PRAGOTI

A Blog entry on the Lankan conflict.

Just sometime ago, when Pragoti was re-publishing and publishing articles on the genocidal attack by the Israeli state in Gaza, a friend of mine, one of the many who are part of the "Tamil diaspora" asked over email, as to why is that the Sri Lankan government's bombing of areas in the northern part of the island has not been condemned in the same terms by Pragoti. At first glance of my friend's email, my instinct was to tell him to not to find some kind of a "false equivalence" between these two military campaigns; one led by a hegemonic criminal state, which had flouted international norm after norm in wanting to go about their ethnic cleansing aims and to further their ambitions of consolidating an illegal Zionist state. 

However, when I pondered over what was happening from an "original position", i.e. devoid of my earlier knowledge of the conflicts in the two regions, I was stuck at some of the similarities in the military campaigns.

Here was the Sri Lankan government trying to avowedly demolish the terrorist LTTE and asking for the international community's understanding of that aim. The Lankan government had continuously pounded areas where the LTTE was strong and had engaged in a simultaneous land and artillery attack to capture Kilinocchi and later the remaining remnants of LTTE presence in the Mullaitivu jungles. Any criticism on the "damage", injury and deaths to "civilian" citizens -- all of them from the minority Tamil community was brushed away in the same way, the American imperialists have done all over the world, citing "collateral damage". The Lankan government has suggested that any solution to the decades long ethnic problem (which is otherwise not quite acknowledged by many sections of the Sinhalese polity), would arrive only after the LTTE is militarily defeated.

There is an uncanny resemblance of such logic with what the Israelis are doing in the Gaza strip, but the resemblance stops there. DBS Jeyaraj, an accomplished Sri Lankan reporter suggests that there is no truth in the argument that the Sri Lankan government is indulged in "wilful genocide" of the Tamil citizenry, as is alleged by the LTTE, its supporters and even sections of the Tamil civil and political society in Tamil Nadu. On the other hand, there is a great deal of truth in the argument that both the warring parties, the LTTE and the Lankan government have been lax in providing safe passages to the civilians from the conflict zone. While the former has used the civilians as cannon fodder in terms of using them as a base for forced recruitment and conscription, the latter has been shamelessly bombing areas such as hospitals in its singleminded approach to destroy the LTTE, come what may.

Thus prima-facie, one could suggest a parallel between the atrocities in Gaza and the same in the Wanni from a humanitarian point of view. The Hamas and the LTTE also have similarities in terms of some of the methods that they have used to indulge in their praxis. But again harping on those similarities would be misleading. Hamas participated in a democratic election held in the Palestine Authority and won them decisively. On the other hand, the LTTE ruthlessly demolished all other representatives of the Tamil voice in the region, embarked upon an iron fisted administration that showed little recognition of minority rights (for Muslims) in the areas under their control before the current phase of war and consistently and cynically derailed any genuine measure to establish peace in the region by targetting even rational voices such as erstwhile foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar or Tamil intellectual Neelan Thiruchelvam. The LTTE, in its single minded intransigence that is derived from its Pol-Potish leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran has proved how much of a bane it has been to the Tamil community through its efforts in the name of liberating them.

As for the Sri Lankan government or indeed the Sri Lankan polity (dominated by the Sinhalese), as Neil DeVotta points out in a recent article in the EPW, the tendencies of ethnic majoritarianism has taken root among it, buttressed by years of feeding of such sentiments by all sections of the mainstream polity. Thus, today, one finds a ruling party(the SLFP) led by a president (Mahinda Rajapaksa) that swears by peace and a regime of rights for all sections of the people including the Tamils, but has only paid lip service to that intent and has indulged in furthering ethnic majoritarian claims. The main opposition party, the UNP had embarked boldly on peace moves during its rule previously, but cynically and opportunistically has reverted to a position that is destructive to any moves of finding a solution to the conflict, by refusing to be part of the All Parties Representative Conference constituted to find that solution. Of the other parties, the JVP seems to be a Sinhala ultra-nationalist party instead of its claimed leftist credentials, while the less said of the supremacist JHU, the better.

The general antipathy to "terrorism", post the events on September 11, 2001 has marked the decline of the legitimacy that the LTTE enjoyed in certain international quarters. That opened up vistas for the Sri Lankan government to go in for an all out military attack on the organisation, and also explains much of its success of late, as the LTTE, starved of international help in terms of weapons' access and propaganda looks increasingly a spent and a defeated force. But far from retaining the new found upper hand in terms of legitimacy they had got to enjoy over the period, the Lankan government has frittered it away by the indiscriminate and brutal nature of its military acts and by the refusal of its polity to offer a genuine and lasting political solution to the conflict. It is a shame that the Sri Lankan polity refuses to go beyond nominal measures of powers of devolution as envisaged nearly 20 years ago and finds even the Indian model of "federalism" as anathema to the political arrangement of its state. Such is the denial of the greivances of the minority community (nurtured over years of majoritarian bungling by the Lankan state), that nearly the entire polity rests on an unitary solution which only furthers the status quo in the nation. This author has written about the lack of a civic nationalism in the country that goes beyond identities, but for that to happen, there has to be an understanding that no identity would be privileged.

The military conflict, for the moment continues and almost everyone agrees that the LTTE is on its last legs. But this Sri Lanka watcher is not enthusiastic that the demise of the terrorist force is going to help bring about a culmination of the conflict through a political solution. That the Lankan government and polity has been compared to Israel in its actions is itself enough for one to be cynical about the pious utterances of the Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Even in its constitutional duties of ensuring freedom of expression and democratic dissent, the Lankan government has come a cropper, as the organisation Reporters without Borders has ranked it among the worst "democratic" countries in press freedom.

Getting back to the original question posed by my friend, the answer has to come to this -- is the military struggle waged by the LTTE representative of the Tamil people's concerns? Is there a genuine cause for self-determination for the Sri Lankan Tamils, as the LTTE claims it to be? I have tried to answer those in these articles, and have maintained an emphatic no to the LTTE's claims. As for the separate nation question, that is a more complicated one. My bone of contention with the Tamil nationalist project in Sri Lanka is with the fact that it retains the same ethnic and exclusive basis of nationhood that is exhibited by the extremist elements of the Sinhalese polity. For e.g., the plantation Tamils who were immigrants from India have never identified with the Eelam project and neither have the Muslims in eastern Sri Lanka. The past foibles and atrocious majoritarian measures adopted by the Sinhala polity cannot be the only basis for the claims of an exclusive nationhood for the Sri Lankan Tamils. The concerns of minority rights and privileges not limited to linguistic basis, can still be addressed through the aegis of the united nation-status of Sri Lanka (through more autonomy, a more federal structure etc), provided efforts are made in that direction - as many from the Tamil polity themselves have asked for, Anandasangaree from the TULF for e.g.

The case for Palestine is different as it is not for the carving out of a Palestine out of Israel, but for the retreat of the marauding Zionists from the original homeland of the Palestinians. As Aniket writes somewhere else (and I agree), the solution to the conflict is impossible without the defeat of the Zionist aim, which obviously means the secularisation of Israel. In Sri Lanka, there have been majoritarian impulses, but it is possible to construct a secular (in terms of ethnicity) and civic nationhood without privilege to one identity over the other as none of the major political forces are characterised by an avowed ideology of exclusivity as the Zionists are (irrespective of political party in Israel).

In other words, Sri Lanka has acted Israel-like, but it is still not Israel, while the Hamas has acted LTTE-like, but is not the LTTE in form, content and aims. That explains the relative silence on the Sri Lankan military efforts in the Wanni beyond humanitarian considerations and pleas for a ceasefire and in no sympathy for the LTTE, compared to the strong solidarity for the Palestinians in Gaza and the outright condemnation of Israel. I supposed this has been rambling, but I have been able to lay out the context.