All the IDPs are not in Menik Farm

By Malinda Seneviratne

(October 04, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) Politicians come and go and this is true for every country. Statements stay, in heart and memory. Some politicians are remembered not for the good they do but because they are either vile or they are unforgettable clowns. Two names I shall not forget: David Miliband (Britain) and Bernard Kouchner (France). First they wanted to bail out the world’s most ruthless terrorist, Velupillai Prabhakaran. They engaged in a lot of chest-beating in their home countries, virtually promising LTTE supporters that they would orchestrate the LTTE leader’s escape. They vilified the Government of Sri Lanka, made a lot of noise, screamed in fact, before arriving in Sri Lanka, only to get a mouthful from the Defence Secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. They went back, tail between legs, and whimpered that they had failed.

They were quiet after mouthing, as expected, ‘serious concerns’ about human rights issues after the war ended and Sri Lanka began to enjoy a kind of peace that had been absent for three decades. Then came the issue of IDPs and now these two ‘gentlemen’ want to re-visit Sri Lanka to ‘see for themselves’.

It would be good if Kouchner and Miliband first visited New Orleans to see how the victims of Hurricane Katrina are doing and of course what’s happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan to peoples displaced by the mad adventure to secure control over oil resources (wrongly labeled ‘war on terrorism’), but I doubt they will. They don’t have the political will and neither do they have the slick rhetoric of a Barack Obama to justify anything. I mean, Miliband even got tongue-tied over the misuse of public funds.

They are welcome to come. They can come, see but they will have to go back the way they did the first time: tails between their legs. Perhaps they’ll learn something about how Sri Lanka, a third world country with limited resources manages to do the best it can by its citizenry, especially the most dispossessed. I doubt it though.

I do know that the IDPs are not exactly having a gala time in Menik Farm. There are many inconveniences and it is to the credit of the Government that the relevant concerns are being addressed, including the issue of freedom of movement. It is Utopian to expect resettlement and resolution of all problems overnight. Takes time. Has taken more time than necessary, one could argue, but things are getting done.

I believe that Kouchner, Miliband and others like them don’t have the moral authority to point fingers at the Government of Sri Lanka. I do believe, on the other hand, that the ordinary Sri Lankan does have that right.

There have been home-grown complaints, i.e. objections by people who cannot be accused of being lackeys of the LTTE or foreign powers or being motivated by petty political interests. These the Government should take note of. I am not convinced that this is happening, not with the IDPs in Chettikulam and not with respect to a lot of other things.

I was alerted to these ‘other things’ by Dr. Mervyn de Silva, a former National List MP and Coordinating Secretary of the SLFP, and a person who has wide experienced in the fields of agriculture, planning, plan implementation etc. He was responding to an article that I had written in which I stressed the importance of employing both reason and compassion in the complex matter of winning the hearts and minds of ex-LTTE combatants. De Silva expressed a wish that heart be employed not only in engaging with LTTE cadres and IDPs, but in sorting out the problems faced by ‘all those in living hells called shanties’.

We are not the failed state that some would like us to be. We are nevertheless citizens in a political economy that is full of flaws, slants and anomalies. To begin with, our constitution is skewed dangerous in favour of the politician and against the ordinary citizen. It has been tailor made for crooks and thugs, regardless of the party they belong to or contest from. There is power concentration at the top and the lack of checks and balances is appalling. The nature of the bind is such that this side of a revolution we have to depend on the goodwill of these very same politicians to correct the flaws through legislative enactment. The fate of the 17th Amendment demonstrates clearly that ‘goodwill of the politician’ will continue to be absent.

Today we are not living under the shadow of terrorism. There is much we can be thankful for. And yet, we must not forget that for all resilience we have shown as a nation, for our enormous reservoirs of equanimity that allows us to smile, shrug our shoulders and move on in the face of natural and human-made calamity, we are still a nation of unconscionable disparities.

There are citizenship anomalies pertaining to ethnic group for instance. We can and should brush aside much of the claims touted by Eelamists for lack of substantiation, but there are language issues that are still to be transferred from paper to ground. We can’t be slow on this.

Then there is the economy and economic realities which generate anomalies that find expression in the urban landscape, such as shanties. There are over 500 ‘slum colonies’ where hundreds of thousands of people live in insufferable conditions. It is not a housing problem but one that has to do with push and pull factors generated by an overall economic system.

Poverty is not an urban problem and this too has to be recognized. The terms of exchange are heavily skewed against the farmer. It has been found that rice cultivation is characterized not by provision of incentive but disincentive and that successive Governments have uncritically accepted policy recommendations from organizations and individuals who operate against the national interest.

All those who suffer as a result are also ‘categorizable’ as IDPs. They are displaced by political structures and preferences in economic/development strategies. The vast majority of the people in this country, then, are IDPs in terms of the lack of access to decision making; they are located at the periphery of political structures and more often than not have utility value only during election time. Even during elections, they are offered a paradox: choose Crook A or Crook B (or C, D, E, F etc).

Those who cannot obtain a fair price for what they grow, those who have to sell their handicrafts for a pittance, those who cannot dream of giving their children a decent education, those who don’t have the capacity to purchase necessary medication are also ‘displaced’. Internally. And similarly displaced, internally, are those who do not have the money to retain the better lawyers capable of obtaining redress to grievance in the judicial system. The system, let us not forget, continues to pamper the ‘haves’ and kick the ‘have-nots’ in their behinds.

We can ask Bernard Kouchner and David Miliband to go stuff it. We can laugh at Hillary Clinton’s antics and Patricia Butenis’ damage-control efforts. We should, of course. But we cannot ask ourselves to go stuff it. We cannot laugh at ourselves. We have to take these things serious or else the vast majority of us will remain as IDPs as have our parents and their parents for decades and decades.

Where do we begin? I would say, ‘we begin by looking at ourselves, the labels we’ve picked, consciously or unconsciously, the labels that truly describe and locate us in the overall political, cultural, economic and social structure.’ ‘IDP’ is an unhappy tag. It is not something any of us would like to have attached to our person. Well, perhaps we should recognize the truth. Perhaps we should cultivate the eyes that allow us to recognize that which is disconcerting. That would be the first step in any journey that seeks a better tomorrow, for self, community and nation. The way I see it, this would be an obligatory journey for anyone who wants to be a citizen in any meaningful way.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be contacted at malinsene@gmail.com

-Sri Lanka Guardian