On mouth-lies and tongue-truths

There is a pithy Sinhala saying (well, there are many), kata boru kiwwath diva boru kiyanne nehe (even if the mouth lies, the tongue does not). I believe this is what is called a Freudian Slip. The line came to me this morning (October 6) when I read in The Island a short note by Dayan Jayatilleka titled ‘Shanie’s sleight of hand’.

This was regarding a comment by ‘Shanie’ a columnist to The Island, who, writing on the event commemorating the 20th anniversary Rajani Thiranagama’s death, said that ‘a critic’ (Dayan) had complained that the evening was marked by an absence of actuality, and offered ‘perhaps this critic wanted the event to focus only on flogging a dead horse, the killers of Rajani’.

Dayan, in his response, points out that in his piece on the Commemoration, he had not focused ‘only on the identity of Rajani’s killers’ and argues that it is a serious absenting when the murder is not attributed to the LTTE and the identity of the killers is not mentioned even once. He is right.

According to Shanie’s theory, once wars are done, the thing to do is to move forward without dwelling on who did what to whom. Thus, we cannot talk about the identity of those who caused the Jewish Holocaust. We can’t talk about who massacred half a million Armenians in a horrendous period beginning on April 24, 1915, we can’t talk about the mass murderers who turned Kosovo into a cemetery, and we can’t talk of who killed 259 people in Jallianwala Bagh on April 13, 1919 (the Amristar Massacre) in just 15 minutes (i.e. until they ran out of bullets). And, according to this theory, the ‘Truth Commission’ in South Africa should have been shot down the moment it was proposed. Why not? The horse is dead now.

The LTTE horse was alive and kicking before May 2009. There was very little ‘flogging’ of that beast before that was there? Does anyone remember, for example, a single event commemorating Neelan Thiruchelvam where the accusing finger was pointed towards the LTTE?

The ‘tongue-truth’ question that Shanie’s assertion yields is this: was the horse flogged, adequately or otherwise, while it was alive (as sanctioned by implication)? For decades the Shanies of Sri Lanka urged successive governments to go soft on the LTTE, going to the extent of giving legitimacy to that organization (‘representative of the Tamil people’). Military action against the LTTE was vociferously objected to. Those who said that the LTTE should and can be militarily defeated were vilified as war-mongers (Mahinda Rajapaksa was tagged ‘hawk’ even before he became President), extremists, chauvinists, ultra-nationalists and so on. Yes, there was a lot of ‘flogging’ back then (as now) and what the LTTE received was little more than a soft reprimand of the ‘you should do that, brother’ kind.

The tongue-truth is that there was hysterical objection to flogging the LTTE. The equally hysterical demand to haul the President and the Defence Secretary to a War Crimes Tribunal is nothing but the product of leftover bitterness of having lost that ideological battle, I am compelled to conclude.

There is more sleight of hand on Shanie’s part which also revel tongue-truths. Shanie says, ‘If Rajani had been alive today she would have done the same for the victims of the war now ended and challenged the ideologues on both sides who boast of their military genius at the expense of the people.’

At the expense of the people? What is Shanie talking about? Which ‘people’? All I know is that terrorism cost all of us and that if it hadn’t been stopped we would still be suffering from bomb explosions, suicide attacks and the general disruption of life. Yes, ‘people’ died during the war.

If it was possible to defeat the LTTE in a bloodless manner, it would have been wonderful. But that’s just idealistic dreaming. The only people that all this ‘cost’ were Prabhakaran’s thugs, those who were dragged from their villages by the LTTE and held hostage and now have to wait necessary and unnecessary delays in the resettlement drama, and those who benefited from advocating in favour of the LTTE, the NGO-clique in Colombo, mostly.

In war you have to have perspective. This war could have been finished years ago and part of the reason this didn’t happen is because there were people deliberately propagating the myth that the LTTE could not be militarily defeated.

Two hundred thousand or more people could have perished if the Security Forces decided to speed things up in the last few months of the conflict. Instead, most of these civilians, at the time held hostage by the LTTE and made to survive on a glass of kunji per day, were saved. There was a cost. It was borne by the Security Forces.

‘The people’ are appreciative of the military genius that orchestrated the elimination of the LTTE threat. Well, most of them are, apart from the handful of Shanies who seem to be upset that the cookie didn’t crumble in favour of the terrorists. They did pay a price, but they stood behind the President and the Government and more than all this, behind the Security Forces risking all and thereby ensuring (among other things) that there is political space for the Shanies of this country to utter mouth-truths and tongue-lies and engage in sleight of hand.

It seems to me that what is being advocated here is the continued flogging of the Security Forces because the LTTE is no longer available for flogging, if it ever was adequately flogged that is.

There is a lesson in all this, a lesson pointed to by the observation ‘kata boru kiwwath diva boru kiyanne nehe’. Read the lips; watch out for the tongue. It pays to be alert for the enemy appears in different forms at different times.

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