Why Sri Lanka burns

(March 27, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Recently, I wrote about the current slaughter in Sri Lanka— tens of thousands of civilians killed because neither side will let them leave the battlefield. In response, one reader called my "evenhandedness" "insipid." He ascribes to the party line that the LTTE are freedom fighters justified by decades of Sinhala oppression against the Tamil people.

That's one of two positions common in the Sri Lanka conflict. The other is that the LTTE are just terrorists who have taken up arms against the lawful and just Government.

Which one is true? Both have small threads of truth to them, but neither really explains much. These simplistic views of the conflict fail to adequately explain the actions of the combatants. For example, to believe the former, we would need to believe that the rabidly chauvinist Sinhalese people care nothing for their own wellbeing— they're willing to sacrifice themselves to wipe the Tamil people off the island. Or that the LTTE is equally committed to the destruction of the Sinhalese "nation." Neither explanation makes much sense— especially if you've ever been to Sri Lanka.

The problem is, the roots of the conflict are complex— and they cast both sides in an unfavorable light. You'll never hear about them from representatives of either combatant, nor will you read about them in the media, which has no patience for complexity. The simple "ethnic conflict" explanation is far easier to sell, even if it does paint both sides as madmen inexplicable to anyone outside the island.

In a series of posts, I hope to bring some understanding to what is surely a misunderstood conflict— and one in which dozens of civilians are being killed in the time it takes you read this. The most troubling aspect of Sri Lanka's Sinhala-Tamil conflict is that it's a secondary conflict, and there is no possibility of peace until the primary conflict is identified and understood.

The primary conflict actually has nothing to do with the Tamils— it's internal to the Sinhalese, and it's a struggle for power between different sets of leaderships. In the beginning, there were two: the traditional pre-colonial Buddhist monk/village headmen structure, and the colonial trading class that arose (and was supported by the British) that stands in opposition. From the time of independence in 1948, these two jockeyed for position— to the exclusion of anyone's interest but their own. Not only the Tamil people, but also the poverty-stricken Sinhalese suffered as a result.

On the Sinhalese side, militancy arose among the poor. The self-described "Marxist-Buddhist" JVP staged an aborted revolution in 1972. The leaders were imprisoned or eliminated. But in 1987 they arose again, this time triggering a 3-year bloodbath in which tens of thousands of Sinhalese were killed. The government eventually vanquished the JVP, but only by using tactics even more heinous than the rebels. When the JVP emerged again in 1994, it appeared as a political party that had ostensibly renounced violence. Today, that party represents a "third front" in the intra-Sinhalese struggle.

Here lies the problem for the Tamils: from a pragmatic political standpoint— the view of the Sinhalese elites— there are not enough of them to be important. None of the Sinhalese parties needs them in order to win the struggle for control of the Sinhalese. But all three Sinhalese leaderships use the war as a tool for manipulating the Sinhalese public.

Since the fighting resumed in 2007, the Rajapakse administration appears to have gained nearly complete control over the Sinhalese. That is its goal: elimination of the democratic process and consolidation of control over a diverse and fragmented populace. (The notion of a unified Sinhala nation is erroneous— the Sinhalese are divided by class, caste, and regional variations in language, culture, and economics.) The administration will use any means for success. What happens to the LTTE or the Tamil people in the process is purely a secondary consideration. Simple math explains why: 2/3 of the island is Sinhalese, and 100% of 2/3 is better than 50% or less of the whole.

Sadly, it is not only the Tamil people who suffer as a result of this conflict. The vast majority of Sinhalese who are not members of the elite or the tiny urban middle class live in poverty. Tens of thousands were forcibly resettled in "Tamil" areas where they became targets for the LTTE. Hundreds of thousands of others, having no job prospects, joined the military in exchange for the government's promise to support their family should they be killed in action.

Though the suffering of both the Sinhala and Tamil people as a result of this intra-Sinhala conflict has been great, few outside the Sinhala community recognize it— and few within acknowledge it. Yet no peace can be made until this intra-Sinhala conflict is understood and resolved, since that is the real cause of the inter-ethnic conflict on the island.

Given the position of Sri Lanka's Tamils as a minority on the island and a pawn in the struggle between competing groups of the majority Sinhalese, the Tamils have legitimate grievances against the government. But despite its claims, the LTTE's ultimate goal has little to do with the redress of those grievances. Rather (much like the various Sinhalese leaderships) the goal of the LTTE is to control the Tamils.

To understand this dynamic, it's necessary to know a bit about the role of caste in Sri Lanka. Among both Sinhalese and Tamils, the high castes are the majority. This differs markedly from India, where there are many more low-caste people than high caste. The LTTE, despite its vociferous claims, represents not the Tamil people as a whole, but the low-caste Tamil people who were the most powerless among their disempowered ethnic minority. (They do not, however, and do not claim to, represent the Plantation Tamils who were brought as laborers from India by the British— these belong to an even lower caste, and the LTTE has no use for them.)

Politically, this means that on a level playing field, the LTTE could never win a demicratic election. Their constituency is a minority within the minority. Rather, they have gained power by (1) eliminating all opposition within the Tamil community, and (2) using the war and the cycle of violence as a tool to increase their own support. Their own fight has been as much against the high-caste Tamils as against the Sinhalese.

Although interesting changes appeared on the horizon during the four years of cease-fire, at its root the LTTE is an organization that doesn't know what to do with peace. They don't approve of democratic process. They don't permit dissent. Such niceties threaten their control, and are met with violence and finality. And they view the Tamils of the east, who differ significantly in culture, as a people worthy of colonization— the ricebasket of the north.

This puts the Tamil people in an impossible situation: forced to choose between a government that doesn't want them and a rebel group that can't afford democracy but which claims to speak for them all. The current situation in the war zone is a perfect example: The LTTE uses them as human shields, the government attacks anyway. The LTTE shoots those who try to escape, and the government interns those who survive.

At times, partricularly after a quarter-million Tamils were held as human shields in Jaffna ahead of the 1996 government offensive, the Tamil people's rejection of the LTTE has appeared so complete that it was impossible to imagine a resurgence of LTTE popularity. Yet using the cycle of violence— attacking the Sinhalese and letting Tamil civilians bear the brunt of the government's retaliation— LTTE became once again the only possible hope for the Tamils.

As LTTE endures what appears to be an inevitable battlefield defeat, fades into the jungle, and returns to the guerilla tactics at which it excels, it will no doubt seek to reposition itself not as the organization that held two hundred thousand civilians in a battle zone against their will, but as the only combatant that has any political interest in the Tamils whatsoever.

-Sri Lanka Guardian