சிங்களஒருமை ப்பாடு என்பது இனப்படுகொலையை மறைக்கும் முகமூடியே!
‘Reconciliation in unitary Sri Lanka a cover for genocide, assimilation’
After threatening the Eezham Tamils with annihilation with the
genocidal massacre at Mu’l’livaaykkaal, unitary Sri Lanka’s idea of
reconciliation and the best solution it can offer is assimilation “where
the Eelam Tamils will lose all sense of identity and become ‘authentic
Sri Lankans’ i.e. mimics of the Sinhalese,” writes RM Karthick, in an
article published on JDSLanka . But even as the Sri Lanka implements its
model of ‘reconciliation’ through land grabs, Sinhalisation and
Buddhicisation, world establishments are compelling the Eezham Tamils in
the homeland and diaspora to reconcile with this ‘change of ground
realities’. Likewise, the concept of ‘restorative justice’, taken from
South Africa being proposed by such establishments in a wrong context to
the Eezham Tamils who bear the brunt of genocide will only facilitate
eventual assimilation into unitary Sri Lanka.
Referring to implications and pitfalls in the concept of reconciliation
as such, and taking from the arguments of Dr. Alexander Boraine, one of
the chief architects of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, Mr. Karthick, a research scholar in the University of Essex,
UK, raises basic ethical questions to be asked to the Sinhalese by
those arguing for reconciliation, concluding that for genuine
reconciliation to happen between the two nations in the island certain
fundamental moral and political actions need to be undertaken by the
Sinhalese.
The contextual differences between the South African
case and the Sri Lankan case are glaring. While in South Africa, it was a
privileged minority that systemically practised racial discrimination
against the majority, in the island of Sri Lanka, it is a privileged
majority nation that uses structural genocide to destroy the homeland of
the numerically inferior Tamil nation.
The restorative justice
model promoted in South Africa was known for its sharp contrast from the
Nuremberg Trials which were based on retributive justice to deal with
war criminals and genocide accused, with punishments for those in
command responsibility and those following superior orders. The South
African model focussed more on reformation of the system and
rehabilitation than punishment.
The restorative justice model of
South Africa, while it won applause from the promoters of liberal
peace, drew strong criticisms from many victims and their families,
including the family of prominent Black activist Steve Biko who was
killed under the apartheid regime, and internationally acclaimed
intellectuals and writers like John Pilger, for giving primacy to a
smooth political transition over justice, and for being lenient to those
guilty of criminal offences for this purpose.
What this model
will mean in the context of Sri Lanka and the occupied homeland of
Tamils is that the existing political structure of the unitary state
will be taken as legitimate, the Sinhala colonization of Tamil homeland
and the erected Buddhist and military structures by the occupying Sri
Lankan armed forces considered permanent, while asking both the Tamils
and Sinhalese to forgive and forget.
Tamils, likewise, will be
asked to give up their demands for the prosecution of those in the Sri
Lankan establishment complicit in the genocide and for a political
solution based on the concepts of the historical, earned and remedial
realities of their sovereignty. These processes are already in motion in
the diaspora by organizations like the ICG, International Alert, the
Royal Commonwealth Society, One Text Initiative and others.
Archbishop
Desmond Tutu, who was one of the champions of the restorative justice
model in South Africa, is an important member of International Alert.
Along with the Royal Commonwealth Society, International Alert did its
own version of a ‘reconciliation programme’ in early March 2012 by
taking “British Sri Lankans” on a trip of the island, sponsored by
British High Commission in Sri Lanka, concluding it on late March with a
‘diaspora dialogues’ event, promoting the development model of Colombo
that seeks to erase the Tamil homeland.
The International Crisis
Group, that does not acknowledge the genocide of Eezham Tamils or their
right to sovereignty, has also promoted South African model in the
recent past.
While Holocaust denial is serious criminal offence
in many Western liberal democracies, whether they are not being
hypocritical by making the Eezham Tamils submit to a ‘reconciliation’
that makes them forget the genocide of their own people even as it
continues it front of them, asked a veteran Eezham Tamil activist.
This
model of justice and reconciliation would mean nothing more than Eezham
Tamils being reduced to a vulnerable minority status and losing all
claims to their homeland, since the absence of a political solution
based on retributive justice would ensure the gradual breaking up of the
contiguity of the Tamil homeland and the permanent occupation of Sri
Lankan state.
In the article, the author also sardonically
points out how such a ‘genuine reconciliation’ would happen after
Sinhala colonization has reached a point of no return in the Tamil
homeland and the Tamils are made a scattered minority, arguing that this
possibility “is contingent on the idea of Tamil Eelam and retributive
justice for what happened over the past 60 years breaking completely
among the Tamils not just in the homeland, but in Tamil Nadu and
diaspora as well allowing things to reach such a stage.”
The
Eezham Tamils should carefully observe whether those who come to them
with the terms of reconciliation, accountability and justice with this
or that model, without recognizing the context of genocide in the Tamil
homeland and their right as a nation to self-determination, are actually
hoodwinking them into forgetting the genocide of their own people and
reconciling with the structure that was responsible.
The full text of RM Karthick’s article from JDSLanka, a website run by exiled journalists from the island, follows:
DECONSTRUCTING SRI LANKA’S RECONCILIATION DISCOURSE When
the Lankan government triumphantly announced the ‘defeat’ of the LTTE
on May 19th 2009, there was great jubilation among chauvinist forces in
the island. While there are more than enough credible evidences to show
what happened to the Eelam Tamils during this period and after – killing
of civilians, mass rapes, routinization of torture, denial of medical
care to the sick and the injured, to name a few – popular enthusiasm for
the regime that made this possible was at its peak in the south.
And
after the smoke in Vanni subsided and the diaspora began turning on the
heat for an independent international investigation to probe charges of
genocide, a word started entering the discourse around Sri Lanka in a
big way. Reconciliation. Gotabaya talks of it. The opposition talks of
it. Liberal Sinhala and Tamil activists talk of it. India and the West
talk of it. NGOs talk of it. But many Tamils remain cynical of the word,
three years after Mullivaikaal.
The LLRCAn
elaborate report tabled by experts handpicked by the Sri Lankan
government called the ‘Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission’
waxed eloquent on measures to be taken so as to achieve unity in the
island. While the report completely exonerates the government, let alone
from charges of genocide, from even the liberal accusations of human
rights violations, it lays the blame for the misery of the Eelam Tamils
squarely on the most committed defenders of their interests, the Tigers.
Adding the necessary points on the need to address this or that
grievance to give itself some credibility to observers, the report
brims with enthusiasm for building a united Sri Lanka. Multi-lingual
schools, bilingual anthems, pluralist approach to culture, people to
people contact, and yes, mechanisms “that would effectively address and
discourage secessionist tendencies and safeguard the sovereignty and
integrity of the State.” Over the bones of the more than hundred
thousand dead Tamils, that is.
The real message of the devisors
of the LLRC seems to be that Tamils have learnt a lesson and must
reconcile to the fact that they are a minority at the tender mercies of
the state, not a nationality, and that the there is no imagination
beyond the unitary Sri Lanka. And yes, that the LTTE and its
‘secessionist’ project is a ghost of the past.
The same spirit
was reflected in the recent US backed resolution in the Geneva UNHRC
session, which called for a speedier implementation of the LLRC (a
resolution rightly criticized by the civil society in the island,
activists in Tamil Nadu and politically informed organizations in the
diaspora for being grossly inadequate). Unfortunately for the
international powers, GoSL and all the mechanisms it might promote
through the recommendations of the LLRC, some ghosts do haunt the Sri
Lankan and Eelam Tamil polities.
This was evident in the
commemoration of Heroes Day in many parts of the territory of Tamil
Eelam despite open threats from the occupying Sri Lankan military, and
in the continuing apprehension of Rajapaksa that the Tigers may come
back with their ‘secessionist’ project. But again, why retrieve the
dead? Why to exorcise ghosts when they can be written away by such
reports promising harmony in the future? Or, why is it that the Sri
Lankan model of ‘reconciliation’ appears a joke for the Tamils?
Questioning ‘reconciliation’The
term ‘reconciliation’ originally is derived from the Christian
theological concept of ending the gap between god and man, through
atonement of the latter. In politics, it is a liberal concept where one
socio-political group of people - which formerly was privileged in a
system that worked against the detriment of another group - constitutes a
series of legal and symbolic acts, mostly with assistance and
participation of the affected group, with or without external mediators,
so as to create political and more importantly psychological conditions
to generate a social harmony that was lacking in the past. To draw an
analogy from the Christian concept, let’s say, the dominant group atones
for its sins against the oppressed group.
One can presume that
that the cynicism shown by atheists to this theological concept that
material sin can be expiated through symbolic gestures will be shared by
radicals towards the political concept. As the flaw with liberalism
goes, the system is not radically restructured, only reformed so that
certain grievances of the affected group are addressed and the psyche of
the group is assuaged that some credible changes have taken place.
Case
to consider: South Africa, where despite the much talked about
reconciliation process and the feeling of empowerment among the Blacks
post-apartheid, the vast majority of wealth is still in White hands. The
effects of reconciliation, we must understand, are meant to be more
psychological among the oppressed groups than material.
Nevertheless,
to be fair to the liberal pundits of reconciliation theory,
psychological impacts do affect material conditions to some extent. A
feeling of social harmony can effect some positive political changes
within a system, though these changes needn’t be the ones that the
oppressed group had initially desired. Elaboration is not necessary on
how illusions of the justness of a political order can maintain it.
So
let us consider here the arguments of Dr. Alexander Boraine, by no
means a radical, one of the main architects of South Africa’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission and the co-founder of International Centre for
Transitional Justice. On reconciliation, he writes “At its best,
reconciliation involves commitment and sacrifice; at its worst, it is an
excuse for passivity, for siding with the powerful against the weak and
dispossessed.” [1]
He further argues, “Unless the call for
reconciliation is accompanied by acknowledgment of the past and the
acceptance of responsibility, it will be dismissed as cheap rhetoric.
Perhaps one of the ways in which to achieve at least a measure of
reconciliation in a deeply divided society is to create a common memory
that can be acknowledged by those who created and implemented the unjust
system, those who fought against it, and the many more who were in the
middle and claimed not to know what was happening in their country.”
Based
on this, certain questions can be posed to those who argue for
reconciliation between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in the island.
Will
the Sinhalese, obviously the privileged group in the unitary Sri Lankan
system, acknowledge that what happened in the past was not a ‘war on
terror’ but the continuation of a protracted genocide of the Eelam
Tamils, genocide conducted to maintain the system that structurally
privileges them?
Will the Sinhalese recognize that those who
fought against the genocide enforced by the Sri Lankan state apparatus
through armed struggle were not terrorists but the only credible
representatives of the Eelam Tamils?
Will the Sinhalese recognize
that the Tamils not just have a right but also an obligation to retain
the memory of both the civilians and the fighters who died in the Eelam
wars and to commemorate them publicly?
These of course are only
moral questions. The appropriate political question would be to ask the
Sinhalese, (along with the above three, for the line between politics
and morality is always blurred), whether they would push for an
independent international investigation to identify and punish the
perpetrators of genocide in their state and for a referendum to be
conducted among the Tamils so that the Tamils can determine their
future.
But are the Sinhalese in a state of mind to answer at least the three moral questions?
The Sri Lankan system and ReconciliationAt
the risk of sounding cynical, one can say that apart from a few
exceptions, the answers to the above questions would be in the negative.
To push it further, there is a high probability that even the
legitimacy of these questions will be questioned.
Why is there a
general state of denial of the state of affairs in the island? Of
course, in this media age, should anyone make a claim that he was not
informed, one can only scoff at him. Sri Lankan society suffers from
what Zizek terms ‘fetishist disavowal’ – the Sri Lankan knows what
happened (genocide), but he refuses to accept the consequences of this
knowledge (prosecution of offenders, a corresponding political
solution), so that he can continue acting as if he didn’t know it.
Hannah
Arendt points out how mendacity became a general part of the German
character under the Nazis by the acceptance of effective lies. The most
effective of these was the Nazi slogan “the battle of destiny for the
German people”, which made self-deception easier on three counts – that
there was no “war” in the proper sense of the term, that it was started
by destiny and not by Germany, that the Germans need to annihilate or be
annihilated, a matter of life or death.
One only needs to look
at Rajapaksa’s speeches, editorials of some mainstream Sri Lankan
newspapers, blogs and sites run by Sinhala ‘patriots’, the writings of
some JHU leader, or even better, the articles of certain self-proclaimed
intellectuals to get the same message. The Lie that the Sri Lankan
state had been spreading for ages about a global Tamil conspiracy, of
Tamils as impure alien invaders, the uniqueness of the Sinhala race, the
chauvinist concepts of blood, religion and soil, found acceptance as
Truth by a vast majority of the Sinhalese. And this made many of them
immune to any moral indignation at the obvious sufferings inflicted on
the Eelam Tamils by their state.
A condition after the military
defeat of the LTTE has been arrived at now. Actual subjective violence
on the Tamils needn’t even happen – the omnipresence of the jack-boot
and the rifle butt, the panopticon of the police-military institutions
and the intrusive symbols of the colonizer, besides being an open threat
of direct physical violence, creates enough psychological violence
against the Tamil body to keep it in a permanent state of trauma.
The
argument that the absence of any major uprising in the so-called
‘post-war’ era signals the Tamils’ acceptance of the unitary state and
the success of reconciliation is as ridiculous as the one that slavery
is justified when slaves don’t revolt. The Sri Lankan state knows well
that to crush the possibility of any mass outbreak of protest in
post-Mullivaikaal period, it needs to create such a scenario where the
Tamils would be made to know, would be made to feel, that any protest
against the powers would be futile and suicidal.
Can’t it be
otherwise in the future? Remember Col. Mathieu from The Battle of
Algiers who responds to the questions of the French reporters on human
right abuses in the colony with one of his own. “Should France stay in
Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the
consequences.” Structural genocide and violence against the Tamils must
continue as long as Sri Lanka occupies the Tamil homeland. At a further
degeneration, annihilation is the solution that unitary Sri Lanka can
provide, with an intensification of subjective violence on the Tamils.
With
a possible betterment, assimilation is the best solution it has to
offer, where the Eelam Tamils will lose all sense of identity and become
‘authentic Sri Lankans’ i.e. mimics of the Sinhalese. Either ways,
violence on the Tamils will only shift forms in unitary Sri Lanka. But
it is the latter that the Sri Lankan system desires, since it believes
that it has cowed the Tamils with the possibility of the former through
what it did during Mullivaikaal. It calls this reconciliation.
Conditions for reconciliationThere are two broad conditions in which reconciliation in the island can happen.
One
is a long term possibility. If we can recognize that ‘reconciliation’
in the current context means nothing more than the acceptance of the
superiority of the Sinhalese by the Tamils and a willingness to
assimilate as Sri Lankans, it can proceed successfully through a
combination of factors which include intensification of Sinhala
colonization/Sinhalization to make claims of a Tamil homeland
impossible, neutralization of activists in Tamil Eelam, Tamil Nadu and
the diaspora to accepting the unitary state as the final solution,
erasure of memory of the struggle for Tamil Eelam and its symbols and
so.
If this is allowed to happen, a stage will be reached -
looking at trends in the island, it is likely to be within a decade if
left unopposed - when the Tamils are but a scattered minority throughout
the island without the possibility of a homeland of their own. At that
time, maybe there will be a benevolent regime in Sri Lanka that
recognizes that what happened to Tamils was a grave mistake, maybe even a
genocide, for which they are genuinely sorry, and would ensure that the
cultural and economic rights of the Tamil minorities are strongly
safeguarded.
This would be a genuine reconciliation, with a
touch of irony albeit. For it is contingent on the idea of Tamil Eelam
and retributive justice for what happened over the past 60 years
breaking completely among the Tamils not just in the homeland, but in
Tamil Nadu and diaspora as well allowing things to reach such a stage.
The
other possibility, which needs to happen soon, is for the Sinhalese en
masse to answer the three questions in the affirmative, to pressurize
for prosecution of war criminals from the bottom to the top in the Sri
Lankan state, to press for an immediate removal of Sinhala military and
colonies from the Tamil homelands, to call for a referendum to ascertain
the political aspirations of the Tamils, and to ensure material
reparations for the losses that the Tamil Nation suffered. Unless this
sounds like an idealist pipedream, this is the only way through which
reconciliation in the island can happen between the two nations. If this
does not happen, ‘reconciliation’ is likely to join the list of swear
words in Tamil.
To end, the Christian concept of reconciliation
was probably the inspiration behind the proverb “to err is human, to
forgive divine”.
The Tamils, of course, cannot be expected to be
divine considering that the other side largely tolerates a regime that
was and continues to be inhuman.
Notes:
-
See Alexander Boraine’s “Retributive Justice and Restorative Justice:
Contradictory or Complimentary?” in “Genocide and Accountability” edited
by Nanci Adler
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