The Second Coming ?

By Tisaranee Gunasekara

"The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience".-Camus (Homage to an Exile - Resistance, Rebellion and Death)

(August 02, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K, he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested’, so begins Kafka’s The Trial. Joseph K’s unexpected and incomprehensible plight is presaged not by the grand and the ominous, but a sudden absence of normalcy - the non-appearance of breakfast, a curious look on the face of an old neighbour. For the victim, the everyday mundane reality has been overtaken by a nightmarish horror; outside his life, that everyday mundane reality reigns supreme, serving as an effective cloak to hide his fate. For Joseph K was not a victim of a generalised repression; he is just one man whose turn and time had come, in a land cocooned in a tranquilising sense of normalcy.

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Almost seven months ago, Lasantha Wickremetunga was murdered in broad daylight, in a crowded junction, as he headed to his workplace. Last week the Leader of Opposition of the Galle Municipal Council was gunned down in front of his two young children, as he stepped out to buy some food from a wayside bakery on the way to school. Here too the murderers came on motorbikes (two); here too they completed their gory task and vanished into thin air; here too the police are investigating; here too the murderers will not be caught.

The Southern Provincial Council election is expected to be held within a couple of months. Had Dushyantha Seneviratne lived, he would have played a key role in that contest on behalf of the UNP. His killing, and the manner of it, is likely to further discourage the UNP, already debilitated by repeated defeats and burdened with a leader whose sole concern is preserving his place at the top, at any cost.

When critics and opponents of the powers that be are targeted and the perpetrators of these crimes are never caught, it creates a ripple effect of fear and uncertainty. The killing of Mr. Wickremetunga impacted not only on the paper he edited but on Lankan media in general. Other attacks on other media personnel (from arbitrary arrests to abductions and killings) have similarly contributed to the erosion of media freedom, from within. The killing of a leading opposition figure, in the run up to a crucial regional election, cannot but have a politico-psychological impact on oppositional activists and activities in the province, and even beyond. Just as attacks on media personnel reduce the vibrancy of the media, attacks on opposition politicians will reduce the competitiveness of any multiparty election. Taken together both processes will serve to make the Lankan democratic system less democratic.

Terrorism and Terrorists

Terrorists are not born; they are made and they make themselves. Terrorism is not the patrimony of any organisation, ethnic or religious group; it is a malady that can affect even legally constituted governments.

The LTTE killed political opponents and dissenters, politicians and academics, the well known and the anonymous, to spread terror and turn the Tamil community into mindless adherents of its deadly project. The JVP followed a similar strategy during the Second Insurgency, murdering political opponents and compelling even ruling party politicians to resign. As these and other examples demonstrate amply, a few well targeted killings/attacks can act as discouragement or deterrent to a much larger populace. Consequently such selective targeting can obviate the need for generalised repression or even repressive laws. The current condition of the Lankan media is an excellent case in point - the task once performed by Competent Authorities and formal laws is being accomplished today by a process comprising of selective targeting, self-exile and self-censorship, plus the unofficial obstructing of websites (Tamilnet and Lanka news web).

"This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector", says Plato in The Republic. The LTTE killed and terrorised Tamils, for ‘Tamil liberation’; the JVP killed and terrorised the Sinhalese to ‘liberate’ Sri Lanka from Indian occupation. Successive Sinhala supremacist regimes discriminated against, attacked and repressed Tamils and adopted a permissive attitude towards Sinhala on Tamil violence; but it took the LTTE to deprive Tamils of every last vestige of freedom and free will, presenting them with an unequivocal choice between mindless obedience and traitor status. The JVP’s criminal intolerance made the Southern left realise the qualitative difference between an authoritarian regime and a Polpotist movement; the Jayewardene regime repressed its opponents as a norm; the JVP killed its opponents as a norm.

Discriminated against, over and over, by successive Lankan regimes, bereft of hope either in democracy or the rule of law, the Tamils yearned for a strong and forceful leadership which could reply the Sinhalese in their own language. The LTTE is the result of that yearning. Caught in a never ending war and held to ransom by a brutally intransigent LTTE, the Sinhalese too yearned for a forceful leadership which could fight the Tigers in the Tiger way. The Rajapakse administration is the result of that yearning. Since the war against the LTTE was waged on a Sinhala supremacist platform, the peace that follows cannot but be indifferent to minority concerns and impatient of minority demands. The war against the LTTE was also premised on the intolerance of dissent, and of alternate viewpoints, on impunity and permissiveness. Consequently post-war Sri Lanka may be a place of less openness and less freedom than Sri Lanka during the war. Lankan democracy survived a quarter of a century of war and the threat of the LTTE; it may face a greater peril from patriots who dream of eternal rule and dynastic projects. At what price the victory over the LTTE has been won, only time can reveal.

Black July and the New Paradigm

The 26th anniversary of the Black July has come just after the era created by the Black July ended on the shores of ‘the sea of conches’ and in a time of paradigmatic shift along the lines of 1956 and 1987. The project of recreating Ceylon/Sri Lanka as a Sinhala supremacist country commenced in 1956; in the intervening years a new commonsense came into being, symbolised by the acceptance of Sinhala Only by the UNP and the traditional left. It would take a massive, externally oriented shock to the system for this paradigm to come to an abrupt and violent end. It would take a very real threat of a foreign military invasion to make the government of Sri Lanka agree to grant linguistic equality to and share some power with its minority citizens.

The intervening years saw the evolution of a different commonsense. Racism went out of fashion, Sinhala supremacism became confined to the lunatic fringe and a political solution a la quasi or even full federalism became more and more likely. But this historic opportunity was lost thanks to the maximalism and the intransigence of the LTTE which refused to accept anything less than a de jure Tiger Eelam. The LTTE’s conduct discredited not just the notion of a peaceful, negotiated end to the war (which was impossible in any case, given the nature of the Tiger) but also the notion of a political solution to the ethnic problem. This was the context in which Mahinda Rajapakse won the Presidency. His thinking and praxis enabled the current paradigmatic shift, away from the politico-social commonsense created by the Accord and the 13th Amendment. With even the UNP shifting its stance on devolution and playing with the notion of adopting a Bhoomiputhra model, this new commonsense bears a striking resemblance to the old paradigm of 1956-1987. The defeat of the Tigers in a military campaign unaccompanied by a political corollary has restored to Sinhala supremacism its lost sense of power and glory. The Sinhalese have come almost in full circle, to a point they feel they can ignore Tamil needs and grievances. The Northern internment camps symbolise this new mood of hubris.

The Black July was a collective punishment imposed on the Tamil community for a crime committed by a handful of Tigers. The Black July would not have happened if a segment of Sinhala society did not regard all Tamils as (real or potential) Tigers and acted on that belief - and acted as if the rule of law and common human decency were not tenets to be observed but ballast to be discarded. It is often said, as if in mitigation, that Black July was perpetrated by a small segment of Sinhala society and that the absolute majority of Sinhalese had no hand in it. Correct. What did the absolute majority of Sinhalese do, when a minority was murdering, looting and burning in its name? Some indeed risked their lives to save not just friends and neighbours but even strangers, but most did absolutely nothing; they either supported or deplored the horror from the sidelines or just remained silent. It was that inactivity, that indifference which enabled the Black July to realise its full destructive potential. One can see shadows of that unforgivable inactivity in the Southern indifference to the existence of illegal internment camps in the North. This too is an act of collective punishment; this too goes against the rule of law and common human decency; and to this too we react with silence as we did to the Black July.

The government needed the support of non-Western states (especially Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan) to continue the war against the LTTE, in the midst of accusations of gross human rights violations. Now that the war is over, that support has become less relevant. Instead the government needs Western backing, because it is the international institutes controlled by the West (such as the IMF) which can provide the regime with the financial assistance it needs for its survival. Consequently one can expect a toning down of the asinine anti-Western rhetoric which was becoming a staple of the Rajapakse foreign policy. In the coming weeks and months, the administration may strive to find a way to win back some of the lost Western support, without making significant concessions on the political front. This would entail making significant economic concessions to balance off the failure to make meaningful political changes. The non implementation of a political solution, the continuation of the Northern internment camps and the persistence of attacks on political opponents and dissenters will thus be balanced off by shifting the economy in a more neo-liberal direction and reorienting the foreign policy in a more pro-Western manner. The main aim of the Rajapakses is the success of the dynastic project. The family will do what it takes to ensure this.

Kafka’s Joseph K lives an year, the prisoner of an opaque Prozess. He does not know the nature of his crime; he lives at his lodgings and goes to work in the bank. He is a free man who is yet unfree. In the end he is taken out by two ‘gentlemen’ and ceremoniously handed a knife to kill himself with. Wondering about ‘the judge he had never seen…the high court he had never reached" Joseph K refuses to oblige. But his moment of resistance comes a year too late and he is killed, shamefully, ‘like a dog’. Self-annihilation is the fate a man, and of a society, who, however unconsciously, follows the dictum told to Joseph K by a priest (in a fable about the uselessness of resistance): "You don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary".

-Sri Lanka Guardian