Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Great Opportunity

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Part of me, the idealist, would like to be Mahinda Rajapaksa, the recently reelected president of Sri Lanka.  He has an opportunity to call back to health a deeply wounded country. 

The cynical part of me would rather be an observer.  Even if Rajapaksa strives to do the right thing, the country may not be willing to follow. 

In any event, having just won reelection by a beyond-contestation margin, Mahinda Rajapaksa is the man on the spot.  The immediate future belongs to him.  Given the perhaps necessary ruthlessness of the endgame in the war against the Tamil Tigers, I’m not sure he will be able to say,  “That was then; this is now.”  But I hope so.  Only thus will smoldering remnants (and no doubt there are some) find insufficient kindling to reignite the violence.

Here are some thoughts about how Rajapaksa might proceed in resuscitating a country that emerged from colonialism with the epithet “most likely to succeed,” then loused it all up by self-destructive ethnocentrism.

How About Some Soul Searching?

A reconfirmed President Rajapaksa needs to confess that decades of death-dealing began when a resentful majority was prompted to legally disadvantage a minority that seemed too hard to beat on a level playing ground.  Roughly speaking, the Sri Lankan population is 74% Sinhalese, 9% Tamil (divided between Indian and Sri Lankan Tamils) and 17% others, including Muslims and those of Dutch or Portuguese descent.  The Tamils were the target.  They were winning too many places in the universities and doing too well on the civil service exams.  Enter opportunistic Singhalese politicians with a Sri Lanka-for-the-Singhalese policy. 

What were the put upon Tamils to do?  Opt for independence?  Seek autonomous areas?  They did both.  Fight?  Enter various insurgencies of which the most ruthless were the Tamil Tigers, now defeated and seemingly unlamented by non-cadre Tamils.  Forced recruitment of adolescents was the Tiger style.  Life in Tiger enclaves had all the charm of existence in a gulag.  Those who were prudent did not complain—or try to escape, not even during those last horrible days on the sand. 

Two Things for Starters

So much for history.  A reelected President Rajapaksa can do two things to rebuild a shattered Sri Lanka.

First,  Rajapaksa needs to trust that most Tamils aren't and haven't been terrorists.  He needs to resettle them fast; he needs to get schools going; he needs to find jobs, etc., so young men (and women) won’t get restless and violent.  All in all,  he needs to create some semblance of normal life  so that Tamils feel they have a stake in the country again.

Second, the laws need to be rewritten (or good old laws need to be enforced again) so that everyone in the country gets a fair and equal shake.  Once upon a time the Singhalese didn’t take education as seriously as the Tamils did.  Naturally they couldn’t compete.  This time around it needs to sink in that no one succeeds in the current global economy without achieving educational success first.  So, non-Tamils, start burning the midnight coconut oil! 

To achieve one and two, our ideal Rajapaksa needs, above all, to bring the Sinhalese population along with him.  They need to understand that injustice lay at the root of the terrorism that racked the country for two generations.

Advice to Meddling Outsiders

Now I have a word or two for the international community as well as for Sri Lankans. 

With V. Prabakharan, the maximum Tamil Tiger leader, killed while ignominiously fleeing, the brutalities of the civil war have a more than adequate and thoroughly guilty scapegoat.  It will do no good to bow to the urgings of the international human rights community to punish anyone else, on the government or the insurgent side, for crimes against humanity, though crimes were indeed committed.  An adversarial procedure will pour salt on wounds just as healing may have begun.  What’s needed, I would suggest, is more on the pattern of the South African Truth and Reconciliation process.  Out of that may grow the “we” that is needed to reconstruct the country.

Precisely what shape that reconstruction will take can’t be predicted just now.  To the degree that  mutual trust can be nurtured by working quickly on (1) and (2) above, to the extent that genuine atonement is achieved, the need for autonomy for Tamil majority areas may be diminished. 

When I arrived in Colombo in the early 1980s, both Tamils and Singhalese in the capital were in a state of amazement and denial: they’d grown up as friends and now they were afraid to socialize with one another.  If anything close to that previous state of good relations is to be recovered, the work needs to get underway now and be seen to have got underway.   Buddhism surely offers the intellectual resources to construct a policy to achieve reconciliation.  Given a fair shake, Tamils are likely to respond constructively, especially if hawk-like exiles refrain from funneling money to irredentists.

The Window of Opportunity Problem

But the clock is ticking.  Does Mahinda Rajapaksa have what it takes to reunite the country? Can he inspire Singhalese and Tamils to go along with him?  Does he have the sense of urgency that will allow him to act quickly enough?