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yajitha's Blog
Lashkar-e-Taiba in Sri Lanka?
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This is in response to a news item titled “US says Lashkar in Lanka” published in the Daily Mirror on 27 march 2010.
Citing a PTI report Admiral Robert Willard, Commander of the US Pacific Command in his testimony before the US Senate Armed Services Committee, has said, in response to a question from Senator George Lemieux, that the Lashkar-e-Taiba group is expanding and specifically positioning itself in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. He has also said that “we have certainly knowledge of their influence within the region beyond the countries that I just mentioned. The extent of that influence is what we’re taking under study”.
The Sri Lanka government rejected these reports saying there was no evidence to prove that the group was in the island. Therefore, it is extremely important that the US provide details about this alleged LeT influence in Sri Lanka in view of the serious Implications of this disclosure to Sri Lankan Muslims.
That is, assuming Admiral Willard is speaking the truth.
It is worthy to note that Muslims in Sri Lanka, as rightly pointed out by the island’s former Chief Justice Sarath N Silva, remain the only community which never took to arms to realize their grievances even at the peak of their sufferings during the ethnic war when they were evicted from their homes, their lands grabbed, their livelihoods deprived, kidnapped, tortured and indiscriminately killed. This alone would have been cause enough for any group to take to arms. However Muslims refrained from succumbing to violence. There were, however, a few Muslims who acquired weapons to defend themselves against the LTTE atrocities, but they disappeared even before LTTE disappeared. After the elimination of the LTTE the remaining few armed Muslims handed over their weapons to the authorities. The question is why the Muslims should take to arms now under LeT or any other banner?
I submit that Admiral Willard’s statement must be taken with a pinch of salt. For example, within days after the 9/11 events in New York in 2001, former US President George Bush together with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom accused Al Qaeda of destroying the World Trade Centre without any proper inquiry. Exploiting the mood in its wake Bush blackmailed a shocked and confused world, created a coalition and invaded within 27 days the war battered and impoverished Afghanistan where he slaughtered innocent and poverty stricken Afghans in one of the most barbarous military ventures of its kind in modern history.
More importantly, Admiral Willard’s submission must be viewed in the backdrop of the lies and disinformation that the US media leading up to the war on terror, kowtowing a government agenda and working to create a conducive environment for the senseless attack on Iraq and the slaughter of its unarmed civilians.
The US accused Iraq of possessing weapons of mass destruction that, Bush and Blair claimed, threatened the west and invaded Iraq in 2003, despite United Nations weapons inspectors repeatedly stating that Iraq did not possess such weapons. They turned this once almost developed country into a wasteland. Around 1.4 million innocent Iraqis killed so far, hundreds of thousands of innocent men and women were tortured, women indiscriminately raped, infrastructure destroyed and birth, marriage, death, land and vehicle registration offices burnt causing chaos in the society.
Around four million Iraqis who lived in peace were forced into refugee camps in neighboring countries to languish in sub human conditions. More than two million Iraqis were made refugees in their own country. Shiites and Sunnis were put against each other turning Iraq into a killing field where, with the help of a puppet government, western oil companies started looting the country’s oil wealth while the Iraqis starve. And now it turns out that since he stepped down as Prime Minister Tony Blair has pocketed more than $30 million in oil revenues from his secret dealings with a South Korean oil consortium.
There are liars in Admiral Willard’s camp. The so-called US led Western war against terrorism turned out to be a war against Islam and Muslims. Now after Afghanistan and Iraq they have turned their attention on Pakistan that is bleeding. The question is whether this statement is a pretext for US plan to expand its agenda to cover Muslim living as minorities in Sri Lanka and other countries in the region.
The frightening situation worldwide caused by the US led so called war on terrorism is such today that every Muslim with a beard and a head cap and every Muslim woman with a Hijab have been branded as terrorist and humiliated. Muslims have been attacked and killed all over under various pretexts. Muslim refugees walking in sheer desperation in search of shelter with their meager belongings have become frequent common sight worldwide.
Helpless Muslims worldwide are seething with anger at the west.
This is the reason why Sri Lankan Muslims take serious note of Admiral Robert Willard’s disclosures. Sri Lanka has its own share of anti-Muslim elements which could exploit this statement to suit their own agendas. If Admiral Wilfred was speaking the truth he must come up with hard evidence so that the authorities in the island can verify.
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A choiceless election to elect a lumpenised parliament
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This general election would bring about a parliament with a clear majority. Few if at all, would dispute that. While there is also talk of a two-thirds majority in parliament for President’s UPFA, that possibility seems remote, unless the Southern voter goes berserk. That for the Sinhala voter is not that impossible and then, all calculations and forecasts could go haywire as well. Such are elections now in Sri Lanka. Wholly unpredictable with most faults conveniently left with computers and with post election reports by election monitors who had never been effective for the past 20 years at least.
Yet at this election, what is easily predictable is the quality of the parliament that would be elected. A parliamentary candidate from the UPFA, Minister Amunugama went on record saying there are “hooligans” contesting from their own lists. Another who discreetly jumped over to be a minister, carries a paid advertisement in the media, saying he always stands for “decent and honourable politics”.
One thing is absolutely certain. The preferential vote system has provided this regime the opportunity to promote “hooligans” and the “indecent” from their contesting lists. Those remaining few who want the voter to accept they have some “respect and decency” left in them, have been exposed as those who do nothing to clean it up.
These few self declared “decent” politicians even if elected, would not in any way make a difference in this rule of a “Kleptocracy”. Their “decency” had no impact in the past years, compromising to keep their privileged positions in a festering, corrupt regime. They would not do any better in the future, in a family regime, they are not prepared to even criticise or denounce, for want of position and privilege.
It is therefore not just personalities that matter, but what politics they stand for and work on, that matters. That is what makes this regime different to orthodox “autocracies” and “dictatorships”. Different to Hitler’s, Idi Amin’s or even Mugabe’s regime. This regime is unique in its racist politics and in its nepotist rule. It grew in a wholly different political context to all others, both locally and globally. It could if at all, be more akin to the other Theravada Buddhist country, Senior General Than Shwe’s present Burma, officially known as Myanmar.
First is that this regime would never have established itself this strong, in a pre 9/11 world. It was only possible after the New York 9/11 terror attack, when all developed democracies in the world accepted, “terrorism as a global evil”. When they all geared to curb democratic life, in allowing a ruthless anti terrorist network of State controlled “military intelligence” to work across borders, breaching all accepted democratic and diplomatic norms and systems. They all covertly helped each other with logistics, intelligence and even arms procurement. India assisted the Rajapaksa regime all through the war and was accused as responsible for the human tragedy the country is left with. The British government had to accept they provided arms to SL during the war, violating their own policies and decisions.
With such international and regional connivance in waging war and with financial backing by China, Iran, Pakistan and then Russia too, all what this regime needed was local mobilisation in support of the war. That was not achieved by simply and ruthlessly trampling the society into silence. That would not have been easy in a country with a long tradition of democratic life. Next to India, Sri Lanka is the only country that can boast of a long history of democratic social existence, equipped with all the necessary constitutional provisions and a long list of social tools that make democracy and freedom, a part of socio political life.
Thus this Rajapaksa regime could not have emerged in any other way than in how it came about to dismantle the very democratic structures that paved the way for its emergence. It needed a political platform and a social ideology to justify the dismantling of democratic structures. The political platform was found in the “unitary State against Tamil separatism” and the Sinhala supremacist ideology that argued for the right of Sinhala Buddhist ownership of this country provided the ideology. Together this justified the war that also justified dismantling of all democratic structures, one by one in the name of a patriotic war.
The violation of the Constitution in paving the way to manipulate all important and sensitive appointments that had to be independent and out of politics, like that of the Attorney General, the IGP and all appointments there after, the Human Rights Commission, the Police Commission, tampering with the Bribery Commission and then allowing the Defence Secretary to decide politics of war violating Chapter XXXII, sections 1.1 to 1.4 of the Establishment Code and also using the Army Commander to politicise the security establishment, helped establish an arrogant family regime.
The Sinhala ideology that supported the war on the other hand was not challenged by the defeatist Opposition, thus allowing the regime leadership to establish itself as that which saved the Sinhala nation from Tamil separatism. This racist politics thus allowed the whole media to be threatened and tamed and the whole State to be ruthlessly turned into what it is today, from the moderate Sinhala State it was, half a decade ago.
The Rajapaksas thus usurped all power and left a society that has no law and order and no justice. Has no independent establishments that people could turn to, for redress when they most want. Has a corrupt and a politicised State machinery that understands only the needs of a selfish regime and a democracy that is only procedural at its best and never functional.
This regime is therefore an “autocracy” established with the political consensus of the people, for the express need of the regime to rob, loot and plunder. That allowed Mihin Air to swallow Rs. 06 billion in one gulp and have another Rs. 03 billion added, all from public money, while the 20 million people were only allocated Rs. 05 billion for their health and live without adequate medication. Losses in AirLanka, CEB, Ports Authority, Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, SLTB and RDA only, is said to top over Rs. 72 billion during the reign of the Rajapaksas. Another Rs. 150 million and more is spent annually on 20 plus Advisers to the President.
If one keeps adding the waste on mega cabinets, housing allowances, water and electricity for these houses, ministers asking for more billions after over spending, the plunder of public money is colossal and unending. Its a typical “autocracy” of a group of “kleptists”.
It is now quite similar to the Burmese military junta where Senior General Than Shwe’s whole family, in laws and even grand sons have taken over its economy as their fiefdom. Others in the junta too have sizeable kickbacks, as supporters and shareholders of the regime. A “kleptocracy” can not go on with constitutionality and democracy. Thus the Burmese junta surprised most Burmese and Buddhists who thought, it would not touch Buddhist monks being a Theravada society, when they massacred the “saffron protest” that challenged its rule in 2007 September.
There is yet a difference in Sri Lanka. This regime has yet to show, it respects Buddhist monks, it respects democracy and that it is for all citizens, an elected government. The contradiction lies in that it can not go on with such pretence for long. It needs a new life with a new turn that would give it more muscle. This election is being used for that evolutionary phase. In getting the people to elect a legislature, that would not be of any purpose in legislating law and deciding policy to democratise and develop the country.
The calibre of people nominated to contest, shows the quality of the parliament, this Rajapaksa regime is keen in having. The lists have highly suspect drug dealers and criminal elements, gang leaders of underworld goons, political stooges known for heavy corruption and almost wasted celebrities, all promoted as patriots, philanthropists, task masters and social leaders. Most of them would be mug head legislators who would only be good enough to do what the regime insists. Good enough to legalise all what this Rajapaksa regime would wish to have as theirs.
In a country where the main Opposition does not have a gutty intellectual leadership that could tell the people a rogue in robes is no clergy or saint, its such mug heads with enormous black money who emerge as leaders. The head of this puppet clan they see and understand as the patriot saviour, is their own creation during the past years. The next parliament would have no reason to think of the 13th Amendment or the 17th Amendment to the Constitution or waste time discussing and debating policy for development. Thanks therefore to the Opposition that meekly withdrew from providing an alternate leadership to the people and therefore allows the election of a lumpen parliament.
It would thus be a kleptocracy that permits freedom to the people to watch the rulers rob, in the name of the people who elected them.
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Doing It in a Foreign Language
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In Jumma: The last bastion of the boys, (Groundviews, 26 March 2010) Nazeeya Faarooq wrote: “…most of the Jumma sermons are totally irrelevant. Firstly they are given in a language they don’t quite understand…”. Presumably the language is Arabic. Such an enforced linguistic barrier between us and our God(s) is common: Latin and Sanskrit are other examples. I think it is done to give a power base to the priests, but there may well be other ingenious explanations.
Language is important to us all. Our genetics gives us unique power to model grammar on dedicated neural circuitry and acquire linguistic skills from very sparse data. Of its importance, someone told me in primary school that language can be used in three ways: to express thought, to hide thought and as a substitute for thought. (I am not sure where that quote comes from, but my guess is, like with all cute things you learn at prep school, W. H. Samaranayake’s English with a Smile may well be the source – I don’t have the book to check, but this point is not important for the rest of this article.)
Speaking of the use if Sanskrit in Hindu temples, I remember questioning it in my teenage days, just like Nazeeya Faarooq. “Why should I sit cross legged in front of this priest and listen to him chanting something I don’t even understand?” I protested at some temple event. An old man who had studied Sanskrit at Hilltop University in Sri Lanka calmed me down: “It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand any of it, the priest doesn’t either!” According to the old man’s estimate, the priest has just written the mantras in Tamil script and memorized them.
Digressing a bit, can you actually tell, you might wonder – if someone knows what they are talking about, just from the way they are speaking, even if they get the pronunciation correct? Intonation, I think it is — not what you speak, but the way you speak it, the sing-song way you change your pitch as you speak, and the way you put pauses between phrases to catch your breath. Get it wrong, and a native speaker will immediately know you are just reading transcribed text of a foreign language that you are yet to master. For example, native speakers of Tamil travelling by Sri Lankan Airline can immediately tell that the announcement in Tamil “Kappiththaan Wickramanayake unkalukku nalvaravu koorukiraar” (Captain W welcomes you aboard), is being read off written Sinhala text. (I know for sure, she showed me.)
At Bridgetown, I learnt this the hard way from a professor. At weekly meetings, I would suggest ideas about my project, and he would say they were interesting. After two months or so of it, my ego took a trip up the stratosphere. Me, a little guy from a developing country, making suggestions which the know-all professor, an authority on the subject, found to be interesting! Wow. On one of those rare days I felt a bit self-critical, I experimented with my ego by making completely silly suggestions, bordering violations of the Laws of Thermodynamics, and to my surprise the advisor found these to be interesting too. It was then I realized it was not the word “interesting” that mattered, the information content was in how precisely it was said — the intonation superposed on the spoken word. Of the story so far, “Interesting?” I ask you. “Interesting!” you say to me (But “boring”, you might actually mean).
The purpose of intonation differs in different languages. In English, for example, you can use it to change a statement into a question. Compare saying “It’s raining.” as a statement and “It’s raining?” as a question – all you have changed is the intonation, superposing a little sing-song like pitch onto the former, gets you the latter. We don’t do this in Tamil or Sinhala, I believe. “mazhai peiyuthu” the statement doesn’t change to a question just by speaking it differently. We change the text to “mazhai peiyuthaa”. Similarly, “vahinavaa” the statement changes to “vahinavaathe” when it becomes a question, doesn’t it? (I once measured pitch changes in spoken Tamil. South Indian spoken Tamil differs significantly from Jaffna Tamil, making very large pitch excursions, but it was hard to pin point what precisely the communicative function of it was, if any – languages evolve, sometimes with a purpose, at other times without.)
You could run into trouble speaking a foreign language at times, you might have experienced. It is best illustrated in this silly joke: There were three cows grazing in the Scottish Highlands one rainy afternoon. “moo” said the first. “moo” said the second. “baa” said the third. “Cows don’t say ‘baa’”, protested the first, “You should say ‘moo’, as proper cows do, that is our cow culture.” “Just ignore her dear”, said the first, “she is showing off her foreign language skills.”
Let me take you back to Nazeeya Faarooq’s objection to doing it in a foreign language. I recently attended a Hindu wedding ceremony in London with a friend, where the priest who did the formal part injected some novelty into the session by doing it all in Tamil. My friend was quite excited by this: “This is great, this is the way to preserve our language, or else it will die”, etc. We listened. As the priest got to the part of blessing the bride and groom, he says to the bride: “thou shall be a proper wife to your husband and do thy duty by bearing him healthy children.” My friend’s face went flat. “Better if he had done it in Sanskrit”, he said in a monotone voice with no intonation, “at least I wouldn’t have understood anything.”
(Oh, there is something I forget to tell you. My friend and his wife are awaiting a hospital appointment for In Vitro fertilization treatment.)
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April 8: The best case scenario
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The government wants a two thirds majority in order to replace the Constitution, it says. The UNP opposition hopes to form a coalition with other Opposition parties. It would be unhealthy for the body politic if the electorate were to grant the wish of either side. What would be healthy is for the Opposition to have a strong enough representation in the legislature so that a two thirds majority is out of reach for the government even by means of defections.
The most authoritarian administrations we have had have been those with a two thirds majority and the worst experiences we citizens have undergone, have been at the hands of governments enjoying a two thirds majority. Of the three Constitutions we have had, those produced in 1972 and 1978 were far less enlightened and prudent than the one we started off with at Independence, the Soulbury constitution.
The government wishes a two thirds majority to ‘protect the country from foreign conspirators’. With the Executive in safely patriotic hands, this is surely far more a question of the right foreign policy — and foreign minister — than a two thirds majority in the legislature.
Does the government need a two thirds majority so as to effect ethnic reconciliation between our constituent communities by radically reforming the structure of the state? Hardly, because the President himself has ruled out a federal system and is unwilling to go beyond the 13th amendment making for provincial autonomy, minus police powers. Which may be fine, but this is already part of our existing Constitution.
What of the UNP’s favourite scenario, of a replay of 2001? After our last experience of Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister I do not think the electorate should or would risk a replay which would amount to an erosion of the gains of our military victory over the Tigers. This would be so if he were to become PM with the support of the TNA. Mr Wickremesinghe has already pledged irresponsibly on a visit to Jaffna, that he would remove all military camps except for Palali. That is not his decision to make even if he were to be elected PM, because the portfolio of defence remains in the hands of the Executive. Matters would be different if the UNP were able to secure a majority to form an administration with the DNA – or the DNA as well as the TNA—which scenarios are exceedingly unlikely.
The Coen brothers’ movie with Javier Bardem was called No Country for Old Men. What should we begin to call this one? I mean the country, not the movie. What do you call a country in which an unarmed young woman, a woman who has not harmed anyone, is detained in a police station for writing a book, and a book which does not call for bloodshed? As Marvin Gaye, another non-home grown cultural inspiration, kept asking ‘What’s Going On’? Where, when and how will this end? It is against a backdrop of such preoccupations that I view the April 8th election.
The best case scenario is if the governing coalition were able to secure a two thirds majority not on its own volition or by means of defections, but solely by means of negotiation with the main Southern and North-Eastern Oppositions, namely the UNP and the TNA. It would compel the incumbent to revise the present equation, include the aspirations and ideas of the opposition, thereby balancing the influence of the small chauvinist parties in the government’s ranks and establishing something close to a broad national consensus which could be reflected in the architecture of a new basic law; a new Constitution for a post-war Sri Lanka. Such an equation could not only revive the practice of serious multiparty deliberation in Sri Lankan politics, but also generate the synergies needed to restore rationality and propel reform.
Tamils Must Not Fall Into Political Trap
Tactically the Tamil politicians need to make three moves: unite under a single umbrella, reviving the Tamil United Front of 1972 (not the Tamil United Liberation Front of ’76); abandon the Vadukkodai resolution of 1976 and adopt instead as a moderate common platform, the May 1972 Six Points sent to the Constituent assembly by SJV Chelvanayagam (but ignored by Sirima Bandaranaike); and coordinate with the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and others in a bloc of minority parties which can work flexibly with both Southern formations.
The TNA’s demand that troop levels be reduced to the pre-1983 level, i.e. the pre-conflict level is absurd, because no sane defence policy can base itself on a return to the vulnerabilities of those times. Opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe is wrong to pledge the withdrawal of all military camps in the North except for Palali, because many of those were set up precisely to protect Palali. There is a pocket of hostility in Tamil Nadu, just a strip of water away. Future threats are of Fourth Generation War, i.e. small unit war by offshore networks, which could include an infiltration from overseas by a well trained and equipped terrorist cell (the Mumbai attack is a model) that can rocket or mortar Palali or use MANPADS against landing planes.
This is not to say there is no problem with our troop presence, but it lies elsewhere. Ours is a mono-ethnic, mono-lingual, mono-religious army. An entrenched troop presence in any part of India of its multiethnic army, the mailed fist of its secular state, is a very different proposition and far less contentious. A Sinhala armed force in the North, if rotated back to base in the South, would not be as much of a problem as one replete with permanent housing for families. If we go down that road will we hear the phrases ‘creating facts on the ground’ and ‘natural increase’, and can we afford to play act at being Israel without a superpower as our axiomatic subsidiser, supplier and supporter?
As the TNA and the newly elected MPs from the other Tamil parties ready to assume their seats in the 2010 parliament, they must straighten out their relationship with the Tamil Diaspora. For the Sinhala people and the Sri Lankan state, the role of the Tamil Diaspora is clear: it is secessionist and actively engaged in soliciting western support for its goal. Its ideology is strategic Prabhakaranism without Tiger tactics. At best it is analogous to the relationship between Cuba and the Miami Cuban community — and the greater the pressure from Miami the tighter the defensive crackdown in Havana. Of course, the Tamil Diaspora doesn’t have the political clout of the Miami Cubans: our giant neighbour is anxious to invest in our economy, not impose sanctions on it.
At worst the hawkish pro-secessionist majority of the Tamil Diaspora is the external, existential enemy of Sri Lanka as state and political community. But what of its relationship with the Tamils of and in Sri Lanka; the voter base of the Tamil parties including the TNA? For too long, the Diaspora tail has wagged the dog, and even the Tiger. The LTTE would have been able to disaggregate into small units, disperse and engage the advancing Sri Lankan forces in guerrilla warfare for a considerably longer period, had it not been for the Tigers’ need to play to the spectators of the Tamil Diaspora and meet its expectations; expectations which were themselves the phantasmagorical manifestations of overblown Tamil self-regard and self-centeredness. On the other hand the Tamil Diaspora was not able to fulfil any of the expectations of the Tigers and save them in their dying months, because those expectations were based on a myth of being a player or wielder of influence in the international system.
It would be unrealistic to expect the TNA to cut links with the Diaspora because these relationships are in fact, precisely that — relationships, in the sociological and familial sense. What is needed and possible is an inversion, where the Diaspora takes the cue from the elected Tamil representatives –who themselves must realise that they have to settle with Colombo, not London or even Delhi (as Prabhakaran and Perumal realised). Gajan Ponnambalam’s outfit has said that “There is legal space for the policy of ‘One Country, Two Nations’ and such a system embodies sovereignty whereas a ‘Nationality’ does not include same…sovereignty could only be attained when the Tamil Nation achieves the stage of a Nation with its own land”. (TamilNet 30.03.10) The more raucous such agit-prop for ‘sovereignty’ and ‘self determination’, the more determined and accelerated will be the State’s pre-emptive action to transform the realities on the ground, including the demographics, that permit such a slogan. Plainly put, the only way to stop the Sinhalese from settling in the Tamil majority areas is for the Tamils to settle with the Sinhalese.
Conversely the Sinhalese must realise that collective Tamil identity cannot be pounded into a composite Sri Lankan one as if by mortar and pestle. Tamil compliance with a united Sri Lanka can be insisted upon by law and enforced by the state, but Tamil allegiance to a common Sri Lankan identity cannot be enforced; it can only be accomplished through the earning of Tamil consent. Both the Sinhalese (especially the Sinhala Buddhists) and the Tamils have to make concessions if they are to enjoy a benefits of a larger, common Sri Lankan identity. The TNA has made a positive shift to “One Country, with Two Nationalities”, rejecting Gajan Ponamblam’s “One Country, Two Nations”, but stood opposed to “the 13th Amendment and a political solution based on a unitary form of governance”. (TamilNet 30.03.10)
This simply will not work.
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