{"id":118895,"date":"2014-01-25T00:02:32","date_gmt":"2014-01-24T18:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=118895"},"modified":"2014-01-30T04:22:57","modified_gmt":"2014-01-29T22:52:57","slug":"re-thinking-the-ethnic-imbroglio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/re-thinking-the-ethnic-imbroglio\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-Thinking The Ethnic Imbroglio"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Izeth Hussain<\/span><\/a> –<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"<\/a>

Izeth Hussain<\/p><\/div>\n

It is always difficult to see things as they are. Somerset Maugham, a shrewd observer of human frailty in his best work, claimed that the transcendental geniuses such as Shakespeare and Dostoevsky \u2013 I am not sure of the names he actually used \u2013 could see through a brick wall, whereas he himself, unlike average humanity, could clearly see what was directly under his nose. Wyndham Lewis was even more scathing about the limitations of average humanity: he wrote that only a few people of very exceptional intelligence can see that the cow is in the field. Many readers will write all that off as misanthropic hyperbole. But most will agree that in general we are usually reluctant to see things as they are when they are unpleasant.<\/p>\n

An example is provided by the question of the prospects for a political solution of the ethnic problem. The prospects are nil, or almost nil. The realistic prospect is that the ethnic imbroglio will continue indefinitely into the future. Such is the situation after 25 years of war and four years of peace. Our expectation that peace would lead, sooner rather than later, to noon-tide glory in the resplendent isle, has led instead to what looks like darkness at noon. This is the situation, the horribly unpleasant situation, which most of us, including myself, have been unwilling to face. What this situation demands, above all, is that we rethink the fundamentals of the ethnic imbroglio. It is a process that could lead to our posing the right questions which could lead eventually to the right answers.<\/p>\n

What is the problem? It is not just a Sri Lankan ethnic problem, but an Indo-Sri Lankan ethnic problem, as I have argued in an earlier article. The fall-out in Tamil Nadu of what happens to the Tamils in Sri Lanka can never be ignored by the Delhi Government because that fall-out can take the form of restiveness and even a rebelliousness that spawns separatist movements that under certain unforeseeable contingencies could even threaten the very unity of India. It seems to be a unique problem because I can think of no parallel case where an ethnic problem in one country can threaten the unity of another. If Turkey had not intervened in Cyprus and there had been a blood-bath of the Cypriot Muslims, the Turkish Government would have fallen, but there would have been no threat to the unity of Turkey. We must face up to the unpleasant fact that no Government in Delhi can remain uninvolved in what happens to the Tamils here. The external Indian dimension of our ethnic problem is not of an ancillary order but is integral to our ethnic problem. And that fact is not going to change because of unalterable geographical propinquity and the common ethnicity of the two groups of Tamils. General Zia-ul Huq of Pakistan, one of the most sympathetic friends of Sri Lanka, was quite right in advising us repeatedly \u2013 not in his exact words: \u201cIf you try to solve your ethnic problem regardless of the wishes of India, you will sink into a bottomless pit\u201d.<\/p>\n

However \u2013 an unpleasant fact that our Tamils have to bear in mind \u2013 what I have written above is not meant to imply that our Tamils can rest assured of Delhi\u2019s support no matter what. I must have been the first to try to assess systematically the Tamil Nadu factor in our ethnic problem, in a paper that I presented at a seminar in the late \u2018eighties. My argument was that there is an ethnic commonality between the SL and the TN Tamils, but the two groups are not identical, and that fact will weigh in the political realm. My late friend Professor Sivatamby \u2013 articulating the views of the other Tamils present \u2013 argued that what I was saying was true at an anthropological level but that I was underestimating the importance of the ethnic commonality between the two groups. My argument received substantiation after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi<\/span><\/a> when Delhi and Tamil Nadu to a large extent turned against the LTTE. Later Delhi supported the Sri Lankan Government in the war against the LTTE<\/span><\/a>, probably to a far greater extent than is known to the public at present. At present SL and TN Tamil fisherman are virtually at war against each other. It seems to me that Tamil Nadu and Delhi will support our Tamils only to the extent that their demands are reasonable and fair-minded according to international standards. The Eelam project has no traction in India \u2013 though, I acknowledge, the time for that may yet come given the colossal racist stupidity that has always been rampant among a segment of the Sinhalese power elite.<\/p>\n

I come now to the present unpleasant situation. Neither the TNA nor the Government wants 13A, and there is nothing else on offer to enable us to start moving towards a political solution. However, there is a difference between the two in that the TNA is willing to give 13A<\/span><\/a> a try \u2013 which is why I wrote in the second paragraph above that the prospects for a political solution are nil \u201cor almost nil\u201d. But I cannot envisage the TNA really being in earnest about 13A until after the Indian General elections. If Narendra Modi and the BJP get a clear majority the Indian Government may go in an authoritarian neo-Fascist and racist direction. The new Government could become much tougher with the SL Government than the Congress one. There could be very serious developments over the problems of marauding Indian fishermen and Kachchaitivu. For such reasons we cannot expect the TNA to be really enthusiastic about 13A, unless it comes under serious Indian Government pressure. But we cannot see that happening either. As for the SL Government no one expects it to agree to the full implementation of 13A \u2013 inclusive that is of police and land powers \u2013 while the Indian Government wants no less than that.<\/p>\n

The unpleasant reality is that it is darkness at noon. What do we do? In this article, which is aimed at a rethinking of the fundamentals of the ethnic imbroglio, I have argued that our Tamil ethnic problem is not just a Sri Lankan problem but an Indian one as well, and furthermore, that India is not ancillary but integral to the problem. There are therefore four actors in our ethnic problem: the SL Government, the SL Tamils, Tamil Nadu, and the Delhi Government. In terms of the argument that I have been developing, the concurrence of all four actors is required for a lasting political solution. The two Governments in Colombo and Delhi have to work towards that end.<\/p>\n

The suggestion that I am making might seem humiliating and most offensive to our national pride. Why, it might be asked, should two outsiders, namely Tamil Nadu and Delhi, be regarded as integral to our purely internal ethnic problem? The answer to that is that it was not they but we who gave an external dimension to what should have been a purely internal problem. It was the anti-Tamil genocidal State-backed pogrom of 1983 that gave the external dimension to the problem, by shocking and outraging the rest of the world and making it impossible for Tamil Nadu and Delhi to ignore what was going on inside the blood-drenched paradise isle of Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n

Is there a way out? More specifically, is there a way of making the ethnic problem once again an internal one and getting the foreigners off our backs? I don\u2019t know but we have to try and we must try. Perhaps the starting point should be for both sides, the Sinhalese and the Tamils, to stop demonizing each other and acknowledge their own shortcomings and errors. The Tamils must acknowledge that the LTTE and the TNA put themselves completely in the wrong by rejecting every proposal for devolution from 1994 to 2000, by making a farce of the peace process, and finally by compelling the Sinhalese to fight the war to its conclusion. They must acknowledge that the Sinhalese side fought a just war in the sense that they had no alternative whatsoever. Both sides must acknowledge that they fought a savage war with no prisoners taken.<\/p>\n

The Sinhalese side must acknowledge that the discrimination against the Tamils went to grotesque extremes from 1970 to 1977, and that that was followed by the State terrorism of JRJ<\/span><\/a> which rose to a genocidal apogee in 1983 when the Tamils were treated as worse than pariah dogs. I mean that literally: from British times the pariah dogs were rounded up but they were never burnt alive whereas Tamils were burnt alive in the streets of Colombo and elsewhere with total impunity. Thereafter there was a silence, a criminal silence, from the civil society and the dignitaries of the four great world religions until Anne Abeyesekera broke the criminal silence by writing a letter which was surprisingly published by the disgusting racist paper The Sun. She has conveyed to me that there was also a letter written from a Buddhist perspective by Mahinda Palihawadana. The Sinhalese must recognize that the Tamils had the following alternatives: either be reduced to worse than pariah dog status, or fight. They must acknowledge that the LTTE fought a just war from around April 1994 onwards until the just war shifted to the other side.<\/p>\n

It is time for the Sinhalese to recognize that it is ridiculous to regard the LTTE as a terrorist group and nothing more than that. Over the decades I have refused to use the term \u201cterrorist\u201d to characterize the LTTE, and I have written at least two articles on the subject, and must do so again. There are over a hundred definitions of the word \u201cterrorism\u201d, but the consensus about its core is this: the indiscriminate killing of innocent non-combatant civilians. The LTTE was guilty of that through the Pettah bomb, the Maradana bomb, the Sacred Bo Tree bomb etc, but JRJ killed far more through his State terrorism from 1977 to 1983. The accolade of Sri Lanka\u2019s greatest terrorist should go to JRJ and not to Prabhakaran<\/span><\/a>. The latter led a nationalist movement, but most unfortunately for the Tamils his was a regressive tribalist neo-Fascist nationalism, similar to that of the JVP and what the nationalism of the present Government is threatening to become. All the same, it is time for the Sinhalese side to acknowledge the capacity for self-sacrifice, the valour, the fighting prowess of the LTTE cadres. I want the Sinhalese people to rise to the greatness of the ancient Chinese who inscribed on the tombs of their fallen enemies, in recognition of their valour: \u201cMay you be born among us in your next birth\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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