Sunday Times 2
Sixteen years later…
View(s):Each year around May 19, I cannot help musing about the events that took place in our country sixteen years ago.
On that fateful day of May 19 in 2009, Sri Lanka’s armed forces finally defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. In the process they eliminated not only the LTTE’s supreme leader Velupillai Prabhakaran but also its top leadership, including Soosai, the leader of the Sea Tigers, and Pottu Amman, its ruthless intelligence chief who had masterminded the assassinations of leaders like Rajiv Gandhi, Lakshman Kadirgamar, Ranasinghe Premadasa and Ranjan Wijeratne.
Students of guerrilla warfare cannot but admire, albeit grudgingly, Prabhakaran’s military genius and innovative mind. It was he who perfected the use of the ambulant suicide bomber and developed the cyanide capsule culture. He was the supremo who had devised daring and devious tactics to combat and outwit both the Indian and Sri Lankan armies.
But finally, he too met his demise. As then-army commander General Sarath Fonseka observed to India’s NDTV, “This time we were playing for a victory, not for a draw.”
It was a famous victory against a fearsome guerrilla group that better-equipped but less successful fighting forces—like the Americans in Vietnam and the Russians in Afghanistan—had never been able to achieve. It was a victory over an outfit that had been described as one of the most ruthless terrorist groups—and it was achieved by the men and women of Sri Lanka’s own fighting forces.
Of course, there are still folk in various parts of the world who claim that the Sri Lankan government of the day committed genocide against the Tamil citizens of this country. A notable person who has jumped on this genocide bandwagon is the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who issued a statement on May 18 to ‘mark Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day’.
It is relevant here to note that Carney was endorsed for leadership of that country’s Liberal Party by Sathyasangaree “Gary” Anandasangaree, a Jaffna-born Canadian who is now a cabinet minister in Carney’s cabinet. This chap Gary Anandasangaree is the son of former TULF politician Veerasingham Anandasangaree.
It was Gary Anandasangaree who sponsored the bill in the Canadian parliament to ‘create a day to recognise the genocide of Tamil people in Sri Lanka’. What many do not know is that his father, V. Anandasangaree, lost his own brother, Rajasangaree (chairman of the Chavakachcheri Citizens’ Committee), and his younger brother, Ganeshasangaree, during the civil war—not at the hands of the Sri Lankan armed forces whom he maligns but at the hands of rival Tamil militant groups.
Rajasangaree was killed by the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) on October 26, 1987. Ganeshasangaree was murdered by the LTTE on February 10, 1988, after he criticised the Tigers in public. After two of Ganeshasangaree’s sons complained about their father’s killing, they were abducted by the Tigers and never seen again. Another son, VG Yogasangaree, who was an EPRLF Member of Parliament, was assassinated along with EPRLF leader K Pathmanaba on June 19, 1990, in Kodambakkam in India—by none other than the LTTE.
Genocide is a word that is loosely bandied about today—for example, by Donald Trump recently to describe the death of two white farmers in South Africa. The word ‘genocide’, originally coined by Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, is defined as ‘an act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’.
The more than 70,000 deaths that occurred during what is euphemistically called the Sri Lankan civil war were terrible and certainly a blot on our country. But in no way can they be termed genocide as defined by Lemkin—and in no way can they be compared to Israel’s current systematic destruction of the Palestinians of Gaza, nor the planned destruction of the Jewish people under the Nazi Germans, nor that of the Armenians by the Turkish Ottomans during World War II.
Perhaps those who listen to Canadians of Gary Anandasangaree’s persuasion talking of ‘genocide’ are unaware that Gary’s own father’s siblings and nephews were brutally killed by other Tamil militant groups like the LTTE. It may be convenient (and good to garner votes in Scarborough) to lay the blame on the Sri Lankan armed forces.
It was these same armed forces of Sri Lanka that decisively eliminated the very terrorist group that had murdered Gary Anandasangaree’s own cousins!
But what did we in this country go and do after that famous victory—a brutal war but certainly not a planned genocide?
In less than a year, the Rajapaksa brothers and General Fonseka, allies who had got together to successfully prosecute the war, were sworn enemies. Massive egos and the insecurities of petty minds led to such a sorry state of affairs. The peace which was won by the effort and sacrifice of thousands of war heroes was squandered by our political rulers. Not only did they use the opportunity to line their pockets and help themselves from the country’ss, but they also liberally appointed their catchers, pandan-kaarayas, siblings, spouses and progeny to positions from which they too could freely profit from contracts and commissions.
Last year we citizens won a victory of another kind when we were able to exercise our democratic vote and evict the rogues and rascals who had been misgoverning this country and helping themselves to its riches.
But sadly, nine months after we elected a new president and then gave him a legislature of his own choosing, we are left with the sneaking feeling that we have got rid of rogues and replaced them with a bunch of incapables. They profess honesty in their dealings, but they are proving themselves to be quite incompetent in their ability to govern.
Did we win the war—and lose the peace?