If the current mentality prevails, separation becomes a legitimate cause

"The Rajapakse Government, a tragic entourage that keeps bloating by the hour, seems insisting on compounding all these evil into one mighty monster with absolutely no courage and guts to sort out and solve the ethnic problem; that is all what is needed to put the country back on the straight path."

(October, 26, Frankfurt, Sri Lanka Guardian) Just about everything that happened at the Anuradhapura Military Base has a strange familiarity except this was a much larger operation by the LTTE that caught the government forces once again on the hop like in many previous operations including the Katunayake International Airport attack.

The country is steadily going down the slide, now even at a faster pace and Zimbabwean type of inflation is threatening Sri Lanka. We are borrowing in terms of billions from the international market at commercial rates. This means we will remain steeped in debts for a very long time to come. All this because successive governments have alienated the Tamils and virtually exhausted our assets and driven the nation into the mire of racial hatred, ethnic violence, corruption and political tomfoolery.

A nation with an exceptionally high degree of literacy and plentiful natural and human resources at the dawn of independence rubbed the magic lamp for a genie of racial horror and plunged the country into utter straits. Since then government after government has been held to ransom by a minority of racial and religious bigots and later in fanning more and more racial and religious hatred the politicians saw opportunities to make private gains through corrupt avenues for themselves.

The Rajapakse Government, a tragic entourage that keeps bloating by the hour, seems insisting on compounding all these evil into one mighty monster with absolutely no courage and guts to sort out and solve the ethnic problem; that is all what is needed to put the country back on the straight path.

Why is this difficult?

The Tigers are not problems generated or created by the Tamils. The LTTE is consequential to the racist policies of the government, and wiping out the LTTE will not solve the problems either. The solution lies not in dumping the country with all kinds of arms, not in forcing young people to arm themselves to kill their own people – I gather Tamils and Sinhalese and Muslim still belong to each other – but in making it possible for all the people to live in peace and good relationship.

Photo: Sri Lankan Muslims in Muttur, Trincomalee, Pix by Nuwan Jayatilleke.

Before the European conquerors arrived on our horizon our people enjoyed a civilized system of government very much decentralized and quite healthy too. We have to go back to that which today would be equivalent to a federal system.

If the government is not prepared to consider this as fair and just solution, it had better be ready to face a situation when the cry for separation would become the only alternative for the Tamils. This is not a just demand just as a federal state was considered years ago. But today the federal system offers the only hope not just for the Tamils alone but to the whole country as well. If this is resisted then a separate linguistic state for the Tamil-speaking people becomes the only alternative.

Colombo would be wiser to consider a federal solution but if it still remains silent or rather immobile and allow racists to call the tune, Tamils will have to consider seriously the geopolitical context in which the Tamils in Sri Lanka have been reduced as second class citizens.

(Satchi Sithanandan is a Consulting editor for Sri Lanka Guardian)