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| The UN report came as a shock to the ruling family because it is unused to criticism and adept at averting unfavourable outcomes with the clever use of lies and half truths, blanket denials and false promises. |
“Why were such perverse times ours?”
Giaccomo Leopardi (On the proposed Dante monument in Florence II)
(May 24, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) In Sri Lanka, misfortune seems to dog those who incur the wrath of President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his family. Journalists or media outlets critical of the regime have been particularly ill-fated: Lasantha Wickrematunge was killed; Keith Noyahr escaped by a hair’s breadth; J.S. Tissanayagam was incarcerated; Prageeth Ekneligoda disappeared; Sirasa/MTV was repeatedly attacked - just a few notable examples located outside the war zones.
Currently, it is the turn of LankaeNews, a bilingual website extremely critical of the regime. Its office was gutted, its cartoonist1 disappeared; its editor had to flee the country; its elderly news editor, a senior journalist, was thrown in jail on a bizarre charge.2 Given this vein of ill-luck, banning the site for publishing an incorrect news item about a regional magistrate seems almost preordained. The website apologised, publicly, thrice, but to no avail. The magistrate ordered the police to arrest the journalist who filed the story3 and instructed telecommunication authorities to block the website until judicial proceedings are over (this order was rescinded by the same Magistrate last week and the jailed journalist released on bail).
Sri Lankan exceptionalism is a cherished precept of the Sinhala-supremacist creed. Sri Lanka is indeed unique; in the midst of a Third World-wide shift towards democracy, the island-nation is moving rapidly and decisively in the opposite direction. Its shift is no accident, but the result of a plan carefully crafted and ingeniously implemented by the ruling Rajapaksas. The shenanigans of arguably the most ineffective opposition in independent Sri Lanka have been of enormous use to the regime in its anti-democratic moves. Yet, oppositional incapacity is not the main reason for the smooth rapidity with which Sri Lanka’s tectonic shift from a flawed democracy into a familial autocracy is being accomplished; the main enabling factor is the willing consent and the unwilling compliance of a large segment of the populace, if not the majority.
The Rajapaksa plan of degrading democratic institutions and phasing out democratic rights, without resorting to generalised repression, is being strategically facilitated by the absence of popular resistance, even verbally. The opposition did manage to organise a few political demonstrations, but, in the main, Lankan society seems indifferent to the anti-democratic path the country is traversing. Neither enthusiastic support nor outraged opposition but apathetic unconcern seems to be the dominant societal response to politics, not just in the battered and cowed North but also in the South.
Indifference rooted in faith and fear
This mood is very much in evidence in the public’s reaction to “The Report of the Secretary-General’s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka” from the United Nations, released in late April. Its few vocal opponents and far fewer vocal supporters are vehement in their stances but the public, by and large, seems to regard the entire saga with manifest detachment. The demonstrations and the petitions against the UN report have been orchestrated affairs; no spontaneous outbursts of popular indignation or anger have occurred, despite persistent attempts by the regime to provoke such sentiments. The United People’s Freedom Alliance May Day demonstration, for instance, was planned by the Rajapaksas and their acolytes, down to the last placard and slogan.
This indifference is rooted in faith (in the Rajapaksas) and fear (of the Rajapaksas). Many Sinhalese have faith that the Rajapaksas will do the right thing, just because they won a 30-year-old war in under four years. Some Sinhalese, many Muslims and most Tamils do not have faith in the ruling family but believe that it is too strong, too entrenched and too ruthless to resist. This segment of the populace thinks that any opposition to the Rajapaksa juggernaut is an exercise in futility, and a dangerous one at that. The confluence of these antithetical readings of the Rajapaksa project has created a rampart of deliberate indifference, which is enabling the ruling family to stride towards omnipotence almost unimpeded.
The black and white world of the Rajapaksas
When resistance is depicted as treachery, opposition is naturally discouraged. For instance, the recent UN report can be categorised and castigated as a pro-Tiger construct only in a Manichean universe, a world characterised by a single divide, a world in which all those who are not supportive of the Rajapaksas are pro-Tiger. This indeed is the mindset of the ruling family, which - like Vellupillai Prabhakaran and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - believes it is the sole authentic representative of Sri Lanka and it is the duty of all patriotic Sri Lankans to support it unconditionally. It facilitates their equation of Rajapaksa familial interests with Lankan national interests, and their treating any opponent of the former as a foe of the latter. This attitude has caused the steady erosion of the politico-psychological space for democratic and peaceful opposition.
The UN report quotes Defence Secretary and presidential sibling Gotabhaya Rajapaksa telling the BBC on 3 February 2009, “I know only two groups - the people who fight terrorism and terrorists.” This black and white “if you are not with us unconditionally, all the time, you are our sworn enemy” worldview is not unique to the Rajapaksas but common to extremists worldwide (including Prabhakaran; thus the fate of anti-Tiger/anti-nationalist Tamils, from Rajani Thiranagama to Kethesh Loganathan). The report would seem a pro-Tiger document only from this surreal perspective because, while being sharply critical of the conduct of the Rajapaksa regime during and after the war, the report also makes extremely serious allegations against the LTTE, pulverising its image (still extant among many Tamils, especially in the Diaspora) as a national liberation organisation. As the report points out, this is an entity that treated the people it was supposed to protect and liberate with unmitigated brutality and cynical unconcern. In the final analysis, the Tiger cared only for and about itself. Obsessed with its own wellbeing, the LTTE reduced the continuity of the Tamil cause to its own survival.
Some of the invective thrown at the report is politically illuminating for what it reveals about the Rajapaksa worldview. The best case in point is the official response to the report’s use of the adjective “disciplined” to describe the LTTE. This description put Gotabhaya Rajapaksa into a distempered frenzy; he proclaimed that this usage proved that the report is blatantly and completely biased in the LTTE’s favour.4 Other members of the regime took up the refrain, including Minister of External Affairs G.L. Peiris, who certainly should have known that the adjective “disciplined” can be used both as a compliment and a pejorative.
Rajapaksa, an erstwhile career-soldier, can hardly be faulted for not knowing that discipline is a quality well loved by anti-democrats in general and those of the fascistic persuasion in particular. The Nazis, for instance, placed the greatest value on it. A key Nazi criticism of the Weimer Republic was that it undermined the discipline for which the German nation was justly famous.5 Discipline was a ruling deity of the Nazi Party while organisations such as the SS (paramilitary) and the SD (intelligence agency) regarded it as the most cardinal of virtues. Their members were expected to follow orders, regardless of what those orders entailed, including mass murder. Befehl ist Befehl (an order is an order) was in fact the basic premise of German defence at the Nuremberg trials.6
Iron discipline is the natural corollary of the leadership principle, the belief in an omnipotent, infallible leader who always knows and does the best. As Karl Dietrich Bracher pointed out about the Nazi party, “Unquestioning discipline and a rigid command structure from top to bottom made for a submissive fatalism of both membership and bureaucracy which was given directions by the consummate exploitation of the pseudo-religious, mystical, providential role of the one and only Leader.”7 This was precisely the kind of allegiance Prabhakaran tried to inculcate in the LTTE. That the LTTE carried on with the war to the bitter end, that Tiger cadres continued to conscript men, women and even children even weeks before the final defeat, and did not hesitate to shoot at desperate civilians to escape the death-trap that was the no-fire-zone (as the UN report points out) demonstrate that rigid discipline did indeed reign in the LTTE. The Tigers committed crimes not because they were anarchic but precisely because they were disciplined and programmed to follow orders, regardless of the nature of those orders.
Thus the Rajapaksa utopia too is a regimented society in which people follow the leader(s) unconditionally and obey orders unquestioningly. The creeping militarisation of Lankan civil society is motivated in part by this purpose, to stamp out individualism and habituate the people into total obedience, to create an anodyne patriotic mass willing to follow wither the leader(s) lead. Schemes such as the plan to compel all new university entrants to spend three months in army camps, undergoing “leadership training” by military officers, are aimed at bringing Sri Lanka closer to this Orwellian dystopia, where crowds of “ordinary decent folks” are trained to watch, unmoved, as horrors are committed in their name.
The need for a sword of Damocles
The UN report faults the Rajapaksas for fostering a mood of triumphalism post-war and failing to come up with a political solution to the ethnic problem. True, but unavoidable, given the nature of the Rajapaksa project, which aims at installing a familial autocracy by hollowing out Lankan democracy. For the Rajapaksas, the war against the LTTE was a means to this end. A just peace based on genuine reconciliation was thus never a part of the Rajapaksa plan. On the contrary, the siblings need triumphalism to retain their Sinhala base, while a political solution is an anathema because it would mean sharing some power with outsiders (not just non-Sinhalese but also non-Rajapaksas).
So, just as the war was shaped by the political needs of the Rajapaksa project, the peace is being informed and contoured by those needs. This was the rationale for one of the greatest crimes committed by the regime, post-war: the incarceration of almost a quarter of a million civilian Tamils in camps surrounded by barbed-wire fences and gun-toting soldiers. The original plan seems to have been to keep the camps going for several years, getting over the embarrassment of these sprawling ill-facilitated open prisons by balkanising them and scattering them all over the North: “an influential section of the security establishment believes the camp population should be re-located to smaller camps. Intelligence services have brought this to the notice of the Defence Ministry. A senior government official told The Island that authorities in charge of camps had been unable to run overcrowded camps effectively. Responding to our queries, he asserted that it would be ideal if only a few thousand could be held at one camp. He said that setting up of additional camps would be a heavy burden on the government but it could greatly help their efforts to identify terrorists taking cover among ordinary civilians.”8
The camps were a logical outcrop of the Rajapaksa administration’s attempts at peace-building, based on force rather than on political or humanitarian concessions. “Don’t forget Prabhakaran’s parents, too, took refuge among ordinary people,”9 warned the government official quoted in the above report, in his bid to justify the incarceration of more than 300,000 civilian Tamils, illegally. Though Prabhakaran’s parents never belonged to the LTTE and never took up arms, they were not considered as civilians; similarly, the kith and kin of Tiger cadres were also not considered as civilians. According to this logic, Prabhakaran’s parents are guilty of the crime of terrorism because they are the parents of Prabhakaran. This perspective justified the camps, because every civilian incarcerated in those barbed-wire enclosures had to be closely related to a Tiger cadre and thus guilty of the crime of terrorism! In turn, it compels the Rajapaksas to keep the North under a de facto military operation and stymie a political solution.
The UN report came as a shock to the ruling family because it is unused to criticism and adept at averting unfavourable outcomes with the clever use of lies and half truths, blanket denials and false promises. Currently, the regime is “negotiating” with the Tamil National Alliance, an amorphous process which can provide the regime with extremely useful protective cover vis-à-vis India and the West, without causing any real improvements in the Tamil condition. The report would be doubly objectionable because it holds a mirror up to the regime, the Sinhala South and the Tamil Diaspora. It tells some uncomfortable truths about ourselves all of us would rather not hear. Had Prabhakaran been alive he would have reacted to the report with the same venom the Rajapaksas are displaying today. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, extremists occupying antipodal positions sometimes do speak the same language of unreason and intolerance.
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1. Prageeth Ekneligoda worked as a cartoonist and columnist for LankaeNews; he disappeared two days before the 2010 presidential election.
2. He was accused by the police of making a threatening telephone call to the brother of the man arrested by the police for setting the website office on fire.
3. According to media reports the journalist has been assaulted in jail by an unidentified jailer.
4. Interview with The Manila Times – 26.4.2011
5. Two vignettes, one factual and the other literary, can be used to illustrate the German nation’s obsession with order and discipline, qualities the Nazis abused to devastating effect. The latter is from Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel: “You must understand this nation. The German loves birds, but he likes tidy birds. A bird left to himself builds his nest just anywhere. It is not a pretty object, according to the German notion of prettiness…. He drops things on the grass; twigs, ends of worms, all sorts of things. He is indelicate. He makes love, quarrels with his wife and feeds the children quite in public. The German householder is shocked. He says to the bird: ‘For many things I like you. I like to look at you. I like to hear you sing. But I don’t like your ways. Take this little box, and put your rubbish inside where I can’t see it. Come out when you want to sing…. Don’t make the gardens untidy…. The German bird has come to prefer the box, and to regard with contempt the few uncivilized outcasts who continue to build their nests in trees and hedges.” Not even the socialists were immune to the obsessive-compulsive tendency towards iron discipline, as the following word-picture of a May Day demonstration in Munich illustrates: “Columns of socialists, ‘their pockets bulging with radishes’ accompanied by wives and children, marched briskly in dead silence through the city to a beer garden on the outskirts, where they drank beer and munched their radishes, struck a Russian exile as ‘not at all resembling a May Day celebration of working-class triumph.’” Quoted in The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman.
6.This defence was not accepted. According to the Nuremberg Principle IV, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
7.The German Dictatorship – The Origins, Structure and Consequences of National Socialism
8.The Island – 31.8.2009
9.Ibid
- dissenting dialogues
2. He was accused by the police of making a threatening telephone call to the brother of the man arrested by the police for setting the website office on fire.
3. According to media reports the journalist has been assaulted in jail by an unidentified jailer.
4. Interview with The Manila Times – 26.4.2011
5. Two vignettes, one factual and the other literary, can be used to illustrate the German nation’s obsession with order and discipline, qualities the Nazis abused to devastating effect. The latter is from Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men on the Bummel: “You must understand this nation. The German loves birds, but he likes tidy birds. A bird left to himself builds his nest just anywhere. It is not a pretty object, according to the German notion of prettiness…. He drops things on the grass; twigs, ends of worms, all sorts of things. He is indelicate. He makes love, quarrels with his wife and feeds the children quite in public. The German householder is shocked. He says to the bird: ‘For many things I like you. I like to look at you. I like to hear you sing. But I don’t like your ways. Take this little box, and put your rubbish inside where I can’t see it. Come out when you want to sing…. Don’t make the gardens untidy…. The German bird has come to prefer the box, and to regard with contempt the few uncivilized outcasts who continue to build their nests in trees and hedges.” Not even the socialists were immune to the obsessive-compulsive tendency towards iron discipline, as the following word-picture of a May Day demonstration in Munich illustrates: “Columns of socialists, ‘their pockets bulging with radishes’ accompanied by wives and children, marched briskly in dead silence through the city to a beer garden on the outskirts, where they drank beer and munched their radishes, struck a Russian exile as ‘not at all resembling a May Day celebration of working-class triumph.’” Quoted in The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman.
6.This defence was not accepted. According to the Nuremberg Principle IV, “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”
7.The German Dictatorship – The Origins, Structure and Consequences of National Socialism
8.The Island – 31.8.2009
9.Ibid
- dissenting dialogues
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