the paper suggests.

And when on Bob Raersquo;s official website (that finds no mention at all in the story) one finds no evidence of the alleged partiality to the LTTE, one recalls this estimation of the Sunday Times published on Groundviews recently.

• Sundays without English newspapers?



• The pretense of professionalism - the flipside of media freedom in Sri Lanka



• Life in an Open Prison



• Dismissing inconvenient truths - The Divainarsquo;s take on Groundviews



• Daily Propaganda

Jagath Weerasinghe is one of Sri Lanka best known and most influential artists (see bio here). He was commissioned by the Sri Lankan government to design the monument ‘Shrine for the Innocent’ as a remembrance for the innocent victims of the ruthless violence that the southern part of the country experienced in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was completed in 1999.

Jagath and I talked about art and politics, how for example the experience of witnessing the Tamil pogrom in July 1983 and being abducted in the late 70rsquo;s shaped his political consciousness and in turn influenced his creative output. We also talked about Sri Lankan art more generally - about new painters, the potential for art in post-war Sri Lanka and the Colombo Art Biennale, slated to be held later this year.

• TNA MP Mr. R. Sampanthan remembers the events of July 1983



• My abducted brother found in Colombo National Hospital



• Shanthi Sachithanandan on July 1983



• Mano Ganesan on his experience of the anti-Tamil riots in July 1983



• Interview with Kumaravadivel Guruparan, a Sri Lankan Youth Activist

The warning about the risk of triumphalism came days before the 65^th anniversary celebration of D Day, by the leaders of the US, UK and France. In the USA there are annual re-enactments of the battles of the American Revolution – the War of Independence against Britain —and of the Civil War against the Secessionist Confederacy. While the risk of triumphalism does indeed exist and must be cautioned against, I think there is yet another risk, an opposite one, which we must avoid. The USSR which triumphed over the bulk of the Nazi fascist army, collapsed without a shot being fired, and that collapse was preceded by an ideological surrender in which everything positive in its history was turned upside down and held up for derision. In the recovery of its self-respect under President Putin, one of the first steps was to restore pride in the wartime achievements of the Red Army. Sri Lanka must learn this lesson. We have nothing to be ashamed of in our martial feats throughout our long history, whether successful (Dutugemunu) or valiant failures against stupendous odds (Puran Appu). All we have to be ashamed of are periods of division, appeasement, surrender and occupation such as the Kandyan Convention of 1815, 450 years of colonialism in parts of the island, a century without armed resistance after the uprising of 1848, or the period of the CFA during which Prabhakaran built up a state within a state with the support or tacit approval of our elected government.

My own view is that we should not only declare 2009 The Year of Victory and have celebrations at a provincial level, since every province (including Jaffna) contributed to the victory and benefited from the liberation from fascist terror and tyranny, but that we should also declare May 19^th as Victory Day, to be commemorated by future generations down the ages.

External, extra-regional pressure, channeled through the international system and its multilateral institutions, is focusing on two issues: “full, rapid and unimpeded humanitarian access” to the IDPs, accountability and an independent/impartial international inquiry and a UN role (“a central role” in the words of some dignitaries) domestic political reconciliation between the communities. The agenda is clear: while access is desirable, unimpeded, i.e. unregulated access would allow a swarm of international personnel who would encyst the IDP camps and turn into a semi-colonial antibody within Sri Lankan territory, reporting to their international headquarters which themselves are penetrated by covert metropolitan agencies of one sort or another. It is not paranoid to speculate that some would entice the IDPs with promises of refugee status in the West in exchange for false testimony of so-called war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military, many of whom lie dead or disabled because we deliberately and rightly desisted from using airpower extensively in the final offensive against an deadly enemy entrenched among civilians. Having eliminated one separatist political entity that was not under the control of the Sri Lankan state, we would be permitting yet another space which is not subject to Sri Lanka’s sovereignty.

This does not mean that the IDPs must not be treated as decently, humanely, equitably and generously as possible and processed out as fast as possible. Even from a counter-terrorism perspective, it is unwise to have large numbers concentrated in any one place under difficult circumstances. Under the US military’s new counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine designed mainly by warrior-scholar Gen David Petraeus, PhD, the policy of “clear, hold and build” eschews long term internment or resettlement in fortified villages of large numbers, in favor of early re-settlement in their original domains. Our IDPs must be relocated in their own homes or villages, and the joint communiqué of Governments of Sri Lanka and India as well as that of the Govt of Sri Lanka and the UN Secy Gen commits us to so resettling the bulk of the IDPs within 180 days. But this must be by primarily local efforts, involving the state, the local government authorities, the private sector, the civic associations and NGOs.

Ours is not a stalemated war with a negotiated outcome, still less an internationally mediated outcome – which is the endgame that was sought by some Western sources as the war drew to a close. We warded off such attempts at abortion. Ours was an outright victory for the democratic forces against the tyrannical and totalitarian; the forces of national re-unification against the forces of secessionism and dismemberment. Whether and when accountability and transitional justice issues will be addressed, and how, with what combination of local and foreign expertise, must and can only be a sovereign decision.

While we are on the subject of independent impartial international inquiries, why not appoint one into the activities of the Tamil Tigers, which includes how they succeeded in building a state within a state, with the help of which collaborationist personalities and agencies, elected and unelected, local and foreign? Now that we are besieged by calls for rapid, full and unimpeded access, the Sri Lankan people surely deserve to know what took place mdash; and especially the degree of international involvement with the Tigers, naming the external agencies and personalities involved in buttressing the LTTE.

It is absurd and unthinkable that there should be any role for the UN in domestic political reconciliation. We know what happened in Kosovo with UN involvement, and in any case the Serbian army lost the Kosovo war, we did not. Elements in the West, allied with the pro-Tiger Tamil Diaspora seek a role for the UN in political reconciliation in order to secure for the Diaspora based Tiger political network (though they would claim it is for the Tamil minority) the kind of political role in the postwar settlement that is ruled out by the outcome of the war. Some could not obtain for the Tigers or rather the Tamil Diaspora, or for the Tigers on behalf of the Tamil Diaspora, a stalemate on the battlefield. They are now trying to obtain a stalemate at the negotiating table. This will not work either. We have nothing to negotiate with the pro-Tiger Diaspora. Any negotiations will be with the Tamil democrats, i.e. the non Tiger Tamils. This too will probably be fuelled by the new parliamentary balance that results from the holding of elections. None of this provides political space or a political role for any extra-regional entity or elements.

I for one am for a General Fonseka’s idea of 300,000 strong military, though it should be as balanced between the three services and as multiethnic as possible. Sri Lanka is being subject to intense external pressure and these could turn coercive in one form or another. We must have a capacity to deter them from which ever quarter they emanate, and the sole way of doing this is to have a trained military which is capable of imposing unacceptably heavy casualties on any hostile force that steps on our soil, whatever its technological advantages. We must, if needed, merge our own successful strategy, tactics and weapons systems with those that are valuable of the defeated Tigers, creating a deadly Sri Lankan military synthesis. Of course, the cost of maintaining a 300,000 strong military must not be at the expense of investment in education and social services, or else we’ll doom ourselves to stagnation as a nation that simply cannot compete in the world, not least with its enemy, Tamil separatism.

Does this mean that the Tamil people will be under the Sinhala jackboot? This is the scenario that is painted in order to justify the slogan of “unfettered access”, “international inquiry” and a “central role for the UN in political reconciliation”. There are only two types who think that this is a likely scenario: the bloc of Tamil separatists/ultranationalist, the UNP leaders, the Sinhala liberals and their Western allies on the one hand, who fear this outcome or thrive on it, and on the other hand the Sinhala chauvinists and supremacists who fantasize along the same lines; one person’s nightmare being another’s fantasy. The Tamil ultra-nationalists think that the 13^th amendment is too little, too late and in any case will never be implemented by the Rajapakse administration due to its own ideological predispositions as well as the pressure of the Sinhala chauvinists. For their part the Sinhala chauvinists think that the 13^th amendment is too much, and in any case they can prevail over the Rajapakse administration not to implement it. In their dark fantasies both these extremist camps have forgotten one “tiny” factor: India.

The full, if reasonably graduated implementation of the 13^th amendment is the cornerstone of our postwar relationship with India, the relationship with which is the cornerstone of our international relations. As the paradigmatic victory in Geneva showed, we can win against the Tiger Diaspora and the Western European bloc influenced by it, when we are supported by our neighbors, our continent and our natural constituency the developing world plus Russia. In this strategy the support of India is critical. Without India’s support, the rest will distance itself from us, leaving us wide open to Western pressure and coercion. China alone cannot carry the weight: it is too far away and cannot be expected to risk its relationships with important powers for the sake of Sri Lanka.

Contrary to the nonsense of Sinhala racist propaganda, the implementation of the 13^th amendment is not the tithe or “protection money” (kappan) paid by the Sri Lankan state to Tamil separatism and/or our Western critics and adversaries. It is the minimum cost of accommodation between the Sinhalese who are the majority on the island and the Tamils who dwarf the Sinhalese outside it. It is the only way to balance the two aspects of Sinhala collective existence: a majority on the island and minority worldwide, as well as the dual character of Tamil collective existence- a majority outside the island and a minority within it. The implementation of the 13^th amendment, and the equitable expeditious treatment of the IDPs, constitutes the minimum requirement for Sri Lanka to retain its friends and allies in the face of a hostile Western project. It is also  the sole realistic option  by which the Sri Lankan state, the Government, the Sri Lankan military and the Sinhalese can retain the support of the anti-Tiger Tamil democrats and through them the moderate Tamils on the island with whom coexistence and partnership are imperative.

(These are the strictly personal views of the writer).

• Tamil politics tomorrow: Options, challenges and pitfalls



• An alternative grid map of political opinion serving the best interests of Sri Lanka



• WINNING LOCALLY, WINNING GLOBALLY



• MAN, OH (VANANGA) MAN!



• Monster

Once in a while, the bear would come down the mountain, smash up part of my plantation and eat some of my potatoes. The monotonic increase in the frequency of bear attacks made me live in constant fear. What do I do?

My little daughter said she had a solution. She collected a handful of little stones and was going to throw them at the bear. ldquo;That will teach him a lessonrdquo;, she said, ldquo;He will then leave us alonerdquo;.

ldquo;No darlingrdquo;, I protested, ldquo;An angry bear is even more dangerousrdquo;; ldquo;He is big and powerfulrdquo;, ldquo;He could kill us all and wipe out our potato farmrdquo;.

ldquo;Do you have a better idea dad”, she shouted at me, ldquo;If you donrsquo;t have a solution, you have no right to criticize minerdquo;.

Did I not have that right?

Over the years, she threw many stones. Her siblings encouraged her. My neighbors urged her on; they gave her stones; they taught her how to aim better. When she ran out of stones, she threw bricks pulled off the garden wall. She even threw my seed-potatoes at the bear.

When she scored strikes on the bear, she celebrated; ldquo;my solution is workingrdquo;, she gloated. “Soon the bear will go away”. Her arrogance grew exponentially with every hit. When the bear struck back, she hid behind the potato plants. At her extreme of arrogance, she even threw a stone at the neighbor once; the very neighbor who taught her to throw stones.

I tried to protest. ldquo;Better we compromise with the bear dearrdquo;, I said. ldquo;There are enough potatoes for the bear and usrdquo;, I reasoned. “Bears are beautiful, too”.

It all fell on deaf ears. She wanted me to shut up. I argued with her. When she threatened to throw stones at me, I shut up. When she did cruel things to the bear cubs, killed many little bear cubs that had nothing to do with the damage to my farm, I didn’t interfere. When she badly hurt her own siblings, too, I kept quiet. Mostly out of fear, and partly, I confess, out of my utilitarian calculations – after all, promised ends may well justify the means. Pathetic! Shame on me!

Now, several years on, my predictions have come true. The bear woke up. It was angry and determined. In its charge against my daughter, it has fully destroyed my farm. It has attacked and hurt my daughter. It has destroyed all my potatoes - even the seed-potatoes I had so much treasured and saved to plant when rains next came.

The bear huffed and puffed, as bears do, and our roof is now blown off.

I ran to the neighbors for help. They showed no interest. ldquo;Itrsquo;s not fashionable to throw stones these days, you knowrdquo;, they said, ldquo;particularly at bearsrdquo;. ldquo;You should have brought her up to know better.rdquo; “Remember, she even threw a stone at us”.

My daughter is now dead. Her siblings died before her. Potato farm is destroyed. Even my seed-potatoes have been crushed. My loss is enormous. The damage is beyond comprehension. I will never know for sure how much I have lost. I can only use my expertise in statistics to estimate. It is certainly high. Error bars in it, even higher. So I just cry in despair and constantly think of her death.

There she was, lying on my lap, just one breath between this world and the next. I looked straight in her eyes. It was my opportunity to tell her what I most wanted to tell her all these years: “I told you so!” I have been looking forward to this opportunity, just like parents of naughty children often do. But I couldn’t bring myself to telling her that. The shared guilt of not speaking up when it mattered most, put me at a loss for words. Wasn’t my silence partly to blame? Was I actually that helpless not to have articulated my thoughts? Did I really keep quiet out of fear for my daughter throwing stones at me, or was my silence due to just plain selfishness?

Then in her eyes I saw that all the arrogance had gone. Much to my momentary surprise, there was fear instead. It wasn’t clear if she had realized her stupidity, or if she was willing to acknowledge the destruction that her ways had invited. There was panic in her voice, and that could be heard the world over, thanks to the wonders of modern technology.

“I am helpless”, she moaned, her voice cracking, “The whole world is against me”.

“If the whole world is against you”, I thought to myself, “Perhaps stone throwing was rather a bad idea, as I told you”.

And then, in what Physicists call a phase transition, the duration of which I still cannot reliably estimate and the cause I will never know, she just died. My chance to tell her ‘I told you so” suddenly evaporated.

I stare at my ruined potato farm and reflect about my missed opportunity: What good would have come of telling her, “I told you so”?

Would it have eased my pain?

Would it have dried my tears?

Would it have brought back my seed-potatoes?

• Sri Lankarsquo;s IDP camp Manik Farm is what it is (but what is that?)



• Sri Lankan refugees in India: “Are we the ones to bear this shame, are they the sacrifice”



• Why are we wasting our lives in traffic jams for corrupt politicians?



• Doesnrsquo;t she have the right to live with her daughter?



• My life and my choices in a country at war: A personal reflection

To think that the trauma and suffering of thirty years can be extinguished by one bullet to the back of one guy’s head.

I think it’s stupid…

To celebrate the death of those who didn’t want to die; and especially those that didn’t deserve to die.

I think it’s stupid…

For the Buddhist flag to be seen anywhere at any time during any celebration of the end of the war.

I think it’s stupid…

To call for a homeland without having any inkling of moving into it.

I think it’s stupid…

To expect there to be no civilian casualties.

I think it’s stupid…

After all that’s gone on to expect Sinhalese and Tamil people to live together in peace and harmony overnight.

I think it’s stupid…

Not to learn the language of someone you want coexist with. It’s like not talking to your roommate.

I think it’s stupid…

To wilfully break the law and expect sympathy for being clapped in jail.

I think it’s stupid…

That we forget that people are remanded cos they can’t pay their 2000 rupee fine for ganja possession and have been in jail for years for doing something we do at every party we go to but they don’t have any one to make a phone call.

I think it’s stupid…

That we don’t seem to appreciate how little we have actually suffered, and that getting your nuts groped at a checkpoint is a small price to pay for being alive.

I think it’s stupid…

That any victory that costs 75,000 lives is called a Victory at all.

I think it’s stupid…

That I can’t tell you I think you’re stupid without you getting pissed off.

I think it’s stupid…

That we hear each other and never listen.

I think it’s stupid…

To think that war is only fought by soldiers on battlefields when it’s actually fought by our egos in our heads.

But it just may be that Irsquo;m stupid for thinking this way. Do you? 

[Editors note: This is something the author, I am told, wrote literally in three minutes for an open mic night in Colombo recently. The author notes that it was not initially meant to be published in print, but hopes that it provokes some good discussion on Groundviews.]

• Old Truths and Old Men



• Robberies Increase In Jaffna



• The Sri Lankan Voter



• Groundviews back online, with new features and enhanced for mobile phones



• Mobiles Working Again

The Times’ campaign is a sad example of the depths to which modern journalism has plummeted. Journalists are now not content to merely report news and provide readers with information to form their own opinions. They are often the source of news themselves, these self-appointed media celebrities. It is no surprise then that two of The Times’ journalists made the news in recent years in Sri Lanka. First, Marie Colvin enters LTTE held territory illegally in 2001 without informing the Sri Lankan authorities and then gets caught up in an SLDF ambush of the LTTE. She then accuses the SLA of deliberately targeting her. This is a ridiculous claim as she assumes that the junior infantrymen who took part in the attack knew who she was and were targeting her. That protagonists in a war usually attack each other was a fact that escaped her I suppose. Then, earlier this year, Jeremy Page was deported from Sri Lanka for not possessing a valid visa. Both of these journalists now write with a decidedly anti-Sri Lankan slant, liberally lacing their articles with unverified facts and figures. In fact, Jeremy Page even called for tourist boycott of the country in a recent article. The Times is currently attempting to escalate their petty vendetta by involving India, accusing that country of being ‘complicit’ in the killing of 20,000 Tamils. This figure has been disputed by the UN itself.

I hold no brief for the Sri Lankan government, which, unfortunately, is growing more despotic by the day. The trampling upon of media freedom and civil liberties was justified under the pretext of war not just by the government, but also by a significant section of civil society who argued, quite wrongly in my mind, that human rights and media freedom were secondary to the goal of crushing terrorism. Sri Lanka’s foreign policy seems to be controlled by individuals who pander to the government’s nationalistic mindset by rabid attacks on any individual or institution who dares question anything the government does or comments on a relevant situation in Sri Lanka. Granted that some of these individuals and institutions are busybodies but then diplomacy is not called diplomacy without reason. However, for all its warts, I don’t believe the Sri Lankan government is racist, which is exactly what The Times et al are implying through their allegations of ‘genocide’. It is incredible that the nations who gave us that terrible term ‘collateral damage’ don’t seem to understand that people die in war. It is unfortunate and, yes, the SLDF could have done more to reduce civilian casualties, but death is a fact of war. I can’t imagine the US or the EU calling for a ceasefire when they have Osama Bin Laden cornered in cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan so expecting the SLDF to do so is hypocrisy of the highest order. The GOSL, though, has played into the hands of the West through its draconian regulations regarding the coverage of the war. It gives the western media a readymade excuse when accused of one-sided coverage. A smarter move would have been to give them the necessary access, possibly embedding them with the troops like the US and the UK armies did in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we could have had them on our side cheering a rare triumph over terrorism. Sadly, common sense is not something the GOSL seems to have.

We cannot afford to burn our bridges with the West as we need them, at the very least, for economic reasons. They are the market for our biggest sources of income; tea, garments and tourism. Though the GOSL did the smart thing in taking aid and military assistance from whichever country that gave it, I don’t see any long run benefit in being allied to Iran and Libya without having excellent relations with the EU and the US. Playing off China against India is probably the only silver lining in our foreign policy storm cloud but I wonder how much of that was planned and how much was a result of us having nowhere else to go. What we now need is a PR offensive with two primary objectives. The first would be to directly counter specific allegations such as those made by The Times, as well as those made by institutions such as the UN. Most of these allegations are based on flimsy evidence and it should not be too difficult to counter them. The difficulty would lie in ensuring that our rebuttals receive adequate coverage. The second objective would be a diplomatic campaign to repair the damage done to our relations with the EU and the US. Although Rajiva Wijesinghe and Dayan Jayatilleke have spoken out recently, I am not convinced it is part of a grander plan. For Sri Lanka to successfully counter all the negative press it has been receiving it has to act now and use the above mentioned gentlemen, along with others of similar calibre, as our voice to the world.

Ultimately though, the success of this campaign would also depend on how effectively we can ‘walk the talk’. The GOSL needs to sort out the issue of the IDPs quickly and transparently, and needs to table the long awaited political solution. The GOSL also needs to start its own investigations into possible violations by the SLDF, not just in this last battle, but in the entire conflict. If the SLDF’s actions have indeed been above board, then it has nothing to fear from such an investigation. In fact, even if found guilty of minor violations, the very act of auditing itself would boost its reputation and strengthen the institution of the SLDF. This last suggestion may not go down well with the ‘armchair patriots’ but the fact is that no army in the world is without its rotten apples. [For example, Israel recently conducted an investigation into the conduct of the IDF in the most recent campaign against the Hamas and this is important for two reasons. One, Israel is arguably the nation most under threat from terrorist attacks and, two; there is an extremely strong connection between the military and civil society due to compulsory national service. Despite this, some of the soldiers involved felt free enough to talk about certain violations committed by the IDF during the Gaza conflict at a university gathering and the media, in general, was objective enough to report it and free enough to demand an enquiry and get it. This example also clearly undermines the GOSL’s implicit position that a war against the LTTE could not have been waged with a free media looking over its shoulders]. Without the deeds to back up the words, any attempts to counter the prevailing anti-Sri Lankan sentiment would unfortunately turn out to be as farcical as the claims made against us.

• Daily Propaganda



• Remembering Sivaram



• The killing of journalists and the Media Ministerrsquo;s comments



• Significant Other



• Whose rules? Amnesty Campaign

Beyond the politics, the pending IMF loan to Sri Lanka re-opens an old debate on international aid, its relevance and effectiveness, both within and beyond the island. Before the current global crisis, the IMF and many supra-national banks had almost run out of relevance – and, more significantly, clients – in the developing world. Many countries had started borrowing in private capital markets. This was partly due to the unpopularity of the Structural Adjustment Programmes and other conditionalities imposed by the body. The institution had also lost considerable credibility for its response to the East Asian financial crisis during the late 1990s, and its handling of the Argentina economic collapse, from 1999 until 2002. This was particularly true in the wake of World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz’s critique that IMF policies actually exacerbated these crises. Stiglitz subsequently lost his job at the World Bank, but won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001.

The IMF’s diminished relevance prior to the current financial crisis was also due to the emergence of new Asian donors such as China and India moving into Africa and Asia with billions of dollars, to secure the natural resources needed to sustain growth at home. Following the financial crisis, the IMF gained a new lease of life, with a revitalised mandate to assist poor countries affected by the downturn. The G20 Summit in London in April was a particular turning point, as the IMF garnered pledges in the billions to help economic recovery. However, at the same meeting, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also declared, “the Washington Consensus is dead.” (Perhaps he was following in the English tradition of announcing, “The king is dead! Long live the king!”) In any event, it appears that the IMF, at least in Sri Lanka, may now step in where the World Bank once trod – the latter being the Bretton Woods twin once tasked with post-conflict reconstruction. Going off of the Sri Lanka’s most recent aid experiences, however, perhaps it will make little difference: despite promises in 2003 of some USD 4.5 billion by the four co-chairs of the peace process (Norway, Japan, the US and the EU), much of that aid turned out to be ‘phantom aid’, with some 70 percent being given in the form of loans rather than grants.

Recently there have been investigations into the large bonuses and salaries that CEOs, experts and executives in the international financial system paid themselves over the years and Pres. Obama has asked for a cap on salaries and perks, likewise there is a scandal of improper payments made by British Parliamentarians to themselves. Similar inquiries may be raised with regard to the international development and humanitarian aid industry, particularly UN agencies and INGOs which is lacking in transparency, whose CEOs, representatives and “experts” are paid enormous salaries, per diems and “hardship allowances” while claiming to be doing poverty alleviation while living in extraordinary comfort in disaster affected countries..

For instance, the Red Cross brought 183 foreign delegates to Lanka after the tsunami (they were Red cross volunteers from the different RC countries with no particular technical expertise), and each delegate cost over 120,000 USD per annum. Just as the international financial system’s and politician’s excesses are being exposed at this time the international aid system too needs scrutiny, transparency and regulation. In short ETHICS need to be re-inserted into the international aid business and it seems that now is the time to do begin the process of cleaning up the aid industry.

New donors

Resurgent as the IMF may be, it has not reduced the importance of India and China as newly established donor countries. Indeed, there has been a shift in the structural dynamics of the international development architecture, as the current aid configuration in Sri Lanka reflects. In the context of a general critique of the Western aid system taking root in the Global South, there has been an emergence of new Asian donors, particularly China and India. What is more, the stepped-up power of these two donors may also be increasingly rendering the established international aid architecture irrelevant. While these Asian donors tend to have a more state-centric approach to aid, they do not attach many policy conditionalities, and offer cheaper technical assistance. The new donors also tend to be less concerned about paying lip service to human-rights requirements, as was clearly demonstrated by New Delhi and Beijing’s recent stance in Sri Lanka.

Such nonchalance is quite in contrast to many Western donors, many of which have a significant Tamil diaspora in their capitals that was troubled by the humanitarian situation as the war drew to a close. Tied in with this concern has the question of the exchangeability of the aid. As the areas in which the aid can be used are rather flexible, there were fears for many donors that Colombo could be redirecting some of the funds to its war effort, for instance, rather than using it for development projects. Given such concerns, many had been arguing that conditionalities on an IMF loan should relate not only to immediate humanitarian assistance, but also extend to a sustainable solution – demilitarisation and good governance for conflict de-escalation.

India, always a significant political force in Sri Lanka, has now taken on a development role previously alien to it. To begin with, it has pledged post-conflict reconstruction assistance, and has sent emergency humanitarian assistance to the conflict zones in northern Sri Lanka, including teams of navy doctors. Of course, New Delhi also supplied intelligence to Colombo and provided defence equipment, principally radar equipment to detect LTTE planes. In the commercial arena, it has also leased oil terminals in Sri Lanka’s prime and much-coveted natural harbour in Trincomalee, on the northeast coast.

The island also counts on China for significant military and financial assistance. In Hambantota – the southern tip of Sri Lanka, 106 km from one of the world’s busiest shipping lines – is a vast construction site, where a Chinese-funded port is being built. One of the poorest districts on the island, Hambantota is also President Mahinda Rajapakse’s electorate. And while China says that the USD 1 billion port is a purely commercial venture, American and Indian military analysts regard it as part of a so-called ‘string of pearls’ strategy, meant to encircle strategic waterways.

China has also helped Sri Lanka in other ways as well, including encouraging Pakistan to sell weapons to Colombo and supporting it diplomatically at the Security Council, especially blocking votes on the war. It is also reported that Beijing provided, free-of-charge, six F-7 jet fighters last year. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, it was these very planes that subsequently shot down the LTTE ‘mosquito’ planes. And the relationship shows no signs of dwindling, with Chinese aid to Sri Lanka jumping from a few million dollars in 2005 to USD 1 billion last year, replacing Japan as the island’s largest donor. Of course, Beijing was already Colombo’s biggest arms supplier by the 1990s. As both India and China fish in Sri Lanka’s strategically located troubled waters, the government seems to have been using the rising Asian donors in particular to defeat the LTTE and to counter the Western aid lobby – one that may increasingly become irrelevant in Asia.

Aid tsunami

It is generally agreed that Sri Lanka’s current economic woes are related more to soaring defence expenditure, dysfunctional governance and corruption (which have fuelled and been fuelled by the extended armed conflict), rather than to the global economic crisis.

Three years ago, Sri Lanka turned down an IMF offer to give the country a status of Heavily Indebted Poor Country. Then, the Rajapakse regime celebrated the departure of the IMF with fanfare, promising never to go back to Western aid conditionalities, which often included the privatisation of public corporations and assets, underperforming or otherwise. Colombo had also concluded that concessionary loans (one at little or no interest rate) offered by international financial institutions were too costly. This was especially true given aid conditionalities, including over-priced technical assistance from donor countries that flow back to the contributor, amounting to ‘phantom aid’. Since then, Sri Lanka’s Central Bank has followed a path of borrowing from private capital markets. Not so long ago, the governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, Nivard Cabraal, went on record telling the IMF to put Washington’s finances in order following the global financial crisis, rather than advising Sri Lanka on monetary policy.

Sound as this advice to the IMF may have been, the Sri Lankan economy itself is hardly in good shape. The country currently suffers from a serious deficit, a home-grown balance-of-payments crisis caused by excessive defence expenditure, bloated public sector spending and inflation that peaked last year at 30 percent. All the while, official reserves have in recent years been whittled away by defending an exchange rate of 108 Sri Lanka rupees to the US dollar. According to Razeen Sally, the director of the European Center for International Political Economy, an apparent balance-of-payments crisis is also related to “corruption and institutional rot that set in long ago, but has plumbed new depths”. Currently, controversial oil-hedging deals are under investigation by the Bribery Commission, following a Supreme Court stop order on payments by the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, including to Citibank and Standard Charted Bank. Recently, the United National Party, the main opposition, raised questions about conditionalities attached to the IMF loan under discussion in the Parliament. The Rajapakse government has stated that it will not tolerate conditionalities from the IMF, which would likely welcome a client from Southasia given its declining clientele in the region.

Historically, Sri Lanka has been a bit of a donor darling, receiving disproportionate international media attention when compared with other conflict regions. Despite and arguably because of cycles of conflict, peace-building, reconstruction and destruction in the last quarter-century – as well as due to Sri Lanka’s lush tropical beauty, cultural openness and tourist-friendly people and infrastructure – the island has been a favourite of the international development industry. The country, however, tends to underutilise normal development assistance (making use of only around 17 to 35 percent of the total aid, depending on the project).

It has also at times experienced ‘hot’ aid flows. This was particularly the case following the 2004 tsunami, when over 500 donors and international organisations arrived on the island to provide relief – and then stayed on for several years. This experience gave rise to a local discourse that the island had been struck by an ‘aid tsunami’, which had caused new conflicts and problems of coordination, equity and lack of local ownership of recovery priorities and programmes. Several studies indicated that a significant part of the funds for disaster victims were consumed by international experts from various UN Agencies, the International Committee for the Red Cross and their partners, and INGOs based in Colombo – rather than reaching affected communities.

International assistance can certainly be helpful. But it is clear that aid dependence in conflict situations may lead to institutional de-development that exacerbates the emergent conflict, creating a poverty trap in places where long-term, low-intensity conflict prevailed. It is in this context too that the Sri Lankan government has recently been quite dismissive of Western aid donors. Ultimately, the giving and receiving of aid is as much about politics as it is about humanitarian aid or poverty alleviation. In the words of political theorist Joseph S Nye, “Politics in an information age is not only about whose military wins, but whose story wins.” This has proven to be a truism in Sri Lanka, especially as the war has wound up in recent months.

Trade, not aid

With much physical and political reconstruction work now necessary in Sri Lanka, the issue of aid disbursement becomes more relevant than before. It is still possible for Colombo to win the war but lose the peace. Many have predicted that the remaining LTTE cadre will melt into society, in Sri Lanka and South India, continuing to fight a guerrilla war until the root causes of the conflict are addressed. After all, the core concerns of the Tamils are in no way addressed by the military victory. These fundamental concerns will cease to exist only with the devolution of power to the north and eastern regions.

Tamil moderates could argue that now, when the LTTE threat has passed, meaningful power-sharing should take place. This should be in direct opposition to the masquerade of democracy that has been evident in the east since the government ‘liberated’ the Eastern Province. After that area was re-captured by the Sri Lanka military in mid-2007, the situation in the east has been showcased as a post-conflict development model. A report by the International Crisis Group, issued in mid-April, notes:

Even now, the Eastern Province is still not the ‘post-conflict’ situation that development agencies had hoped. Despite the presence of tens of thousands of soldiers and police in the east, the LTTE have proven able to launch attacks on government forces and their rivals, the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Puligal (TVMP). There have also been violent conflicts between different factions of the pro-government TVMP and impunity for killing and disappearances, many of them apparently committed by government forces and their allies. The government has still not devolved power to the Eastern Province as required by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution which established the provincial council system in 1987 in response to Tamil demands for regional autonomy … In this environment, development of the east remains affected by the conflict and threatens to exacerbate them. Despite the need for development there is a danger of funds being wasted or misused.

The critique of development assistance within the country has, of course, also remarked that international aid itself has contributed in the past to the conflict. Poor governance locally as well as in the international aid bureaucracy, where phantom aid, lack of transparency, poor monitoring and evaluation, and non-existent exit-strategies, are all part of the problem. In this context, it is to be hoped that the IMF loan and other international aid is now conditional on a scenario that ensures sustainable peace through genuine devolution of power.

Most importantly, the moderate Tamil voice that had been stifled by the LTTE and government-allied paramilitaries must play a central role in the reconstruction of the northeast. The military defeat of the LTTE does not mean that its ideology has been defeated. This will only happen when the state recognises the multicultural and multi-religious nature of the country, and ensures equal rights to all communities. The state will need to reach out to the minority community, ensure that displaced people are not held in internment camps, and offer the Tamils an acceptable political solution. There also needs to be a process of reconciliation and peace-building among the various ethnic and religious communities. Affirmative action, by hiring minority community members into government institutions, the bureaucracy and the armed forces, could be a useful start.

Unfortunately, much like the LTTE, southern politicians have played the ‘ethnic card’, using the conflict to win votes and stay in power. This political culture must end in order for bridges to be built and ethnic relations to improve in Sri Lanka. Ultimately, no amount of aid, howsoever large, can heal Sri Lanka’s wounds if it is not implemented in an environment of compromise and understanding. Indeed, as Colombo’s political approach to Tamils and other minorities must change, so must the state’s handling of aid monies. Naturally, the involvement of national development experts as well as civil society in monitoring the IMF loan and other reconstruction assistance is extremely crucial. What is more, there should be clear timeframes and exit strategies for all the reconstruction players. Finally, ‘trade not aid’ is the path forward for sustainable economic recovery, as well as to avoid aid dependency and the related poverty trap n which northeast Sri Lanka has been caught for the last two decades.

• G- 20 and the World Economic Crisis



• Rebuilding the East and Other Stories . . .



• Pledges



• Isolation and International Relations



• Who is afraid of NGOs?

For live updates / tweets of the Presidentrsquo;s speech at the National Victory Parade today in Galle Face, Colombo, click here or follow #srilanka on Twitter.

The speech is scheduled to begin at 9.10am local time (+5.30GMT).

• Live micro-blogging of Presidentrsquo;s speech in Parliament today



• Groundviews on Twitter and Facebook



• The celebrations in Colombo after Prabhakaranrsquo;s demise



• Groundviews on Twitter



• Prabhakaran is dead - join debates on what next for Sri Lanka

You only have to look at the names in the line up to know that Vandort, Murali, Maharoof and Sanga don’t all practice the same faith or speak the same language. Yet as a team, I think they’re the best! Forget Vass and Mendis crossing themselves or Jayasuriya’s pirith nul, they are out there because they are good at what they do and together they make one hell of a team!

Since independence, we have been so busy trying to define our ‘Sinhala-ness’ or ‘Tamil-ness’ that we seem to have all but forgotten how to be Sri Lankan. The petty politicking for votes and territory only pushed the wedge deeper between us. For folks like me, whose ethnic background is an achcharu at the best of times, still had to tick a box next to ethnicityhellip;. because there was no option for leaving it blank. And look where that got us. We forgot how to be Sri Lankan and concentrated instead on how deeply and radically we could embrace our ethnicity. I know I did. I defined myself by my surname and not by my mother tongue (which is Sinhala). And what did I end up being? Confused, confused and confused! Seriously though, while I’m very proud of my dual heritage, growing up, I felt I couldn’t comfortably be both – I had to choose and stick with one identityhellip;.when the audience is Tamil, my Sinhala self ceased to exist and amongst Sinhala friends and family, my Tamil self was forgotten.

There have been so many politically defining moments in our post-colonial history that have nurtured radical sentiments and ensured that we became a nation divided, that to go down that road will be pointless. But I will say that as a country we have wasted too much time and shed too much blood in trying to move away from a common identityhellip;.and not to mention how we keep blaming the colonial types for our lack of unity. Sure, they practiced a ‘divide and rule’ policy that was only to their advantage, but after 61 years of doing things our way we should have more to show for ourselves than a bloody war and severe mistrust of each other.

And that’s why we need to start thinking outside the box (which we’re all had to tick at one time or another). The hurting and misery that this war has caused will take time to heal and the government has its work cut out. It also needs to be sincere in its commitment to a lasting peace and the ‘no more minorities’ concept. In the meantime, we as a people have to take stock of the situation and put our differences behind us. As Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslim and Burghers and everything in between, we have a lot to offer each other and the world. So, instead of using our diversity as an excuse to hate, let’s make it a platform to celebratehellip;.like when we win the next match!

Enough said.

• The Amnesty Campaign: Taking the Eye Off the Ball



• For a Sri Lankan Nationalism



• Misguided cultural policing in Sri Lanka: Wherersquo;s the morality amongst politicians?



• Can we End this Cycle of Hatred?



• ldquo;We need a revolution in Sri Lanka!rdquo; - A brief chat with Sam de Silva

The three panelists consisted of the former Sri Lankan ambassador to the US and Mexico, a human rights activist and a spokesperson (Ms. Janani Jananayagam) for London based ‘Tamils against Genocide’. Ms. Jananayagam is also in the running for the European Parliament elections according to TamilNet.

Now while the entire aim of the panel discussion seemed to be on looking at what the future holds for the Tamil people now that the war’s over, I was pretty surprised to see the spokesperson for ‘Tamils against Genocide’ seemed only interested in talking about what has happened in the past. In fact, such was the focus of this lady that she even saw fit to speak about incidents that took place within one year of Sri Lanka gaining independence!

Now correct me if I’m wrong here, but I was under the impression she had been invited to talk about the future of the Tamil people, not about their past. I don’t believe anyone is denying the fact that there were incidents in the past that contributed to the entire war, but should we as a people allow ourselves to be bogged down by the past? I would rather think that we need to use this opportunity to move forwards towards reconciliation and a lasting peace that addresses the aspirations of the people of Sri Lanka. Not just one segment, but ALL of the people.

IMHO, the former ambassador was the only person on the panel who stuck resolutely to the subject at hand and kept reiterating the need to let go of past hatred and ill feeling. He kept constantly calling for the need to understand and move on from the past. Unfortunately it seemed the one person invited to speak on behalf of the Tamil Diaspora seemed only able to stick to the Diaspora party line of ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’. In fact she seemed highly cynical of there ever being any form of reconciliation between the Tamil and Sinhalese people!

It was sad to see that when asked to discuss the future aspirations of the Tamil people, Ms. Jananayagam could only focus on the fact that Diaspora Tamils are in a state of shock and mourning and want only to see justice executed against the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL). There was absolutely no indication of the Diaspora seeing any hope for the future!

It seems obvious that Ms. Jananayagam doesn’t believe in any future for the Tamils in Sri Lanka other than what is dictated to them by the Diaspora. The Tamil people, whether they liked it or not, have of been constantly forced to go along with the aspirations of the Tamil Diaspora who tirelessly provided funding for the LTTE to carry on with their armed struggle for independence. I wonder if these Diaspora members who continue to carry a torch for an independent Tamil homeland have ever stopped to consider the views of the Tamil people who’re actually on the ground in Sri Lanka?

IMHO, it’s high time the Tamil Diaspora realized that their single-minded and almost obsessive focus on a separate nation has wreaked untold damage and suffering on the Tamil people. In fact it was this same obsessive thinking that eventually led to the LTTE holding their own people as human shields, whilst claiming to be their saviours! Even at this juncture in time, when faced with the unshakable evidence that 30 years of war have not been able to achieve this goal, they continue to cling mindlessly to this dream!

It’s not very hard for most people to see that more than a future for the Tamil people, what the Diaspora wants is for their twisted version of justice and fair play to be made a reality. Their dream needs to see light even if it means bankrupting the GOSL and making everybody, including the Tamils, suffer for the sins committed many years ago. They also seem totally unable to see that continuing with this course of action is only going to keep this ‘beggar’s wound’ of a conflict festering for many more generations to come!

So I believe its time for the Tamils of Sri Lanka to stand up and decide for themselves what they want for the future, and not let the Diaspora bury these aspirations under yet another load of hate and rhetoric.

• Impervious and Insular members of Tamil Diaspora: M.I.A. and the Bogey of Genocide in Sri Lanka



• QUO VADIS, MAJORITY REPORT?



• The Art of Forgetting by Lisa Kois - Directorrsquo;s Introduction and Previews



• India: ‘Hands on’?



• The needs of the hour

My country’s heartbeat

Resonates as drumbeat and dance step,

Rolls off the udekki, the geta bera and thammatama,

Turns somersaults along the Street of Pageantry and Veneration.

The heartbeat of my country

Resides in every clod of earth turned at ploughing,

It rides the unwavering voice of the farmer coaxing his buffalo,

And dances in the harvest song,

Traces the contour of tank bund,

Rises with the rural dust of drought-heavy days,

Slows with nightfall and awakes at first light.

The heartbeat of my country

Has been captured in verse and prose,

Etched on rock and manuscript,

Carved on collective memory

Residenced in lives and livelihoods.

My country’s heartbeat is as much an epic

As that of any other land;

Made of triumph and defeat,

Theft and magnanimity,

Intrigue and passion,

Blood-letting and benevolence;

A chronicle of kings and queens and

People and events,

A gathering of stories

Of invasion, defence and recovery.

My country’s heartbeat is resilient.

It can be pushed against the wall,

Crushed under the jackboot of invader or tyrant,

But it is far too tender for destruction.

My country’s heartbeat is the resolve

To overcome tragedy

Bury it with a smile and move on.

It is the fuel

That turns an island into a dansala

Twice every year,

And conjures kiribath on the most humble table

Come the Aluth Avurudda.

My country’s heartbeat

Arrives as laughter and tear,

The steaming cup of tea

And the red of a betal chew,

It is the dance of the toddy-tapper,

The patience of stilt-fishermen,

The shrewdness of the Southern businessman,

The PR of the trader,

The thrift of the gentle folk from the Peninsula,

The faith of the devotee that walks on coals

Or is suspended on hooks from a Vel cart.

My country’s heartbeat is white

On Poya days and funerals,

red on May Day,

multi-coloured on polling days;

it has seen black days

and has known sunsets bathed in tears,

death, destruction and dismemberment,

and yet it is an unguent that sutures

the most terrible cuts,

a song that persuades embrace,

and a constant call to meditation.

I have heard the heartbeat of my country

In the tolling of the bell on Samanala Kana,

The healing drone of pirith weaving its way

Through tree and conversation,

In the call for prayer,

Allah O Akbar,

The church choir and the hymn

And the chanting of the Poosari.

My country’s heartbeat

Is, in fact, indescribable

And this gladdens me,

For I do not wish to see it traded

I do not wish to see it defined and bled,

Contoured and decimated.

I live in a country whose heartbeat sings to me

And perhaps others.

It gives me heart

It gives me life

And lets me breathe.

I am content.

• Song of the Sleepless River: Music, racism and resistence



• My life and my choices in a country at war: A personal reflection



• Cutting off telecoms in Sri Lanka reduxhellip;



• The end of one man and the legacy of another: We cannot glorify death



• An appeal to support Kumbi Kathawa (Ant Story): A Dance Drama

31 May 2009, Colombo, Sri Lanka: Genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes may have been released in the Greater Colombo area this year and can wreak havoc on public health, scientists and activists warn.

These mosquitoes are larger in size, and far more resistant to insecticides and other repellents. “They will not be deterred by mosquito spray or coils – in fact, these methods will have no effect on these new breeds,” a top entomologist, who did not wish to be named, said.

It was not immediately clear as to what species of mosquito has been genetically modified to make them withstand eradication measures. This news comes in the wake of a losing battle that local governments and health authorities have been waging against mosquito-borne diseases in recent years. In particular, the number of dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF) cases has been on the rise, with a particular increase during monsoonal periods from May to September each year.

Many residents in Kotte, Battaramulla, Piliyandala and Wattala have reported the appearance of extra-large mosquitoes in recent weeks. “I have been amazed at how large they are,” said one concerned housewife in Jayanthipura, Battaramulla. “I have never seen such large mosquitoes in my life.rdquo;

Environmental groups, meanwhile, allege that the GM mosquitoes were released by a multinational drug company that failed to win a multi-million dollar contract from the government of Sri Lanka.

Independent health professionals urged that the matter be investigated immediately. Dr Madhura Rathuvitarana, a retired director general of health and former researcher on mosquito-borne diseases, said that this could be a turning point in our continuing war against the mosquito menace. “We were already losing the battle with ordinary mosquitoes, and running out of effective drugs and insecticides. If the GM mosquitoes are stronger than other species, the situation is going to be very grim indeed.”

The Green Hornets, an environmental investigative organisation, claimed yesterday that the release of GM mosquitoes was done by a leading multinational company engaged in the pharmaceutical business. The company had for years been supplying anti-malarial drugs and mosquito spray to the Ministry of Health and Nutrition. The contract, running into several million dollars, was a drain on Sri Lanka’s scarce public health funds since the drugs were increasingly ineffective as the disease-causing parasites developed resistance.

“Our information is that this company wanted this contract to continue, and were outraged when the Ministry stopped it,” said environmental activist Kumar Anthranam. “At the last meeting held in February, company officials had stormed out of the Ministry when their demands were not met. It looks like they have now struck back, unleashing the GM mosquito to ‘punish’ all of us!”

The Ministry of Health declined to comment on the specific dealings with any of its suppliers, but confirmed that a major anti-malaria contract continuing from the 1990s was not extended for 2009.

“At this point, we simply cannot comment on reports about GM mosquitoes,” a health ministry source said on the condition of anonymity. “We will soon appoint an expert committee to look into the matter. Due procedures have to be followed.”

For years, American and Swiss pharmaceutical companies have been researching into genetically modifying both the disease causing parasites as well as their vectors. In 2007, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, reported that they had genetically engineered a mosquito that was resistant to the single-celled malaria parasites called Plasmodium. It was a hailed as a breakthrough in humanityrsquo;s struggle against the ancient disease.

ldquo;If they could tinker with some genes in mosquitoes, they can probably tinker with any genes in mosquitoes,rdquo; speculated Dr Rathuvitarana, urging health authorities to take this risk seriously.

Meanwhile, the Green Hornets called upon the Ministry of Health to reveal to the public the full and exact dealings with the said multinational company, and the threats the company officials are alleged to have made.

“This is a matter of great public importance, and peoplersquo;s lives are at risk,” the statement said. It added: ldquo;In this instance, we commend the Ministry of Health for taking the right decision and for standing by its decision in spite of threats of reprisals by the supplier company. These western conspirators now need to be exposed.rdquo;

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• Minister of what?????

“Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends

…Mmm, I’m gonna try with a little help from my friends”

- The Beatles

Was Geneva the last battle of the Thirty Years (hot) war, the first battle of the next war – a long Cold War against Sri Lanka mdash; or was it a combination? Only future history will tell.

When we aren’t involved, our arithmetic goes awry. We speak of four Eelam wars when there were five, because we omit the important one fought between the LTTE and the IPKF. There were five Eelam wars fought on the soil of our island: 1978-1987, 1987-1990, 1990-1994, 1995-2002, and 2006-2009.

Similarly, there weren’t two defeats suffered by the Tigers and pro-Tiger separatism, namely military (on the Wanni coast) and diplomatic (at the UN in Geneva), but three, military, politico-ideological and diplomatic. The political defeat actually preceded the decisive military defeat and provided the final prerequisite for the surge that overran the LTTE leadership. This was the result of the Indian election and especially the wipeout of the hardcore pro-Tiger forces in Tamil Nadu.

Geneva was the third defeat. It was not a defeat of the Tiger Diaspora alone. It was the defeat of a powerful bloc of forces: the foreign affairs apparatuses of the European Union (driven by several Western European states), the Western dominated international media, the amply endowed international NGOs, the pro-Tiger Tamil Diaspora, anti-Sri Lankan elements within the UN system, and a residual political fifth column within Sri Lanka itself.

An unintended consequence of the Geneva session was the profoundly educative and collective character of the experience for Sri Lankans, a huge number of whom watched the proceedings on the live web-cast which was picked up by at least one popular TV channel.  It was a distance learning Open University on international affairs for the country as a whole.

The nation saw who our true friends were and who the friends of our separatist terrorist enemy were. Sri Lanka saw and heard hypocrisy at work in world affairs. It also saw and heard fairness, friendship and solidarity.

As a former student activist of the Independent Students Union of Colombo University, now a university lecturer in New Zealand emailed me about the support we received: “It’s a beautiful wave going through, if I start from the “west”, from Brazil, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba through Egypt, Iran, the Middle East via Russia, Pakistan, India, China to the Far East including Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia etc up to the Philippines.”  More prosaically, we received solidarity in the forms of vote (member states) and voice (observers) from the following states, geographically clustered by a young Sri Lankan student from Cambridge, voluntarily interning in our Mission.

Euro-Asia: Russian Federation

South Asia: Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, Nepal

Far East: China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Maldives, Singapore, Thailand, Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Middle East: Azerbaijan , Bahrain , Egypt , Jordan , Qatar , Saudi Arabia , Iran , Syrian Arab Republic , Lebanon , Oman , United Arab Emirates

Latin America: Bolivia, Brazil, Cuba, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Venezuela

Africa: Angola , Burkina Faso , Cameroon , Djibouti , Ghana , Madagascar , Nigeria , Senegal , South Africa , Zambia , Algeria , Sudan

When I handed in my credentials here on June 1st 2007, I assembled the Mission staff and told them of the chronicle in Herodotus’ Histories of the three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae who held on against incredible odds to provide the time and political space for the rest of the Greek federation to mobilize and crush the aggressors. This, I told them, would be our task, and should animate our work and attitude. It worked and we held the line, not permitting a single move or sound out of Geneva which could reinforce the other prong of Western diplomacy – working for a “humanitarian pause” and an evacuation or “honorable exit” for the Tiger leadershipndash; before the Sri Lankan armed forces finished their historic task, decimating the Tiger army and decapitating the fascist enemy.

The Western Europeans had pushed for a special session for weeks, lobbying intensively in capitals across the world. Their target date was May 14th. They failed due our intense resistance, and that was our first success. The story is best told by Prof Rajiva Wijesinha in his How the West Was Sidelined (For the Moment), which appeared in The Island. Though the proffered reason was the fate of trapped civilians, a Reuters report out of Geneva on Friday May 15th, datelined 5:30 pm, and dealing with the call for a special session, let slip the truth. It leaked the text of a draft declaration to be adopted by the EU Council on Monday May 18th which would insist that the Government of Sri Lanka “desist from a final assault”. This then was the agenda, because the EU had reckoned that with the Tamil nadu elections over on May 13th, the Sri Lankan armed forces would storm the last redoubt of the fascist Tigers. They were right.

When the European Council met on Monday May 18th, it had to amend its text, dropping the obsolescent call for desisting from “a final assault” and substituting instead one for an independent international inquiry into war crimes, and urging the UN Human Rights Council to have a special session. The news leaks surrounding it clearly stated that the EU expected the Human Rights Council to be the appointing body for such a probe. Obviously someone up there wanted to punish the Sri Lankan state for pressing ahead with the offensive and finishing off the LTTE. On May 19th, after President Rajapakse’s address to the Sri Lankan Parliament, UK Foreign Secretary Miliband submitted a written Ministerial statement endorsing the European Council’s call. One simply must recall that it was after the visit of secretary Miliband to Washington that the joint US-UK statement called for a pause and negotiations, and that the remarks by Foreign Secretary Miliband and Foreign Minister Kouchner in a co-signed article in The Times, Mr. Miliband’s favorite paper ( which he commended twice to reporters at the UN Security Council briefing) concluded by sounding the note of the so-called Responsibility to protect and calling for an international inquiry, more than 18 days before the war would be over. These personalities echoed this call at their remarks at the standup microphone outside the Security Council following the UN SC Press statement on Sri Lanka.

The EU worked overtime across the globe during the weekend of May 16-17 and in an activity spike occasioned by the May 18th statement in Brussels and the written Ministerial statement in Westminster of May 19th, finally managed to get the 16 signatures (peaking at 17) by the middle of that week. The surge was assisted by vigorous lobbying by Tamil ethnic lobbies in some countries of the global South and most of all by a blitzkrieg of disinformation in the Western dominated world media.

How did little Sri Lanka first resist successfully and then prevail over, for the moment—but a decisive momentndash; the concerted global efforts of old, massive, well funded and thoroughly professional foreign offices of the UK, France, Germany and Denmark, together with their access to the media, their “paramilitary proxies’ the INGOS, and their men and women seeded through the upper reaches of the UN system?

In the first place we had a political leadership, or more correctly, a politico-military leadership, in President Mahinda Rajapakse and Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse, that possessed the political will to go ahead despite the odds, and in this they were supported by the national will, the people’s will, to prevail over the Tigers whatever the external pressures.

The strategy that I adopted in Geneva was discussed and agreed upon in a one-on-one conversation with President Rajapakse at the very time he appointed me. He had sent me on the delegation for the HRC sessions in March 2007, so I could get a feel for the place. Upon returning I outlined my perspective, simply that which came authentically to me, of actively re-committing to and practicing Sri Lanka’s traditional foreign policy of Nonalignment.  The President briefed me on certain unfortunate departures from this policy that had taken place, which had led to changes he had just made in the foreign relations apparatus; deviations he wanted rectified including in the disarmament realm mdash; and gave me the needed autonomy, saying “you know my thinking”. As for the specific scenario I anticipated, given that the EU had a draft resolution against Sri Lanka on the table since March 2006, he said “Yes, even if we lose, go for a vote.”  President Rajapakse re-endorsed the strategy in two telephone conversations I had with him on the weekend just prior to the special session.

Sri Lanka’s leading analyst of international affairs, Mervyn de Silva, my father, died ten years ago this month, June. I practiced in Geneva that which I had absorbed from him. He told me of Ben Bella and Patrice Lumumba even before I started schooling. As a boy I had seen Sri Lanka’s diplomatic stance at its best, adopted by his friends Hamilton Shirley Amerasinghe, Neville Kanakaratne, Gamini Corea, and Anton Muttukumaru. Through my teens I attended the lectures, including by Sir Michael Howard, organized by the Ceylon Institute of World Affairs, of which Maj Gen ‘Tony’ Muttukumaru was President and Mervyn was Secy General, and the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies which was founded on the basis of a report by Mervyn. As importantly I was introduced to top foreign diplomats such as Cuba’s Armando Bayo and foreign policy thinkers such as Russia’s Evgeni Primakov. From the library at home to my father’s famous foreign journalistic friends, from our travels overseas to our conversations at dinner, the world my family inhabited was as much international as it was national. Eschewing lucrative offers of journalistic employment overseas, my father had his feet firmly in the national reality but his head in the international. I grew up with hardly any dividing line between one and the other, with my own role models and independent identifications being with a trend, tradition and experience that was internationalist and truly world-historical.

Mervyn de Silva believed firmly that Sri Lanka’s national interests were best served by active membership in the Non Aligned movement and commitment to the policy of Non Alignment. He believed that our relationship with our neighbor should be the bedrock of our foreign policy. He was also keenly aware of tendencies towards multi-polarity and new global trends such as identity politics which transcended national boundaries (“in this age of identity, ethnicity walks on water” he said in one of his last essays). Though he avoided didacticism of any kind, something he told his staffers (as revealed in the reminiscences of one of them, the journalist and literary critic Gamini Dissanayake) was that “if you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything and everything”.

In Geneva we stood for something. In our hour of need, we reaped the harvest of a principled and active foreign policy practice, in the votes and supportive speeches we received from our natural constituency, variously identifiable as the global South and Russia, or the NAM plus Russia and China, or G77 plus Russia. Mao ze Dong identified the crucial question of strategy as “Who are our friends? Who are our enemies?” and commended the building of the broadest possible united front, uniting all those who can be united, neutralizing those intermediate elements who cannot, and isolating the main adversary. Without clarity in identification of who one’s friends are, one cannot build the broadest possible united front and succeed. In Geneva last week we may have applied the tactics of Zizek’s Lenin, of a high risk pushing for an endgame while we could have stopped short and capitulated in a compromise on sovereignty masked as consensus, but our approach was more Lennon than Lenin. We won “with a little help from our friends”.

As Cuba has proved, one cannot defend the national interest by being narrowly nationalist; one has to be internationalist in order to defend and protect the Patria. Geneva was a miniature diplomatic Dien Bien Phu or Bay of Pigs for the EU. Of the many comments on Sri Lanka’s victory (and the many congratulations that came my way) the most accurate was in an email and fax from DEW Gunasekara, who wrote both on his behalf as well as that of his party. Currently Minister of Constitutional Affairs and National Integration, DEW is the leader of the Communist Party, but more pertinently he was the International Affairs Secretary of that party when I first knew him more than three decades ago. Revealing that the Cabinet had been meeting, monitoring the Geneva HRC proceedings real time, with President Rajapakse expressing optimism at the result, reminiscing that he had known me from my days as an undergraduate at Peradeniya, and making a poignant reference to his late friend and my father Mervyn, comrade DEW correctly summed up the Geneva outcome: “it was a historic session reflecting the growing role of the new world balance of forces”. None can do a Kosovo on Sri Lanka: wrong century, wrong continent, wrong country.

(These are the strictly personal views of the writer)

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