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June 6, 2009

Unregistered User

I sincerely enjoyed reading your article. Agree with most of the issues you raised. The defeat of the LTTE might have ended the physical violence, which is important, but has certainly not ended the conflict. The road ahead is indeed the most difficult one since it is now that the Sri Lankan government will lay the foundation of its relationship with the Tamil minority and learning from past mistakes is crucial. Moreover, the Sri Lankan government has a dounting task ahead as it has to consolidate its role as the government of Sri Lankans (an identity that has yet to be created) rather than that of the Sinhalese and the plague of hundreds of thousands of Tamils in the recent fight against the LTTE makes this even more complicated. Under such circumstances, isolating and punishing the Tamil community for having the wrong ethnicity at the wrong place and at the wrong time makes future nation building and reconciliation very difficult.
As far as the solution of a federation that you suggest is concerned, I am more reserved for four reasons. First, Sri Lanka, unlike India, is a very small state already. Second, though I think that the Tamils need a special administrative arrangement that would grant a certain degree of autonomy (particularly with regard to language and decision-making on distribution of resources) to Tamil majoritarian areas (in particular North, Northeast and East), this particular arrangement need not be a federation. The third reason is that, because of its limited size, a possible Tamil state would hardly be economically self sufficient. Moreover, because of the authoritarian (to say the least) rule established by the LTTE within most of the Tamil dominated areas, the Tamils themselves have no governance experience (unlike in India). Four, such an arrangement (substantive autonomy for the Tamils within a unitary Sri Lanka) is easier for the current Sinhalese government and society to accept.

June 7, 2009

Member deleted

Alessandra's views are very enlightening. They do open up a vista of difference when compared to an equally enlightening comment by a friend (who one wishes had identified himself/herself).

The important step in re-conciliation and peace building in conflict-torn societies/polities like Sri Lanka lies in identifying the various causal factors that are at play. The so-called diagnosis, as it were, forms the first step towards effective policy decisions as well opinion formation. The reason why Alessandra's views make for such an enlightening companion, to the comment posted by an unregistered friend here.

The correct diagnosis and what it would be (including what it takes to achieve that) is what would be ideal in any conflict situation and its resolution as the necessary first step. Between the notions of such 'collective' identity and the realities of ordinary life in 'homogeneous' societies perhaps lies much of the fallacy of erudition - as reification of earlier heuristic devices. Quite a circularity of a different sort, one supposes!

June 8, 2009

Atena Stefania Feraru, National Chung Hsing University, (3)

I apologize for the involuntary "veil of mystery", just joined the network, my name is Atena Feraru and am studying for my PhD in International Relations in Taiwan.

June 13, 2009

Jacques COULARDEAU, Université Paris 1 Sorbonne Panthéon, (6)

This point of view is purely personal and lacks academic distance. If we speak of history we have to go a lot farther back than 1983. The Tamils are not from Sri Lanka originally. They were brought there by the English in the 19th century to work on the plantations on which the Buddhist original population refused to work. These Tamils were probably running away from the Hindu caste system and were from very low castes, and even Untouchables, Dalits. The English treated them as plantation slaves: they had no land, no real homes, no schooling. They were entirely dependent on their masters the plantation owners. In one word the English reproduced the system they had produced in their American colonies, this time with Tamil slaves, or semi-slaves.
The first thing that has to be explained is how this total dispossession could be accepted in the 19th century in a continent with a very old civilization. The caste system of Hinduism is probably the answer. Dispossessed low caste Tamils were ready to accept the “better” living conditions of the plantations, better as compared to the brutal caste system of India, Tamils or Hindis alike, not to speak of the Dalits of course. This historical heritage explains the hostility between the two communities that the English created themselves by bringing the Tamils into Sri Lanka. That does not excuse the excessive and discriminating violence of the majority of the population against the Tamils after the liberation. It is this hostility that explains the next stage, which is the grafting of the Maoist ideology onto the ethnic and religious situation.
That’s what this article forgets too. The inspiration of Prabhakaran comes from Maoism at the time of the Cultural Revolution, hence quite many years before 1983 and his first great deed was the assassination of the Mayor of Jaffna. The dispossession of the Tamils under the British by the British and the caste system of their own religion were transformed into a revolutionary and basic norm: human beings are not supposed to own the earth, to own anything. Private property is banned and only collective property is accepted. That creates a total dependence of the population on the state. Then a total dictatorship can develop without having the taste of it.
The LTTE is such an organization that has here and there in the world and here and then in history captured the imagination of a people and then has maintained that capture by making the people captive, the captives of this organization. And elections are not needed since the support is natural, complete, total. And the secret police is nothing but a way to protect this perfect support from negative influences from outside. Hitler did it, Stalin did it, Mao did it, Castro did it, etc. If we do not understand that we cannot understand what is happening right now under our eyes.
That kind of government, of political organization, of political philosophy produces total stagnation since it bans anything from the outside, anything that goes against the official “truth” of this regime, and that “truth” is of course a lie because there is no truth, only points of view and these have to confront one another constantly. That’s what we call democracy. But the world is following the road its inner contradictions (social, economic, cultural, biological or even geological, etc) and outer contradictions (environmental, cosmic or purely astronomical) determine and blaze at every instant of this historical development of ours. That is its end, its finality, its target, but contradictions, inner or outer, will never disappear. They may change but then new ones will appear and develop and history will go on along that road these contradictions will blaze. To believe history has a final point was the mistake of Saint John in his messianic Jerusalem, or of Marx in his communistic paradise, or of Fukuyama and the perfect democracy and free society. Society will never be free of contradictions and history will go on, till the cosmos decides that the earth has to disappear for its own structural physical reasons.
All these Maoist movements have to either get back into the main political stream like in Nepal, or be erased from the society in a way or another, like the LTTE in Sri Lanka, not to speak of the famous successors of Mao, Lin Piao and his other three acolytes. Then of course the survivors can be eventually entrusted with being believed that they want to get back into the political democratic system. But we have to be very clear about the 250,000 people who “followed” the LTTE into their final end. Either they were real supporters as the LTTE said and then they have to be treated as supporters and suspects and people detaining enough information about where the weapons are and who is ready to start all over again. Or they were hostages and they have to be taken care of properly, which of course does not mean trust them as being all of them pure victims of the LTTE. Among these there must be quite a few LTTE soldiers there. The ascendants of Prabhakaran himself were among the last batch of freed civilians just before the last battle that had no survivors. It does not matter whether these LTTE soldiers merging with true civilians were born under Prabhakaran’s dictatorship or whether they were children-soldiers or whatever. They have to be found out and reformed in their minds. We all know that these children-soldiers have been indoctrinated with violence and killing objectives and that they have been traumatized by this indoctrination that they are not even able to control their simplest reactions. How many Germans were made prisoners after WW2 and kept in camps for several years? Ask Guenther Grass about it. He knows.
This article is thus extremely naïve.
But also badly informed. The speech the President of Sri Lanka delivered in Parliament in Colombo after the end was in Tamil and not in Sinhala, at least partly. That’s the line: integrate the Tamils, restore democracy and democratically elected authorities in all the provinces and then work on implementing a new organization of the country that has to be decided after discussion by the Srilankans themselves and not by us from our university chairs. But the Tamils, including quite a few officials and officers and “cadres” as they call them in Sri Lanka of the LTTE, have already reintegrated the political system, particularly in the eastern provinces. And that is not entirely new.
The Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka who was assassinated by the LTTE in August 2005 was a Tamil. The country was shocked and I was there to see these reactions. The Prime Minister of the time had to contain some reactions that were anti-Tamil. The Prime Minister of the time was the President of today. I believe that assassination played an essential role in the nomination of Mahinda Rajapaksa as the candidate of the “left” in the presidential election of November 2005 and in his victory, amplified in a way by the LTTE’s decision that the provinces under their control were not going to vote.
Terrorism is no longer acceptable and less and less accepted in the world. Compare the election of Hamas in Gaza under Bush administration and the surprise failure to be elected of Hezbollah in Lebanon under Obama, two or three days after his speech in Cairo. And probably the events of the last week of campaign in Iran and the results I do not know at the time when I am writing this opinion.
The real problem that is now on the slate of Sri Lanka is the reconstruction of the country and the final recovery of the central geopolitical position of Sri Lanka as a hub between the various sea-routes coming from the North (the Silk Roads: the one via Tibet and down to Calcutta, and the one via Kazakhstan and Pakistan through the new sea harbor built by the Chinese) and the other routes from the West and the East, from and to the Mediterranean Sea and southern Europe, from and to Indonesia, South East Asia, Australia and the Pacific Ocean, not to speak of the South route to Africa and Madagascar.
It is high time that we, the West, understand what is changing in the world and in what direction the world is going so that violence can one day be either contained or even gotten rid of. The politicians in power must understand they have to drop their old arrogant colonial stand of pre-emptive domination, and the politicians who define themselves as an alternative, as progressive, as the “left” if it means anything, must understand they must stop supporting organizations that have been violent all along and refuse to change their style and means. The FARCs are for one example a sorry survival of the Cold War period and of the pre-emptive domination of the western establishment over the whole world after the fall of the Wall of Berlin.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne.