by Dr. Rajan Hoole
On 15th June S. Pathmanathan, the most prominent of surviving members of the LTTE announced the establishment of a Provisional Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (PTG), pointing to the danger to the 'very physical survival of Tamils' and the absence of 'political space to articulate their legitimate political aspirations' in Lanka. This was followed the next day by V. Rudrakumaran, heading the committee of 13 leading advocates of the LTTE for the formation of the PTG. There was a note of irony in his saying that the committee would function within democratic principles and would capture the aspirations of the people by means of contact maintained with them through the TNA.
Many of the sentiments expressed by the two gentlemen would have captured the feelings of most Tamils in the wake of the July 1983 violence and the Welikada prison massacre. We Tamils had then what was still a democratic leadership. The TULF leader Mr. Amirthalingam would have been under pressure to establish a PTG, had not India intervened and tried to push through the Parthasarathy proposals, agreed to and aborted by President Jayewardena, signalling the protracted civil war.
Much water has since flowed under the bridge, which makes the PTG a dangerous exercise, cornering the Tamils again into the pernicious politics of half truths. Rudrakumaran points to the killing of three Tamil MPs on Rajapaksa's watch, saying nothing of the LTTE's killings of scores of MPs, political leaders and budding leaders. A good core of thinking people on the ground and certainly the 300,000 in IDP camps would not go along with blaming all the Tamils' ills on the Sinhalese government. The IDPs would have spoken aloud their indignation about the LTTE, which used them as hostages to protect the leadership and their booty, placed their conscripted children on the frontlines and shot and shelled hundreds who tried to escape from their clutches.
The reason the IDPs cannot do so is the Government holds them prisoner behind barbed wire indiscriminately, fearing that they would give the world 'false testimony' about bombing and shelling by the Government.
What is then the PTG's link to the people, while it totally denies this tragedy and holds that the people were staying with the LTTE out of patriotic devotion? Even during the last weeks of acute tragedy, the TNA uttered not a word demanding the LTTE let the people go. It would now keep quiet about it and watch the drift remaining carefully ambivalent about the PTG. As with the LTTE, the interests and arrogance evident in the PTG's attempt to continue a politics detrimental to the Tamil people inside Lanka, is more about attempting to sustain a bankrupt enterprise abroad through further lies, mobilisation and collection of funds.
We see here Sinhalese and Tamil polities gearing up to continue the politics of half truths, reinforcing each other's myths to goad the country into further tragedy. The Government would, on the presumption of Tamil perfidy, go on finding reasons to expand the army and maintain it on a permanent war footing and to keep IDPs, both old and new, away from their lands from which they were violently driven out in Manal Aru (Weli Oya) and large stretches of arable land in Sampoor and Jaffna. It will find reasons to override the law and continue with disappearances, official killings, the new habit of putting persons in remand prison (even an astrologer, now that the CID could apparently read the stars even better) and thinking about charges many moons later. Besides, it now seems that the Government could detain someone on the hypothetical fear that they might give false testimony about it to foreigners.
On the Tamil side there would be an attempt to promote a mythical legacy of the LTTE shorn of all its terrible crimes against its own people. All that this politics had to offer were cycles of tragedy and displacement would be hidden behind an appeal to emotions. What happened in 1987 and described by Rajani Thiranagama in the Broken Palmyra, holds for 1990, 1995 - 2000 and 2006-2009:
"The nation was on the roads, their worldly belongings in plastic bags, their children on their hips, in the blistering noon day heat, from refugee camp to refugee camp, from village to village, fleeing from the withdrawing Tigers and the advancing army...Then came the shells, cannon, tank fire, helicopter fire and even bombs from the Sri Lankan bombers. When Tiger sentry point after sentry point withdrew without a whimper, only firing rounds of automatic fire thereby luring the Indian army, the people were the sacrifice."
What the Tamils need uppermost is a reexamination of their narrow-nationalist politics, a challenge V. Karalasingham posed as early as 1963: "The present leadership because of its close identification with the past will not encourage any discussion of fundamental questions - it would rather see the Tamil people burn themselves out in impotent rage and despair rather than permit a critical reexamination of its politics."
There cannot be reexamination without facing the truth, and when that happens we have to exorcise all associations with the TULF-LTTE legacy. It is the bankruptcy of this legacy that led to anger against those who try to work constructively with the Muslims and Sinhalese. It was the TULF leaders' deadly ambivalence about violence which led them to hound Alfred Duraiappah and incite his assassination as a traitor by its parricidal progeny - the LTTE.
Where would Germany, Europe's economic giant, be today, if her postwar political leaders had begun by denying the fascist legacy and mass murder instead of facing the bitter truth and its implications?
While living through the bombing of German cities as a prisoner, Dietrich Bonhoeffer did not utter a word of blame against Britain and the US who were themselves committing a crime against humanity. He mourned for the dead and gave practical advice to the living on protecting themselves against allied bombing, but his state of mind is best described in his citation from Psalm 60: "Thou hast moved the land and divided it; heal the sores thereof for it shaketh" (Letters and Papers from Prison). He was an internationalist, far too conscious of German blame.
Anyone observing this country's record of several rounds of communal violence since 1956 and continual killings of thousands of civilians in security operations since 1984, mainly of Tamils by armed forces and of Sinhalese and Muslims mainly by the LTTE, and the absence of credible inquiries leading identification and punishment of offenders, would be very pessimistic about its future. Reconciliation would be a lost cause unless the truth is made public and a starting point is in place. Take the two cases below.
On 14th July 2007 Miss. Lathasini Arunachalam a timid assistant in a shop in Chavakacheri regularly visited by Army Intelligence, was followed by military men on a motorcycle and shot dead a short distance from home, leaving five bullets in her body. Having made several inquiries we found no evidence that she was helping the LTTE.
On 9th November 2008, Mrs. Sumathy Srirangan (28), a mother of two, who was travelling from Pt. Pedro to Jaffna for medical treatment was taken off the bus by the LTTE in Nallur, walked to a tank a mile away and shot dead. She had left the LTTE and become a family woman. Her crime was that she had gone to the EPDP office seeking support for her medical treatment.
Both these stories are samples among thousands which show the sadistic character of both sides. Any organized force that kills unarmed women in this way is to be utterly abhorred. To the Sinhalese in the near term the Army may be heroes, but the Tamils will find it difficult to see any qualitative difference between the Army and the LTTE.
The Presidential Commission of Inquiry assisted by the IIGEP gave the Government an opportunity to prove that impartial and professional investigations could be conducted in Lanka and thereby strike a new direction. But government manipulation made the attempt a farce. The politics of both sides obstruct any honest reassessment.
Without the truth being investigated and made public, those who want to keep the people divided would feed them with half truths that place all the villainy on the other side. Thus while one side has screamed genocide against the Government, the country's leaders have glorified the Army for getting rid of a 'monster'. The leaders have repeatedly dismissed well-founded cases of violations by the security forces, as fiction concocted by traitors and malignant foreigners. Others inevitably see monsters among those who planned and executed in public the fearsome killing of the Trincomalee five students.
We have a divided country set to continue the politics of half truths. The majority from all the communities are capable of looking inwardly and want to move away from the desultory post independence politics of confrontation on fanciful issues based on history and genetics, issues as slippery as reading the stars. They would be more than ready to rise to the challenge of facing the facts and to develop an impartial and effective machinery to address past violations. If that cannot happen, it is a failure of leadership on both sides.
While the people have repeatedly shown themselves ready for a political settlement, a handful of opinion makers in the South continue to blame everything that went wrong for the Sinhalese polity since independence on the Tamils. Any discussion of a political settlement is sidetracked by them with feints such as 'not home made', 'imposed from outside' and 'not suitable to our conditions'. The logical implication would be the absurdity of discarding the modern state with its parliamentary democracy, which is a colonial legacy, and going back to the old despotic kingdoms of Kotte and Jaffna!
(Rajan Hoole is a Martin Ennals award winning human rights activist, heading the well known UTHR (J) rights group)
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