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The Storm's Eye by Prof.Rajiva Wijesinghe

Being ill over Christmas was not pleasant, but it did have at least one compensation. This was the possibility of reading, much more than I had been able to get through over the previous few months. And since I was with friends whose interests are much wider than I find amongst my usual range of contacts, I had a great many books from which to choose.

One friend had to teach the Risorgimento next term, and in addition to biographies of Mazzini and Cavour and collections of documents, he had 'The Diary of one of Garibaldi's Thousand'. The writer, Giuseppe Cesare Abba, had been just 22 when in 1860 he joined the force that sailed to Sicily to liberate the southern part of Italy. The book is immensely moving, in its vivid account of that extraordinary campaign, led by Garibaldi at the head of his republican redshirts, which resulted in the House of Savoy being established as monarchs of a united Italy.

Abba is wonderfully enthusiastic about everything, the cause, his comrades, the countryside, the nuns he comes across, even the more committed of his enemies. A modern eye might see something homoerotic in his rhapsodies about the beauty of several of his fellow soldiers, but it is part of his innocent romanticism, of a piece with the tender description of the nun he visited every day while in Palermo, to talk to her through a grill, not able to tell her when he was leaving, so that he had visions of her waiting for him 'tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow....'

Towards the end of the book, having been separated because of illness from the main force that had crossed over to Calabria, he meets them again in Naples and exclaims, 'Nothing, there is absolutely nothing in the world to compare with the sensation of feeling oneself absorbed into the life of a great body of youth, love and valour.'

And that commitment carries him through even the great disappointment of King Victor Emmanuel, having accepted all this territory from Garibaldi, not even bothering to keep an appointment to review the troops, so that a visibly disappointed Garibaldi had to go through the exercise on his own. It would have been nice to have read the book in a vacuum, relating it only to my youthful study of the Risorgimento (in the days when you actually studied History for the Ordinary Level here) and my own enthusiasm for such liberation movements, Byron in Greece, General Giap in Vietnam, Mujibur Rahman a few years later in Bangladesh.

But unfortunately one is also stuck in the here and now, so that I was reminded again and again of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and their youthful volunteers who have caused so much destruction. That does not seem innocent to me, but one has to recognize that there may be many who would see the exploits of the Tigers, not only at Katunayake but also at the Central Bank, as wonderfully heroic.

Of course some differences are obvious. Modern weapons of destruction are so effective that anything outside orthodox warfare is clearly terrorism in a way that small scale attacks on civilians in Abba's time were not. And such acts seem to have been more promptly condemned by the movement itself, and were indeed dealt with by Garibaldi and his lieutenants, in a way that is rare enough in most parts of the world now, amongst regular as well as irregular forces.

But in the end it is not the means that are judged but the ends, and in that there seem to be more obvious similarities between the Italian Liberators and the Tigers, at any rate to those not involved in the process. Most people elsewhere have simply not registered the effects of terrorist acts, and if they do they see this as a response in kind to state terrorism. That is why so many Scandinavians think of the Tigers as heroes.

Their cause after all is a familiar one. Norway got its own separate state with no bloodshed at all in 1830, the Danes lost Schleswig and Holstein to resurgent German nationalism around the same time, and have never regretted it. Those who see themselves as a distinct nation must, on this view, be allowed to become distinct.

So Kurds and Karens are to be encouraged, and even Chechens and Kashmiris. Counter-examples are conveniently forgotten, that Savoy for instance, Italian to the core in 1850, was ceded to France a few years later and is now incontrovertibly French.

Trying to make meaningful distinctions in the context of such sentimental general principles is not of course easy. But I think it would be a mistake to confuse the issue, by conflating the abstract concept of nationhood with the very concrete fact of oppression. The one seems to me to be in itself morally neutral, where oppression, being in itself a bad thing, makes those who fight oppression obviously deserving of our sympathy.

What does confuse the issue is that sometimes oppression arises because ideals of nationhood are suppressed brutally without the actual problems that give rise to such problems being addressed.

This certainly happened in Sri Lanka, with the issue being further confused by an opposing nationalism, having seen itself as oppressed under a colonial dispensation, flexing its muscles without caring about who suffered as a consequence. But though one can comprehend such self assertion, it should have been opposed, and should continue to be criticized now. In short, the hijacking of the Sri Lankan state by a Sinhala majoritarian dispensation was not only a disaster, socially and economically, it gave rise to a liberation movement that seemed therefore an eminently justifiable reaction.

But the danger is that that liberation movement has also become oppressively nationalistic in its own turn.

And while the Sri Lankan State was at least in some respects democratic (except in the six years after 1982, which were precisely those which saw the liberation movements turning definitively to terrorism), democracy and indeed tolerance of dissent are not in the least parts of the Tiger agenda. In short we are not dealing with a self-effacing Garibaldi, or an elected Mujibur Rahman to whom the Mukthi Bahini yielded without question. We are dealing with a millenniary outlook that cannot allow for questioning.

Why are we doing this? Now that both major parties have recognized the evils of majoritarianism, now that both have accepted that this country needs not only power-sharing but also that that sharing has to be both vertical and horizontal, with independent institutions needing to be established and nurtured so that a passing political triumph cannot subvert the state, it is bizarre that we are still waiting for a comprehensive package acceptable to all parties. After all, all parties now seems to mean just the UNP and the LTTE.

Instead of trying to satisfy just them, it seems to me that we should rather go ahead with the simple reforms that all can agree on, a different electoral system, a second chamber that gives weighted representation to the periphery, a limited executive, and so on, so that the larger problem will reduce in size and scope quite painlessly.

Italian unification was achieved, not by trying to make everyone happy through a package, but by applying different solutions to different problems as and when they arose. It is too much to expect our leaders, who know everything and have read nothing, to learn from history. But they should at least try to learn from the disasters of the immediate past, and solve what can be solved without waiting for the stakes to be raised to an impossible extent.

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