Government and LTTE differ on value of life
by Global Citizen for Banyan News Reporters
Colombo, Sri Lanka:Â Researchers at the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence and their counterparts at the LTTE Humanitarian Research Institute at Puthukkudiyirippu (formerly based in Kilinochchi and which did not at any time have a hospital) have been competing for months to produce the most accurate calculation of the value of life.
The Defence Ministry spokesman who leads the government research team revealed their preliminary findings several months ago through the Media Centre for National Security. Speaking to Journalists, he reported that eight soldiers had died in battle the previous day, when the actual body count of security forces personnel killed in battle was thirteen. He assured that according to his scientific calculator, the given numbers indicated the value of a soldier’s life was approximately 0.6153846153846. Based on these figures, he said that 36.92307692307 valiant soldiers laid down their lives for the motherland when their busses came under terrorist attack a couple of weeks ago.
When BNR contacted mathematicians at the LTTE Humanitarian Research Institute, they rejected these figures as ‘laughable’. They claimed to have adopted more accurate methods which have enabled their organisation carry out hundreds of suicide bombings and still manage to balance their accounts at the end of every humanitarian year.
Analysts believe that the LTTE uses sophisticated equations where the value of life is believed to be:
(a) directly proportional to the number of civilians they hide behind
(b) inversely proportional to the number of white hairs in their leader’s moustache
BNR learns that progress is being made at a heightened pace of late in and around Puthukkudiyirippu towards the harmonisation of the GoSL’s and LTTE’s varying value of life calculations by civilians who are killing and dismembering themselves in the name of pure mathematics.Â
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Mr Prabhakaran's true colours are coming out only now. He wants to protect his wife and the child and send them away from the war area to a safe place. I am glad he did that. What about the thousands of other Tamil civilian women and children who are kept by force by him as human shield to protect him. Are they a lower class of Tamil People who's lives are not worth saving. Think about it.
What an irony/paradox:
1.Emergency '58, Tarzi Vittachi:
When a government, however popular, begins to pander to racial or religious emotionalism merely because it is the loudest of the raucous demands made on it, and then meddles in the administration and enforcement of law and order for the benefit of its favourites or to win the plaudits of a crowd, however hysterical it may be, catastrophe is certain.
At the risk of losing the monumental support of the anti-Muslim Congress sympathisers, M. K. Gandhi once said: ''No cabinet worthy of being representative of a large mass of mankind can afford to take any step merely because it is likely to win the hasty applause of an unthinking public. In the midst of sanity, should not our best representatives retain sanity and bravely prevent a wreck of the ship of state under their care?''
Can anyone doubt that if this glorious principle of statesmanship had been applied in Ceylon the bloodbath of 1958 could have been avoided?
To be continued
2. nearly five decades later Prof Richardson in Paradise Poisoned(2005):
In 1993, Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, invited me to contribute to a volume, entitled World Without Violence. The causes of violence in society were not complicated, Gandhi maintained, and could be traced to 'eight blunders':
1. Wealth without work
2. Pleasure without conscience
3. Knowledge without character
4. Commerce without morality
5. Science without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without principle
8. Rights without responsibilities
Each contributor was invited to use one 'blunder'. I chose 'politics without principle' and drew two lessons from Sri Lanka's experience. First was that practising politics without principle, even in pursuit of principled goals, is likely to push a society toward violent conflict. The second lesson was that processes of democratic political campaigning and elections pose nearly irresistible temptations to practice politics without principle.
Contd….
The illustrative examples I chose focused on the development failure of polarising political rhetoric and tactics, described in chapter 21. S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike's 1956 general election campaign used racist appeals, in which he did not personally believe, to mobilise support for his People's United Front. Not long afterwards, as readers will recall, J.R. Jayewardene and Dudley Senanayake used similarly expedient tactics to defeat a carefully crafted Compromise plan for devolving power to Tamils, the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam pact. The overarching message embodied in Mahatma Gandhi's enumeration ofblunders and my enumeration of development failures is the same. We know more than enough to choose policies that will help prevent protracted deadly conflict – and to not choose policies that will cause protracted deadly conflict.
Contd…
I have used the following metaphor in previous chapters, but it cannot be repeated too often:
The situation is analogous to our knowledge about the relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. We know that smoking is a principal cause of lung cancer, though there are other causes. We know that refraining from smoking is the best way of avoiding lung cancer, though some abstainers may still contract the disease. A medical practitioner would not simply advocate abstinence. He or she might recommend regular exercise, a healthy diet and a regimen of antioxidants. Thus 'avoid development failures' is an insufficient prophylactic for protracted deadly conflict. More proactive remedies are needed.
A promising, proactive strategy for preventing deadly conflict and terrorism can be summarized in ten imperatives. Their relevance extends well beyond Sri Lanka , to Kosovo, Kashmir , Palestine , the Sudan , Afghanistan and, in particular, Iraq:
1. Maintaining public order and preventing social turbulence from escalating into protracted deadly conflict are prerequisite to the success of all other development policies.
2. Polarising political rhetoric and tactics must be forgone, however empting their short-term benefits may seem. Like mustard gas, which had to be abandoned as a weapon in World War I, this strategy
has a tendency to 'blow back' upon the user.
3. Meeting the needs and aspirations of fighting age young men should be the first priority of national development polices and of programs funded by international donors.
4. Developing countries should have internal security forces (police and paramilitary) that are generously funded, professional, apolitical and trained to meet the complex challenges of maintaining public order in a changing society.
5. Development policies that meet human beings' common aspirations – to feel good about their lives, the circumstances in which they live and future prospects for themselves and their children – will contribute most effectively to keeping violent conflict and terrorism within acceptable bounds.
6. Those who frame development policies should seek a middle path between capitalism's efficient, but Darwinian precepts, and socialism's egalitarian, but stultifying precepts.
7. Good governance and democratisation must be part of the 'successful development' mix. Most important are governance institutions that are open to 'bad news' and self-correcting.
8. Multinational corporations, businesses and businessmen's organisations should play a more active role in supporting successful development policies.
9. Successful development requires a long-term view. Giving sufficient weight to the long-term requires institutional mechanisms and discourses that extend beyond the next election and term in office of political leaders presently in power.
10. There must be realistic, rigorous, opportunity-costs analyses of military options, versus equivalent expenditures for non military options, before proceeding down the slippery slope of 'military solutions' to complex development problems
dear punitham, you remain a dreamer when the need of the hr are men with their feet on the gorund…
When one has been at the receiving end of a deadly treatment for sixty years, one wishes it doesn't happen to anyone else and is desperate to see the lessons are learnt by others.
But then the probability of this deadly combination of geography and history anywhere else or anytime else is very remote.
Puthinam,
It is heartening to see your fair and constructive points you present (though they would have been better argued in an article instead of being hidden away as comments). They are idealistic, but i think it is encouraging to see that dreamers and idealists still speak out with hope for Sri Lanka.
We need charismatic voices to promote the cause of reconciliation, forgiveness, understanding and broad and meaningful interaction between the sections of our society that have been disjointed because of war.
We are like the pieces of a broken machine – the only way to make it work – to make ourselves work again – is to put it together, have the cogs turn each other, make sure it is well oiled with understanding and mutual respect so that it won't jam and break again.
Mhhhh…., Ishini, Ctizen……..
One cannot fathom how vicious this conflict is.
In late 2008 only I found out from the website of International Centre for Ethnic Studies(in Sri lanka) that there was a lecture on "The Iraq Intervention: What US Policy Makers Could Have Learned from Sri Lanka" by Dr. John M. Richardson on July 21, 2006 at the ICES Auditorium, Colombo. Ever since I have been trying to get at an electronic/paper copy of this lecture. I'm still hunting for it. If the ICES is genuinely interested in not only peace for Sri Lanka but also peace for the whole world, they should have it available(free or priced) in electronic or paper form to as many people as possible. It IS part of PEACE EDUCATION which is not confined within the walls of a classsroom of a school but distributed all over this wide world, esp. the multiverse of the internet.
If anybody who reads this knows where I can get it please let me know by posting a message here.For more than ten years I've been outraged to hear that some people are making money in Colombo on ''peace initiatives'' and ''conflict resolution''.
Contd….
I mean i was outraged by the accusations hurled on the peacemakers of all sorts. But now I think there may be some truth in it.