Geopolitical matrix of Sri Lanka’s conflict
On March 6, Ambassador Dayan Jayatilleka participated as a special
guest lecturer at a seminar organized by Prof. Michel Korinman,
professor of geopolitics at Sorbonne University (Paris IV). Prof.
Korinman is also the editor of Outre-Terre a French periodical on
geopolitics. Among the participants present were French officials,
journalists and academics.
Following is the full text of presentation by Ambassador Jayatilleka.
“I am appreciative of the fact that this is a seminar on geopolitics.
I think geopolitics has been underestimated; perhaps overestimated
earlier and then there was a reaction, the pendulum swung too far in the
other direction. I am not a geopolitical determinist.
I do not believe that geography is destiny. If we look at the case of
Cuba for instance, it is very clearly a dramatic rupture from any notion
of geopolitical determinism. However, if we have a notion of long term
history as recommended by Braudel, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, then we
understand the importance of place.
We are materially and psychologically constituted at least in part by
where we are. Though I would not say that who we are is determined in a
monocausal sense by where we are, it is certainly one of the decisive
and perhaps one of the determinant factors. So Sri Lanka, as most of us
know is an island and this itself is a constitutive factor because Sri
Lanka is shaped by the fact that it is embedded in the sea. It has no
land borders, and this is important.
Geopolitical component
In the tourist books, in the journal articles, we would say Sri Lanka
is that island off the tip of India. That would be the most obvious
introduction, the shortest introduction to Sri Lanka.
But that again is a fundamental factor in a geopolitical sense, in
understanding the history and the trajectory of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has
been defined by India but it has also defined itself, demarcated itself,
as against India.
So it is this dialectical relationship with India that has been the
most important single geopolitical component in Sri Lanka's evolution.
Now, it is usually the case that we tend to forget the specificities,
the concreteness of a society, a nation, and we tend to put them in
categories - which is necessary- but without due reference to their
concrete specificities.
However, there is also the other and opposite phenomenon, and this is
true certainly of Sri Lanka but it is also true of the Unites States of
America.
Specificities are often confused for, or give rise to, notions of
exceptionalism and of manifest destinies. It is true of Sri Lanka as
well. If we use the notion of the very long term of blocks of several
thousand years of history which historians like William McNeill,
theorists like Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein
have been using, then we would see that to understand Sri Lanka today
you perhaps have to go back to an early version of the struggle between
Catholicism and Protestantism, the struggle between Hinduism -the
Brahminic concept- and Buddhism which did not unlike in the case of the
Protestant reformation, result in major clash of arms as such.
But there was a Counter-Reformation. I say Counter-Reformation
because Buddhism had no notion of and even made a critique of the notion
of caste, the sociological hierarchy into which one is born, which the
Brahminic or Hindu faith placed great emphasis on. In India after the
zenith of the Emperor Ashoka, who was a Buddhist, there was a
counter-reformation, and Buddhism itself was pushed back, pushed
downwards to the South.
It also migrated to the North and to the East; that is: Nepal, Tibet,
China, the Far East and Japan. But in the South there was only one place
that it could go and that was Lanka, or Sri Lanka.
So the successful counter-reformation or counter-revolution
-ideological, sociological, and not violent in terms of well-known great
wars (this is of course interesting) - pushed Buddhism to this little
island to the South of India. And there, this philosophy was retained,
one might even say contained, because unlike to the North of the
subcontinent where there was the Silk Route, this was an island.
Buddhism either converged or became an over-lay, on an ethnic community,
the Sinhalese, who may have been auto-centrically evolved or who may
have come from India -this is open to debate.
The Sinhalese constitute the arithmetical majority of the island,
roughly two thirds, living in two thirds of the island.
Three factors converged: ethnicity, language (which is Sinhala) and
the religion of Buddhism. Buddhism appraised itself as a philosophy
rather than a religion, but when it was absorbed and retained by this
island it naturally took the sociological coloration and configuration
of the preexisting society. And one might even say that it shifted from
a cerebral philosophy to a religion. So you had an amalgam of a religion
that no longer dominated or was even no longer existent in the vast
landmass of the Indian subcontinent and had no co-religionists anywhere
around. In any case there were no neighbours; this is an island with
only one neighbour, the Maldives, and nothing to the South of Sri Lanka.
The next constellation of Buddhism was far away in what you would
know as Indo-China, the Far East (Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar). So a
religion on an island, adhered to by an ethno-linguistic community which
had no co-ethnics or co-religionists. And the language itself, which had
some affinities with one or two other languages in the area but not
many, is not spoken by a large collective anywhere else in the world.
Though for a language that was isolated in the island it developed
considerably. It did not remain an underdeveloped language, and it is
said that at least one of the texts is among the oldest pieces of
history writing: the Mahavansa.
Thus the combination of language, religion and ethnicity became a
very strong amalgam. In a strange inversion the domestic geopolitics of
the island of Sri Lanka are the reverse, a camera obscura, an upside
down image of its giant neighbour India. In India the Southern most
part, contains Tamil Nadu: 70 million people who speak the Tamil
language, who consider themselves of the
Tamil ethnicity and who are for the most part Hindu. On the island of
Sri Lanka, which is separated from India by a very thin strip of water,
it is exactly the opposite. It is not the Southern tip but the Northern
tip that is pre-eminently Tamil. So, one third, the top of the island,
is predominantly Tamil, the Southern two thirds is predominantly
Sinhala.
Interpretation of facts
This domestic geopolitical configuration has given rise to a certain
narrative. Now I would not call it a history because I do not know
whether we are talking about objective facts all the time.
At least from Nietzsche we know that interpretation is as important
and perhaps more important than fact --though that itself is an
interpretation. The interpretation or the pre-eminent narrative, the
hegemonic narrative of the history of the island has been one of a
southward push from South India by the Tamil kings invading the island
and leaving behind a residue from ancient times; of constant waves
pushing southward and the Sinhalese pushing back northwards and
attempting to rule the entire island.
So this is partly a story of dual power, of shifting balances in a
bipolar situation and much longer periods of uni-polar hegemony. We can
see how the geopolitical configuration gives rise to a kind of a
domestic geostrategic narrative of competing centers; of bipolarity and
the attempt of one pole in the North to be auto-centric, and the other
in the South, which considers that it has no strategic ‘defense in
depth’ because it is a small island, to attempt constantly to prevail,
to re-impose itself in a project of unification or reunification,
reconquista.
The point I made earlier about specificity and exceptionalism comes
in at this point. There are more than two major communities in Sri
Lanka.
In terms of religions you have the Buddhists, the Hindus, the
Christians-which is the only religion that has both Sinhalese and Tamils
(about 7percent) as adherents and you have Islam, the Muslim community.
So, four religions, but two major ethno-lingual communities.
Each of these two ethno-linguistic communities has a specific,
distinctive kind of a collective psyche where both the Tamils and the
Sinhalese consider themselves at one and the same time a minority and a
majority.
The Tamils feel that they are a minority on the island and therefore
discriminated against as a minority and oppose that discrimination, but
at the same time they see themselves as a majority because there are 70
millions co-ethnics across the water and of course another million in
the Diaspora including in the West.
This is possibly why the Tamil armed movements and even the unarmed
Tamil Nationalist parliamentary parties will not accept the kind of
solution that Northern Ireland's Catholics, including the Sinn Fein,
have accepted. This strange duality is true also for the Sinhalese.
The Sinhalese feel that they are the majority on the island and
therefore they deserve a certain special status, but this is reinforced
by the sense of being a minority in the sub-region and in the larger
region and in the global space. So there is a striving to assert itself
as a majority but also to defend itself as a minority. And the fact that
Buddhism in what is considered in a pure or more rigorous form
(Theravada) is the most predominant faith among the Sinhalese, gives
them a sense of exceptionalism.
They are defending, protecting Buddhism in the area in which Buddhism
hardly exists, and a Buddhism which they feel is purer than the variant
of the doctrine that you find in Japan or China.
If you look at it in terms of the history of Christianity, the
parallel is the kind of Catholicism that prevailed on the Iberian
Peninsula in Portugal and Spain until a few decades ago, a somewhat
rigid orthodoxy. This is part of the matrix of conflict.
Contemporary violence
I would embed the contemporary violence and history in this matrix
that I have set out. It is in this matrix that the war took place, the
war of 30 years. We have been an independent State for 64 years and a
little under half of this has been in a situation of war. Interestingly
these wars have not only been between North and South or the two power
centers which are preponderantly Sinhalese and Tamils. There have also
been wars, anti-systemic wars, waged by an ultra-left insurgent
movement, two insurrections in the South of Sri Lanka. Even in the North
while the secessionist war was going on, there was a struggle between
the left of the Tamil movement which was drastically weakened and the
ultra-nationalist right of the Tamil movement represented by the Tamil
Tigers.
Now we have testimonies from former founder members of the Tigers,
testimonies which say that at the beginning of the movement, the leader
of the Tigers, Prabhakaran, was already an admirer of Adolf Hitler and
that Mein Kampf had been translated and that even the LTTE’s salute was
the fascist salute. As a political scientist, I note that in the 1920s
and 30s you had in some parts of Central and Eastern Europe, movements
that were ethno-nationalist but also of a fascist character- but this is
another discussion all together. The two power centers on the island,
almost naturally, instinctively, tried to play the larger geopolitics of
reaching out to allies, in the region and outside the region, over the
past thirty years. These attempts of alliance and of blocs of power
balancing underwent drastic, radical recomposition.
It was not the same set of alliances that prevailed during the period
of thirty years. Most dramatic is the role of India, which, because of
Tamil Nadu, was originally supportive not of the project of an
independent Tamil country but of the armed movement as a kind of
counterweight to the central government in Sri Lanka, the power centre
in Colombo. For one phase of the war, from the late ‘70s through the
‘80s, Delhi was dragged in by Tamil Nadu. The role that Tamil Nadu
played and still plays is rather like the role of Miami in the USA, in
relation to Cuba.
There was a dramatic turning point, when the grandson of Jawaharlal
Nehru, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, used coercive diplomacy but played a
kind of Bonapartist role and got the Sinhalese government to sign a
peace accord which provided provincial autonomy to the Tamil majority
areas and sent a peace keeping force of 70 000 Indian troops to police
this ceasefire. Now, dramatic as that was, what was more dramatic and
illustrative of the specificities of the Tamil ultra-nationalist
movement and of the Tamil Tigers, was that the Tigers, far from
supporting this reform and making it work and perhaps playing a longer
term game of greater autonomy, instead
fought a war against the Indian peace-keeping forces, and after the
peace-keeping forces were withdrawn not least because of the Tamil Nadu
politics, assassinated Rajiv Gandhi by suicide bomber, on the soil of
Tamil Nadu, exactly 21 years ago. That caused a dramatic shift in all
these alliances, and from that point on, it was not that there was a
convergence or an open alliance between Colombo and Delhi but there was
a steady rapprochement. When the decisive stage of the war arrived three
years ago, the enormous -and now, stronger than ever- geopolitical
weight of India was on the side of the Sri Lankan State in determining
the final outcome.
Element of competition between China and India
From the point of view of geopolitics, it is also interesting that
not only India but also China supported the Sri Lankan State in the
final phases of the war. This is interesting because as we know the
relationship between
India and China in Asia is not devoid of an element of competition
though there is also great economic cooperation as well. Why did India
and China put aside their competition and support the Sri Lankan State
in the end game of the war? There we come to the term “Eastphalia”
because even Dr. Henry Kissinger in his new book on China has made a
point -made by others as well - that the classic Westaphalian notion of
State sovereignty which is no longer observed strictly, in the West,
certainly in Europe, has migrated to Asia.
Why? This is another discussion, though Dr. Kissinger does not go
into that in his excellent book on China. I would say that perhaps Asia
is at that particular historical stage of State-building -which had been
superseded by Europe- where national/State sovereignty becomes of
paramount importance. So it is the convergence of a particular
historical moment and particular geopolitical balances on the island, in
the region and beyond, between the East and the West, you may even say
the global North and the South, which jointly determined the outcome of
the Sri Lankan conflict. Of course the story is not over. It is still
being played out, in the aftermath of the war, in the debate and
struggle on the kind of peace. While Sri Lanka has won the war could it
lose the peace? We have seen this happen in the Middle-East in the
decades after the 1967 war which Israel so brilliantly won.
“There are many questions, but I will conclude by saying that while
domestic dynamics and dialectics led to the Sri Lankan war and its
outcome, we may, borrowing a term from Lacan and Althusser, say that
geopolitics played a role of “over-determination”. |