Looking East at Independence
Susantha GOONATILAKE
The setting, Trincomalee was symbolic. Around 10 years ago, a
fisherman had pointed out to me a leveled strip of Sampur where he said
the TNA had declared as the future Parliament of Tamil Eelam. It was
here in the LTTE’s Pongu Tamil celebration that Catholic priests were
pictured provocatively marking out the future boundaries of Tamil Eelam.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa addressing the nation at the 65th
Independence anniversary celebrations held in Trincomalee.
Picture by Sudath Silva |
It was of this same Trincomalee that I had heard in a New Delhi
seminar, the Indian General Kalkat, play-acting 19thCentury European
colonialists who carved up the world. Kalkat recalled he had chosen
Trincomalee to be the capital of the Northern and Eastern provinces of
their puppet entity instead of Jaffna.
The present government and the Sri Lankan political system are far
from perfect. I can point out, as I have done privately, many failings
and many possible improvements. But, the speech by President Mahinda
Rajapaksa was in many ways flawless. At a time when the opposition, both
the UNP and the JVP seem to be continuously on the verge of suicide, it
was in many ways brilliant. And I do not use such words carelessly.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa punched all the correct buttons. He
recalled the correct history of Trincomalee, not the fiction created by
the LTTE and TNA. He mentioned the ancient port of Gokanna and also the
Mankani inscription around the 12th C (shortly after the Chola invasion)
evoking the Buddha written in Tamil but with some words of Sinhalese
origin. He mentioned how the Asgiriya temple had given land for the
Kandy mosque indicative of Sinhalese Buddhist largess.
He could have mentioned that when the barbarous Portuguese attacked
the Muslims, the Sinhalese Kings gave them shelter and later settled
them in the Eastern Province. He could have also mentioned how when our
Catholics converted by the Portuguese were being persecuted by the
Protestant Dutch, it was the Sinhalese King who gave them refuge.
President Rajapaksa could also have mentioned that under the British,
our Buddhist monks helped translate the Bible and allowed Christian
priests to use temples as churches. Only of course to be later let down.
United Nations Charter
There was of course other relevant information that President
Rajapaksa did not mention. For example, that the Portuguese who
destroyed the temples around Trincomalee were according to Portuguese
records administered by “the Ganzes (Ganinnase) of the sect of Budun
(Buddha)”.
Air Force personnel |
Various dances as part of the cultural show. Pictures by Sudath
Malaweera |
|
Or that the Portuguese had mentioned that the Buddhist monks who
controlled the Trincomalee “pagodas” were subordinate to the Matera (Mahathera)
of Aracao (Arakan in Burma). Or that Francis Xavier claimed to have met
the Terunanse (“Terunnanse”) the head of the Buddhist monks of
Trincomalee.
These Trincomalee sites were first destroyed by de Azavedo who
“killed the Ganzes (Buddhist monks)”. De Sa then destroyed the three
pagodas making use of their building material to erect a fort close to
the harbour of the “Chingala” (Sinhalese) “on the site of the celebrated
pagoda”. The king of Kandy who had been a Buddhist monk, the Portuguese
noted, greatly resented this destruction.
Mahinda Rajapaksa was now looking towards the East whose nations
after centuries of humiliation by the West are today rising. He quoted
sections of the United Nations Charter which stood for the sovereign
integrity of nations.
Leading Western nations have large amounts of blood in their hand
from Afghanistan and Iraq at the present, to the carpet bombing of
Vietnam and innocent Laos, to the barbarous genocidal actions in World
War II as in the overnight destruction of Dresden city and the atom
bombing of Japan after the war was almost won.
Our war, one of the longest ever in the world, started in 1973 when
20,000 detonators were smuggled from India into Jaffna. And in 1976, the
Vadukoddai resolution called for separatism.
The major trigger was India, arming several terrorist groups in
different parts of India and sending them to Sri Lanka in multiple acts
of cross-border terrorism. This sub imperial exercise backfired when the
LTTE killed Rajiv Gandhi. War is no picnic. It is an extremely bloody,
cruel exercise with innocents from every side getting killed. And all
these countries in defence of their sovereignty have fought furiously.
The US, the world overlord is not subject to war crimes and refuses
to sign the associated international laws. And none of the Western
countries engaging in recent imperial overreach have been subjected to
the required criminal charges. Just browsing through the Internet would
give numerous Western leaders culpable of major war crimes. India for
her part has mercilessly crushed her internal revolts like those of the
Punjab, Kashmir and the North-East.
The current picking exclusively on Sri Lanka is regional and global
geopolitics. It is like dogs fighting over a tasty morsel. Fortunately,
the West has arrived at imperial over reach. The US is indebted to
China, and Europe bending its knee to rising Asia. We as the country
with the longest written history in the region have only to grit and
wait.
During the ceremony at Trincomalee, dancers and performances from all
nationalities participated as was the audience. With no LTTE threat
against Tamils joining, the Armed Forces are increasingly recruiting
them into the police and the army.
Cultural differences
The national anthem was sung in Sinhala at Trincomalee, just as the
Indian national anthem is sung in sanskritised Bengali. Almost all other
nations including those with significant minorities have anthems in one
language. Not in two languages, Sinhala and Tamil as our self-styled
“firebrand” Minister of National Disharmony had suggested. In despair, a
close relative of his came to me for advice and said that two NGO women
who have worked against Sri Lanka in Geneva and who are pilloried on
government TV are among the Minister’s key advisers.
And while the Armed Forces marched in Trincomalee, we could not but
recall that once NGOs had been lecturing on downsizing the Armed Forces
and in fact, had even lectured at defence institutes.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa made a significant statement “it is not
practical for this country to have different administrations based on
ethnicity”. He could have added that Sri Lanka being an island at the
crossroads of global traffic has a huge genetic mix. This would be in
addition to the cultural differences that do exist. But in present
Colombo, all co-exist beautifully.
Repeated statements by government TV on a unitary Sri Lanka gave no
room for doubt – no separatism, no fictional traditional homelands.
There is very much that can be and should be improved in the present
government. But President Rajapaksa was only echoing what the Portuguese
historian Queyroz had observed that the Sinhalese are “generally proud
and vain” on account of the “antiquity of their kingdom and nation” and
of the riches in the country.
Another Portuguese Pires observed that in Sri Lanka, “the grandees do
little honour to strangers (meaning foreigners)”that is, they do not kow
tow to foreigners or foreign pressure.
The Portuguese historian Queyroz went on to say that the Sinhalese
thought that they alone in the world “observed and maintained,
cleanliness and propriety and that all the other nations are barbarous,
low and wanting in cleanliness and propriety - especially Europeans.” In
the waning decades of Western hegemony and rising Asia, it is very
useful to recall this. |