Dignity cannot be compromised

By Malinda Seneviratne

(May 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Nations are not aggregates of people; they are not coterminous with populations sharing a geographical space. Nations are made of people. They are made of histories. They can reference heritage(s), language, customs, rituals, ways of being, and particularities of landscape. They are made of solidarities, of commonalities and other things gelled together by a necessarily undefined thing called ‘dignity’. Where this sense of collective being, of self-affirmation and celebration is absent, nations become dependencies sans spirit, sans will to innovate, sans resolve to overcome adversity. They decline.

Nations that are endowed with dignity can of course be subjugated, colonized, plundered and enslaved, but they will still retain the seeds of recovery, renewal and ultimate liberation from bondage whichever form it may take, physical, cultural or ideological.

I believe that Sri Lanka as a nation is not a basket case because despite five centuries of foreign rule and half a century of neo-colonial domination actively aided and abetted by a culturally un-moored set of academics, NGO ‘activists’ and two-bit politicians we have retained vast reservoirs of national dignity. Our today and our tomorrows will no doubt be challenged by these very same forces. There will be arm-twisting and the force-feeding of the proverbial bitter-pill in the name of geo-political reality, globalization etc., but we will contest these to the end and even if pushed back will draw from these reservoirs to recover, to stand tall and someday push aside parasite, thief and brigand to move forward to better times.

I am reflecting today on the issue of dignity because of something Prof. G.L. Peiris said recently. I am certainly not a fan of G.L. Peiris and indeed have taken issue with his statements and the policies he has designed, defended and tried to implement, but I believe in this instance he touched upon something salient in the matter of relations among nations, a factor that will not be summarily dismissed, deleted, footnoted, ignored or forgotten: yes, dignity.

He was speaking on the occasion of the National Day of the European Union. The speech is replete with the diplomatic niceties required by convention and occasion of course and in my opinion unnecessary and overly generous given the histories of EU members and especially given the histories of their relations with us and the statements they’ve made regarding us, fraught with inaccuracy, ignorance, bullishness, disingenuous and hypocritical posturing, and uncalled for big-brotherliness.

G.L. Peiris has articulated with a great deal of sensitivity the importance of dignity for nations. He has gone further in pointing out the importance of mutual respect in the matter of healthy inter-nation relations. He has pointed out that no nation can claim superiority through moral reference and more importantly implied the importance of a certain degree of humility.

One of the most memorable lines of literature I have come across was in Charles Dickens’ ‘Hard Times’, a text I studied for my Advanced Level examination, where Sleary tells Gradgrind, ‘Do the withe thing and the kind thing too, and make the betht of uth; not the wurtht!’ If we were to let the bad, the ugly and yes, why not, the despicable, inform our decisions, then the entire world, and indeed all nations, communities, villages and families, would be dissolved forthwith and divested of the idea of togetherness. There can be no international relations. There can be no commerce. There can only be one thing: conflict and conflict guided by the everyman-for-himself ethic. Cooperation would not be possible. All objectives would be underlined by a single overriding need: subjugation.

The truth, as G.L. Peiris very eloquently (and with far more generosity than I could ever manage to muster when thinking of Europe) articulates, is that no nation, however small or large, whether wealthy or poor, powerful or weak, can take the moral high ground vis-à-vis another nation. As importantly, he has not allowed his eloquence to gloss over the key policy issues pertaining to the EU in her relations with Sri Lanka, clearly articulating the need to separate contractual agreement and caveats therein from what are largely political issues external to these.

Europe is a powerful political region and the EU has clout most certainly. And yet, Europe’s hands are not exactly without blood, Europe’s history is replete with horrible crimes against humanity, Europe’s ‘today’ is laden with the guilt of perpetration and complicity in genocide, torture, displacement of millions of people, destruction of cultures and civilizations and a myriad other despicable crimes. We do not ask the EU to look the other way with respect to excesses committed by the security forces, but the EU most certainly can reference context, engage in meaningful comparison, express concern about crimes of omission and commission and humbly acknowledge guilt in transgressions that make ours seem trivial.

G.L. Peiris does not say all this of course. The truth is that EU’s friendship is important to us. The more abiding truth, however, is that our sense of dignity is far more important to us than EU’s friendship. We cannot afford to let anyone assault our dignity, vandalize it or mock it, as someone put it somewhere. We will not surrender it. Indeed, we cannot surrender it if we love our children and respect our ancestors. This land will survive our passing. It will not survive the surrender of our dignity.

So, let there be partnership. Let there be sharing among nations. Let there be friendship of the kind where error is pointed out, acknowledged and corrected with mutual respect. Let there be no bruising of dignity for although it might help deliver ‘prerogative’ to one party or the other, it will most certainly make for suspicion and disgust, ridicule and insult and other such things unhealthy for inter-nation relations.

We cannot decide for the European Union or anyone else. We can decide for ourselves, however. The EU can decide to lecture, to insult and to indulge in selective reference. These decisions could hinder us, hurt us and bring untold misery to our people. That’s the EU’s business. We have ‘business’ too. Our business is to ensure that we are not robbed of our most prized possession. Our business is to place the highest premium on our sense of dignity. This nation will triumph or be destroyed on this fact alone. It is as simple and as profound as that, I believe.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who edits the monthly magazine Spectrum. He can be contacted at malinsene@gmail.com.

-Sri Lanka Guardian