A New Begining and a Foundling Hope (June 09)

Weaving New Realities...

In the wake of the triumphalist drum beats, twitter updates, fire crackers and facebook status’, I wonder what exactly it is that we are celebrating. The end of terrorism or terrorist activity in Sri Lanka? I think we would be naïve to assume that. The end of the LTTE? Again, unless minority issues are addressed, it just takes another charismatic heir to the LTTE to attempt to revive the movement. The death of a man who wreaked havoc and was the architect of genocide for decades in this fragile little infant state. Surely we are not that short sighted to assume that terminating one man or even a small group of men will solve the problem. Mass murderers and tyrants will swarm like flies to a carcass unless the underlying issues of justice (even if it is only perceptive justice) and equality are addressed.

So what exactly is this underlying issue/s?

1. Is there real racism against the Tamil peoples?
2. Is there a lack of minority representation in Government?
3. Is there a prejudice / discrimination against the Tamil peoples in opportunities or in general social organisation?
4. Is their person hood and property under threat based on their ethnicity?
5. Do they live in fear of another black July in this wake of triumphalism?
6. Do the Tamil people feel under represented and muted in this dark under current of paranoia?

As an academic knee deep in conflict discourse in the west, whenever some one refers to a ‘civil war’ in Sri Lanka I bristle. We don’t have a civil war, but a terrorist problem I defend. I sincerely believed that the answer to these questions was a vehement NO, growing up in the 80s. But the truth is if we didn’t start out with a civil war, we had certainly arrived there recently. If you tell two groups of ‘peoples’ long enough that their interests and goals are mutually exclusive, contradictory and detrimentative, they are going to believe it. If you tell a group of peoples that the ‘other’ hates them, wants their person hood and property destroyed they are going to take precautions and actions to defend against the ‘other’, or at least support any movement that claims to. If you tell a minority group that they have no representation in this democratic state due to numerical deficiencies they will cease to believe that a democracy serves their best interest. If you tell a state for nearly half a century that their race is above everything the most relevant thing in political organisation, their concept of state (what ever their ethnicity) is going to be most pertinently ethnocentric. This has been the LTTE’s legacy, a sense of ethnocentric paranoia from all communities.

Unless ALL communities, be it Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher, peoples vehemently believe that the response to the above 6 questions is a wholehearted and sincere NO, unless there is no shred of doubt that this state is not obsessed and organised by an ethnocentric agenda of our colonial legacy, we have achieved nothing than terminating ONE man’s madness and giving way to a hydraic conundrum.

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