JHU LOST THE ELECTIONS!!! BUT BARKING EMPTY!!!

How to ruin a perfectly good idea by Kath Noble

The JHU appears to be desperately seeking a raison d’être. Having set itself up as a single issue party, interested in nothing much other than crushing the LTTE, it has actually suffered as a result of successes on the battlefield. Mahinda Rajapaksa did all the hard work, and the voters know it. The JHU didn’t get a single candidate through in the recent provincial council elections in the Central and North Western Provinces, despite standing under the UPFA banner, and its leaders must be wondering if the party is destined to the same fate as the LTTE. That would be strangely entertaining.

This is what came to mind when I heard Udaya Gammanpila explaining last week that the JHU was going to set up a committee to sue the British for our invasion of Sri Lanka. Compensation is long overdue, he said.

I would normally be all for such an idea. We became wealthy by subjugating other nations, and the impact of our policies continued to be felt long after the end of direct rule. Britain, as Udaya Gammanpila so characteristically barked, helped to create ethnic disharmony in Sri Lanka, as well as plundering your natural resources. He probably meant to refer to the forcible conversion of a whole lot of people to Christianity too, and that’s fair enough. Culture was as easily trampled as people and the environment in those rather inglorious days.

Compensation would help to set what we currently refer to as aid on a proper footing. When funds arrive as charitable donations for the needy, the givers are accorded far too great a say over their use, in some peculiar recognition of their munificence. Principles like democracy that require decisions to be made by those in need and their representatives are cheerfully ignored in favour of allowing swarms of foreign consultants to rush around the country telling people what they ought to have or want. In the process, aid often does almost as much to grow the British economy as it does to help the recipients. That couldn’t happen with compensation.

The process would also be of use to the British people to understand how we managed to get into such a warped state that we truly considered ourselves superior to the nations we were invading. Simply taking what we felt like because we had the military strength to do so would have been far less ugly. It would stop people advancing the incredibly hopeful point of view that a few railways made up for complete domination of the local polity too. I don’t know if history teaching has improved in recent years, but children were learning about the ancient practice of trephining, the Spanish Armada, General Custer’s last stand and the murder of Archduke Ferdinand in my schooldays, with not a word about the Empire and its implications.

That this is still an important task has become rather too clear in recent times. For Britain appears to believe that our colonial history gives us a unique right to interfere in Sri Lankan affairs. I have lost track of the number of times our parliamentarians have referenced an alleged special relationship between our two countries, meaning the fact that we invaded and occupied your land for a century and more. The only kind of special relationship I can see is one in which Sri Lanka is owed the unstinting support of Britain in resolving its problems, if directly requested.

It isn’t just a question of thinking we have a unique right to interfere, for we also suffer from a quite unshakeable belief in our ability to be useful. This isn’t limited to the British government, for we have seen how the crowds of British people who have mysteriously come to occupy most of the senior positions in international NGOs and the United Nations often seem to think alike. We never remember our failings, even those manifested in the Northern Ireland conflict that took place so very recently. The British government couldn’t prevent armed groups from wreaking havoc in communities and amongst the media there, nor could it avoid the security forces colluding with armed groups, but these weaknesses somehow aren’t permitted to inform our thinking on the situation here. Perhaps the majority of British people just don’t know how ineffective we have been, because it should be obvious that not having been able to deal with such problems when they arose at home doesn’t make us experts when similar issues crop up abroad.

The fact that there is absolutely no chance of success wouldn’t put me off pressing for compensation. Things like this have to be done on principle, never mind the likely result. Of course Britain is not going to allow the idea to get very far, because we imposed ourselves on a good third of the world. If we were to make a list of people with whom we ought to make amends, Britain would be bankrupt before we got to those beginning with the letter C. This doesn’t matter, for the process of demanding compensation might turn out to be more useful than success ever could be.

I do however think there may be a case for suggesting that this country has less of a claim than many others that are doing rather worse today. Take most of the places we colonised in Africa, for example. I’d argue that compensation for our more recent adventures in Iraq should come before any redress for colonialism too. People who are currently suffering the most surely ought to be dealt with first.

This is one of the things that bother me about the JHU getting involved in this issue. Having a rather inward looking tendency, it does not appear to have noticed that Sri Lanka is not alone in this struggle. Any progressive attempt to sue Britain for its colonial misdeeds ought to be done as a partnership between all the nations affected, rather than as a narrow campaign by a fringe party like the JHU. It would also have to reference the current global political and economic situation.

The JHU is of course only talking about compensation in support of its regular agenda. Shouting at foreigners is an integral part of its campaign against the LTTE, and probably for good reason. Indeed, perhaps it is unfair not to give the party some credit for having dedicated itself so determinedly to a single issue. The conflict with the LTTE has been arguably the most important challenge for Sri Lanka in recent years, if not quite so exclusively as the JHU would like to think. Whether the JHU has properly assessed the causes of the problems with the LTTE and the preferable solutions is another matter.

While I am putting things in context, a few words on the motivation for this activism would seem relevant here. Britain did plenty of damage to Sri Lanka, but it can hardly take all the blame for ethnic disharmony. The story of the colonial attempts to divide Tamils and Sinhalese needs no repetition here, but neither should the other tale of purely Sri Lankan mistakes that followed British rule. If a proper accounting for the current situation is to be done, I suggest that it cannot be focused on external involvement.

Perhaps this is a waste of time. As a good friend of mine keeps telling me when we discuss the antics of the JHU, it’s just politics. By this he means to imply that we should ignore what politicians say, because they don’t really mean it. Udaya Gammanpila is standing for the upcoming provincial council elections in the Western Province, and he probably doesn’t care about anything else. It may only be foolish newspaper columnists who bother to listen and try to understand the worth of proposals like this, but we can still hope that this is not the case. Let the JHU demonstrate its seriousness if it can. Maybe then the voters will recover their enthusiasm for the party.

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