By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Last week I, too, wanted to dance in the streets of Colombo. The Tamil Tigers had finally been eliminated as a force to reckon with in Sri Lanka—at least, so long as the Tamils comfortably ensconced abroad can restrain themselves (or be prevented) from funding and arming their resuscitation.
I was also pleased that the resolution adopted by the U.N. Human Rights Council wasn't a version laying disproportionate blame on the Sri Lankan government for war crimes—though I would have welcomed a text calling for outsiders to investigate atrocities even handedly, and so would the U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights, he says. The West loudly and rightly condemns Al Qaeda’s terrorist tactics, perhaps because Islamists are seen as a threat to European and American cities, as the Tamil Tigers weren’t. But Al Qaeda learned those tactics from the Tigers, who assassinated anyone who got in their way, including Tamil politicians opposing the separatist cause. One victim was a Prime Minister of India who’d lent support to the government of Sri Lanka, not the rebels.
The Romancing of the Tigers
Like most Sinhalese and many Tamil Sri Lankans, I believe that human rights organizations and western powers have been deeply biased, culpable enablers of one of the world’s most vicious and coercive terrorist organizations masquerading as a sympathy-deserving nationalist movement. During the last phase of the decades-long battle, outsiders should have been calling for unconditional Tiger surrender, not for a unilateral cease fire by government troops. If civilians were killed during Prabakaran’s grand finale, it’s because Tiger guns held them hostage in a water-surrounded outdoor prison despite the obvious fact that the cause was lost. This last stand was symbolic of the Tiger attitude to Tamil civilians in general. Boys were wrenched from their families to serve as soldiers, child soldiers. Dissenters were executed within the Tiger-controlled zone. People who wanted to leave were prevented from doing so. Need I mention suicide bombs on crowded Colombo streets?
Yet, much as I have nothing positive to say about the Tigers, much as I am thoroughly happy to know that V. Prabakharan is dead, I am losing my patience with the government in Colombo.
The Tamils had legitimate grievances when all this agony began. (See description thereof from a post I wrote a little earlier this year when a false end to the war was declared.) Surely, while the final push against the Tigers was underway, as it has been now, for months, or years earlier, the Rajapaksa government could and should have been readying a program for rapidly reintegrating Tamils from Tiger-ruled areas. Laws for ending discrimination against Tamils could and should already have been put in place. Thus far, so far as I know, neither is the case, unless perhaps on paper in closed files, though elections have been promised in the very near future. What a laugh that would be! With no recovery program in the offing, what can an election possibly mean to anyone, especially to the thousands of Tamils who are marooned in refugee camps?
Where I’m Coming From
In a way, this is where I came in, so far as my relationship with Sri Lanka is concerned. When I arrived in Colombo in the mid 1980s, the Civil War was already under way. The worst was yet to come, of course, but Tiger violence had already prompted a ghastly retaliatory attack by Singhalese civilians on totally innocent Tamil civilians, who thereafter had been gathered into camps for their own protection. My Sri Lankan secretary, I discovered, had been one of those Tamils. She had recently returned to her normal life, but was still in a state of shock. How could she and her family have been in danger of losing their lives at the hands of people among whom she had lived peaceably all her life? (Such questions were asked in Bosnia, too.) Many Sinhalese, those who had not been caught up in the rampaging mobs, were also in a state of shock. The people who were being victimized were their own schoolmates, colleagues, neighbors, relatives even.
I had my own moral crisis to confront. I had hoped, having been posted to Sri Lanka, to be able to study Sinhalese with a U.S. government-funded tutor. In my free time I had expected to study Pali, in order to deepen my practice of the Theravada Buddhism that had first come to Sri Lanka in the time of India’s King Asoka. But already, inexplicably to me, the Sri Lankan Buddhist sangha was implicated in violence against Tamils, who are predominately Hindu, with a very large Christian admixture. (Sinhalese are mostly Buddhist.) There was, it seems, a passage in an ancient text that predicts an end to Buddhism should it not survive in Lanka. So much for the study of Singhalese and Pali! As for the matter of associating myself with the horribly misguided Sri Lankan Buddhist sangha, that could not be!
Finally, as it would turn out, my best friend in Sri Lanka, a friend
ever after, was a Tamil—and I dedicate this post to her memory. Her
name was Rita Sebastian. She was the editor of the Sunday Times, which
still publishes. As time went on, she turned herself into a war
correspondent, too, covering the war personally. Perhaps in later days
she would have been killed, either by the Tigers, since she did not
support the goal of a bifurcated island, or by the Rajapaksa
government, which has done its best to cover up its own excesses by
conniving at the slaughter of honest journalists. In any event,
pneumonia did the job instead, ten years ago.
The Very Murky History
So, yes, I have always been firmly pro-Tamil, because I felt that Sinhalese nationalism had put Tamils in an untenable position. And yet, paradoxically, I could also see that many Sinhalese were acting out of equally deep fears of loss and dispossession.
According to the 2001 Government of India census, the number of Tamils in the Indian state of Tamilnadu stood at 62,500,000, while the last complete Sri Lankan census showed only 12,500,000 Singhalese in all of Sri Lanka and nowhere else in the world (except for some smallish expat communities), plus around 3,000,000 Tamils, divided among Sri Lankan Tamils whose antecedents arrived nearly 2000 years ago and Indian Tamils brought over by the British to tend the fabled tea plantations. (I’m omitting consideration of two other significant minorities: the Muslims and the Bergers who descend mostly from Dutch stock.)
Now it appears that Sinhala is an Indo-European language most closely related to Bengali in North India, but its vocabulary has over the years been much augmented by Tamil, which is a South Indian Dravidian language. Sinhala was first written in Brahmi, an early North Indian script, but its modern script is closer to South Indian scripts, all of which encourages pugnacious Tamils to claim that Singhala and the people who speak it really hail from South, not North India. Given such intellectual assaults on their sense of identity, the big fear of nationalist Sinhalese is that they will be cheated of their identity as well as a chunk of the only bit of earth they can call their own. Meanwhile, Sri Lankan Tamils feel they are being marginalized in a land that has been their home for practically two millenia. Neither concern can be pooh-poohed. The situation was clearly ripe for exploitation either way.
Confused? Not to worry. The ancient history of Sri Lanka is as murky as it comes. Archaelogy is unhelpful. Texts are vague or contradictory. Though the Sinhalese are ascendent now, there were times when Tamil kings ruled the island. There have been times of invasion and war—and times of peace with much intermingling and intermarriage. Clearly the only rational solution is co-existence, which is why the rise of virulent Sinhalese nationalism in the post-colonial period was such a game changer for Tamils. Equally sad was the way in which Tamil push back was hijacked by the Tigers of Tamil Elam, whose implacable determination to carve out a separate state at any cost led to that suicidal last stand on a barrier island. V. Prabkaran, the charismatic leader of the Tigers, was beaten. Instead of surrendering, however, he and his colleagues surrounded themselves with thousands of Tamil hostages in a last desperate hope that the international community would once again succeed in pressuring the Sri Lankan government into a cease fire that would give the Tigers breathing space.
Now What?
And so I was glad that the Rajapaksa government turned a deaf ear to those who would interrupt the end game to the advantage of the Tigers—and also to those who’d tar the government while whitewashing the bloody Tigers. But now it is time for Sri Lanka to hold its own truth commission, to begin its own honest examination of the national conscience, beginning with the Bandranaike years, when the virulent discrimination against Tamils began. There also needs to be an immediate promulgation of laws that will give Tamils fair access to universities, civil service employment and army slots at all levels. No doubt there will be ripples of temptation to punish all Tamils for the bloodshed, the loss of life, the damage to the economy, et. al. But retaliatory urges need to be resisted strenuously. Perhaps the Buddhist sangha may find it possible to remember that dharma is supposed to be about compassion.
Meanwhile, the government must accelerate the return of Tamil refugees to their villages. I can understand a certain caution about sending people home before ideologues and combatants have been culled from true civilians—up to a point. V. Prabakaran and some of his top leaders attempted to flee in the guise of ordinary Tamils. Other known leaders have been found in the midst of never-armed refugees. The government, obviously, cannot afford to allow intransigent Tigers to slip out of control and restart the rebellion. And yet the longer people are forced to stay in detention, the more any residual bitterness will be reinforced. The “disloyalty” of otherwise ordinary Tamils will become a self-fulfilling premise. And then, of course, there are the genuine humanitarian concerns. Refugee camps are not the healthiest situations to be stuck in.
Unfortunately, it will take a while for the government to be reconciled to outside aid organizations seen as pro-Tiger propagandists, even though their support for refugees is much needed. As for well-heeled Tamils settled abroad, there is a constructive use for their financial contributions, too. The displaced need support to rebuild their houses and restore their fields to productivity. Clinics and schools need to be rebuilt. Programs to bring Tamils and Sinhalese back into constructive interaction might also be useful. That, too, takes money, which, let's hope , won't be wasted on Tiger escapees who want to restart the war. If funds can be kept from Hamas, surely they can be kept from resurgent Tigers.
