SL: A FAILED STATE.....???

Muttur Muslims and Crypto-Fascists...............by Izeth Hussain
According to The Island of October 10 the Presidential Commission of Inquiry probing the massacre of 17 employees of the French NGO L’Action Contre le Faim has asked it to send representatives to appear as witnesses. The Island report stated further that the Commission had sought Norwegian help to get the LTTE also to send its representatives. It is absolutely clear therefore that the Commission is far from having completed its work, and has certainly not blamed the massacre on any one up to now.

It is totally mystifying how on earth K.Godage came to write of that massacre (Island of September 19 and Lakbima News of September 21) that "our armed forces were NOT involved but as a result of the police not arresting the perpetrators who, according to the respected Jaffna University Teachers for Human Rights, were Muslim Homeguards …the good name of the brave men of our Armed Forces, to whom this country owes a deep debt of gratitude, has been tarnished." In an earlier article he had written that as a result of that cover-up as well as another cover-up Sri Lanka might lose the GSP+ facility putting in jeopardy three hundred thousand jobs and a million livelihoods. In his articles Godage referred to what had earlier been written by Chris Lankathileke.

In my article published in The Island of September 29 I wrote that I and my Muslim friends had not been able to unearth any UTHR report that assigns blame for the massacre on the Muslims. The relevant UTHR report states that one of the three alleged killers was a Muslim homeguard while the other two were police constables bearing Sinhalese names. All the other persons mentioned as having some kind of responsibility over the massacre carried Sinhalese names. I pointed out that if indeed it has been established that the killers were Muslims our Sri Lankan Muslims would unanimously expect the authorities to take punitive action as the Islamic conception of Justice requires no less. If however nothing of the sort has been established, it would mean that a crypto-fascist racist gang has been at work to foment anti-Muslim hatred, over which the President should take tough action.

In this article I want to make a few observations on the possible fascist implications of what has been afoot. But before proceeding any further I want to put my former colleague and friend K.Godage in the clear. His published writings attest that he more or less shares my views on the ethnic problem. I would not therefore regard him as an anti-Muslim racist or fascist. It appears that he and others have been misled over the facts, their judgments perhaps being queered by patriotic zeal to put our heroic soldiers – to whom we Muslims are no less beholden than the Sinhalese – in the clear. However, there remains the possibility that a fascist gang has been trying to cause mischief.

There is also another possibility that we must bear in mind. In addition to consciously motivated action there are also actions which have behind them sub-conscious or unconscious drives. Living as we do in a post-Freud age most of us are aware of what goes on below the level of consciousness among individuals. We are not for the most part aware of what goes on below the conscious level collectively in a society as a whole. It could be important – indeed vitally important for the very survival of a society – to recognise and take corrective action over such collective processes.

I have in mind the collective need that can erupt – perhaps in any society at any time – to find scapegoats. What is meant is that a society that is unable to own up to its sins and crimes finds it convenient to blame them on an outsider, a process of exorcism the most famous example of which is to be found in the Bible. I want here to refer to a part of Robert Girard’s complex theorizing on scapegoats. According to him the ideal scapegoat is not the total outsider. It is rather someone who belongs to a society but is marginalized in it. This description fits perfectly of course the Jews in European and North American countries, on whose heads all sorts of sins and crimes were heaped with total irrationality over many centuries. Hitler’s holocaust made anti-Semitism unpopular but it still erupts in some of those countries, showing the grim persistence of the need to find scapegoats.

The need to find a scapegoat for the thoroughly unsatisfactory nature of our peace process was shown in the propensity to cast the odium for it on the Norwegians. In my view the peace process failed for reasons that had nothing to do with the Norwegians. There was a widespread failure – particularly among the international community – to recognise that the LTTE wanted nothing less than a de facto Eelam, which of course made a negotiated solution impossible. Instead of insisting on that point, our publicity focussed on the absurd notion that the international community was failing to understand that we were confronting a terrorist problem, and not at all an ethnic problem. In addition, our two major parties continued their incorrigible practice of sabotaging each others’ attempts to find a solution, in consequence of which they never came up with a mutually agreed devolution offer. Instead of recognising those reasons for the failure, many Sri Lankans imagined that the Norwegians were out to help the LTTE establish Eelam, that their secret target was exclusive rights in a fisheries harbour, and so on. The irrationality that goes with the need to find a scapegoat was shown very clearly.

The Norwegians have gone, and the question is whether our Muslims are now to become the scapegoat. As a marginalized ethnic group they would fit Girard’s specification for the ideal scapegoat. The following from Kumari Jayawardena’s book Erasure of the Euro-Asian also seems quite apposite, "Diatribes against Jews in European racist literature found an echo in South Asian writing of the early 20th century, when Muslim traders were compared to the stereotyped Jew. Interestingly, one of the favorite Shakespearean texts and plays in English-medium schools in colonial Sri Lanka was the Merchant of Venice, with many a student hamming it up as Shylock."

For some time some Muslims have had the impression that anti-Muslim feeling has been on the increase in Sri Lanka, but that is no more than an impression and it would be irresponsible to give much weight to it. The attempt to affix blame for the Muttur massacre on the Muslims is something of a different order. It could mean that a crypto-fascist racist gang has been trying to foment anti-Muslim hatred, and it could also mean that there is a subconscious drive in our society to make the Muslim the scapegoat. Those two possibilities are not exclusive of each other.

In conclusion I must alert the Government to the possibility that a menacing fascist drive – more perhaps at a subconscious than a conscious level – could be gaining pace in Sri Lanka. The finding of scapegoats and the mad racism that notoriously goes with it as shown by European anti-Semitism are recognised features of fascism. So is the chauvinism – the hatred of foreigners – shown some time ago in the mad diatribes against foreign human rights notables, and more recently against the UN Secretary General merely because he alerted the Government to possible violations of humanitarian laws. Chauvinism is recognised as a characteristic feature of the "extreme right" which amounts in reality to neo-fascism. At the very least the Government should take tough action over the attempt to make our Muslims the scapegoat for the Muttur massacre. Otherwise Sri Lanka could be seen – at least to some extent – as a failed state.

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