“A complete baseless argument is that state sponsored colonization is bad and other forms of voluntary colonization are good. This is baseless because even if people voluntarily settle down in the East and the North, they would still be Sinhalese or Muslims! It is important to remember the degree of damage this attitude has caused to the country.”
by Thomas Johnpulle
(September 14, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) It’s a great misfortune that racism is a long way from extinction. What is even more unfortunate is that it is the leaders of the people or supposed leaders of the people who are poisoning the society with racial ill-will whereas they should be building inter-racial unity! Where on earth do you get racial enclaves where people of other races cannot rightfully live? If there is any such place on earth that place is untouched by modern civilization and it is bound to change soon.
Roots of this race-based thinking are 90 years old. First official race-based demands were made in 1918 by The Jaffna Association when they demanded from the British a racial representation system which was rejected. However, it failed to kill racial demands that grew from strength to strength. From All Ceylon Tamil Congress to Tamil National Alliance (note the racial affiliation even in the names of these political parties) it has been the same theme all the way. This is the biggest impediment to finding a negotiated settlement to the ethnic problem facing Sri Lanka which demands ethnic integration and definitely not further incitation of racial differences. Tamils settling down in Sinhala majority areas and Sinhalese settling down in Tamil majority areas is the surest way to integrate the two ethnicities. People of these two races have lived together for millennia and there is no reason whatsoever why they should split now. And they don’t; they live happily in one community. More than 50% of Tamils live in Sinhala majority areas and a large number of Sinhalese would be still living in the North if not for ethnic cleansing acts carried out by the LTTE. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims would be living in the North if not for ethnic cleansing crimes committed by the LTTE in 1990. Today the war has displaced hundreds of thousands of people. It is a very sad situation and hopefully people would be settled in their homes before long. LTTE and connected groups pretend to be the most concerned about them. This is a joke. They were tightlipped in 1980s when people were wiped out from the north because of their race. Again in the 1990s it repeated and it was the same response from most champions of human rights today. They better learn that displacement and hunger know no race. Only then their concerns would be genuine.
A complete baseless argument is that state sponsored colonization is bad and other forms of voluntary colonization are good. This is baseless because even if people voluntarily settle down in the East and the North, they would still be Sinhalese or Muslims! It is important to remember the degree of damage this attitude has caused to the country. The Mahaweli project which was the largest development project of this country had to be changed, modified, toned-down and partly abandoned due to ethnic cleansing activities carried out by the LTTE in the 1980s and thereafter. Massacres were committed in Kent and Dollar farms in the early 1980s simply because of the ethnicity of the people working in them! Sri Lankan economy and food production suffered irreparable loss thanks to the conduct of these racist elements. Does Mother Nature differentiate between Sinhalese and Tamils; do the Mahaweli or Kelani rivers discriminate between the Sinhalese and Tamils?
There lived a poet by the name Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who among other great art works wrote a poem by the name, “Father, let my country awake”. The country would awake into freedom where it has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls caused by narrow-mindedness. This is without a doubt the prayer of all Sri Lankans. It is time to tear down these mythical walls that are supposed to separate people based on their race. If someone desires to keep these walls, he/she should be prepared for perpetual war.
(The writer can be reached at trjohnpulle@yahoo.co.uk)- Sri Lanka Guardian
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