The lesson from Sri Lanka

Palitha Senanayake

Western media reported the demise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam with mixed feelings. While some media acknowledged it as the ‘End of terrorism in Sri Lanka’ some others expressed misgivings about achieving peace. But the fact is that they all reported the event with excitement and recognized the event as a new direction in fighting global terrorism. Some went as far as calling it ‘The lesson from Colombo’.

The latest issue of the News Week June 1 titled ‘Lesson from Tiger’ says, “Can Insurgencies be crushed by purely military means? Many counterinsurgency theorists doubt it, arguing that guerilla wars are won and lost primarily on the political front.”

All this conjectures, speculations and intrigue expressed by the Western media has to be understood from the position of their limited and somewhat tainted perceptions, on the issues involved in Sri Lankan terrorism, all along.

To start with, the Western media and even the Indian media preferred to view the conflict in Sri Lanka as a struggle by a marginalized group of people to achieve a separate state to realize their aspirations.

Their excitement and awe is a result of reasoning based on that, seemingly unquestionable but yet questionable, hypothesis.

If what the West believed was true, i.e if the Tamils in Sri Lanka were a historically discriminated group, then every attempt at liberation and every step taken by their liberators, the LTTE, would have brought relief to them loosening their shackles of marginalization. Once you realize that the liberation struggle is paying there is no turning back and the people would be prompted on their own to march towards that liberation.

They will then begin to view liberation as their only hope of emancipation and equality and no matter what the obstacles they face, they would be determined to reach that goal. This is what happened in countries like apartheid South Africa and that is why it is difficult to suppress insurgency based on liberation struggles.

The situation in Sri Lanka however has been completely different. Tamils in Sri Lanka, rather than being a section suppressed and wanting in their basic rights, were one of the most privileged communities anywhere in the world when Sri Lanka achieved independence from Britain in 1948.

The British, as usual selected the minority to control the majority encouraging migration from the Tamil homeland in India just 22 miles across the Palk Straits. British used Tamils like how Tutsies were used in Rwanda by the Belgiums.

However when democracy was introduced at the time of independence the country experienced a situation where the Tamil minority was still mostly in charge of the country’s administration with the Sinhalese taking over the political power.

Tamils had casuistic leaders like G. G. Ponnambalam and S. J. V. Chelvanayagam who did everything possible to prevent the Sinhalese asserting themselves over the Tamils. After having failed in their attempts, at independence, to incorporate minority control into the constitution, the Tamil leaders resorted to a strategy of a loud cry of’ discrimination’.

Tamil professionals

This cry of ‘discrimination’ was well echoed by the Church, who too realized the need to check the majority juggernaut to prevent their religion from sliding to a mere minority status.

Tamil professionals started to migrate to England and other Western countries giving rise to a strong Tamil expatriate community in countries like Britain, Canada and Australia. Tamil politicians became so hubristic that they refused to assimilate into the mainstream society and started their campaign to carve out a separate state in the Sri Lankan territory.

Separate state

This campaign gained currency back in Tamil Nadu in India and Mrs Gandhi opted to accommodate Tamil rebels to teach the pro-Western and pro- Israel Sri Lankan Government a lesson. Tamil leaders inspired their followers more, promising that India would do a ‘Bangladesh’ in Sri Lanka.

Anti-Tamil riots took route in Colombo in July ‘83 after Tamil rebels ambushed and killed 13 army soldiers and the riots gave a tremendous propaganda mileage in the West to the Tamils. Although less than 400 people of all communities died and thousands of Tamils made homeless, the event became a watershed in the Tamil campaign for a separate state.

Scores of Tamils, who up to then had no opportunity of finding employment in the West found themselves welcome and the riots had turned to be a ‘blessing in disguise’ for the Tamils. Even by 1982 the Tamil population that was only 11 percent of the country accounted for well over 35 percent in all privileged professions like doctors, engineers, surveyors and accountants.

They also accounted 60 percent of the countries trade and commerce. But now the propaganda on discrimination is really paying and the more horrendous you make the situation in the country the more chances of securing employment abroad. A powerful Tamil expatriate community dubbed the ‘Diaspora’ was thus borne and the war in Sri Lanka became Diaspora driven.

The expatriate Tamils launched the most sophisticated propaganda campaign and financed the Tamil rebels to fight the Sri Lankan Forces. The West, prompted by the Church had unbridled sympathy for the Tiger and even Western oriented Sinhala leaders justified the Tiger atrocities on the grounds of ‘grievances’.

The war raged on with propaganda to the boot but it left the Tamil community living under the jack boot of the Tigers behind. The ones cultured, educated and prosperous Tamil Community found themselves reduced to a fighting force sucked in to a gun culture. The success of the LTTE depended on its criminality and ruthless war tactics.

Diaspora

The more successful it became the more the ‘Diaspora’ funded and shielded it with their propaganda. Pandered and pampered, the LTTE reached the heights of its cruelties and terror, killing even Tamils and Tamil leaders.

The LTTE that started a fight as a means to an end found itself willingly stuck in fighting and enjoying it too. As it is always the case with violence, its addictive properties took the better of the LTTE. The average Tamil found himself pushed to the brink as never before.

They realized that violence has become a cancer in their society and organizations like the ‘Broken Palmyra’ and the UTHR(J) University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) sprang up criticizing the LTTE. The carrot of a ‘country of our own’ at the end started to lose its magic appeal.

They knew even if they manage a separate state with the pervading fascism of the LTTE, they would still be doomed in such a State. Majority of the members of the Tamil community lived outside the so called LTTE area among the Sinhalese and with time the comparisons between the members of the same community on different sides became only too appalling.

Even though the expatriate Tamils had a symbiotic relationship with the Eelam project the local Tamils were increasingly becoming jetsam and flotsam. The Tamils realized that they need to be saved from their ‘savior’. With such realizations the majority of the Tamils woke up from their ‘Eelam’ nightmare.

This in brief is the essence of the lesson from Colombo. The fact to note is that it was not a ‘liberation struggle’ but a struggle to hoist ones own state initially in a part of another’s land.

The Sri Lankan army was a mere 7,000 ceremonials when the Tamil leaders first mooted this Eelam project in the early 1960’s and they opined that they could take over the country with just 5,000 well trained insurgents. However, with time things changed and the Sinhalese rose to the occasion.

The West viewing everything through its own prism and allowing itself to be a victim of Tamil propaganda, always red the Sri Lankan problem wrong.

The LTTE lost the struggle because it was fighting for a land to set up a monolithic fascist state and not for the rights of the Tamils. The Tamils too realized that they were losing more by fighting for their lost privileges in the guise of ‘grievances’. Therefore, Liberation struggles do not wither but struggles for land and lost privileges do.