A nation bound together by the effete ties of language,race and religion has arrived at the cross-roads between parliamentarydictatorship and fascism!

Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka : A Sivanandan‏
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Jul 10Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka : A Sivanandan ≡ Category: கட்டுரைகள்/ஆய்வுகள் | ≅The Institute of Race Relations’ director explains the roots of ethniccleansing in Sri Lanka in a speech to ‘Marxism 2009′.‘It’s difficult to talk dispassionately about what is going on in mycountry, when the horror of what the government is doing to a civilianTamil population - already shelled and burned out of their existenceand now herded into concentration camps and starved of food andmedicine - revisits me to the pogrom of 1958 when my parents’ housewas attacked by a Sinhalese mob, my nephew had petrol thrown on himand burnt alive, and friends and relatives disappeared into refugeecamps. I was a Tamil married to a Sinhalese with three children, and Icould only see a future of hate stretching out before them. I leftwith my family, and came to England.There is nothing, nothing, so horrendous as communal war, ethnic war.Overnight your friend becomes your enemy, every look of your neighbouris laden with threat, every passer-by is an informant. You walk thestreets on tiptoe, casting nervous glances over your shoulder; you aretight, on edge, the sky lowers with menace.Only one thing is worse - and that is when your government exploitscommunal differences, stokes ethnic and religious fears, all in thepursuit of power. In the process, it engenders a political culture ofcensorship and disinformation, assassination of journalists who speakout, extra-judicial killings by police and army, government withoutopposition - a culture that has to be broken if it is not to descendinto dictatorship.And it is with that in mind that I want to examine briefly the 150years (more or less) of British rule, the sixty years of independence,the fifty years of ethnic cleansing within that and, within that, thetwenty-five years of civil war that have brought Sri Lanka to thispass.The Portuguese and the Dutch had occupied the Maritime Provinces inthe 16th-18th centuries in pursuit of the spice trade and strategicsea routes. But it was the British who from 1815 came to occupy thewhole of the country, turned paddy fields into tea estates,dispossessed the peasantry and brought in indentured labour from SouthIndia to work in the plantations. English was made the officiallanguage and Christianity the favoured religion and a pervasiveBritish culture won over the subject peoples to their own subjection.Incidentally, it is important to distinguish between the Tamils whowere brought to Ceylon by the British and the indigenous Tamils whohave been there from time immemorial.Ceylon got its independence in 1948 on the back of the Indiannationalist struggle. Hence it did not go through the process ofnation building that a nationalist struggle involves. Instead, it wasregarded as a model colony -with an English-educated elite, universalsuffrage, and an elected assembly - deserving of self-government.These however turned out to be the trappings of capitalist democracysuper-imposed on a feudal infrastructure - a democratic top-dressingon a feudal base. But then, colonial capitalism is a hybrid, a mutant.It underdevelops some parts of the country while the part it developsis not consonant with the country’s needs or growth. Nor does it throwup institutions and structures that sustain democracy. Capitalism inthe periphery, unlike capitalism at the centre, does not engender anorganic relationship between the political, economic and culturalinstances. It is a disorganic capitalism that produces disorganicdevelopment and a malformed democracy.Power, then, was still in the hands of the feudal elite, the landedaristocracy. And almost the first thing that an independent governmentunder D. S. Senanayake, “the father of the nation”, did was todisenfranchise the “plantation Tamils” who were now into their thirdand fourth generations - thereby establishing a Sinhalese electoralmajority in the upcountry areas. This was followed by colonisationschemes that settled Sinhalese peasants in the predominantlyTamil-speaking north-east - thereby changing the ethnic demography ofthe area. And although elections were on party lines, the partiesthemselves - with the exception of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP)Trotskyists and the Communist Party (CP) - operated on feudalallegiances. Hence the government that ensued was government bydynasty. The first prime minister was succeeded by his son, DudleySenanayake, and subsequently by his nephew, Sir John Kotelawela and soon. So that the ruling United National Party, (U.N.P.), was moreappositely known as the Uncle Nephew Party.The breakthrough came in 1956 when the Oxford-educated Solomon WestRidgeway Dias Bandaranaike decided that the only way that a distantrelative like him could break into the dynastic succession was toresort to the ethnic politics of language and religion that wouldguarantee him a ready-made electoral majority. The Sinhala speakingpopulation, after all, amounted to something like 70 per cent (theTamils around 20 per cent) and they were mostly Buddhists. All he wasdoing, as a nationalist and patriot was returning power to the people,restituting their ancient rights. And so he came to power on the twinplatforms of making Sinhala the official language and Buddhism thestate religion. The language policy was to be introduced within 24hours of his taking office - and all government servants would have tolearn to conduct business in Sinhala within a given period if theywere to keep their jobs. Sinhala would also constitute the medium ofinstruction in schools.Bandaranaike had struck at the heart of Tamil livelihood andachievement. Coming from the arid north of the country, where nothinggrew except children, the Tamil man’s chief industry was thegovernment service, and education, English education, his passport.And Britain’s divide and rule policies encouraged and reinforced thegrowth of a class of Tamil bureaucrats. So that at independence theywere over-represented in the administrative services and theprofessions.Bandaranaike’s policies were meant to put an end to that but, in theevent, they degraded the mother tongue of a people who held up Tamilas an ancient language (which it was) and its considerable literatureas their bounteous heritage. In protest Tamil leaders staged a massnon-violent sit-down in front of the Houses of Parliament and werebeaten up by government-sponsored goondas for their pains - givingmeaning to the phrase sitting ducks.And there begins the two trajectories of ethnic cleansing: the “legal”and the illegal, the civil and the military, the parliamentary andextra-parliamentary, each overlapping and reinforcing each other.Ethnic cleansing is a process not an isolate, genocide its logicalconclusion.The prime minister, having divested himself of his Oxford bags fornational dress, Christianity for Buddhism, English for Sinhala, wascaught now between his social democratic principles and hisnationalist practice, and proposed to make Tamil a regional language.But his ministers and the Opposition upped the racist ante and theBuddhist monks, whom Bandaranaike himself was instrumental in bringingout of the monasteries and on to the hustings where their influencewas decisive, demanded that he return to his original remit. PeacefulTamil demonstrations were met with police violence, participantstravelling to a Tamil convention in the North in May 1958 were takenoff the trains, cars and buses and beaten up by goon squads organisedby Sinhalese politicians. Attacks on Tamils in their homes, on thestreet and work-places right across the country followed. Bandaranaikevacillated and a monk shot him dead. The chickens had come home toroost.From then on the pattern of Tamil subjugation was set: racistlegislation followed by Tamil resistance, followed by conciliatorygovernment gestures, followed by Opposition rejectionism, followed byanti-Tamil riots instigated by Buddhist priests and politicians,escalating Tamil resistance, and so on - except that the mode ofresistance varied and intensified with each tightening of theethnic-cleansing screw and led to armed struggle and civil war.I do not want to go into the details of that sequence here (for thosewho are interested there is a 1984 article of mine on the IRR’swebsite which goes into the specifics and is entitled ‘Sri Lanka:racism and the politics of underdevelopment’). It is enough to notethe key acts of successive Sinhalese-dominated governments that led tothe spiralling cycle of repression and resistance. If Mr Bandaranaikehad cut out the mother tongue of the Tamils, it was left to MrsBandaranaike to bring the Tamils down to their knees - by using thelanguage provision to remove and exclude Tamils from the police, thearmy, the courts and government service generally, further colonisingtraditionally Tamil areas of the north-east with Sinhalese from theSouth, repatriating the already disenfranchised Indian Tamilplantation workers and, more crucially, requiring Tamil students toscore higher marks than their Sinhalese counterparts to enteruniversity - on the grounds that Tamils should not continue to beover-represented in higher education and the professions.At one stroke, Mrs Bandaranaike had cut the ground from under the feetof Tamil youth. At one stroke she had blighted their future. You takeaway a people’s language and you take away their identity. You takeaway their land and you take away their livelihood. You take awaytheir education and you take away their hopes and aspirations. Theyhad seen their parents try reason and reconciliation, but to no avail.They had seen them try non-violent resistance only to be met withviolence. They had seen their representatives in the Federal Partyrunning between the government and the Opposition with their electoralbegging bowl. And they had seen the Left, the Trotskyists and the CP,who had once stood square against racist laws and for the parity oflanguage, succumb at last to Mrs Bandaranaike’s blandishments ofnationalisation in exchange for dropping their call for parity, andjoin her United Front government.The Left in Ceylon, and the Trotskyist LSSP, in particular, hadhitherto had a noble history. Formed in the 1930s, during the malariaepidemic and led by doctors, they had set up people’s dispensaries inthe villages to treat patients free of charge. They had, along withthe CP, politicised the urban working class and engendered aflourishing trade union movement. And in 1953, when the UNP governmentwithdrew its subsidised rice ration at a time of rising food prices,they brought out the country in a hartal (cessation of all work) anddrove a beleaguered cabinet into the safety of a ship in the harbour.But 1953 also marks the Left’s failure - for instead of pressing homethe advantage, a middle-class leadership took fright at the enormityof its own success, agreed to talks and called off the hartal. Themoment of revolution had passed, and from then on Parliament becamethe Left’s pitch - landing them, as I mentioned before, in MrsBandaranaike’s racist government. But the final degradation was yet tocome. Asked to frame a new constitution, Dr Colin R de Silva, LSSPhistorian, now made a constitutional proviso for the repatriation ofdisenfranchised Tamil plantation workers.There was still the self-styled Marxist Sinhala youth movement, theJVP, the People’s Liberation Front, whom the Bandaranaike governmenthad to contend with. But their insurrection in 1971 was ruthlessly putdown and their protagonists murdered by the army and the police. Theirpolitics though claiming to be Marxist stirred up racial animosity bystoking fears of “Indian expansionism”. Their second coming in1987-89, though laced with anti-Tamil propaganda, was even moremercilessly put down by the Jayawardene government. Today they are themost virulent racists in the Rajapakse coalition government - secondonly to the Aryanists of the JHU, National Heritage Party of theBuddhist monks.The degradation of the Left engendered the degradation of theintelligentsia who now turned to middle of the road reformistpolitics. The Tamil youth looked around and saw no allies in theSouth. Nothing and no one seemed to work for them. They had onlythemselves to rely on. They had no choice but to take up arms. (Theviolence of the violated is never a matter of choice, but a symptom ofchoicelessness - and often it is a violence that takes on a life ofits own and becomes distorted and self-defeating.)The youths began with robbing a bank or two, stealing arms from policestations - and making their getaway on bicycles. The north, and Jaffnain particular, is not orthodox guerrilla country with mountains andforests to hide in, but its villages - a maze of narrow twisting lanesand by-lanes tucked away behind large dense palmyrah-leaf fences - arebicycle country inhospitable to motor vehicles. Bicycles, besides,were the Jaffna man’s chief mode of transport even in the towns, and“the getaways” were lost among them. And as the frustrations of thepolice increased and the stories of the hold-ups became legend, theparents and elders closed ranks behind their young. Their generationhad been stereotyped as weak and cowardly and they had been broughtdown to their knees by government after Sinhalese government. Theiryoung had now set them on their feet. They were “their Boys” and“Thambi” (younger brother) their leader. They would keep faith bythem, give them sanctuary, let them disappear among their midst - bewater to their fish.But the romance of the Robin Hood period turned sour and vicious inthe late 1970s when the Jayawardene government let the police loose inJaffna to break up peaceful demonstrations, arrest and torture Tamilyouth, burn down the Jaffna bazaar when refused free foodstuffs - andgenerally lord over it the Tamil people. And this in turn led to thereprisal killings of policemen by the Boys. In 1979 the governmentpassed the Prevention of Terrorism Act and sent the army to Jaffnawith instructions to “wipe out terrorism within six months”. Theimprisonment and torture of innocent Tamils that followed in the wakeof the PTA drove the civilian population further into the arms of theemerging militant groups, all demanding a separate Tamil state, Eelam,the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) the most militant of them.In 1981 security forces burnt down the Jaffna library, with its “ola”manuscripts and rare literature, the epicentre of Tamil learning andculture. In the same year Gandhiyam, a refugee camp turned farm, setup by a Tamil doctor to restore refugees to some sort of normal life,was over-run by the police - and its organisers killed or imprisoned.In 1983 the Tigers killed thirteen soldiers in Jaffna and thegovernment brought their bodies to Colombo and put them on displaybefore an angry Sinhalese crowd and so provoked “the riots”(pogromsreally) that followed culminating in the killing of Tamils prisonersin Welikade jail, awaiting trial under the PTA, by Sinhalese prisonerswhose cells the guards forgot to lock!That’s when the civil war began in earnest - with each side, thegovernment and the guerrillas, ratcheting up the terror count, withthe occasional pause for “talks” or peace mediation, during which eachside refurbished its forces and came out more intransigent than ever.The government now added an official military dimension to civilethnic cleansing by letting loose its private armies to terroriseTamils and drive them from their homes. Refugee camps were attacked,its inmates killed or driven out, Tamil plantation workers wereforcibly taken from their houses and dumped hundreds of miles away bythugs in the pay of the Minister of Industries in trucks provided byhim. (The state against its Tamils.)The LTTE’s guerrilla struggle, likewise, had degenerated into ad hocmilitarism with suicide bombings and assassinations. And politics wentout of the window. The military tail had begun to wag the politicaldog - and instead of winning people to their cause, whether among theSinhalese or their own people, the Tigers began to eliminate anyonewho stood in their way, be it one of their own dissenters or theIndian prime minister - an act of self-defeat in that it alienated theTamils of India. Two years later, 1993, they assassinated Sri Lanka’sPresident Ranasinghe Premadasa. The final self-defeat came in 2004with the defection of Muralitharan, their military strategist andtheir second-in-command to the side of the Rajapakse government. Andit was the inside information that he and his men provided onguerrilla positions and strategies that helped the government tofinally overcome the Tigers. He is today the Chief Minister of theEastern province and a member of the Rajapakse government and held upas a symbol of the government’s goodwill towards the Tamils, and anindication of its intention to afford them some sort of regionalgovernment.But the President’s own actions since the defeat of the Tigers and,more importantly, the political culture that his government, even morethan all the previous governments, has created, belies any suchdemocratic outcome. For what has evolved in sixty years ofindependence is an ethnocentric Sinhala-Buddhist polity reared onfalsified history reinforced by feudal customs and myths, with avoting system that seals the ethnic majority in power for ever - whilereducing the party system to a war between dynasties, flanked by monksand militias.And within that polity the Rajapakse government or, rather cabal (hehas three brothers in the cabinet) has instituted a regime of blanketcensorship under cover of which it has conducted a ruthless war notjust against the equally ruthless Tigers but against harmless Tamilcivilians, a “war without witness” someone termed it, while feedingthe Sinhalese public with government-manufactured facts and seeing offany journalist who dared to criticise the government. (You will allremember the case of Lasantha Wickramatunga, the editor of the SundayLeader, who sent a letter to his friend President Rajapakse,excoriating him for murders of outspoken journalists and predictinghis own at the hands of government thugs. And so it came to pass.)What, in sum, we are faced with in my country today, is a brainwashedpeople, brought up on lies and myths, their intelligentsia told what to think, their journalists forbidden to speak the truth on pain of death, the militarising of civil society and the silencing of all opposition. A nation bound together by the effete ties of language,race and religion has arrived at the cross-roads between parliamentarydictatorship and fascism.It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now - for if they come for me in the morning, they’ll come for you that night.’(Courtesy The Institute of Race Relations’ July 09 2009)www.thesamnet.co.uk -- http://littleaid.org.uk/
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