An open letter to “the man who tamed the tigers”

An open letter to President Mahinda Rajapaksa

From Satheesan Kumaaran

(July 24, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Upon reading the July 10th interview by Jyoti Thottam with you for the Time Magazine captioned “The Man Who Tamed the Tamil Tigers”, I am appalled as are rest of the majority of the Tamils prompting me to write this open letter to you through the traditional and electronic media. Thank God for free media elsewhere in the civilised world so that your views as well as mine could be aired to the world!

I proceed to comment on every point you have stated in the interview in regard to the Tamils ---statements which I think you could never deny from your conscience, but have been fabricated for your own survival. I hope you will read this letter. By giving interviews around the world, you seek to become the hero by promoting the Tamils’ freedom fighters as villains and thereby trying to shake hands with world leaders, especially western leaders, who opposed your war against the Tamil people.

As you praised the lord for the death of LTTE leader V. Pirapaharan, let the Tamils also praise your lord, the Buddha, for the killing of over 35,000 Tamils within a matter of days for nothing other than believing that they were seeking freedom to live in peace with justice and dignity. Thanks to Lord Buddha who hailed from a royal family in north-eastern India. He hated his own class because they treated minorities as second-class citizens, and he preached and searched for freedom and justice for the minorities.

But, Mr. President, you may have to be ashamed of yourself along with other Sri Lankan born extremist Buddhists because you are hunting down the minorities when they demand their rights peacefully. Neither the LTTE leader nor Tamil militants took up arms just for fun. They had genuine grievances, but you do not seem to have acknowledged the fact.

Your previous counterparts too, met their demands through violence. When the LTTE demanded peace talks for years, you sent armed soldiers in return. You killed the champions for peace, like LTTE’s political wing leaders such as Brigadier S. P. Thamilselvan. Finally, you killed Nadesan and Pulithevan who came out with white-flags to make peace. You are keeping 300,000Tamils in Nazi-style camps in Vavuniya for months without providing food, medicine, clothes, or water, after promising them liberation. It is baffling why access to local and international NGOs and media is denied. Is it because they would speak out the truth?

In the interview you asked: “Why he did all these mad things... [Laughs]...what else can I ask him?” We would like to ask you why you did such horrible and atrocious things to the Tamils. Do you bear a grudge against the Tamil people? What did they do to you? Did you see any of the civilians before you sent the butchers? And we want to remind you that your son, Namal, was stoned by the displaced camp civilians when he visited them recently...does it mean anything to you? To me, it means that the Tamils are sick and tired of your politics and they do not trust you at all and they are living in fear and frustration because they do not want you to capture their traditional lands.

To the question of international relations, you said you fought the war following George W. Bush’s policies in the war against terrorism. Further, you are begging them to give credit to you. However, you fail to understand the interpretation of what Bush said. He meant to fight the Al-Qaeda and other fundamental extremists who fought against the western culture with no injustice done to them. However, the war you conducted was against your own minority community who have struggled on the island since 1948, and who have followed several paths – first ‘Ahimsa’ – a peaceful struggle, second, a military struggle, and now getting on to the third phase.

Can you open up your heart and mind and say who killed the Tamils? It was none other than the Sri Lankan State. I don’t dispute the murders committed by the LTTE, especially since they fought their own battle with other Tamil militants who also took up arms to fight for separate Tamil Eelam. At the same time, we need to find out exactly who created the fratricide. It was no other than your State and the neighbouring India. India created this as it wanted it for its own geo-political gains in the region.

Who poked the eyes of Tamil youths and killed them in the prisons in the south? Who drove over a million Tamils out of the country? Who killed over 700 Tamils -- seniors, women, children, and men -- and buried them in Chemmani graveyard? Who killed wives of Hindu priests by detonating bombs in their wombs? Who raped the women and put them in the wells and pits? Who drove almost a million Tamils into Vanni from Jaffna peninsula in 1996? Even after more than half a million people returned to Jaffna after the completion of military operations, have you done anything to save the civilians from rape, tortures, killings, kidnapping, etc.? Most of these atrocities are carried out by your own armed forces as well as by your sponsored paramilitaries. Have you done anything to stop the activities of white-vans? What have you done to protect journalists from being kidnapped and murdered by the white-vans? Have you brought the perpetrators of the crime to book? Who killed nearly 130,000 civilians through aerial bombardment and shelling? Who widowed over 25,000 women? Who refused to open the roads leading to Tamil villages in the Northeast? Who detained over 300,000 civilians in Nazi-style camps in Vavuniya? Who is killing nearly 1400 people each week in the camps guarded by the Sri Lankan armed forces as reported by the Times journal quoted international aid agencies as its source?

When answering these questions, one could easily say that the Sri Lankan State is an authoritarian state, and is doing everything Saddam Hussein did against his own people. Only the Sri Lankan successive Sinhala leaders having been doing much more harm than Hussein by slowly and steadily wiping out the Tamils. So, the question arises in the interpretation of what Bush said and how he acted against Hussein. Would the international countries including the U.S. direct their guns against the Sri Lankan State as they did against Iraq? What should you do to demonstrate to the international community that you are not an atrocious Hussein-like tyrant? You should grant autonomy for the Tamils when the Tamil people are entering the third phase of their struggle to gain their freedom.

In regard to the question of international sanctions against Sri Lanka, you rightly welcomed punishment for yourself but requested the world community not to punish the entire Sri Lankan community through sanctions, embargoes, and travel advisories. You are holding your people ransom. You are taking cover using them as shields...if you want to get punished for what you did under your leadership, you should allow the International Inquiry Commission led by the United Nations to collect details from the affected civilians and let the media and NGOs meet the Tamils, and you should cooperate with the Inquiry Commission rather than blocking them and acting as a racist State against human rights for the Tamils. You should have the courage of your former army commander, whom you have removed from office, to admit that you committed war crimes and go a step further to admit that you also committed crimes against humanity. If you do, global countries would lift the sanctions and other restrictions against your people. In contrast, I would like to ask, since you have wiped out the LTTE, why do you still impose restrictions on Tamil fishermen? Why aren’t you allowing them to do their fishing trade? If you can lift all the restrictions imposed upon Tamils, the global governments might also consider lifting restrictions on Sri Lanka.

Further, while punishing you for what you did to the Tamils, you responded to the next question thus: “There was no violation of human rights. There were no civilian casualties. If I did that, it wouldn't have taken two and half years to finish this. I would have done this in a few hours. This is all propaganda.” Mr President, you are wrong again. Your armed forces were not able to enter the LTTE stronghold because the LTTE were resisting from the beginning. Your armed forces took so long to capture Mannar alone, and then took months to capture other areas of the Vanni. Further, you did not want to do it immediately because you wanted to end the operation this year so you could get elected again when the Sri Lankans return to elect the President this year. So, as per your calculations, you wanted to get elected again through such military victories in the North.

Also, to the question of 7,000 civilian casualties as per to the UN official report, you said: “Seven thousand? No way. In the eastern province, zero casualties. I won't say there are zero casualties in the north. The LTTE shot some of them when they tried to escape.”

There is an old saying in Tamil that you cannot hide a pumpkin in a plate of rice. The affected civilians are in the government-controlled areas in the internment camps because you fear that they would tell the truth to the world. Further, you say you will release 50% of the people, or at most 60% this year, and saying that this is your target. This shows that you are filtering these people and threatening them not to reveal anything. You think that they would not get the opportunity to meet the press, so you want to release them one by one, and later you hope that the world community will become insensitive to the issue as days go by. Such are the methods you employ to free yourself from the responsibility and guilt of such genocidal war crimes. Your statement about the casualties in the east as zero is totally untrue. The Tamils say that over 50,000 Tamils have been killed in the military operations of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces since mid last year. If you are really worried about the plights of civilians on the island, you should let the international investigators visit the region to find out the exact casualty numbers. So, what are you scared of? The Tamils are not afraid of the truth. Give the human rights agencies access and they will discover the truth.

A well known example is that your security forces detained five physicians who came out of the LTTE former stronghold and you failed to release them despite pressure from world community. Then the doctors were brought to a press conference at the Media Centre for National Security on July 8 to recant their previous eye-witness accounts of the military’s shelling and killing of Tamil civilians during the final months of the military offensive. Human Rights and Global Medical Organizations condemned the Sri Lankan government for bringing them to the press conference saying that the whole event was a stage-managed affair by the government to undermine incriminating evidence of the military’s war crimes. Further, they withdrew their previous claims of casualties and now they read statements produced by the Sri Lankan intelligence wing to show the world that the previous statements when the doctors said the killings in the no-fire zone was wrong, yet the figure given after two months of detention and interrogations by the intelligence wing is correct. This shows how your State and your security forces coerced the civilians and civil servants to lie. This is not a new phenomenon for Tamils because once your armed forces detained Tamils since 1980s, your security forces first got signatures from the detainees on blank paper and then you made up stories so you can keep them permanently in the jails and to show the world that these Tamils are a threat to Sri Lanka’s national security.

The most peculiar response was when the interviewer called the people of the North as Tamils. You said: “Don't say Tamils. In this country, you can't give separate areas on an ethnic basis, you can't have this. With the provinces, certainly there must be powers, where local matters can be handled by them.”

You should keep in mind that Tamils are not bowing to you for their rights. They have now changed their strategies. You should remember that you can never wipe out the psyche of the people, because Tamils are a nation who hailed from the Dravidian race in South Asia. Tamils are basically a cultural identity and secular as opposed to an ethno religious identity. Tamil is an ancient language with its own rich literature that dates back to more than 5,000 years as acknowledged by leading linguistic scholars around the world. Whoever speaks Tamil identify themselves as Tamils, and the people who speak Tamil in Sri Lanka are Tamils. However, the unique thing about the Tamils in the Northeast of Sri Lanka is that they have been living there from time immemorial. What they are asking is to live in peace with all the rights they were enjoying before the Europeans took control of their territory. You, Mr. President, once again prove that you are acting in a puerile manner without considering the historical background of Tamils, asking them to forget their own identity like asking them to commit suicide. Every nation would want to maintain their history and heritage so that they can receive respect from other communities. If they lose their identity, they become homeless and hopeless, and therefore, the question of forcing the Tamils to abandon their identity is another form of cultural genocide, which you are engaged in against the Tamils.

The Tamils are afraid to come to Sinhalese areas, especially Colombo and they would avoid doing so if they can help it.

Mr President, we understand you are so desperate to hoodwink the international community that you are doing your best to convey your false and fabricated stories to the world using the world platforms and the world media while you keep the media in your own country suppressed. Earlier in May, you said while giving an interview to the journal, The Week, that you fought India’s war by crushing the Tamil Tigers. You further said: “There was no guarantee of security all these years. People could not celebrate freely, they were always afraid to speak freely. It was a war to end the rule of fear.” You spoke frankly on this point because India, who trained the Tamil militants, now changed its tactics because it feared that China would enter the scene and thereby become a security concern to India in the future. However, India does not care about the plight of Tamils. India fails to acknowledge the fact that it is making further blunders by alienating Tamils world-wide, including nearly 75 million Tamils that call India home. Further, you should understand that the people were living freely in the LTTE held areas and the Tamils are living in fear in your controlled areas.

After you came to power, you treated the Tamils as the people of a neighbouring country. In fact, you asked all the Tamils from the lodges in the South to go back to their homes in the North and East of the island. After international pressure, you changed your tune saying that they could live in Colombo and other Sinahala areas, but they should register their names in the police stations. Many Tamils are still hunted down by the Sri Lankan armed forces and your sponsored paramilitaries. Many Tamil families are still seeking the truth as to what happened to their nearest kin not knowing their whereabouts. White vans operated by these forces remain active and they have intensified their actions more now than before. So, you cannot claim that the Tamils are living free without fear.

In another interview given on June 30 to your loyal editor of The Hindu, Mr. N. Ram, you said that you would go for a political solution only after obtaining a popular mandate at the next presidential election. You said: “There is no way for federalism in this country. I am willing for a political solution and the TNA must agree to this. They also must know that they can’t get what they want.” Mr. President, the ethnic conflict started because your previous leaders failed to accommodate the Tamils. They failed to fulfill the demands of Tamils. Even the father of your party, the late Bandaranaike, signed an accord with the father of Eelam Tamils, and the late Chelvanayagam believed that the Tamils had grievances and should be solved through a federal model. However, after nearly five decades, even after such brutal war, you are saying you would not consider federalism as a model, rather saying that you would stick to the outdated unitary constitution. This is nothing but a white-wash to hoodwink the international community. However, you should remember that the Eelam struggle has now been internationalized more than ever before and the demon should not again climb the ‘murunga” tree (drumstick tree) as the old Tamil saying goes.

Further Mr President, the time is ripe for you, even after the most atrocious and unprecedented treatment to the Tamils, to fulfill the demands of Tamils. You should open the door for talks and you should come out with a genuine solution devoid of political opportunism and hypocrisy. The Tamils have sacrificed enough and they are sick and tired of facing another war should your leadership fail to grant autonomy for the Tamils. The Tamil freedom is not a dead movement and you cannot kill it, but they have silenced their guns as per the global geo-political demands with the hope that they will attain their lifelong goal even if they are to start all over again.

(The author can be reached at e-mail: satheesan_kumaaran@yahoo.com)

-Sri Lanka Guardian