What now ‘Civil Society’?

By Malinda Seneviratne

(May 17, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The war for a separate state, it is well known, was not fought by Velupillai Prabhakaran alone. All who pledged loyalty to the separatist project did not wear military fatigues, carry weapons or kill people. Prabhakaran’s project was executed on several fronts, the military being just one. There was also a propaganda arm and a separate outfit for psychological operations. These were highly effective and even though the LTTE is all but done in a military sense, these other entities are still in operational mode.

Prabhakaran’s genius was not that he was able to control vast swathes of territory, take on and drive back a conventional army, establish some kind of navy and air force, but that he managed to purchase the conviction of key persons that he was invincible. Prabhakaran’s image, it is not admitted by all, was many times larger than his reality and it is this image that influenced policy decision of successive governments, enabled him to get the ear of powerful players in the international community, hoodwink much of the Tamil Diaspora and secure the loyalty of a significant number of politically na‹ve, supposedly (more) cosmopolitan and anglicized ladies and gentlemen of Colombo society who did not have the intellectual wherewithal to differentiate terrorist from freedom fighter.

Over the past three years, they’ve gone silent, pretty much. They’ve changed their tune. At one time they accused the Sinhala Buddhists of this country and successive governments of being unable to differentiate between ‘Tamil’ and ‘terrorist’ when in fact it was they who deliberately operated as though ‘LTTE’ and ‘Tamil’ could be interchanged. Today they have trashed their LTTE brief and all but trashed ‘Tamil’ as well. Today they hide behind ‘civilian’. Tomorrow, I am willing to wager, all these crooks will reinvent themselves and their organizations as experts in the matter of relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction, in particular the rehabilitation of ex-combatants.

There was word, a term that entered the lexicon of Sri Lankan political discourse over the past two decades: ‘civil society’. These jokers wanted ‘civil society’ to be listened to, a joke certainly, because they defined themselves as ‘civil society’, i.e. the tiniest sliver of the extensive politico-ideological spectrum of the country. Now they want ‘civil society’ to be given a free hand in welfare centres. Just imagine someone like Mano Ganeshan (an ardent LTTE loyalist/apologist who saluted Prabhakaran in the Wanni, no less, during a Pongu Thamil event) being given a free hand with IDPs. What and what he would not do, one cannot help thinking. There are others. Nimalka Fernando for example. This is the person who wanted the world to call Sri Lanka a ‘failed state’. Today she wants to ‘save the image of Mother Lanka’! No, sorry, she adds the saving-mother-lanka tag to her usual anti-Sri Lankan posturing, much like how some countries named torture chambers and concentration camps ‘Freedom’ and ‘Justice’.

Prabhakaran’s propaganda arm

These people are fooling no one today. They were part and parcel of Prabhakaran’s propaganda arm, willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously. However, being ‘educated’ and in fact advertising themselves as ‘educated’, ‘conscious’, ‘concerned’, ‘neutral’ (!), today they have disqualified themselves from the right to plead innocence.

Today they are required to come clean. These ladies and gentlemen who were so good at drawing petitions and signing them to help the LTTE in whatever way possible, who were so good at vilifying the Sri Lankan state, the soldiers who put their lives on the line so they, Nimalka, Mano et al, would continue to have the freedom to rant, can now sit down and write a final statement before stepping off the political stage. Here’s a draft. It’s the least I can do to make their passage towards retirement smooth.

“Dear All,

We, the undersigned, regret to inform you that we have been dead wrong in our statements regarding the conflict. We have, you may recall, time and again insisted that the LTTE cannot be militarily defeated and therefore it is imperative that the Government of Sri Lanka negotiate with them. We have also argued on numerous occasions that the Government cannot differentiate between the LTTE combatant and the Tamil civilian. We loosely threw around words like ‘intolerance’, ‘genocide’, ‘brutal’, ‘insensitive’ etc with absolutely no reference to ground realities. We now understand that the Government and the people of Sri Lanka have shown a kind of restraint and concern for human life that is not only exemplary but totally absent in comparable situations elsewhere in the world.

We have on numerous occasions run to the UN and other multilateral organizations seeking punitive action against Sri Lanka, and now we admit that this was motivated by a desire to support the LTTE. We deliberately desisted from making the pertinent point to key actors in the international community, i.e, what’s happening in Sri Lanka is a veritable creation of heaven on earth when compared with the living hell that the US, UK and other allies have created in Afghanistan and Iraq and what Isreal has created in Gaza.

We screamed, ‘crimes against humanity’. We called for international action to charge the Government of Sri Lanka for ‘war crimes’, yes, we even agitated for and canvassed for sanctions. We did not bother to ask these ladies and gentlemen how it is that action to save hundreds of thousands of civilians be painted in negative terms when the US-UK led military offensive against Iraq involved more than a 1000 air strikes on residential areas in the main cities of Iraq and when sanctions were directly responsible for the deaths of over half a million children.

Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize to all of you for being deceitful, na‹ve, having double-standards, for being traitors to this country, for being lured by material benefits including foreign trips, and for compromising at every turn possible the noble and necessary effort to rid this country of the menace of terrorism. We admit in all sincerity that we helped inflate the image of the LTTE knowing fully well that such inflation would enable the LTTE to secure legitimacy in the eyes of the world and plunder much from successive governments. Indeed, we helped the LTTE thereby to make much political capital which was subsequently employed to purchase weapons.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths and hang our heads down in shame. Our hands are indeed bloody. We do not have the moral right to point fingers.

We ask your forgiveness. We ask for your compassion. Your kindness.

Thank you
(Signed)”

No, they will not write anything like this. They’ve had it good for too long. And they have no shame. So don’t wait. But wherever you see them, ask them, ‘you really can’t stomach the fact that the LTTE is done and dead, can you?’ Watch them cringe.
They deserve to be made uncomfortable; that’s the smallest punishment we can give them since we are not like them and are not calling for their blood.

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

-Sri Lanka Guardian