SL: BIGGER VICTIMS: TAMIL CIVILIANS!!!!

The war and the new wretched of Sri Lanka..................by Rajan Philips

Having missed every opportunity to stop fighting and reach a resolution, the LTTE is now reaping exponentially what it has all along been sowing linearly. It is now the government’s turn at sowing, which it is doing with great gusto and transparent glee. Over a thousand hits from the air by the government, so far, against the paltry seven bomb-drops by the LTTE’s more-show-than-sting air force. The ground skirmishes may be a little less uneven but are very much lopsided against the LTTE. It is a matter of time, says the government, before Kilinochchi falls.

The bigger victims of these onslaughts than the LTTE are non-political and non-combatant Tamils. Over two hundred thousand of them have been forced out of their huts and hearths in the last two months or so in the districts of Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi. An equal number of them have been similarly languishing as "internally displaced" in the other Northern and Eastern Districts, some of them for nearly twenty years. Add to their number all the other denizens of North and East who are stuck in their homes, living from one day to another not knowing what awaits them the next day.

The people of the North and East have seen many wars, were devastated by the tsunami and are now being bombarded relentlessly. The LTTE has no use for them, the government does not care for them, and the philanthropic international community has been shut out of their space by a nasty government decree. Nastier still, those who flee to Colombo from the North are considered ‘abnormal’, declared a security threat, and are put through the process of mass humiliation called registration.

The internally displaced indigenous Tamils are the new wretched of Sri Lanka, surpassing in misery, violence and abandonment the island’s old wretched – the Indian Tamil estate workers. The Indian Tamils were brought in as "coolies" by the British Raj and were forced to toil to pay for Lanka’s passage from paddy land feudalism to plantation modernity. At the stroke of independence, they were the first to be alienated and rendered stateless, and it would take a full fifty years before the status of their statelessness could finally be resolved.

The impetus for that resolution unmistakably came from the rise of Tamil militancy in the North and East. J.R. Jayewardene was forced to settle the Indian Tamil question and accommodate the late Thondaman in his government even as he opted to play hard ball in dealing with the indigenous Tamil question. Political scribes who now opine that it is Delhi and not Kilinochchi that is responsible for forcing Sri Lanka on the tortuous path to devolution, forget the fact that the mighty Mother India could not lift a finger on behalf of the plantation Tamils of Indian origin. In fact, after 1960, New Delhi bent over backwards at every turn to appease chauvinistically insistent Sri Lankan governments on the question of citizenship for the Indian Tamils, with India eventually accepting one half of the Sri Lankan plantation population.

Even then the granting of citizenship to the people who stayed behind on the estates was not a forgone certainty. J.R. Jayewardene would not have moved an inch to resolve the citizenship question if he did not think he needed to have peace in the ‘thottams’ on the hills while he was taking on the separatists on the plains of Jaffna. Admittedly, the influence of indigenous Tamil militancy in resolving the citizenship question of the Indian Tamils was more indirect than direct.

Many fathers, no mother

On the other hand, the hand of Tamil militancy in pushing Sri Lankan governments towards devolution has been more direct than indirect. Tamil militancy was the direct result of the refusal of successive Sri Lankan governments to responsibly deal with reasonable political demands raised by moderate Tamil political leaders. It did not arise because of India although it gave the militants sanctuary in Tamil Nadu. Without Tamil militancy, India would not have had the passport to enter Sri Lanka’s political space in the manner and to the extent it did. From thereon, India dictated, albeit more unsuccessfully than successfully, the framework for and the process of devolution in Sri Lanka. The Thirteenth Amendment had many direct and indirect, willing and unwilling fathers, but no nurturing mother!

It has had, however, several capable enemies among the Sinhalese. The LTTE, more unwittingly and with more martial hubris than political savvy contributed mightily to the Amendment’s non-implementation in the North and East and its ultimate truncation between the two. Finally, having boasted to the world its military invincibility, the LTTE is now showing its military incapability against the government’s air power and ground forces.

If you need a parallel, as some of us cannot see a straight line without a parallel, we had one in Saddam Husain’s boasting about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction without actually having any. He gave the excuse to the Bush Administration to invade his country. The Americans are stuck in Iraq, and Colin Powell’s ‘cut it off and kill it’ military strategy that worked in Kuwait is not working in Iraq. The emerging American strategy for Iraq is more like ‘cut and run’ rather than ‘cut and kill’.

"Cut it off and kill it", is what Sri Lanka’s armchair military zealots are offering as advice on how to finish off the LTTE. "First we cut it off; then we kill it." Colin Powell, the soldier, may have said it in relation to the enemy Iraqi forces that his (American) army was fighting in Kuwait in the Gulf war of 1991. But Powell, whether as soldier or as Secretary of State, would never have countenanced rounding-up and finger-printing Arabs and Muslims in New York in the wake of the 9/11 bombings.

Not so with Sri Lanka’s soldier turned Defence Secretary, who ordered all Tamils who have come to Colombo during the last five years from the five districts of the Northern Province to register themselves at nearby police stations or designated Buddhist temples.

Too many people coming into Colombo create a security threat, according to the Defence Secretary. He considered "abnormal" the arrival of 6,950 people to Colombo during the month of August, while ignoring the much greater abnormality of 70,000 people fleeing their homes during the same period in Mullaitivu and Kilinochchi.

Having had its knuckles rapped by the Supreme Court earlier for trying to forcibly evacuate Tamil people out of Colombo, the government chose to give three days (18-21 September) to an estimated 60,000 Tamils from the five northern districts to register themselves with the security forces. Reportedly, no proof of registration was to be issued and the act of registration would not spare the people from future round-ups and interrogations by the same security forces. No one knows what any Tamil from the North coming to Colombo after 21 September should or should not do to prove that she or he is not a Tiger.

Has the registration of 60,000 Tamils improved the security situation in Colombo? There is no way of knowing. If the purpose was to catch LTTE sleepers in Colombo, it is more than likely that the sleepers gave the registration circus a slip. What we know for certain is that those who went for registration - children, women and men of all ages - suffered indignity and frustration. They are too helpless to complain and too disoriented even to be angry. They indeed are the wretched of Sri Lanka.

In a BBC interview, the Defence Secretary let it be known that he knows that "all Tamil people are not terrorists … but almost all terrorists are Tamil, 98 percent of the terrorists." He went on to say that "when you do operations … the Tamil community will be targeted … not because the government and the security forces want to harass Tamils … (but) because of the Tamil Tigers …"

We need to remind the Secretary that there is another side to his premise that almost all terrorists are Tamils – which is that more than almost all members of the security forces are Sinhalese. Perhaps, we should not hold the Secretary of Defence to a high standard when even a person of the calibre of Victor Ivan appears to have missed this obviousness in his recent interventions in the Sunday Island.



courtesy: www island.lk