_______________
By Terry Lacey
Exclusive to Sri Lanka Guardian
(October 20, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono should be focusing on his Presidential inauguration after resounding election victories placed him firmly as captain of the ship of state for a second five years. Instead he and his close ally Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd have to figure out what to do with 255 Sri Lankans stuck on a dirty little boat in the port of Merak, near the historic volcano of Krakatoa.
For this is the stuff of modern international politics, that the poor, untidy, unwashed and sometimes frightened masses, aspiring to a way of life as advertised on television, refuse to just lie down and die in poverty, misery or oppression, but insist on getting into little boats to sail from West Africa to Spain, or from Sri Lanka to Australia.
So here are 255 of them, all from Sri Lanka, with one lavatory, cleaning their teeth and washing from little plastic bottles of water on this stinking little boat, and none of us know what to call them. Are they illegal economic migrants, refugees or asylum seekers? So we call them boat people and wait to find out their status.
Alex, a Sri Lankan on the boat quoted by The Jakarta Post (20.10.09) started with the best line of argument, “ We will face the death penalty if we return to Sri Lanka.”
But immediately followed this up with a slight political slip, ”We don´t want to live in Indonesia because it already has problems related to poverty and natural disasters”.
If this is what the know-it-all barrack room lawyer said, then who the hell does he think he is? What gives him the privilege to pick and chose destinations and insult the people who are now forced to help him? Why not give free airline tickets and jobs to poverty-stricken peasants from Bangladesh, or weary warriors from Waziristan ?
Many years ago when I was studying why Jamaicans seemed to like shooting at each other, my Sri Lankan supervisor at the University of the West Indies, one Archie Singham, told me a story of Sri Lanka that like an elephant, I would never forget.
One day a crowded train stopped in the middle of nowhere. An elephant sat on the railway line. The passengers divided between those who thought the elephant was sacred and could not be moved and those who wanted it out of the way.
The two groups of passengers got so mad with each other that they had a riot. There was so much commotion that the elephant got up and walked away.
Why does the human race show such genius at not being able to live together? How will we ever muster the energy to stop climate change from destroying the planet we share if we are so busy fighting each other all the time?
And why should a Sri Lankan barrack room lawyer on a small boat in Indonesia, with less bargaining power than a bothersome bat, make speeches to us about which destination he prefers, except Indonesia, where he is sadly located?
Perhaps he does not know there are 1.6 million migrants mostly from Pakistan and Bangladesh in the UK, and that between 60 to 70 percent of their children are raised in poverty in the land of their dreams.
Would it not be better to show compassion for the human condition by striving together to solve the problems of conflict and poverty, by fighting for development instead of fighting each other and by doing so wherever we confront racism, prejudice and communal hatred ? There is no need to go to Australia to find racists.
The real problems are where you find them. And have to be solved where they are.
And if Sri Lanka is not yet safe and offering future security and opportunities for all Sri Lankans after this dreadful civil war, then make it so, or risk another.Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.
-Sri Lanka Guardian
Post a Comment