Call of the Conscience

The speech delivered by Manoranjan Selliah, Chief organiser of the ‘Call of the Conscience’- a human rights art exhibit on the conflict in Sri Lanka, held at Roy Thomson Hall in downtown Toronto last week.

I want to begin by remembering those civilians who are at this very moment suffering from a brutal war in Sri Lanka. Many youth and children have been recruited, mostly by force, to be used as cannon fodder in a war that means little to their innocent lives.

This exhibition is about such ordinary people and their suffering. It is also about ordinary people who did extraordinary work, who rose to the occasion to challenge the madness of war; who believed in the value of dissent, and often paid the supreme price of their lives. My conscience, and we think your conscience, demands that we respond to the call to remember such people. And in mourning and honouring those whom we have lost, we hope that we can change the future for the next generation of young Muslims, Sinhalese and Tamils who are waiting at the edge of war and precarious lives - lives of trouble and sorrow, yes, but also of hope.

I want to talk to you a little bit about my own life, my youth, and how I was influenced by ordinary people in a time of war. As a young person growing up in Kandy, I witnessed first-hand the violence against Tamils in the 1977 riots. I saw how the riots spread, with tensions developing even inside my own school between Sinhalese and Tamil students.

Our house and property were damaged, but our Sinhalese neighbours protected my entire family. In our history, 1977 was significant, as it was the first major communal riots after 1958 that my family remembered. After 19 years of political demands and challenges by the Tamil community, the ruling regime of Sri Lanka was able to incite such cruel violence, shaking the confidence of ordinary Tamils.

Then came the horrible riots of 1983. Again thousands of people were killed.

We heard of even political prisoners who were massacred in prison. While again our Sinhalese friends protected many of us, like other Tamil youth I was very angry. I could not accept the response of the Sri Lankan state, as the police watched on and sometimes even participated in the violence that mercilessly attacked Tamils, while we were dependent on the goodwill of ordinary Sinhalese who helped us and saved our lives. And that is when I, along with so many other Tamil youth from the South, went to the North to work towards what we all believed was the liberation of Tamil people.

While the first couple of years of political work opened our minds and we learned so much about our community, very soon all that youthful enthusiasm was shut down. First, there was the killing of individuals labelled as “traitors”. And then in 1984, the Anuradhapura massacre of over one hundred Sinhalese pilgrims. And then that horror of April 28, 1986, when a pathological killing machine from within our own community was unleashed against our fellow youth, in the form of the LTTE massacre of the other militant group TELO.

This is when our broader community witnessed the brutality of Tamil militancy, as Tamil youth hunted down, murdered, tortured and burned alive other Tamil youth in the streets of Jaffna. The bulk of those massacred here were Tamil youth who had come from other parts of the country to join TELO, while many of the youth from Jaffna were quietly spared.

October 1990 is an unforgettable month as the entire population of Northern Muslims were ethnically cleansed out of the North by the LTTE. And the entire Tamil community stood silent in the face of orders from the LTTE. Unlike the Sinhalese neighbours who could protect us during the riots of 1977 and 1983, we could not even attempt to help our Muslim brothers and sisters, and those with a conscience in the Tamil community could only weep in silence.

It is this culture of fear and paralysis that my fellow activists Rajani Thiranagama, Kethesh Loganathan, Selvanithi Thiagarajah and Wimalesvaran resisted. But even more importantly, so many unknown students and ordinary men and women also resisted on behalf of their community and their own sense of justice. The brutal murder of such ordinary people who represent the conscience of our community should also be remembered. Our entire community became trapped in the logic of war and militarization, and there was no goal other than the military goal and the strengthening of the LTTE, where the common man, woman and child simply became an instrument for war.

War and militarization has trapped our entire country, and it is ordinary Muslim, Sinhalese and Tamil people that are paying the price. It is the poor youth that are recruited to fight and die in the war, whether it is in the Sri Lankan Armed Forces or the LTTE. We are told to look rationally at the Anuradhapura massacre, the eviction of the Muslims, the recruitment of children or the disappearances and massacres by the State. We want to ask you to listen to the call of the conscience. Can we with a clear conscience justify the recruitment of another mother’s child, of the murder of another person’s son, of the eviction of another family?

We want to appeal, especially, to the next generation of Tamils in Canada.

Think of the opportunities you have and the safety that you live in. Don’t you think the youth of your generation in Sri Lanka deserve an education, a livelihood, and the possibility of peace? In listening to our conscience and remembering the loss of all those beautiful lives that could have been much more, we also have the responsibility to act.

We have to stop this war and free our communities from militarization. We have to stop labelling and killing people as “traitors”. We have to struggle for peace and justice. We have to change the country into one in which we can all live together, Muslims, Sinhalese and Tamils.