Selected Writings -S.Sivanayagam - The Birth Throbs of a New Nation State

Those four days of Tamil Tiger blitzkreig in the first week of November when nine military camps fell like nine pins and nearly 500 square miles of Tamil territory were recovered from Sinhala military occupation had already left a devastating dent on the morale of the Sri Lankan armed forces. That was obvlous by the way the soldiers deserted their positions and fled by the hundreds, reportedly leaving behind armoured cars, sensitive communication equipment and more than sixty tractor/truck loads of other expensive military hardware as a parting gift for the Tigers. But that is not the end of the story. As we write this,the LTTE"s "Operation Unceasing Waves III" continues to pound positions with mortar barrages and battering their defences and acquiring new territory.

So swift and fierce was the Tiger offensive leaving the Sri Lankan generals themselves in awed surprise that "even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer". "Years of gains lost in days", lamented Colombo"s best known commentator on military affairs, Iqbal Athas.

"Army in disarray", said the Sunday Leader. Even The Island"s "Defence Correspondent" pocketted his pride and announced : "Military in worst debacle in nine years". The Times, London, known for its unjournalistic antipathy towards the Tigers yet ran a 6-column headline which said: "TAMIL RAID KILLS 1,000 TROOPS (Nov.4). "MAJOR VICTORY FOR TAMIL TIGERS", said The Scotsman, UK, in a 7-column headline (Nov.4).

While it is easy to interpret the consequences of what happened in the battlefield in pure military terms, there is a far deeper political implication that has yet to seep into the popular mind. Does the idea of a separate Tamil homeland forced out of the hands of the Sri Lankan state seem as remote a possibility NOW, as it looked last year, last month, or even the day before the Tigers launched "Operation Unceasing Waves III" ? Doubting Thomases, even among the Tamils, might take longer to grasp the true significance of what has been happening in the Vanni Tamil heartland now.

The fact is, HISTORY IS IN THE MAKING: HISTORY THAT IS GOING TO DEFINE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWENN THE TWO PEOPLES, TWO NATIONS, FOR ALL TIME TO COME.

What is happening in the battlefields today are not mere battles, but the birth throbs of a new nation state. To phrase it in chess parlance, we are now coming to the end game.

From Sri Lanka"s point of view what are the portents ? Given the inadequate strength of the army , given the impossibility of further large-scale recruitment, given the increasing number of desertions, given the regular loss of expensive weaponry passing into the hands of the Tigers, given the black record of her 5-year rule in which the armed forces have suffered some 15,000 dead and 30,000 injured, how does the President hope to wrest back Tamil territory which her own forces have virtually abandoned ?

Is it not clear that neither she nor any future government can ever hope to establish a land route to Jaffna when the entire terrain from Vavuniya to Kilinochchi including the A9 highway has been cleared of all the military installations ?

How then does she hope to maintain a permanent military presence in a penisula access to which is wholly dependent on sea and air, neither of which could be considered safe from LTTE attacks ?

Is she prepared to leave thirty thousand troops, even three thousand, cooped up in the peninsula, unable to fight, unable to run away, unable to be evacuated in a hurry, and eventually to end up as prisoners of war ? If she cannot find sensible answers to these questions, the whole country could end up in a bloodbath and a state of anarchy.

If Sri Lanka today is a fractured island, in all senses, except the legal, it is not entirely of Madame Chandrika"s making.

The genesis goes back from daughter to mother, and from the Ñmother to the father. No Tamil wanted Tamil Eelam when her father Bandaranaike brought in the Sinhala Only Act in 1956 All what they wanted was the freedom to sit in silent protest in one corner of Galle Face Green overlooking the Parliament building. Was that too much to ask ?

Even that freedom was denied when pro-government mobs set upon the silent protesters under the gleeful eyes of the police themselves. The protesters were no ordinary people. Many of them were elected members of parliament, headed by the pacifist Tamil leader of that time, S.J.V.Chelvanayakam. From that symbolic attack on a whole people"s right to protest, there began over-the years a series of mob attacks on the Tamils themselves. Where the mobs left off, the State took over. There was hate in the air. Tamils were being suffocated in the very land of their birth. They had to have safe living space. If the four-footed living beings and our feathered friends need sanctuaries like Wilpattu and Yala and Kumana to breathe freely and live in peace in a land supposedly visited by the Buddha, why do you deny the same to your fellow human beings?

Today, President Chandrika Bandaranaike is paying the price for that terrible legacy of racist intolerance her parents themselves left her, and which in her foolishness she thought she must perpetuate with greater viciousness. Depriving the Tamils of their birthright must have seemed to her the Ratwatte family"s feudal heirloom which she was called upon to safeguard. Not all her foreign trained four-star generals have any clue as how to fathom the military genius of one man - Velupillai Prabhakaran. Who is he ? Which foreign military academy trained him? Does he hold the rank of a Field Marshal ? The answer is simple. He has justice on his side. What is more, HISTORY IS ON HIS SIDE.

Armies are useless unless the soldiers have a worthy cause to fight for. If all what they are fighting for is to get over the wretched unemployment problem in the country, or to build a house for the mother who has been living in a village shack all her life, or to give a sister a good dowry for marriage, then they are going to run away from the battlefield when things get too hot. To say that the average Sinhalese soldier is on the battlefield because he is imbued with a hefty dose of patriotism as some newspaper hacks in Colombo try to make out is pretentious nonsense.

"Men and nations behave wisely", said Israel"s former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, "once they have exhausted all other alternatives."To Madame President and the Sri Lanka government, this should be the time for wisdom. War has ceased to be an option. If they are wise enough, the Sinhalese people too should know that there is no God-given law that an island shall support just a single state, nor does the United Nations impose limits on the size of nation-states for eligibility of membership. If living together in peace is so hard, nations, like people could be better off living separately.