The Appapillai Amirthalingam Eightieth Birth-anniversary Memorial Lecture ',A Time for Tamil Introspection and Reassessment in the midst of Myth and Propaganda '; delivered by Prof. S, Ratnajeevan Hoole on London, 26 August, 2007Population Statistics – The Bell Tolls for Tamils of Sri Lanka
I now move on to the main subject of this talk – A Time for Tamil Introspection and Reassessment in the midst of Myth and Propaganda. I will take as a given the cruelty we Tamils have suffered at the hands of the Sri Lankan state. I do not for a moment diminish its evil. Indeed there is little to debate on that matter as even the government in its occasional good moments has ceded that fact and also apologized for it. The wider international community too takes that for granted.
Today we are at a time when we Tamils face a grave crisis – a crisis that questions our very existence as a people. When I was a boy, I was taught that we so called Ceylon Tamils and Indian Tamils numbered 11% each, the Muslims some 7 percent and allowing for Burghers, Malays and others, the Sinhalese were 69%. Today the Srimavo-Shastri Pact, so correctly and vehemently opposed by the FP, has reduced the Indian Tamil population to some 5.7%.
And what of the Ceylon Tamil population? No census has been conducted in Tamil areas since 1981 because of the war. The government Department of Census and Statistics has published estimates that do not reflect the massive reduction of Tamils in Sri Lanka, thereby saving the government from charges of genocide. I believe that the North-East was deliberately skipped for this reason. For I have seen several NGO and Education surveys being successfully conducted. In one instance my wife and her team went into remote corners of LTTE territory.
It is a lie in which we Tamils too have colluded. It benefits us as well for it ensures that the number of Tamil seats in Parliament, based in part on population figures, are kept up and quotas of Tamil university places based on these numbers preserved.
It had been my estimate that Ceylon Tamils are at 5.5% making a Tamil total of 11.2%. Ceylon Tamil numbers, as all of us know, have been vitiated by human rights violations from all sides – in the words of the International Crisis Group based in Brussels, and I quote
While the LTTE has continued its deliberately provocative attacks on the military and Sinhalese civilians as well as its violent repression of Tamil dissenters and forced recruitment of adults and children, the government is using extra-judicial killings and disappearances as part of a brutal and counter-productive counter-insurgency campaign. ‘Human rights abuses are for the most part the result of deliberate policy decisions by the government and the LTTE’, says David Lewis, Crisis Group Regional Deputy Director.
Close quotation.
The LTTE leadership has fallen from its noble goal of freedom for the Tamil people; as has President Rajapakse from his once high status as defender of human rights when he was arrested at the airport under Premadasa for smuggling information to Geneva on rights violations in 1990.
As the country bleeds its Tamil population, the world needs to take serious note of Minority Rights Group International’s 2007 Report “Minorities under Threat” which saw the Tamils of Sri Lanka moving from forty-ninth endangered place in the year 2006 to fourteenth in the year 2007. Urgency is added by a recent article in the Washington Post where Minister Rambukwella, the Sri Lanka government spokesman, let the cat out of the bag when he said “Thirty nine percent of Tamils now live in the Western Province.” His intention of course was to say that Tamils prefer, when they can, to live in the Sinhalese South rather than under the LTTE. And this is indeed often true for reasons including fear of military action in addition to the harsh rule of the LTTE as he was saying. But in so saying Minister Rambukwella gave us, officially for the first time, the true population statistics.
Now with Minister Rambukwella’s revelation, we see the true numbers. The 2001 Census from the non-Tamil areas where the Census was conducted gives Tamil numbers in the Western Province Districts of Kalutara, Gampaha and Colombo as 387,043 . If this is 39% of the Ceylon Tamil population, then we Tamils number 992,417 in the island, a figure of 10% at most – a very realistic figure that is a little worse than I feared and is in consonance with figures of Tamils before the conflict, Tamils in foreign countries and those I have seen from government officials in charge of rations distribution in Tamil areas. The Tamil population has been reduced to less than a half in our 60 years of so called independence.
The Need for Reassessment and Action without Delay
A crisis is upon the Tamil community. Time is of the essence. A new direction is required if we are to survive as a people. Reality must be faced. Mythmaking – and there is a lot of it – has to stop. Divisions within the community need to be bridged – and that means pluralism has to return. Indeed, the two – pluralism and our survival – are very connected and I would like to take this opportunity to point out a few places to start.
As a person who believed strongly in federalist principles, I must confess to being guilty myself of many of the community’s faults. As an academic teaching ethical principles for engineers, I am most mindful from the Ford Pinto, Columbia Space Shuttle and Bay Area Rapid Transport engineering debacles that are now classic textbook examples which we engineering educators use to draw lessons from – of their repeated lesson that problems need to be addressed early and that delay means that the problem gets bigger.
We easily see this principle in politics. The US and Israel refused to deal with Yasir Arafat and even tried hard to sideline his Fatah. Arafat lost prestige among his people for his failure to show results. The extremists gained. And today we see the sad spectacle of Israel and the US trying to shore up Fatah in the hope of off-setting the power of the far more radical and uncompromising Hamas. But most analysts believe it is too late. We have seen the same phenomenon with the TULF. After sidelining and breaking it up, the Sri Lankan government tried vainly to deal with the TULF rather than the LTTE
Just like with the engineering problems with the Ford Pinto, an early solution would have been easy. But having delayed it, a solution seems as elusive as when the fuel tanks of the Pinto had exploded in several accidents and several law suits were upon the company. In contrast, when Quebecers wanted to quit Canada and the Canadian government generously allowed a referendum, the fissiparous tendencies seemed to evaporate. Pierre Trudeau, a French Canadian, campaigned against separatism. But no one called him a traitor and shot him. When the Scottish people showed even the slightest sign of restiveness, they were given their own institutions aborting any violent fissiparous reaction.
Link to Part 01
To be continued …….
About Lecture, S. Ratnajeevan Hoole, Scholar Rescue Fund Fellow, Institute of International Education, New York, NY Drexel University, Philadelphia and former Vice Chancellor in University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka
Post a Comment