We Will Win! We Will Win!

"Apart from ignoring these high ideals, does the sight of a landscape littered with charcoal and twisted street lamps, with shells of houses as empty as ransacked tombs, landmarks disappeared under shifting dunes of rubble, tomb cities consisting of walls pitted by artillery shells, the remains of a world covered with gray ash become an acceptable sight?"Image: Vadamaradchy East in Jaffna.

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by Wakeley Paul

(The views expressed are writer’s own)

(February 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) What does this litany of the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) signify? Not just an occupying army with nothing to do but occupy. It indicates an occupying army with a determination to dominate and suppress the rights of those controlled through that occupation. This desire to dominate and suppress is the very opposite of the winners of World War II. True, they had a desire to re-fire a demand for democracy, but here in Sri Lanka the reverse is true. The objective is to control and dominate the losers and ensure that the future hopes of the defeated to exist as equals are knocked out of them.

How do the major western powers - gripped by the fear of what they regard as
Muslinm Terrorism - view this ambition by the GoSL? Another terrorist group knocked out of power? Most of them other, than those who have played a major role to seek a solution, will be convinced that this is so. Do the rights of Tamils supposedly supported by Terrorists have any right to respect? Their blocked view would be, thank God, that Tamil desires for rights, causing a civil war, are ended.

Does that mean these powers assume that deprivation of equal rights to education, land ownership, fishing rights, business capacity and every ability to survive as anything other than powerless Sinhalese dependents matter? The short-sighted would say Sri Lanka and its wretched problems are too insignificant for them to worry about. Is that what these dreams of the spread of democracy throughout the Universe stand for?

Apart from ignoring these high ideals, does the sight of a landscape littered with charcoal and twisted street lamps, with shells of houses as empty as ransacked tombs, landmarks disappeared under shifting dunes of rubble, tomb cities consisting of walls pitted by artillery shells, the remains of a world covered with gray ash become an acceptable sight? Or do the world powers now spend millions to refurbish this lifeless maze into a livable haze for bloodless people destined to be lost souls in a lost world?

Can anything the west do help the Tamils emerge from their darkness? It will be like drinking the water off the roadside. Their I.C. fight to upstream the tragedy against this rocky undercurrent will give every foothold the struggle takes on, an urgency which is too severe to overcome. It will be like trying to clear a devastating flood with a lone water bucket.

The only fact that keeps humans alive is hope, and often the only way to sustain that hope against powerful oppression is an abhorrent act. The irritation of suppression bursts from bust to bloom, which is exactly what has occurred, causing the island's irreconcilable problems. The one-time beautiful tree has been infected by invisible insects that made its trunk lose its magnificence. Any victory will turn the island into a kettle that will scald its rulers and supporters the moment they touch it. One cannot call a tree without roots or bark or leaves a tree. So. too, one cannot consider a land a nation when it is infected by rabid insects.

Regard for a sleeping tiger does not make it a contented one. The fuse within it is ever ready to flare up again. One cannot turn one's back to them as if they are adoring apprentices.

Nothing is bleaker than to ignore the past. The Sinhalese will never realize this, but the International Community should have the objectivity and ability to do so.