Osama bin Laden and Sri Lanka’s WMD moment
Dr Dayan JAYATILLEKA
The killing of Osama bin Laden by chopper-borne US Special forces and
Navy Seals is good news and a job well done by that country. Shortly
after the attack on the Twin Towers the Sri Lankan papers carried a
piece I wrote entitled ‘Why Osama Ain’t My Hero’, a full-on critique of
terrorists masquerading as liberation fighters and an explanation of why
defence of existing states, most especially democratic ones, against the
former is perfectly compatible with the defence of the latter.
My rejection of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda was on a continuum with
my polemics and politics against Prabahakan and the LTTE, and earlier,
the JVP’s savage second insurrection.
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Osama bin
Laden |
Fidel
Castro |
Che
Guevara |
Vladimir
Lenin |
It also stemmed from my understanding of Lenin’s and Ho Chi Minh’s
rational use of violence even on a large scale, and the ethics of
violence of Fidel, Che, and the Sandinistas.
At stake are the ‘ethics and politics of violence’ (the phrase is the
late Prof Fred Halliday’s, and I was pleased to discover that the Ethics
Bibliography of the US National War College features my book on the
subject, with Fidel as the case study). More is at stake: the broadly
shared values of rationality, modernity and civilisation.
Express relief
We Sri Lankans had a 9/11 every year, from the attack on Anuradhapura
in 1985. Osama bin Laden did far less damage to the USA than Prabhakaran
did to Sri Lanka. If there is a counter argument of ‘context’ and ‘root
causes’ as in ‘Prabhakaran was only the result of certain policies’, the
same argument holds for Osama bin Laden. Those who reject that line of
reasoning in his case cannot legitimately insist on it in the case of
the Tamil Tigers and Sri Lanka. If as I do, you choose to comprehend
context but refuse to use it as moral excuse or exculpation, you can
have the analytical cake and eat it too, but the same must go for the
Sri Lankan case: there is a context and a causation (the Treaty of
Versailles, the Cold War, ’58 and ’83) but nothing excuses Nazism, al
Qaeda and the Tamil Tigers.
One joins the USA in its celebratory sentiments and President Obama
in his ringing reassertions about bin Laden, but these are as valid or
even more so, with regard to Sri Lanka and the Tigers.
How come its ‘celebration’ in the USA when people spontaneously shout
the name of their country and express pride in its armed forces and wave
flags outside the White House and ‘triumphalism’ when it happens in Sri
Lanka?
It is fine when people gather outside Ground Zero and praise the
death of bin Laden as justice served for the victims of the Twin Towers,
but it is bad form when Sri Lankans, who have been victims of large
scale terror and murders of their leaders, express relief and happiness
at the death of the man and the destruction of the militia that plagued
a generation?
Is it that it is fine when it is the citizens of the North who do it
but terrible when it is those of the global, ex-colonial South? Or is it
that the sentiments of the people of certain communities can be ‘hurt’
by expressions of relief, congratulations and triumph, but not those of
certain others? Why should Sri Lanka play by these hypocritical
hegemonic rules?
To pre-empt any sly assertion that the killing of Osama did not
entail civilian casualties, we must recall that it was preceded and is
still accompanied by a protracted conventional war in Afghanistan, which
spills over into neighbouring Pakistan, and has entailed quite
significant civilian casualties - not even the most surgical tactic,
Predator drone strikes, are devoid of them when the terrorist leaders
are embedded among their kinfolk and tribes.
Analysts and contemporary historians must not forget that the core of
the civilians who were with the Tigers were those who had chosen to
leave Jaffna with them in 1996 after it had been liberated by the Sri
Lankan armed forces in Operation Riviresa, and most Tamils had stayed
behind or moved precisely from Tiger control to army controlled areas.
Prabhakaran gambled and failed, or did he? He gambled that using
human shield tactics, a Beslan or Moscow theatre hostage tactic used by
the Chechen 'Black Widow' suicide bombers, but on a larger scale, would
either prevent the Sri Lankan state from taking the kill-shot, or
generate sufficient international pressure from the West and Tamil Nadu
to deter the Sri Lankan state, or that a Jim Jones type collective
suicide would make his cause reverberate. It almost worked because there
were calls from the powerful and hypocritical for a ceasefire and
renewed negotiations with the LTTE - as if we and our neighbours had not
been down that road many times before starting with 1987; as if
negotiations had not been repeatedly tried and resulted in renewed
warfare by the Tigers.
Nuclear weapons
Prabhakaran was wrong in assumptions one and two. This is what we Sri
Lankans have to thank President Rajapaksa for, because no one but the
political executive could have said yes or no to external pressure
including projects of evacuation which would have permitted Prabhakaran
to slip through. Prabhakaran was wrong in assumption three, because
collective mass suicide through exposure to Sri Lankan military assault
('suicide by cop') was prevented by the military's willingness to take
casualties in dangerous operations to penetrate the bunker-trench
complex and create openings for the escape, each time, of tens of
thousands of civilians.
However, Prabhakaran's third gamble may have posthumously paid off at
least in part, going by the current intense campaign against Sri Lanka.
All wars including the on-going one in Afghanistan, entails civilian
casualties.
The taboo is the intentional and avoidable killing of civilians. Sri
Lanka's war was not characterised by the intentional, avoidable killing
of civilians. As a policy, Sri Lanka sought to minimise civilian
casualties. Sri Lanka's military policy was not the intentional
targeting and killing of civilians. As in Afghanistan, as in drone
strikes in Pakistan, civilians died as an unavoidable result. Is a 'no
fire zone' a zone into which the military does not fire even if it is
taking heavy artillery fire from within it? Or is it rather a zone into
which the military does not fire at random, but only does so in a
targeted fashion in order to suppress heavy artillery and mortar fire
coming from within?
The US used B-52, B-1 and B 2 strategic bombers, designed to carry
nuclear weapons, in bombing raids on Afghanistan against the Taliban and
Al Qaeda, which were far more lightly armed than the Tigers with their
heavy guns, fledgling air force and established naval arm. Sri Lanka did
not violate the criterion of proportionality in the force it deployed in
the last war, including the last phase of the last war.
The civilian casualties were not only unavoidable, but were a
fraction of those who had died in the wars that the Tigers unilaterally
waged even after a reformist solution was available in 1987, and a
fraction of those who would have died had the Tigers not been terminated
and the war continued for the next 30 years.
Accountability trap
This does not mean there were no brutal excesses as in any war, but
these were not a matter of policy; they were exceptions, which will be
dealt with within and by Sri Lanka, institutionally, just as every state
and society deals with them. Why should Sri Lanka be an exception?
There is an attempt to catch Sri Lanka in an accountability trap.
Iraq was accused of possessing (Weapons of Mass Destruction) WMD and
asked to submit to external inspection. It did, and the absence of WMD
did not prevent the horror that was visited upon it.
The panel report is not, as Gordon Weiss has it, Sri Lanka's
Srebrenica Moment. There, 8,000 men, women and children were taken
prisoner and executed. What is being sought to be staged is Sri Lanka's
WMD Moment.
The question is posed, if Sri Lanka is innocent of charges of war
crimes why not prove it by means of an international independent
inquiry? That's a 'have you stopped beating your wife' type of question.
How independent is independent; independent of whom or what? How
international is international? And why not start with other states
whose wars, including those of conquest and annexation, inflicted far
more casualties and ended much more than two years ago?
The UN Tribunal in Cambodia is an inquiry into war crimes committed
by the defeated Khmer Rouge, not into the conduct of the armed forces of
the government of Cambodia which, in alliance with Vietnam, overthrew
the Pol Pot regime. In Sri Lanka, with the equivalent of Pol Pot and his
henchmen dead, the so-called international community wants an inquiry
into those who overthrew 'South Asia's Pol Pot', as the Pulitzer Prize
winning New York Times journalist John Burns designated Prabhakaran.
The milder method of a 'Truth and Reconciliation' is also
inappropriate. From South Africa to Guatemala, these have been only in
situations of a negotiated peace, never an outright military victory.
Had the Tigers been pushed by the West and sympathisers in the Tamil
Diaspora into adhering to the CFA, instead of, say, assassinating the
Foreign Minister, we might have had one of those to go with it-though,
it must be noted that the Northern Ireland peace process did not contain
any Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Bloody Sunday report
took 38 years.
The Darusman panel's call for an 'independent international inquiry'
is nothing less than singling out of our sovereign country for a 'strip
search'. Is there anything that suggests that an island nation with a
written history of millennia and a collective identity ('imagined' or
organic, constructed or primordial) even longer, a country that is not a
failed state, or located in Europe or across the Mediterranean in a
common region, but in Asia, will subject itself or succumb to that
unfair and intrusive violation?
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