MISCHIEF MAKERS AND SPIN DOCTORS

An insidious attempt is being made to stigmatize Victory Day, with the usual culprits saying it’s not good for reconciliation and that it polarizes the communities, which is hardly the need after the war. The subject was written about a few days back in these columns, but in view of the new attack being mounted on the justification for V day or H-V Day (Humanitarian Victory Day) the spinmeisters of untruth need to be tackled down so they will never raise their head with this self-serving, hideous and wholly unnecessary argument again.

Jehan Perera -- basically an agent for the diaspora and anti-national forces, to say it sans the dripping and unctuous faux politeness that this particularly slick operator is used to -- writes that V-Day serves to polarize the communities, which he says is ironical as V-Day is resultant from the policy of the government that re-unified the nation after the war.

Perera is as slick and manipulative as they come in the NGO circuit. How would Victory Day polarize the communities when it is primarily a celebration of the minorities?

The humanitarian victory operation did not rescue persons of Sinhala ethnicity. Tamils, in contrast, by their thousands were rescued from a life of privation under the jackboot of a demon. Therefore Victory Day somehow polarizes the Tamil and Sinhala communities?

This cannot be true, unless this creator of a palpably false narrative tries to mean that the Tamils that were rescued somehow think that the Sinhalese somehow do not identify with or relate to their victory – and with their (the Tamils’) redemption! In other words, there were winners in this war against terrorism, but the greater winners were obviously the Tamil people. Next were probably the Muslims, as it was the Muslims that bore the brunt of LTTE attacks on places of religious worship – and yes, it was the Muslims that were subject to LTTE pogroms that accounted for mass relocations; clearly acts of genocide in themselves.

If the greater victors in this war were the Tamils and the Muslims, it doesn’t stand to reason that somehow the ‘ethnic communities are polarized due to the government’s declaration of Victory Day,’ unless somehow it’s the Sinhalese that are not happy about the army’s triumph!

Yet, that’s not what these mischief makers suggest. They suggest that the Sinhalese are the victors, and the minorities are the losers - and hence the polarization.

It’s time these people changed the blinkers through which they view the world. Their one dimensional vision sees the issue of Sinhala-Tamil relations in the only way they are used to; they see it being a stratified relationship defined in time as being antagonistic and fraught with mutual suspicion.

But the war and the events leading to the final phase saw a paradigm shift. The Tamils see the Sinhala army as an army of saviours, and this is not hyperbole to the thousands who were released from Prabhakaran’s bondage.

The Tamil leadership, so called, may take a different view of things, but they were not the ones that were rescued, simply put. It was the poor in the Vanni, and the vast mass of people in the Northern and Eastern Provinces who were!

A hue and cry has been made about some civilians who were reportedly arrested while they were attempting to commemorate the war dead on Victory Day. Yes, these people were commemorating the LTTE war dead, and that is an affront to the Tamil civilians, the vast majority of whom were rescued in the Vanni and elsewhere from the descent into fascism under Prabhakaran.

Really, there can be no redemption for people who write propaganda of Perera’s sort. If this so called peace advocate is already being seen as compromised and an agent for Tamil separatism – and indeed Tamil terrorism -- the fact that he wants the government of the day to recognize a commemoration of the LTTE war dead, puts him and people like him firmly in the category of agent provocateurs for the terrorist cause.

These people are akin to, say, Germans who deified Hitler, in the presence of Jews, and called for public displays of swastikas and the open toleration of neo-Nazi acts of race hate. These are people that by any definition qualify for a sanity test -- chances being that they will quickly be declared certifiably loony.