Sri Lanka’s twin despair

By Rajan Hoole & Kopalasingham Sritharan

(February 18, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) The focus now is rightly on the civilians in the Vanni dying and being injured, caught between the LTTE’s determination to use them as a buffer and as corpses in statistics, and a government intent on crushing the Tigers with the free use of heavy weapons. The civilians have not been given a meaningful way out. The glass case behind which these helpless civilians were held and paraded as willing martyrs for the Tiger cause, with the connivance of an articulate expatriate lobby, is being shattered, more tragically now than in 1990 and 1995. It becomes all the more important to have in place an institutional mechanism to protect them.

The right way to deal with the problem was to place the primary onus on political means by meeting Tamil aspirations and exposing the Tigers. This has been tried only half-heartedly because of an extremist but vocal Sinhalese minority intent on crushing the Tamils as a political entity, habitually undermining every effort at a mildly federal settlement. They are now in control, with help from the LTTE and its provocations. The Tigers suppressed dissent with harsh repression holding that there should be no criticism of their means until Eelam is attained. Likewise, Lankan defence spokesmen have branded critics of their often criminal actions as traitors who strengthen the LTTE. While President Rajapaksa tries to reassure the world by saying nice things, masked gunmen on motorcycles or in white vans who began targeting Tamils in 2006 have now become the dread of all Sinhalese who defer. Several journalists have been killed, attacked or have fled the country. The social, political and economic cost of ‘crushing the Tamils with numbers’ is being hid from the Sinhalese. Dissent still survives perilously.

One writer wrote, “Count the number of [disabled] Sinhala youth who are permanently limping around you…Count the number of young widows who are staring blank into the future, with a fatherless infant on her lap. Count the little children who are often used as ‘exhibits’, standing in rows for politicians to grin at them, the children of ‘war heroes’. [Observe] all those teenage village girls who frequent the Anuradhapura town for a living, waiting to be picked up by vacationing young soldiers.”

A senior left leader said recently, “[President] Mahinda uses this opium [of Sinhalese chauvinism] to drug the masses to forget hunger and misery…” A respected woman columnist warned of mounting repression, ‘The President sounded an ominous note in his Independence Day speech when he said, “We are today a nation that has defeated a powerful enemy (the LTTE) that stood before us. Similarly we should have the ability to defeat all internal enemies that are found in our midst’. That ‘internal enemy’ could be a political opponent, a journalist, a Christian priest…any citizen who questions the regime’s omnipotence.’

This is the culmination of a history in which the State’s violence and obduracy in the face of legitimate Tamil demands for autonomy and security led to the Tamil militant response. The State tried to address this with violence and massacres killing, for a start, 7,000 Tamil civilians from 1983 to 1987, triggering the usurpation of the Tamil struggle by the LTTE for whom negotiation was anathema — a luxury whose terrible cost was imposed on a hapless people. The Sinhalese as a people have learnt much more than they are given credit for. Once the war ends the government would find it hard to sustain present levels of impunity and repression and many Sinhalese would want a fair political settlement for the Tamils.

Meanwhile the challenges before India are immediately to contribute towards the protection of Tamils in the Vanni and to a fair political settlement. Given that the LTTE decimated the Tamil leadership, India would have to ensure the emergence of a new Tamil leadership within a genuinely democratic process. In this regard India’s basic stand that it has no sympathy for the LTTE and at the same time the Tamil people are distinct from the LTTE, and should be protected at all times, is the correct one. But in practice its actions that amount to seeking assurances from President Rajapaksa and promising aid for reconstruction, have no effect on the ground.

To all those who look to India to have a benign influence on the situation, it is important that she maintains its credibility. Today many civilians are afraid to leave the LTTE area because of the government’s record in killing sympathisers and family members of the LTTE, and most civilians have, frequently conscripted, close kin in the LTTE. These are also persons being killed without ever having wanted to fight. President Rajapaksa has after all formally invited Tamil Nadu leaders to come and an all-party delegation could do a great deal of good. Civilians would also have far greater protection if India plays its rightful role in lending its weight and personnel in international efforts to monitor and ensure that proper standards are observed with regard to civilians fleeing the LTTE.

It is India that could prevail upon the Sri Lankan government to return the displaced to their homes expeditiously and not hold them in camps for years to establish Sinhalese settlements on their lands. They are traumatised by their calamity and their future cannot be trusted to the present regime.

Those in Tamil Nadu who use the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils for their narrow political ends, and blindly defend the LTTE, are inadvertently advancing the latter’s doom. Playing to emotions without engaging with the Sinhalese to work for concrete measures has been the bane of Tamil politics on both sides of the Palk Strait. This is a role that civil society and human rights activists in Tamil Nadu could take on by engaging with their counterparts in Sri Lanka, through seeking constructive means to defend the rights of all the communities in Sri Lanka.

Judging by newspaper columns there are Sinhalese opinion makers, who though not sympathetic to Tamil aspirations, do not want to see the Sinhalese branded as barbarians. One suggested a week’s truce to allow the UN to go in, ascertain the plight of civilians and do what they can. Given such sensitivities, there is great scope for India in multilateral action. Every effort should be made to give the unwilling conscripts — prisoners — a chance.

Part of the paranoia in Sri Lanka results from a perception in defence circles that any foreign concern is designed to breathe new life into the LTTE. India and the leaders of Tamil Nadu have a clear position on this and could without any ambiguity make the distinction between defeating the LTTE and criminal actions against unarmed civilians by the state security apparatus, and see that the distinction is observed. That would help to ensure that the cause of democracy in Sri Lanka is not lost.

-Sri Lanka Guardian