Sri Lanka's Silenced Constituency
    By J. Sri Raman
    t r u t h o u t | Columnist

    Monday 04 December 2006

    Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapakse has returned home after a five-day visit to India. And an end to the island's internal conflict has been put off indefinitely after four years of much-advertised, internationally mediated efforts to solve the problem.

    The Ceasefire Agreement of 2002, reduced to a scrap of paper quite some time ago, now lies in total shreds. The country faces the prospect of a freshly aggravated conflict - one that has not only turned thousands of the minority Tamils into refugees or roofless survivors in their ravaged region but also proven cripplingly costly for the Sinhala majority.

    Though apparently ironical, the negative outcome of the president's India tour (from November 25 to 29) was only natural. Unmistakable were the indications before, during and following the tour. Let us take a look at these, before proceeding to a more fundamental and larger factor behind the failure.

    Rajapakse embarked on the tour after presenting an annual budget that envisaged a 45 percent increase in military expenditure. When he was in India, on November 27, Tamil separatists delivered the threat of rejecting talks and returning to their pre-ceasefire platform. Veluppillai Prabhakaran, supremo of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), in his public address on the Maveerar Dhinam (Great Heroes' Day) announced that there was no alternative "to a separate, independent state." The day after Rajapakse's return to Colombo saw an attempt on the life of his brother, the defense secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse. The alleged LTTE attack came as a shot in the arm for sections in the Sri Lankan establishment staunchly opposed to any truce with Tamil militants.

    The result, however, was not really negative, from Rajapakse's point of view. Colombo had let it be known earlier that its own expectation from India was at least an unstated intervention in the conflict, in the form of stopping arms and other supplies allegedly ferried to the Tigers across the narrow strip of waters called the Palk Strait. By most accounts, the president has secured India's assurance of steps to keep the Tigers away from its territorial waters.

    This is not a negative result from New Delhi's viewpoint, either. For, as projected officially, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government has firmly rejected Rajapakse's proposal for "joint India-Sri Lanka patrolling" of the Palk Strait. This helps Singh to keep happy his allies among political parties in India's State of Tamilnadu, with a Tamil population that feels a special kinship with Sri Lanka's suffering minority.

    Every political leader or party involved in the entire exercise has his or its constituency to address and nurse. Rajapakse has a predominantly Sinhala constituency to propitiate. He seeks to enlarge and consolidate this constituency through moves aimed at an entente on the ethnic issue between his Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the main opposition United National Party (UNP), whose leader Ranil Wickramasinghe visited India separately but simultaneously. New Delhi has its constituency among the parties in Tamilndu that, in turn, seek to promote themselves by appealing to a profoundly rooted pan-Tamil identity.

    The single constituency that has gone conspicuously unrepresented is that of Sri Lankans who prefer and pride themselves on a composite Sri Lankan identity. It is the constituency of and for peace that they represent. It is this constituency that faces cruelly formable odds, especially in the Sinhala-majority south of Sri Lanka from anti-minority forces.

    I find this strikingly analogous, though not identical, to the situation of far-right creation in India, especially with reference to Kashmir. It is hard to plead for human rights in Kashmir and for a purely political solution to the Kashmir problem without the holy right calling one a "traitor" and a friend of "terrorism." The peace camp in Sri Lanka finds even less freedom to plead for a non-military solution to the ethnic conflict.

    The outside world is almost entirely unaware of the existence of such a camp or constituency, one in in which Sinhalas, Tamils, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians coexist. Indians hear frequently enough about bombardments in Sri Lanka's north and east, and suicide bombings in the south. The media, however, tells them nothing about the repeated attempts at rallies for peace in the south and the reprisals these elicit from rabid majority chauvinists.

    In August, for example, an anti-war rally in Colombo ended in pandemonium when a group of monks and lay persons under the banner of the Jathika Sanga Sammelanaya (National Buddhist Monks' Association) broke it up by climbing the podium in a bid to "question the political motives" of the organizers. As the Free Media Movement (FMM), one of the organizers, pointed out later: "The intention of the monks was to disrupt. Later a monk from the group told a TV station that they intend to stop all peace campaigns in the south, as such activities would demoralize the fighting sprit of the Armed Forces."

    In October, even a press conference convened by Sri Lanka's National Anti-War Front to announce the cancellation of a scheduled peace rally in Kandy was disrupted when a mob attacked it with tomatoes.

    The Anti-War Front and allied organizations did manage to conduct a rally in Colombo on November 14 to condemn the assassination of Tamil National Alliance (TNA) leader Nadaraja Raviraj, described as "a bridge between the north and south." The majority-chauvinist media could not have rained more curses on the rally if it had openly demanded a division of Sri Lanka.

    Detractors of the movement for Sinhala-Tamil unity and peace do not stop with derisively talking of an "Anti-National Anti-War Front," equating the civil war with staunch nationalism. They also point to the association of controversial politician (and former brother-in-law of ex-president Chandrika Kumaratunga) Kumar Rupasinghe, UNP leader Rajitha Senarathne, and a couple of SLFP luminaries with the movement. Politics may indeed play a part in the movement. But obviously this would not happen if the rallies of only a few thousand daring participants did not represent a silent and wide yearning for peace.

    For just an idea of the kind of ideology that drives the anti-peace campaign, you have only to read one of its articulators, Dayan Jayatelleke. Approvingly, he quotes Nazi ideologue Carl Schmitt on understanding politics in "enemy and friend" terms. He proceeds thence to try to find the Sri Lankan equivalents of the "friend," the "enemy," the "enemy's enemy," the "friend's friend," the "enemy's friend" and the "friend's enemy."

    Jayatilleke has no doubt who the "friend" is. "No democrat can ... fail to classify the elected president of Sri Lanka as friend, and by the same logic, no one who classifies, regards or treats him (or earlier, her) as enemy, could in turn be classified as democrat or 'friend,' and may indeed have to be regarded as objectively serving as 'friend's enemy' or worse still, 'enemy's friend.'" Consequently, the "enemy's friend" can only be the movement for Sinhala-Tamil unity and peace, since it seeks a non-military solution to the conflict.

    With such "friends," strife-torn Sri Lanka needs no enemies.