Conflicts and Reconciliations

85th Birth Anniversary of President Ranasinghe Premadasa

By Tisaranee Gunasekara

"History has failed us; we too have failed history."
Ranasinghe Premadasa (Harare, Zimbabwe - 3.8.1986)

(June 23, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) In November 1989 the Second JVP Insurgency was defeated and its top leadership killed.

What if the government of the day considered the power hunger of the JVP to be the sole cause of the insurgency? What if the existence of any systemic errors or injustices (which alienated a segment of Sinhala youth and made them susceptible to the JVP) was denied? What if the need for radical reforms was discounted and a policy of achieving systemic stability via extraordinary security measures, leavened by a modicum of development, adopted?

What if the government suspected every poor Sinhala youth from subaltern castes of harbouring anti-systemic yearnings? What if hundreds of thousands of such young men and women (and boys and girls) were treated as real or potential JVPers, to be either punished or kept under surveillance? What if entire villages were cordoned off with barbed wire fences, and their inhabitants prevented from going out, in order to apprehend a few thousand suspected JVP cadres? What if the Armed Forces were expanded rapidly, and made to mount guard over those villages in the Deep South which were once under de facto JVP control? What if even old men were considered guilty until proven innocent, because, it was believed, many of them were ‘mentally supportive’ of the JVP? What if guns were prioritised over rice, even after the Insurgency was defeated?

That could have been Sri Lanka’s fate, post-insurgency, but for the Premadasa Presidency. Ranasinghe Premadasa, a member of a subaltern caste born and bred in Keselwatte (the geographical other of Kurunduwatte - Colombo Seven), understood the anger and the bitterness, the frustrations and the despair of the marginalised. In his long march through the system he had experienced many of the socio-economic and psychological hindrances and barbs that were the daily fare of the underprivileged. He knew that in a country where caste and socio-economic background mattered, the upward journey of any man not fortified by these inherent advantages could almost be a labour of Sisyphus. Though he did not agree with the ideology, strategy or tactics of the JVP, he could empathise with the anti-systemic feelings of its rank and file members and, thus, view with sympathy their desire for systemic change.

President Premadasa understood that sustainable systemic stability cannot be achieved without a thorough overhauling of the system; therefore the process of reform began while the Insurgency was still raging. Since the reforms were seen not as a sop for the JVP but as a systemic need, they were not abandoned once the Insurgency was defeated. Answering a question about measures taken to prevent another outburst of youth unrest, Ranasinghe Premadasa responded, "We have a whole package of policies for ensuring that the unjust system which produced the JVP is changed rapidly – and radically. This package of policies is aimed at confronting poverty and alienation directly. We cannot wait for the benefits of growth to trickle down. The Janasaviya programme is one of our main instruments for this purpose… We are planning to implement the majority of recommendations of the Youth Commission Report…. We have decided to implement 43 of the 51 recommendations straightaway. We are also breaking down the barriers between the administration and the people through our policy of Presidential Mobile Service…" (A Charter for Democracy- emphasis mine). Other efforts were to follow, despite the outbreak of the Second Eelam War and despite political unrest in the South. The totality of the Premadasa programmes amounted to a Lankan Risorgimento, aimed at broad-basing the system by turning the have-nots from undesirable aliens into partial or full stakeholders.

The wellsprings of the Southern Insurgency were poverty and marginalisation; therefore redressing these were the main aims of the Premadasa administration. The seeds of generalised Tamil alienation were sown when governments in Colombo demonstrated, again and again, their majoritarian bias. Resorting to violence was not the first option or even the preferred option of Tamil society in general. Most Tamils did prefer to remain within the bounds of legality and to express their dissatisfaction in non-violent ways. It was Black July, that brutally unjust attempt to hold every Tamil man, woman and child responsible for the murderous deeds of a handful of armed Tamils, which reconciled Tamil society to the idea of violent struggle. To forget this complex history and to regard the abhorrent nature of the LTTE (and its leader) as the sole (or even main) cause of the Eelam wars is a reductio ad absurdum.

It would not have been possible to render infertile the breeding grounds of youth unrest in the South, without understanding and addressing the reasons for their fecundity. Similarly, it is not possible to reintegrate Tamils into Sri Lanka without making a sincere effort to address the politico-psychological causes of their alienation. Development is necessary but insufficient. Tamils must feel they have something to gain by being Sri Lankan; they also need to be protected from any future attempts by the Sinhala majority to abuse its numerical preponderance, as it did from 1956 to 1987. Just as the defeat of the JVP did not remove the need to address, urgently address, the socio-economic and political root causes of the Insurgency, the defeat of the LTTE does in no way remove the need for a political solution based on substantial devolution. A home grown solution is fine so long as it materialises in the here and now and does not entail less devolution than was accorded under the 13th Amendment.

Ranasinghe Premadasa was able to make a successful effort to address the root causes of the Second Insurgency because he looked within, because he understood that systemic injustices and governmental mistakes contributed to the Southern explosion, because he acknowledged that violent excesses happened in the unavoidable struggle against the JVP (unavoidable, because the JVP, like the LTTE, spurned a negotiated solution): "Let us look at the events of ’88-’89. What we saw in Sri Lanka was an attempted revolution backed up by an incredible and unparalleled brutality and a counterrevolution of almost equal ferocity… But while we deplore the violence, there is no point in being moralistic and judgemental, of one side or the other. Rather, it is for us the living to understand the causes, the underlying causes, and work towards their removal. It is not for us to point fingers or to score cheap debating points. Rather it is for us see that we pull together to eliminate for all time the roots – the political, the social, the economic, the cultural and indeed the spiritual roots – that brought forth the terror. Let us not forget that the dead and the living have been alike, often helpless victims of forces far beyond their capacity to control" (ibid – emphasis mine).

A similar attitude of openness, a similar willingness to look within is needed, vis-à-vis the Eelam wars. This is not to say that a veil of silence must be drawn over Tiger atrocities; on the contrary. But self-criticism must accompany criticism; we need to acknowledge our own errors and crimes, even as we condemn the monstrous deeds of the Tigers. The necessary criticism of the LTTE should be accompanied by a criticism of Sinhala supremacist excesses such as Sinhala Only and the Black July (as well as the excesses made in the context of the Eelam wars). These errors did not create the inhuman nature of Vellupillai Pirapaharan, anymore than the inhumanity of Rohana Wijeweera resulted from the referendum or the proscription of the JVP. But without these historical errors neither man would have been able to become, for a while, makers of history.

History should be a guide and a teacher but not a master or a goddess. We cannot permit the ancient battles between Sinhala and Tamils kings to determine our present relations with Tamils, any more than we can permit the deeds of the Portuguese and the Dutch and the British to determine our relationship with Lankan Christians. To see the Eelam wars as a continuation of ancient dynastic battles against ‘Datiya, Pitiya, Palayamara, Siva and Elara’ (Tamil kings of Anuradhapura), to invoke ‘Dutugemunu, Valagamba, Datusena and Vijayabahu’ when celebrating the victory over the LTTE is as inane and counterproductive as seeing the current ‘war against terrorism’ as a continuation of the Crusades.

Throughout human history different civilisations have colluded and collided. For many centuries tolerance and openness were Eastern/Arab virtues while the West prided itself on its closed mind and its religious dogmatism. When the draconian anti-heresy laws introduced by the Christian Emperor Justinian outlawed Hellenism and resulted in the closure of the 900 year old Academy of Athens (founded by Plato), the intellectual heritage of the Antiquity found a refuge first in the Persian Sassanid Empire and later in the Islamic Caliphates. As Rome and the West receded into the darkness of medievalism, Persia and the Caliphates experienced a golden age civilisation. This intellectual accumulation fed the European renaissance subsequently. To see the relationship between Christianity and Islam solely through the prism of crusades, as George Bush did, is to miss the woods for a few outstanding trees.

It is equally erroneous to see Lankan history as a perennial struggle between Sinhala Buddhists and various enemy aliens. This Manichean view of history breeds intolerance and hatred towards ethno-religious minorities; consequently it is an indulgence pluralist Sri Lanka cannot afford. Elara was no tyrant; he was a decent king, a practitioner of religious tolerance (even according to the Mahawamsa). He becomes an enemy of us today only if we see Sri Lanka as a Sinhala country, a country in which the minorities are not co-owners but guests, welcome or unwelcome, depending on their behaviour and our moods. And if we keep harping on Dutugemunu, how can we prevent the Tamils from identifying with Elara?

This is a time of choice. We can either see the minorities as co-owners, an indispensable component of the whole that is Sri Lanka, enriching this country socially, religiously, linguistically and culturally - as President Premadasa did: "Sri Lanka has always had many ethnic groups, many religions and many social traditions….. The history or the future of Sri Lanka does not belong to any group" (12.11.1990). Or we can see the minorities as interlopers, unwelcome visitors who distort the real nature of Sri Lanka. It was this mindset of ‘hosts and guests’ which made us enact ‘Sinhala Only’. It is this mindset which makes some of us attack churches and advocate legislative discrimination against non-Buddhists as the way to deal with the ‘conversion issue’. If given full rein, this mindset is likely to make us react violently and extra-judicially, to any future attempts by the Tamils to agitate for their rights peacefully and democratically. And that is the road to fresh conflicts rather than to an enduring peace. A united country is not possible in a land of divided minds. The past is never the past in a land weighed down by historical baggage and thus incapable of living in the present.

-Sri Lanka Guardian