TAMIL NATIONAL FORUMSelected Writings - Fr. Chandiravarman Sinnathurai Sri Lanka: The Undeclared Dirty War 19 January 2007 "..I wish to ask the question again: What is still the obstacle in the Sinhala mind in recognizing the Tamils as a nation in order to live side-by-side, as neighbours with peace and harmony? One has to admit that the writers, intellectuals, artistes, poets and others have a public role to play in this human crisis – a cry for freedom. Each side must possess intellectual integrity and deep honesty for the sake of common humanity. I should think none would want the suppression of the Tamils to continue. Talk of federalism is a pie in the sky, quite frankly..."
Recently I wrote to a Sinhala editor of an English language newspaper in Colombo asking the following questions:  "It makes me wonder whether it is hubris or mockery on the part of the SLMM [Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission] to recently declare that the CFA [Ceasefire Agreement] is still alive and active. A lawyer said to me that "technically the SLMM are correct". In light of SLMM's declaration, one has to consider however, what is happening in the east, in Vaharai - thousands of innocent civilians including children are trapped and are starving whilst being attacked by aerial bombardment. A similar situation is witnessed in the North. Is the government 'technically correct' in engaging in such human rights abuse?
I also wish to ask, after many moons of blood shed, what is 'technically wrong' in accepting and recognizing the Tamils as a nation? They have a distinct language, culture, tradition, heritage and history. What is the fundamental stumbling block?
In the United Kingdom, the English have no qualms in recognizing the Scots and the Welsh as distinct nations. Even a Scot could become the next labor Prime Minister!
Are we not caught in an archaic mind trap of a single nation concept and as a result, no solution is a solution except to play in the hands of international forces to the tragedy of all our people.
How much more blood has to be shed to be proven that "technically" the country is ruined and the future generations are doomed to reap the fruits thereof.
The un-declared war in Sri Lanka has caught a fever pitch. The plight of Tamil civilians in the North and East has degenerated to an appalling humanitarian crisis. In Batticaloa town [in the East], multitude of Internally Displaced People from the Vaharai region have started to literally beg for their food. The Government seems to show no concern or compassion to these Tamils. In the Jaffna peninsula, the situation is much worse than stark.
The value for human life has dangerously deteriorated.
Another worrying trend is that this so-called “undeclared war” has transmuted into a tribalistic dirty war. It is indeed degenerating into more than a racial conflict. Ground reality suggests that things have transformed itself into a savage ethno-religious war. The politico-Bhikkus alongside the pseudo-Marxists have made abundantly clear that that is the path this war will follow. Many clerics of minority faiths have sadly been abducted in recent months, never to be seen again. Some Christian priests and pastors have faced extrajudicial execution. [http://transcurrents.com/tamiliana/archives/270 ]
Dayan Jayatilleka (aka Anuruddha Tilakasiri) in his ‘Death of a Thousand Cuts’ article dated 27 April 2006 [Ceylon Daily News] warned, aside his diatribes, against such a deterioration. Of course, Jayatilleka would want the Government to win the war – hook or by crook However he accepts that this is a war of attrition. That brings beyond all some clarity. Nevertheless, in order to claim the “high moral ground” by the State, according to Jayatilleka, this war cannot and should not stoop to tribalism.
Jayatilleka referring to his father writes: “Mervyn de Silva often warned in the Lanka Guardian, that the East is our Bosnia, and if he was right, it is important that we not be Milosevic’s Serbia in that scenario. If we play the Serbs, we’ll wind up like them.”
Alas!
Lanka Guardian’s prediction about the East is a ground reality now. Whether President Rajapaksha & brothers will end up like Milosevic (not forgetting the war crimes of previous president Chandrika Bandaranayke) is a question for the international community.
Jayatilleka puts Dong’s question ‘who are our enemies and who are our friends?’ and then he responds by stating that the LTTE [The Tamil Tigers] is the main enemy of the state and Karuna [defected faction of the former Eastern commander] is our friend. In order to understand what lies behind this response, Taraki’s writing puts things into perspective: "One of the main speakers in the Stalinist Study Circle ( STC), who spoke about the Tamil rights and their right for self determination and who justified the Tamils armed struggle, was Dayan Jayatilleke. Not only that, he and his comrades formed an armed organisation called "Vikalpa Kandayama."
What is Jayatillake, a person who moved intimately with the Tamil liberation organisations, doing today? Today, he writes without cease how the Tiger liberation struggle should be crushed.
Once an extreme opponent of American imperialism Jayatillake writes week after week emphasizing that Sri Lanka should seek collaboration with the US to crush the military power of the Tamils.
In those days Jayatillake used to write and say that we must go beyond Sinhala-Tamil differences and fight against American imperialism and fight for the class struggle.
Such a nice friend of mine, Dayan Jayatilleke, now writes in the Island newspaper that "We [i.e. the Sinhalese and Sinhala nation] must seek the support of the US to crush the military power of the Tamils." What happened to him? [Excerpts from The Psyche of the Sinhala Nation, 10 October 2004]
 In such a humanitarian crisis and appalling human rights breaches in Sri Lanka one has to draw the line, stop and think about the suffering humanity here. Children have suffered the most. Starvation, abuse, and constant threat to life. While speaking to a group of 19-20 year old lads, they said to me that they have known nothing else since their childhood, but conflict and war. They have not experienced peaceful co-existence.
I wish to ask the question again: What is still the obstacle in the Sinhala mind in recognizing the Tamils as a nation in order to live side-by-side, as neighbors with peace and harmony?
One has to admit that the writers, intellectuals, artistes, poets and others have a public role to play in this human crisis – a cry for freedom. Each side must possess intellectual integrity and deep honesty for the sake of common humanity. I should think none would want the suppression of the Tamils to continue. Talk of federalism is a pie in the sky, quite frankly. The Sinhala majority are opposed to it. The late Edward Said had something crucial to say in his brilliant piece – The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals. I end with an excerpt:
"...The Peace cannot exist without equality: This is an intellectual value desperately in need of reiteration, demonstration and reinforcement. The seduction of the word itself--peace--is that it is surrounded by, indeed drenched in, the blandishments of approval, uncontroversial eulogizing, sentimental endorsement. The international media (as has been the case recently with the sanctioned wars in Iraq and Kosovo) uncritically amplify, ornament, unquestioningly transmit all this to vast audiences for whom peace and war are spectacles for delectation and immediate consumption. It takes a good deal more courage, work and knowledge to dissolve words like "war" and "peace" into their elements, recovering what has been left out of peace processes that have been determined by the powerful, and then placing that missing actuality back in the center of things, than it does to write prescriptive articles for "liberals," à la Michael Ignatieff, that urge more destruction and death for distant civilians. The intellectual can be perhaps a kind of countermemory, putting forth its own counterdiscourse that will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep. The best corrective is, as Dr. Johnson said, to imagine the person whom you are discussing--in this case the person on whom the bombs will fall--reading you in your presence."
|
