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TAMIL NATIONAL FORUM

Editorial, Oru Paper, 18 August  2006

We, the Tamil expatriates are mourning yet another massacre of our young ones. Why innocent children? we ask. How can they? most weep. Revenge! some shout. In war one does not kill children. That is a fundamental human instinct, common to all peoples and all cultures. Even a Tamil who wants to take revenge for the hundreds of our children killed by the Sri Lankan forces should not take revenge on children. No moral commandment says “a child for a child”.

The people who plan and execute these killings on behalf of the Sri Lankan state are not crazy killers or blood-thirsty monsters. Most of them are quite ordinary, non-violent Sinhalese. Many of them are not Buddhist fundamentalists. These persons belong to all social classes; some come from poor families but others come from middle class families and most of them are well educated.  So what makes them to do such barbaric things? What makes other Sinhalese justify them?

In order to cope, one has to understand the core problem, as without understanding it is impossible to cope, and this is, that the majority of the Sinhalese sincerely believe that the land of Lanka belongs to them. It is their promised land and they are the chosen people. Anyone who is not willing to accept this fundamental principle is an enemy and s/he should be killed or chased away. The children of the enemy are targets too as they are the enemy of the future. It is difficult to digest this but it is the sad truth.

A Middle-eastern poet Bialik wrote a hundred years ago, after a pogrom: “Even Satan has not yet invented the revenge for the blood of a little child.” Satan may not have but the Sri Lankan State certainly has! So what now, we ask ourselves.

The fourth Eelam war is on and the political and military chiefs of Sri Lankan state have a simple solution to win this war: hit, hit and hit again. Kill the attackers. Kill their supporters. Destroy their organizations, including the schools. Demolish the homes of their families and chase away their relatives. 

But, wonder of wonders, these methods achieve the opposite as in the previous Eelam wars. For example after the huge Sri Lankan bombardments of the ‘war for peace’ of the late 90’s that flattened the “Tamil terrorist infrastructure” a new “infrastructure” came into being within couple of years. So how does this happen? It can be summed up in one word: rage.

An ordinary Sinhalese or a white man, who has never been in the Tamil Northeast, cannot even imagine the reasons for this rage. The global media totally ignore the events there, or describe them in small, diluted doses. The average Sinhalese knows somehow that the Tamils suffer (it’s their own fault, of course), but he has no idea what’s really happening there. It doesn’t concern him, anyhow.

Homes are demolished. A teacher, businessman, ordinary craftsman, respected in his community, turns overnight into a “homeless” beggar, he and his children and grandchildren, internally displaced persons (IDPs) on the UN’s statistics. He burns with rage.

In Tamil villages of the East there is state sponsored colonisation by Sinhalese thugs. The army defends these settlements by erecting a ‘high security zone’. Tamil villagers are forbidden to work in their fields within this zone, so that the security of the colonies will not be endangered. The Tamil farmers see from afar, with longing eyes how their fields are being covered by thorns and thistles waist high, while their children have nothing to eat. They burn with rage.

Rage that wipes out all limitations, eclipses all values, breaks the chains of family and responsibility.

And with all this, people are killed. Their torn bodies lie in the streets, for everyone to see. Most of these men, women and children are killed “by mistake”, “accidentally”, “trying to escape”, “were close to the source of fire” - and all the hundred and one pretexts of a professional spokesman. The Sri Lankan state does not apologize; officers and soldiers are never convicted, because “that’s how things are in war”. But each of the people killed has parents, brothers, sons, cousins. These people burn with rage.

And beyond all these, the total humiliation which every Tamil in the Northeast, without distinction of age, gender or social standing, experiences every moment of his life. Not an abstract humiliation, but an altogether concrete one. To be dependent for life and death on the whim of an 18-year old Sinhalese soldier in the street. All of us burn with rage.

A foreigner or indeed a Sinhalese who has not seen it cannot imagine such a life, a situation of “every bastard a king”, a situation of curses and pushes at best, threats with weapons in many cases, actual shootings in some. Not to mention the sick on the way to dialysis, the pregnant women on the way to hospital, students who don’t get to their classes, children who can’t reach their schools. The youngsters who see their venerable grandfather publicly humiliated by some Sinhalese boy in uniform with a runny nose. And to each of these the Tamil’s heart fills with rage.

And they rage.

Terrible rage that fills the soul of a human being, leaving no space for anything else. Rage that dominates a person’s whole life, making life itself unimportant. Rage that wipes out all limitations, eclipses all values, breaks the chains of family and responsibility. Rage that a person wakes up with in the morning, goes to sleep with in the evening, and dreams about at night. Rage that tells a person: get up; take a weapon and resist, no matter what the consequences are.

Thus the Tamil resistance goes on.