LTTE could have been cracked, if Govt., was decent with Tamils

By Namini Wijedasa with UTHR [J]

Some warriors in Sri Lanka’s bullet-ridden, suicide-bombed past stand out like beacons that tirelessly shed light on human misery and despised political truths. The ships may go astray – and even crash on the rocks – but these lighthouses never extinguish their beams. Rajan Hoole is one of them.

“We identify with a peculiar country called Sri Lanka and it must indeed be frustrating for all of us with some sense left,” Hoole reflected last week, in an exclusive interview with Namini Wijedasa. “Why has the war gone on for so long when it is only what arms profiteers and extremists really want?”

“And, then… we are stuck with a force like the LTTE which only a few, like the JHU, have really understood because of shared affinities,” he asked. “Why has the Sinhalese polity been so inept, so blind to the obvious and unable to offer a federal political settlement that would not be an issue in most countries today?”

“Why have they wallowed in a disease where the rest of the world is bound to see us, both Sinhalese and Tamils, as subhuman in the way we have behaved?” he mused. “Tamils are far from innocent. How could one be complacent with a force that conscripts children and encourages the injured to become suicide bombs?”

The deeply religious (he is Christian) Hoole has lived most of his adult years cheating death and fighting injustice. He is fifty-eight-years old, conceived at Ceylon’s independence and born in Jaffna. His father was an Anglican priest, his mother a teacher. Parts of his childhood were spent in Tangalle, Veyangoda and Jaffna.

After seven years at Chundikuli Girls’ College and St John’s, Jaffna, he joined St Thomas for his last four years of school – two of them at Gurutalawa. He read engineering at Peradeniya and spent seven years in Singapore before doing his Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics at Oxford. This was followed by three more years in Singapore before he joined the University of Jaffna in 1985.

“Paradoxically, the bulk of my life has been spent out of Jaffna, the only place I feel home,” he says, today. “We could move to another country and try to build up a new identity. But our diseased minds we carry with us. The cure is in Sri Lanka. We cannot shake off where we come from.”

“I, for one, will never be a normal person abroad… though I could try to become a vegetable,” he continues. “Frustrating, but we are chained. With our origins come challenges and there is fulfillment in facing up to them. Running away is a form of cowardice that diminishes us.”

“My frustration,” he points out, “is nothing compared with that of a family living a fairly peaceable rural life, then the Tigers come and start taking their children, then the Government shells them, drives them away from home, kills and maims them, dumps them in a refugee camp and pinches their land. We must all remember that and do what we can even if it is only a drop in the ocean.”

Hoole is a founding member of the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), launched at the University of Jaffna in 1988 as a local chapter of a countrywide organization addressing human rights violations. Another founding member was Rajani Thiranagama, whom the LTTE murdered in 1989. Despite her death, UTHR (J) has continued to publish its special reports for nearly twenty years.

Today, Hoole and co-founder Dr Kopalasingham Sritharan are the public faces of UTHR (J). In May, they were named winners of the prestigious Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders by eleven of the world’s leading human rights organizations. The award ceremony is in October.

The two men are under dire threat from many quarters. Where did they find the courage to persist? “Ceasing to worry about danger is more accurate than (the word) courage,” Hoole replied. Rajani’s assassination had been a warning to all who disagreed with the LTTE. They had two choices: “Go out and forget all about it… or function semi-underground from Colombo”.

Rajan and his colleagues chose the second option and continued with help from several Sinhala groups and Tamil dissidents who left the country after mid-2004, when LTTE terror in Colombo became severe. “It always involved more than individual courage,” Hoole said.

The UTHR (J) has never been an NGO with a public office and receives funding only for their publications. “For our living, we supplemented our own funds and wives’ earnings with informal contributions from friends,” he explained.

Over the years, through every phase of political upheaval and bloody war, UTHR (J) special reports have staunchly maintained independence. Nobody involved in human rights violations has escaped unscathed. The latest report, released on August 3, is a strong indictment on President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s regime which it accuses of “decimating” the Tamils.

Asked whether he truly believed this of the Government, Hoole replied: “Of the Government, yes, but we have made it clear that its actions do not represent the Sinhalese people who have far better sense. We are dealing with a President whose election is in doubt, whose proposals for a constitutional settlement are an insult and who has allowed persons with JHU-type ideas a key role in the Defence Ministry.”

“The Sinhalese never elected the JHU as their leaders,” he said. “The President seems to have decided that capturing the central ground of Sinhalese extremism is the key to his survival.”

Tamil people have been driven out of their homes with multi-barreled rocket launchers. They have been aerial bombed and dumped in refugee camps where, too, they are terrorized. Their lands have been taken over. Their livelihoods and education of children have suffered irreparable damage.

“The Government does not in any tangible way acknowledge responsibility for their fate or for the wanton damage it did,” Hoole pointed out. “There are surely more effective ways of fighting the Tigers, firstly by an acceptable political settlement. It was as though this war is primarily against the Tamils.”

“When previous Governments violated human rights, it was certainly ugly and arrogant,” he said. “Under this Government, it is rank hypocrisy bordering on comedy… if such things were laughable.”

The minorities, he said, cannot live with dignity in the kind of Sri Lanka offered by Rajapaksa and the JHU.

But Hoole is no Tiger champion. Asked whether he thought he was less Tamil than LTTE cheerleaders, he said strongly that Tiger-supporting Tamils have “reached a point of total bankruptcy.”

“They have over the years funded the misery of Tamils at home,” he maintained. “Many of them would walk away and perhaps curse Prabhakaran for his tactical obduracy in alienating people around him and killing Rajiv (Gandhi). They would not blame themselves for failing to see the inevitable end of such homicidal intolerance. They would likely walk away into a shell and forget with shame that they were ever Tamils at all. How could I, then, become less Tamil?”

There has been no change in the LTTE, only adaptation. “The leader seeks absolute power over the Tamils and the means to stabilize his global networks, which could only be realized in a separate state,” Hoole analyzed. The Norwegians and nearly all peace INGOs essentially proposed to the LTTE a “half way extra-constitutional solution”.

“They failed to grasp that a man who has made himself god, and believes in his right to have and to order suicide cadres sworn to die at his command, cannot be anything less than king and emperor,” Hoole said.

Today, the LTTE has hit another low, but is far stronger than what it was after the Indian Peace Keeping Force left. “There is a lot of disillusionment within,” Hoole said. “If Governments were decent with the Tamils, it would have cracked a long time ago. For the LTTE, a federal solution is what they would periodically float to buy time. But for the Tamil people today, it is a matter of life and death and a long held aspiration.”

Asked how he would like to be remembered after death, Hoole said “as one who honourably faced up to the challenges I was thrown into in my time”.

“I meet many animals, strays, and my heart goes out to them. I would like to think that they remember I meant well by them, though I did very little.”