Letters to the Editor

If we remember the poet’s words that, “one man’s death diminishes me”, we would not find it reassuring, as the government spokesmen and their media ‘echo-makers’ imagine. To anyone who values life, war, whether of “low-intensity” or “full scale”, is a shocking and horrorful and most despicably barbaric way to solve a conflict, especially as negotiations are an effective method.

Whom are we fooling or consoling or placating anyway with such meaningless words as “low-intensity”? Twelve gunned down here, two killed there, three or five or ten or thirteen in massacres, suicide attacks, in claymore bomb explosions, in shootings in cold blood, aerial bombing and pressure mines.

All in this so called “low-intensity conflict” that suddenly gained momentum after mid-November 2005. It is a “low intensity war” as the media insists on behalf of the Government to lull our fears about a “full scale war” (those of us who happen to live in the South). To encourage foreign investment, to lure tourists to “the land like no other”, to give the green light to the “jet set” and their spoilt “brats” to indulge themselves in “balloon parties” and “candle-lit dinners” and more outrageous forms of entertainment. O, Colombo! One can cry. O Sri Lanka! Doom is nigh if peace is delayed. Or is yet another generation to live in “low intensity” conflict conditions?

And while the “brats” and their ageing parents swing it out, the body bags come in “low intensity”, while the grief of the victim’s loved ones is on a mega-scale. But who cares as long as the false, empty, unjust, exploitative show can go on, and on?

Let us remind ourselves that thousands have been sacrificed over more than twenty years of “low intensity conflict”. But soldiers (or sailors or airmen) are: TO DIE, what else? And hard luck for those in the North and the East. As for bomb victims elsewhere, blame it on their bad Karmas, poor things.

I do not think we Sri Lankans will ever learn. We will simply sit by, make an occasional feeble protest (like one hundred women did recently in a newspaper “Ad”, when there are millions of women in this country against war) or carry out some purely cosmetic exercise against the war, whatever its scale or degree of “intensity”.

When, oh when, do we get down to the “brass tacks” and demand justice for the minorities and an end to the chauvinism of the majority in a country which is a mosaic of religio-cultures — the main reasons for the on-going war?

The government’s decision to increase the salaries of ministers and MPs is the most atrocious decision it has taken since coming to power.

The J.V.P. and the J.H.U. that support this regime have forgotten their election pledges when they support this move without a murmur. Could they, in justifying their despicable conduct show the voter the page in the ‘Mahinda Chintanaya’ in which they promised to increase their salaries?

Are they forgetting the constant struggle the wives of Citizen Pereras go through when they go to the market to get their daily needs with price increases of essential commodities almost every week?

Of course, they cannot see the masses who voted them in as they now travel in super luxury vehicles with tinted glasses. Of course they would be in blissful slumber after partaking of the gourmet delights at the Parliament canteen at ‘Thosai Kade’ prices, while Citizen Perera cannot even have a decent breakfast in the cheapest eating house in ‘Maria Kade’.

There should be a referendum on the issue and I will bet my bottom dollar that ninety five percent of the voters will vote for a salary cut by half and the doing away of luxury vehicles. Surely the ministers and MPs who would lay down their lives for the masses will relent and travel by public transport.

There is no point in asking the Parliamentarians to tighten their belts because their waist lines are so enormous that there won’t be any belts in Sri Lanka to fit them. We will have to import extra large belts and that would be an added burden on the economy.

In the interview given to The Sunday Times (May 21) Anton Balasingham said, “We deeply despise racial violence since it has always been the Tamil community who has faced enormous suffering in terms of mass scale destruction of life and property.” Earlier in the same interview he referred to “the racial holocaust” of 1983, which as we all know was perpetrated by Sinhalese against Tamils. It is clear that in Balasingham’s perception the only “racial violence” in this island has always been directed by the Sinhalese against the Tamils.

A convenient amnesia seems to have overtaken him about the “racial violence” to which the Muslims were subjected by the Tamils of the LTTE. I refer to the well-known expulsion from Jaffna of its entire Muslim population. True, there was no “mass scale destruction of life and property” as in the 1983 holocaust, but scores of thousands of Muslims were deprived of their property and reduced to total destitution within hours. It has been regarded, both within Sri Lanka and internationally, as one of the most stupendous acts of ethnic cleansing in the world. It was most certainly an instance of barbaric racial violence.

I must explain why that expulsion should be regarded as having a racist character. Not all acts of violence by one ethnic group against another need be racist. The massacres of Muslims in the Eastern Province mosques were most certainly barbaric and inexcusable on any ground. But they might arguably be regarded as manifestations of the barbarism inherent in war, and not necessarily as acts with racist motivations behind them.

According to the Tamil version, the traditional good relations between Tamils and Muslims in the EP were being destroyed after Muslim homeguards started collaborating with the STF, and the mosque massacres were only intended to stop that anti-Tamil collaboration. I am not concerned here with the question of whether or not the Tamil version was accurate. The point is that according to the Tamil version those mosque massacres had a straightforward retaliatory and punitive character. There was no racist dimension to them.

The expulsion of Muslims from Jaffna was of an entirely different order. Nothing had happened to disrupt the traditional good relations between Tamils and Muslims in Jaffna. The Muslims there were blithely unaware of what had been going on in the EP, so much so that when they were given marching orders they, as well as the Tamils there thought that it was a precautionary measure in anticipation of governmental military action. In Jaffna, unlike in the EP, there was no need whatsoever for any retaliatory, punitive, or corrective action against the Muslims.

What then was the logic behind that stupendous act of ethnic cleansing? The answer, I believe, is to be found in the stereotypical thinking and the essentialising habit of mind that is at the core of racism. What is true of some members of an ethnic group is taken as expressive of its essence, and therefore as something that is applicable to all its members. According to that habit of mind, what the EP Muslims allegedly did made all Muslims everywhere guilty. Consequently, according to the mad logic of racism, the Jaffna Muslims just as much as the EP ones richly deserved to be reduced to pariah dog status, even though they had not done a damn thing against the Tamils. Balasingham and the LTTE will do well to acknowledge that in terms of the contemporary understanding of racism the expulsion of the Jaffna Muslims was an act of blatant racism.

There are two requisites to an understanding of our ethnic problem in terms of a racist paradigm. One is a recognition of the fact of the almost ubiquitous propensity, which can be observed in most ethnic groups right across the globe, to view the other in negative terms. The second is a recognition of the fact that, that negative propensity can lead to a failure to give fair and equal treatment to other ethnic groups. That is the practical meaning of racism in the world today.

Our ethnic imbroglio continues interminably because of an underlying racism on both sides, which makes each side resistant to the idea of giving fair and equal treatment to the other side. Today a solution requires a federal power-sharing arrangement. But the LTTE is fanatically insistent on Eelam or at the least a confederal arrangement. On the Sinhalese side, our two major parties are still unable to come together to establish a southern consensus for a substantial devolution package. This imbroglio seems striking for its sheer absurdity. It can make sense only in terms of an underlying racist drive.