GOSL: TREATING TAMILS WITH MISTRUST AND INJUSTICE !!!

Notes of Dissonance....................... Tisaranee Gunasekara

"’Think as I think’, said a man

‘Or you are abominably wicked; you are a toad’.

And after I had thought of it, I said, ‘I will, then, be a toad’"

Stephen Crane (The Black Riders)


Vellupillai Pirapaharan needs human sacrifices to turn the final battle of the Fourth Eelam War into a Tamil epic, the psychological and political wellsprings of a future insurgency. Therefore it is in the interests of the LTTE to keep the civilians trapped in the war zone for as long as possible, forcing on them the triple roles of human shields, cannon fodder and propaganda props. Conversely, it is not in the interests of the Lankan state to let the humanitarian crisis in the Vanni fester any further. If (as claimed by Lankan defence authorities) the anti-Tiger offensive has slowed down because of the presence of the civilians, a planned evacuation is the most cost effective way out of the conundrum. Once the civilians are removed from the killing zone, the war can be taken to its logical conclusion, with no let or hindrance.

According to media reports a plan to deploy an international task force led by US marines to evacuate Tamil civilians from the war zone floundered because of the inflexibility of the Rajapakse administration and the LTTE. The government wanted the Tigers to lay down arms and surrender as a precondition to any evacuation; the LTTE insisted on a formal ceasefire. Given the nature of the protagonists and the state of play, both sets of demands are totally unrealistic; it does not make sense to expect the Tigers to surrender or the government to stop a war it is winning. Since neither protagonist is completely imbecilic, the obvious conclusion is that such inane demands were made precisely to sabotage the evacuation effort.

The Tigers’ need the humanitarian crisis to go from bad to worse; thus their obduracy on the issue of evacuation makes terrible sense. They have more to lose than to gain from such a plan. Not so the Lankan state. Rationally, it is not in the interests of the Lankan state to sabotage international plans to evacuate the civilians. On the contrary it is in Sri Lanka’s interests to defuse the humanitarian crisis by facilitating the orderly removal of all civilians from the last Tiger territory, under international auspices. Of course there will be a downside. Such an evacuation may enable some Tiger leaders to escape; effecting a temporary ceasefire to facilitate the evacuation may blunt the momentum of the military offensive (but then, civilian presence has blunted it already, according to the regime). Still, once the civilians are evacuated, the pressure on Sri Lanka to go for a permanent truce or to resume negotiations with the LTTE will cease. International attention will shift from the costs of war to the wellbeing of the displaced, allowing the government to bomb and shell the LTTE in peace. This is the very reason the Tigers sabotaged the international evacuation plan. Since the Lankan state had more to gain than to lose from it, why, did the Rajapakse regime scuttle it as well?

A touchstone common to two vastly different traditions, the 500 Jathaka Tales and the Old Testament, is pertinent in the current Lankan context. Confronted with the dilemma of determining the maternity of a baby in a time before DNA testing, Pandith Mahaoshada and King Solomon adopted a measure (made famous in our age by the Communist Brecht in his Caucasian Chalk Circle). The two contending mothers were asked to play at tug-of-war with the disputed baby. The pretender was intent on winning at any price, including a baby torn apart, while the real mother preferred to lose the baby rather than see it suffer.

In the Lankan conflict, the Tamils have no real representatives; only spurious ones who are more than willing to sacrifice every last one of them to win a point. In their total indifference to the safety and wellbeing of the Tamils they both claim to represent, the state and the Tigers are almost as one. By making an avoidable calamity inevitable, both protagonists are demonstrating their callous disregard to the fate of the unarmed men, women and children caught in the war zone. The regime’s attitude is more inexcusable because it is a democratic, civilised entity, and not a terrorist organisation. Consequently it cannot imitate the LTTE without bringing itself into disrepute.

The Fallouts

In the absence of an orderly evacuation, the humanitarian crisis will continue to worsen, which is precisely what the LTTE wants and needs. The Rajapakses may regard such an outcome with indifference but, its fallout is likely to be multifaceted, intense and long lasting. The first effects can already be seen in the statement by the Indian Foreign Minister asking Colombo to agree to the Tiger call for a truce. Given the Congress Party’s (wise) antipathy to the Tigers, the shift in Indian policy will happen in fits and starts, but it will happen. April to May is election season and that will be the hour of Tamilnadu, with its understandable preoccupation with the fate of Lankan Tamils. With the UN warning of ‘an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe’, of ‘deaths associated with a lack of food’, even Delhi will find it hard to look the other way.

In his representation to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, former American Ambassador to Colombo Jeffrey Lunstead advocated the adoption of economic means to pressurise Lankan government on issues such as human rights and political reform. After months of bragging about not needing the help of the IMF, reality has compelled the Central Bank to go to the IMF for a loan of US$ 1,9 billion. This request is a tacit admission of failure by the Central Bank, an acknowledgement of its inability to handle the country’s burgeoning foreign exchange crisis through patriotic bonds and currency swaps (without ‘going to the international community with a beggar bowl’, as President Rajapakse once put it). In the last five months of 2008, Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves halved, from US$3.56 billion in July to US$1.75 billion in December. The situation is likely to get worse in 2009, given high debts service payments and crises in our foreign exchange earners, from tea and garments (about 50 factories have closed down causing around 40,000 job losses, according to media reports) to rubber and gems. The global financial crisis is also affecting remittances by Lankan expatriates (the Middle East job market will not expand; in fact it may contract, as oil revenues decline).

Responding to the steep drop in foreign exchange reserves, Fitch Ratings have downgraded Sri Lanka’s long term Issuer Default Ratings (IDRs – an index reflecting the capacity to meet credit obligations throughout the loan period) from stable to negative. Though the Central Bank dismissed this downgrading as ‘unwarranted’, it is likely to have an impact on international financial markets, adversely affecting Sri Lanka’s ability to raise foreign currency loans and imposing higher interest rates on the loans obtained. In other words the crisis is structural and cannot be jollied away by singing hosannas to Mahinda Chinthanaya, as the Governor of the Central Bank is in the habit of doing (accompanied by Minister Champika Ranawaka of the JHU).

Irrationality seems a general malaise, from which no sector is immune. A classic example to this pathological condition is the manner in which the editor of Sudar Oli, N Vidyatharan was arrested. If carried out in a judicial manner, the adverse impact of this arrest would have been minimal. Instead the defence authorities went out of their way to arrest Mr. Vidyathran in the most outrageous way possible. The editor, who was attending a family funeral, was dragged away by a group of armed men (some in police uniform and some in civilian clothes) in a white van. Initially both the IGP and the Police Spokesman denied any arrest, giving rise to fears about Mr. Vidyatharan’s life. The obvious question is not why Mr. Vidyatharan was arrested but why the arrest was made in an unnecessarily arbitrary and extra-judicial fashion, tailor-made to bring discredit to the government? Was it inefficiency or stupidity? Or was the manner of arrest premeditated, aimed at sowing fear among the remaining critics of the regime?

A media blackout is preventing the South from discovering the casualties suffered by Lankan forces. But the very fact of the media blackout indicates that casualty figures are in the higher rather than the lower ranges. There is no let up in the recruitment drive either. This and the sense of urgency conveyed by the request to the applicants to bring their personal effects, as the selected ones will be sent for training immediately, belie the version of the war touted in government propaganda. Military funerals have become the norm in some of the rural districts, tucked away in the interior. A chronically inefficient government fails to prevent a shortage of painkiller injection Pethidine, necessary for the treatment of the war injured (in the context of a war, even a shortage of one day is too long). The reopening of the A 9 road epitomises the outstanding successes of the last three years. But the cover ups, the lies and the inefficiencies are notes of dissonance in this symphony of triumphalism, barely audible, but there nevertheless.

Symbols

With the conventional phase of the war coming into an end, will the government opt for a security policy that consciously refuses to make a distinction between Tamil nationalists and Tigers? After all the Army Commander did warn that "even if we finish the war, capture the whole of the north, still the LTTE might have some members joining them…. There are people who believe in Tamil nationalism" (BBC – 30.6.2008). Last year, "the JHU urged the government to issue an identity card for all Tamils living in Sri Lanka" (The Nation – 10.2.2008). Will acts of repression and laws of discrimination be the price imposed on the country in the name of national security? Are the ‘welfare villages’ which, at the best, offer their inmates a trade off between adequate facilities and basic freedoms, symbolic of the future that awaits Tamils, post-war?

During his recent appearance on the BBC’s Hardtalk, Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said, as if in mitigation, that Tamils over the age of 60 will be permitted to leave the ‘welfare villages,’ if they have alternate accommodation. His statement amounts to an implicit admission that all displaced Tamils under 60 will be forced to live in the ‘welfare villages’. This factor of compulsion radically alters the very nature of these facilities, making them not refuges but centres of detention. Though they are not concentration camps, they are open prisons and their residents will not have freedom even if they have banks and post offices and schools and recreation centres.

The government would argue that such ‘security measures’ are necessary in order to neutralise LTTE cadres hiding amongst civilians. A similar mindset of collective guilt and punishment made Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse order the expulsion of all North-Eastern Tamils from Colombo lodges, because some of them might be suicide bombers. Even after the conventional war ends, Tiger guerrilla raids will continue, within and outside the North and the East. In such a context, what security measures will the regime resort to, in order to weed-out Tiger cadres hiding amongst civilian Tamils in Jaffna or Batticaloa or Trincomalee or Nuwara Eliya or Colombo? More ‘welfare villages’; separate ID cards? Permanent surveillance? Mass arrests and expulsions?

How will the next generation of Tamils react to such humiliatingly unjust treatment? Can we expect them (particularly the ones virtually imprisoned in ‘welfare villages’), to see the Lankan state in any other light than that of an alien oppressor? Will not that fact alone make them vulnerable to Tiger manipulation? Can a sense of Sri Lankanness be inculcated in the Tamils by treating them with mistrust and injustice? Or will we be teaching them to equate freedom with separation?

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