Is Britain a friendly country?

"Why did Britain pass the 2000 Terrorist Act? Doesn’t it violate the so-called fundamental or human rights of certain groups of people to associate and engage in certain "democratic" activities? For how long are we going to be deceived by these technical terms like fundamental rights and democratic activities? As we have mentioned a number of times fundamental rights are relative to a society and they are not sacred or objective as presented in the schools and universities."

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by Nalin de Silva

(The views expressed are his own)

(February 02, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Sunday newspapers were not optimistic about the proscription of the LTTE in the UK. The UK 2000 Terrorist Act gives powers to the government to ban international terrorist organisations though the organisations have not resorted to terrorism in the UK. Under the act, as Mr. Lakshman Kadirgamer had said in the interview he had given to news media, the LTTE can be banned in the UK. In other words the LTTE satisfies the criteria given in the act, to be named as a terrorist organisation. However it is not only the legal criteria that come into play in the decision of the UK government in proscribing the LTTE. There are political criteria, though they are not explicitly stated, that are more important than the legal criteria. In fact even the legal criteria were formulated as a result of a political decision to enable the UK government to ban certain terrorist organisations in that country. Law, however important it may be, subserviently follows politics.

The British government had decided to ban certain terrorist organisation that have become a threat or a nuisance to them. In order to enable them to do so they need a so-called legal instrument, unlike in the days of the kings whose word was the law. The British however would not name the organisations in the Act. The Act is drafted in very general terms to make it very "objective" and also so that it could be used in the future as well if the situation so demands. However, as it is formulated, the Act alone is not sufficient for the act of banning an organisation, and somebody, person or a body of persons, has to be given the power under the very same Act to name those organisations that have to be banned. It could be called the discretion or whatever of the authority and the subjective factor which cannot be avoided now creeps back into the Act. It is this subjectivity, which is present (Heidegger would have said that "presence" is the bugbear of western philosophy) from the very beginning and not the so-called objectivity which is present only in the subjective dreams of the individuals trained by legal and other scholars in the western tradition, that the minister Kadirgamer and the Sri Lankan government have to deal with.

Why anti Terrorism Act?

Why did Britain pass the 2000 Terrorist Act? Doesn’t it violate the so-called fundamental or human rights of certain groups of people to associate and engage in certain "democratic" activities? For how long are we going to be deceived by these technical terms like fundamental rights and democratic activities? As we have mentioned a number of times fundamental rights are relative to a society and they are not sacred or objective as presented in the schools and universities. Fundamental or human rights were given to the people in Europe by governments to their supporters after they were able to establish themselves in power. In Britain or any other country in the west there are no fundamental rights for the other cultures. The people belonging to the other cultures may have fundamental or human rights as individuals living in a Judaic Christian country but not as groups of people of different cultures. The blacks in the USA are gaining their fundamental rights gradually as individuals after having become members of the Judaic Christian culture (civilisation). If there is any threat to the hegemony of the Judaic Christian civilisation, the west knows how to curb those movements with scant regard for the fundamental or human rights of the opposition.

Clash of civilisations

The democracy in the west works within the Judaic Christian culture and it is not for nothing that in Britain the opposition is called Her Majesty’s opposition, the queen being the head of the Anglican Church. It is an opposition within a certain system and both the government and the opposition are united when it comes to a question of defending the system. (We in Asia and Africa, who have been forced with this western democracy, find it very difficult to come to terms with the concept of an opposition within the same culture or civilisation, as the concept did not evolve within our cultures. For us the function of the opposition is to oppose the government whatever the consequences may be. However, this does not mean that in the past we did not have or tolerate opposing ideas in the society)

They may say that they are acting in unison in the national interest which is nothing but another name for the interest of their civilisation in general and culture in particular. There is nothing fundamental or human in these rights and they should be properly called Judaic Christian rights.
The phenomenon of rights for a particular group is not something new in the western tradition. To the Romans all people other than themselves were barbarians. (those who have studied Latin at school will remember the tough time that character Cotta in the elementary Latin text books had fighting all those barbarians). It is safe to assume that the western Judaic Christian tradition started in 315 A.D. when Christianity (not what Jesus preached, I am afraid) became legal in the Roman empire by imperial edict. (This has to be studied in contrast to the Ashokan Buddhist state that was established in Bharat about 600 years before this particular Roman imperial edict.) Those who are interested in finding out how the Judaic Christian civilisation became the dominant civilisation by massacring/converting the pagans/heathens could log in to the website www.siteboard.de . The so-called protestant ethic of Max Weber (we have to remember that he too belonged to the Judaic Christian civilisation and that there is no "objectivity" in his writings.) is mainly the will to dominate by any means the nature and the other people in the world.

Britain as well as the other western countries, now finding that certain terrorist organisations are threatening their civilisation, are preparing to take action against these organisations. As it has been said, the west has now finished with communism and are taking up the fight against Kumenism. In other words the western European Judaic Christian civilisation having defeated the Greek Orthodox civilisation of the Eastern Europe is now prepared to take on the Islamic civilisation. The UK 2000 Terrorist Act is essentially in

preparation for this next major clash of civilisations. It is not for the banning of the LTTE and we in Sri Lanka have to campaign hard to get LTTE proscribed in Britain.

Politics of the ban

Banning of an organisation, legally or otherwise, is a political act. Britain will ban the LTTE only if we are capable of applying extreme political pressure on the British government. Why should Britain proscribe the LTTE, on its own, under the provisions of the UK 2000 Terrorist Act? The LTTE is threatening neither the British government nor the Judaic Christian civilisation at the moment. In fact it is an instrument in the hands of both Britain and western Judaic Christian civilisation. Britain in particular and the west in general are using the LTTE to weaken if not destroy Sri Lanaka as part of a clash of civilisations. As I have shown in "An Introduction to Tamil racism in Sri Lanka", the British created Tamil racism in 1833 by appointing one unofficial member each to represent the Sinhalas and the Tamils in the legislative assembly, thus depriving Sinhalathva its due place in the country. Mr. Kadirgamer and the Sri Lankan government will find it difficult to invite the attention of the British to listen to their arguments. We have to understand that Britain is not one of our friendly countries. Some of us may have been to Britain on scholarships and fellowships offered by them and studied and carried out research for them in their universities and other institutions. But we have to realise that, as the English they themselves say, there is no free lunch as such and we have paid a price by offering ourselves to brainwashed by them. The irony is that by maintaining the school system and the university system that they created, and teaching our students their knowledge we continue to brainwash our children not at their expense but ours. so-called educational experts, who themselves know, if at all, only western educational theories and concepts, now seem to think that the brainwashing can be done more efficiently by instructing the students in the English medium. (It must be stated that as a nation we lost our creativity long ago when the educated switched over to Pali from Sinhala in the fifth century or so. It is sad that after the middle of the Anuradhapura period we have failed to produce any significant theories or concepts on our own. How many concepts and theories have been created by the English educated in Sri Lanka during the last one hundred and sixty five years, since the inception of the Colombo Academy (Royal College)?)

Worldwide campaign

If Britain is a friendly country they should have helped the Sri Lankan government to capture Prabhakaran dead or alive and defeat the LTTE. A friendly country would help a government to implement the policy of the latter especially when there is a threat to the state. It is clear that Britain and the west are more friendly with the LTTE than with the Sri Lankan state. It was reported last Sunday in the Sri Lankan press that a Czechoslovakian officer who has connections with Norway had tried to stop selling arms to the Sri Lankan government after the Elephant Pass debacle last year. Instead of helping the government they send special envoys to Vanniya to meet Prabhakaran. This is in contrast to how they behaved in 1971 and in 1987-90,

when the JVP took up arms against the state. Though not out of any friendly attitude, but to massacre the JVP cades who consisted mainly of Sinhala Buddhists despite their Marxist slogans, the west helped the then governments. That mouthpiece of western cultural hegemony, the BBC, did not hesitate then to call the JVP a terrorist organisation. However, from now onwards the experts and the Foreign Office in Britain will work overtime to think of suitable sophisticated arguments to "convince" themselves first and then the world why the LTTE should not be banned while proscribing some other organisations under the UK 2000 Terrorist Act.

An orchestrated campaign worldwide is called for against the LTTE and terrorism. We have to commend late Mr. Kadirgamer for talks the right step in that direction by entering into an agreement on terrorism with his Russian counterpart. This was something long overdue and we would like to see him in many other capitals in the coming weeks. Though defeated by the west, Eastern European countries are not weak and we also have to have strong ties with countries such as China. It is not a case of externalising the Tamil racist problem but getting help from friendly countries and others to defeat the LTTE terrorists.

(Professor Nalin de Silva is a Sri Lankan theoretical physicist, philosopher and a political analyst. He is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.)