In My View

War is over, the cause is not

Vellupillai Prabhakaran is dead, but long will live the dream he spun for an independent Sri Lankan Tamil homeland. That dream can only be absolved if the Sri Lankan government in Colombo shows the perspicacity to win the war and not just the battles. For, this is a crucial moment in Sri Lankan Tamil history. The people are battered, bruised and thoroughly demoralised.

Atleast two generations of Tamil youth who only knew violence as a state of existence are now cowering in fear of retribution. The “cognitive dissonance” - as the American social psychologist Leon Festinger had coined it - for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka is so stark, that unless they are helped not to rationalise the emergence of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE); their progress into the three-decade long civil war; and their ultimate decimation, the folklores would increasingly get into the realm of mythmaking, thus surviving in the consciousness of the people to the detriment of the Sri Lankan state.

While the military victory of the Sri Lankan forces bore the stamp of strategic and tactical aptitude of the Colombo leadership, it now has to be translated into a much larger realm. There is a reductionist American term for this realm; “winning hearts and minds” of a disaffected people. The British had a better term, ‘integration.’

The Tamils of the north of Sri Lanka need to be integrated into the national mainstream, which albeit dominated by the Sinhala majority now has an opportunity to expand to include the minorities.

At the pain of being called repetitive, it still has to be said: unless the Sri Lankan polity with its jingoistic Sinhala fringe and reactionary Buddhist clergy decides that the integrity of a country is not about just gaining challenged territory but about regaining the loyalty of a painfully subnationalist population, this war will be lost again. The onus for this difficult task devolves on the same singleminded Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Sri Lankan president, who so skillfully ran the violent war. It is upon him and rest of the political class of Sri Lanka to arrive at a national consensus that the Sri Lankan Tamils are as much Sri Lankan as those who wore the uniform of the country to take on the LTTE.

The early signs are promising although seem to give the sense of being cosmetic. The central message that was propagated about the Eelam War IV was that it was not being waged against the Sri Lankan Tamils, but against the intransigent LTTE. After battle pictures of former LTTE leader, Karuna – someone who would have been killed by the all-consuming Prabhakaran had he not fled in time to his eastern enclave - being the first visitor to the devastation of the north shows a certain sensitivity that could go a long way in putting a salve.

Rajapaksa, and the political class of Sri Lanka would have to keep in mind that the LTTE has done the biggest disservice to the Sri Lankan Tamil communities by killing the moderate leadership of the likes of towering, Appapillai Amrithalingam. Hence, they would have to nurture to health a new Tamil leadership that could guide a rudderless community to peace, stability and prosperity.

The LTTE’s record of the ‘protracted war’ is nefarious. They became a killing machine that danced to the tune of one single band master, Prabhakarn. Occasionally showing tactical brilliance, Prabhakarn often missed the strategic picture. He was so consumed by his own propaganda about the “Eelam” that he lost sight of the political nature of his ultimate goal. He thus failed to seize opportunities that came his way, even when the writing on the wall was stark: that redrawing of national boundaries was a relic of the post-WW II world, not to be repeated unless natural.

He thus failed to pick up the international cues for laying down arms and walking the ‘democratic’ path to power; in the process losing his constituency that argued for him.

Prabhakaran did not even relent when he lost the eastern province to Karuna. It is a telling statement on his generalship that he could not read the new status of the Sri Lankan armed forces. Released from fighting a two front civil war, they could not now concentrate their limited resources solely on the north thus creating the possibility of a major military victory over Prabhakaran.

Nor did Prabhakaran anticipate that post-Tsunami his manoeuvrability with small boats will be lessened as the devasatation caused to the fishing communities of the region would be incredible. Plus, the international partnership forged over the post-Tusnami relief operation would hold to the extent of challenging the ingress of his supply ships.

But at the end, it has to be said that Prabhakarn died a warrior’s death. Not for him the quick exit of a Hitlerian suicide. Nor was there an operatic performance of a dramatic attempt at escape. He died fighting the battle that he fought, often dishonourably, for decades without a qualm. Even if the Sri Lankan government manages to not martyrise him, they would not be able to stop him from surviving in the pantheon of free people.

In My View

USA would not change

For the past fortnight or so, a debate is raging in the USA. It has been dubbed ceremoniously by the American media as the debate about “who we (the Americans) are.” This is a long pending process of exculpation for the “crimes committed against humanity” by the George W Bush administration in the name of ‘war on terror.’

On 16 April the new Barack Obama administration decided to make public the American Justice department memoranda that created the whole, supposedly, legal architecture for the practices indulged in places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and Abu Ghraib, Iraq. Apparently, President Obama took the decision to release those memos after a heartrending meeting at the White House.

It can be argued that more than constitutionalism or heightened moral resolves, Obama’s decision was guided by the memory of the leak of the Pentagon Papers in the late 1960s that opened up the whole can of worms of the US’s military actions in Vietnam. In other words, if Obama would not have made public those memos, they could have come back to bite him if leaked at a later date.

Anyway, the release of the memos have highlighted in the blighted consciousness of the American public how much inhuman and immoral their rulers can be. And all this was in the garb of legality

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But curiously Obama has also assured the American elite in the same breath that there would not be any investigation because he would not like to be diverted from his ‘agenda.’ American media has interpreted that as a belief that the examination of the actions of the previous government would rent the bodipolitik of the USA with such divisiveness that it would be back to the days of post-Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s.

But the point is that the US did not learn a lesson even after the Vietnam War. It repeated the same mistakes over and over again, while the world had to bear the brunt of its actions. So it can be safely argued that the US would not change and does not want to change.

Read about some of the actions that were ‘legally’ abetted by the Bush administration’s Justice department team. Washington Post quoted from one of the memos, “"A detainee may be walled one time (one impact with the wall) to make a point, or twenty to thirty times consecutively when the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question."

“Nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary restrictions kept prisoners compliant and reminded them they had no control over their basic needs. Clothes and food could be used as rewards for cooperation,” prescribed another memo. The list goes on.

These are the techniques that the US, indeed the West had been crowing against for decades. They have stood on judgment on other countries, as the self-appointed moral guardians of the world, and have sought to isolate one country or the other on account of human rights violations. And this is their real face, now exposed.

After apartheid was ended in South Africa and a black-led government came to power, the pro-West South African elite alongwith the progressive elements of the Western elite had prescribed as a process of healing from the painful years of white supremacy, a Truth Commission. The formula was later tried in Cambodia and East Timor.

Now is the time when the world should demand a Truth Commission from the Americans to let heal the wounds of US bestiality. Obama has abdicated his responsibility to the global opinion. The international community – if it is not another name of that group of people who owe their allegiance to the US elite in the garb of global citizenship – should rise up as one and demand that ‘let truth prevail.’

Or otherwise, some concerned citizen of the world should stand up and go to the courts of north Europe and file a case against Bush and Co with the same alacrity that is shown in hauling up second or third world dictators.

Of course, there too Obama has created a caveat. He has reassured the CIA officials who could be thus indicted that they would be provided full legal assistance, in the eventuality of such a fate. Not only that, Obama has told them that were they to lose money in the process, the US government would indemnify. No word there, by the way, of any way to compensate the victims or their families, of the treatment of those CIA officers.

Imagine George W Bush with a number pasted on his chest facing a photographer’s camera. Or even a disshevelled George W Bush, fresh out of bed, being examined in his orifices for any hidden cyanide pill, being photographed at that instant like Saddam Hussein had to undergo. That would not happen either. For, Obama has ensured that the people who play the game of global dominance should be immune from the impact of their actions. And he has ensured that the US would not change.