Crisis and history

Dayan JAYATILLEKA

UNITED: The chorus of critics of Government policy on the A-9 needs reminding that in the effort to preserve a united country, Abraham Lincoln, that most enlightened of democratic leaders, permitted General Sherman's March Through Georgia, with its scorched earth tactics intended to starve the secessionist enemy of supplies.

The American Civil War waged to prevent separation (and confederation), cost 650,000 lives.

While one must be mindful of being paralysed by history - "the abuse of history", as cautioned against by Nietzsche - most commentary on the Sri Lankan crisis does seem to lack a sense of history in three senses.

Firstly a sense of long range history as pondered by Fernand Braudel, William MacNeil, Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein; history which takes a look at, say, 5,000 years, as Frank suggests.

Secondly, comparative history, history informed by a sense of similar situations elsewhere. Thirdly, contemporary history, a history of the current crisis.

Ancient history

A look at history over the long term, or the very long term, reveals long continuities in certain structures and dynamics, stemming from those most material of factors, geography and demography.

The pattern is one of intervention and resistance or retreat, episodic ethno-regional bipolarity, continuous civilisational contestation and repeated 'fault-line' wars, interrupted by long colonial rule.

That long struggle is turned into legend and myth in the Mahavamsa. Conversely put, myth and legend though it be, it rests on a collective existential experience of long duration.

Even if that is debatable, the Mahavamsa is so powerful an ideological construction that any realist must reckon with its permanent persistence in the collective consciousness of the island's majority.

Comparative history

No national resistance is ideologically possible which wholly rejects the people's consciousness and heritage.

This was understood by Ho Chi Minh who rooted Vietnam's struggle against US imperialism in a history of thousands of years of resistance against outside incursions.

The outstanding Vietnamese communist theoretician Nguyen Khac Vien, (editor of Vietnam Courier) identified the task as being the synthesis of Tradition and Revolution.

The ethnic aspects of that tradition tragically manifested themselves after the liberation (China and Vietnam, Kampuchea and Vietnam), but fortunately not so during the liberation wars, because the invaders were from outside Asia.

When the Tigers attack, they cannot be resisted and defeated by hurling bound volumes of UTHR-J reports at them with great vehemence!

They can be only be combated by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces and their Tamil allies. "The army is the peasantry in uniform" reminded Lenin.

In Sri Lanka this means the Sinhala Buddhist peasantry. Given that the Armed Forces are drawn overwhelmingly from the Sinhala Buddhists, and that historically the main resistance to Tamil and European incursions came from the Sinhala Buddhists, it is as intelligent to assume that a Mahavamsa mindset would be avoidable or dispensable, as it would be to assume that the Israelis would or could dispense with an 'Old Testament outlook'!

People fight for what they believe in and against what they fear. Ancient embedded energies will be accessed. They cannot be mobilised to risk death or dismemberment, by or for any less.

Stalin, a non-Russian, a great moderniser and a supreme realist, understood that to withstand the Nazi hordes he had to shift the ideological discourse, depart from classical Leninism and compromise with -even permit the revival of- Great Russian patriotism and Russian Orthodox Christianity. For this departure from Marxist-Leninist internationalism he was excoriated by Trotskyism.

The Trotskyist patrimony exists as mindset and learned reflex action in Sri Lanka's civil society and among the intelligentsia: hence the nagging and hectoring tone of permanent criticism rather than constructively critical engagement.

Contemporary history

The last sense in which a historical perspective is lacking is the selective memory of the crisis. Sri Lanka and its Armed Forces were always accused of human rights violations, blockade of civilians, even genocide.

Even today the UTHR-J's benchmark of atrocities are the late 1980s and early 90s, by which they mean the Premadasa period!

The UTHR documents of that time, and Rajan Hoole's retrospective volume, contain accusations or testimony, depending on your point of view, of the most horrendous sort.

A coalition similar to that which formed against Premadasa and his ally Douglas Devananda in the '90s, is forming against Mahinda Rajapaksa, the EPDP and the TMVP today.

It is propelled by the same forces: the LTTE, pro-LTTE forces, anti-Sri Lankan elements in India, the UNP establishment and the Bandaranaike clan (with their satellite families).

The propaganda and prejudice against Mahinda Rajapakse, the only political leader on offer to mount a measure of resistance to the Tigers and in defence of national sovereignty, stem from psycho-political drives similar to those which motivated the DUNF against Premadasa.

Some of the argumentation or the motivation is what may be called 'aesthetic'. Carl Schmitt decries the use of aesthetic criteria as Political Romanticism.

Writing in the Ceylon Observer magazine in 1967 and quite unaware of Schmitt, Mervyn de Silva opined in a three part essay fairly recently resurfaced by Prof Michael Roberts, that the LSSP missed the chance to support SWRD Bandaranaike and constructively influence 1956, painting themselves into a corner (ironically they had to enter an alliance with his less enlightened widow some years later), because as Trotskyists they viewed Bandaranaike and the nationalist social coalition with "aesthetic" distaste. This, Mervyn observed, made for a disastrously unrealistic politics.

As in the case of Premadasa, though less dauntingly, Mahinda is victim of his political inheritance: Ranil Wickremesinghe's debilitating interlude, Chandrika's continuation of those policies during her last stint, and the continued sabotage by both factions acting perhaps in concert.

As in the case of Premadasa, the Jaffna Tamil network especially in the Diaspora, and the wretched chattering classes in Sinhala society may succeed in hounding him, creating a destabilising multi-front crisis, until his attention is diverted and he slips off the tightrope, falling into the jaws of Tigers.

Mass line, middle path

Mao Zedong famously advocated the 'mass line' which he defined as being "from the masses to the masses".

Mahinda Rajapaksa's is a mass line; the concentrated expression of the national-popular collective consciousness - and it is a mass line staying on the Middle Path (hence the critiques from both ends of the spectrum).

None of this means that Mahinda has not made any mistakes. His main mistake was not to go for a snap general election and thereby change the party's composition, in the wake of his victory at the local government elections.

His second and continuing mistake is not pushing the APC/APRC process on devolution to an internationally satisfactory conclusion.

Current challenges

Sri Lanka's crucial problem lies not in the realm of mobilisation ('Sinhala nationalism' etc), but in the realm of representation. We are facing the crisis with unprecedentedly diminished high quality human resources or human capital.

Though there were very nasty goings on as the Sri Lankan Army retook the East in 1990, Premadasa had Bradman Weerakoon (domestically) and Neville Jayaweera (externally) representing our case.

Though there was the ghoulish episode of dead bodies in the Diyawanna Oya in '95, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga had Lakshman Kadirgamar.

Had Kadirgamar been alive, although the 'Children of '56' in the form of the JVP would probably have had a bigger role than they do today, Sri Lanka would have nonetheless been under less pressure internationally!

The main difference between UN special representative Philip Alston's first report and subsequent international reports including that of Allan Rock is almost arithmetically simple: the absence of Kethesh Loganathan. Kethesh briefed Alston but wasn't around to brief the others.

Had he been alive, the anti-Sri Lanka human rights campaign would have met with a surgical empirical and argumentative counter-strike. This is why both Kadirgarmar and Kethesh were murdered on the orders of Prabhakaran.

The Sri Lankan crisis is not so much a crisis of leadership or ideology and consciousness or cultural identity/identities - the latter cannot be addressed right now or in the short term, anyway - as much as it is a crisis of global representation and projection.

It is not a crisis of a surplus of nationalism; it is a crisis of a deficit of internationalism.

For instance, it is incomprehensible why visits to Russia and China - which have excellent weapons, an aversion to separatism and terrorism, a respect for sovereignty, no Tamil lobbies and (therefore) no hypocritical pressure on human rights - have not been arranged for President Rajapaksa and his Defence Secretary!

The Sri Lankan case cannot merely be stated in wooden terms; it has to be argued out, debated, and fought for in the battlefield of ideas. The weakness of representation is one that neither the country nor the administration can afford.

A coalition with the more responsible reformists of the UNP would be the best way to rectify this.