Baron Naseby is a British Conservative Party politician. He has visited Sri Lanka many times, including most recently with the British all-party delegation. Watch him in this clip explaining to a partly hostile diaspora audience his position against international intervention in Sri Lanka.
He has got it right. The focus of the international attention at this juncture should be weighted towards getting the Tamil Tigers to release civilian hostages, as opposed to pressuring the government to agree to a ceasefire. As these two articles, one in the Canadian National Post and the other by DBS Jeyaraj, point out, the voice of the Tamil diaspora has been hijacked by a minority and the wrong message is blackening their name in the international arena.
The Tamil diaspora focus should be on negotiating an LTTE surrender and demilitarization. The LTTE faces inevitable defeat. They should be pressured to admit it and lay down their arms. Which other modern conflict has come to this stage, where an obvious defeat is being postponed at the cost of huge prolonged suffering to the side the loser is meant to represent? It’s a joke. Fighting to the death to the last man went out with Sparta, I had thought.
I inherently have something against the idea of international intervention in our country and I think other Sri Lankans should feel the same way too. Even though I come from a family of Brown Sahibs, it always made me uncomfortable to think that some of our citizens so readily welcome Western examples as superior. The Portuguese, the Dutch and British succeeded in colonizing Sri Lanka by exploiting our own conflicts with eachother. We invited them in to help us fight each other. And this process of intervening in a country for one stated reason and then staying to control and exploit it for some other reason still happens today. Iraq is an obvious case in point. Many of the US bases around the world, the backbone of its imperialist infrastructure, are built on the bones of regional conflicts all over the world.
I am glad that the government said thanks, but no thanks to Britain. Recently, there was some anti-British communication which compared Britain to a mother keeping her kid in line. This is not a bad analogy, because in a lot of ways, Sri Lanka is growing up. For better or for worse, our problems are our own and if we are ever to discover a mature post colonial identity, we have to be left to sort out our own problems. This conflict has its roots in colonialism, and the reactions and counter reactions that stem from the imbalances and distortions within our society that colonialism created. We have handled it badly – true (seemingly much worse than countries like Malaysia that have dressed their colonial wounds with bandages of economic prosperity) but the chain of cause and effect that has led us to this day when the an army stands powerful surrounding a huddled group of terrorists, ready to destroy them, has nevertheless had its origins in the experience of colonialism.
Today, it isn’t just the army that surrounds the LTTE. Today, one idea stands powerful, ready to destroy the other. This is not just about a fight for land, water or freedom – it is also a fight about ideas. The two ideas that are fighting each other are two different views of what post-colonial Sri Lanka looks like and what the post-colonial Sri Lankan identity is. Should Sinhalese be the only national language? Should there be two separate states? Should there be regional autonomy within a united Sri Lanka? These are some of the ideas that have violently fought each other in the years since independence.
The first idea grew, reached adulthood in 1956 and then became old and died over the past two or three decades. As a result, now Tamil, Sinhala and English are all official langauages in Sri Lanka; they are all taught to kids in school, and the Civil Service, after a certain rank, requires its employees to have knowledge of both languages. No one calls for a Sinhala Only policy anymore – not even the most extreme nationalist. So, this is not fated to be our post-colonial identity, even though some people used to want it badly and a Buddhist monk even killed a Prime Minister for it. Similarly, some Tamils have been talking about a separate state from before independence. This idea grew powerful and became embodied in the LTTE, who killed off all similar but slightly different ideas, and fought for this idea for three decades. That idea too is now on the verge of dying somewhere in North of Sri Lanka, under siege from the powerful idea surrounding it that says this country is never going to be split into two different states.
So this is how it is going to be. I have faith that whatever solution the government puts forward now, it will be one which offers some degree of autonomy to the people who reside in those areas, whether it is through the full implementation of the 13th Amendment or through a federal solution and constitutional reform. (I suspect the former). But, whatever solution is arrived at, it is likely to be a permanent statement about what our post colonial identity is going to be. Wars help galvanize identities and they help people rally around and accept ideas. The nationalities that participated in World War II were never the same afterwards. Europeans were never the same. British women were never as feminine. The Japanese were never as proud. It changed them, and the generations after them, from the inside.
Similarly, Sri Lankans will never be the same. This is our identity. This is who we will be. It is being decided right now on a little sliver of land to the North of Mullaitivu. And, it isn’t going to change. Because, these people – these people that control these things – they’ve got the guns and the men to defend their ideas. And the rest of us have nothing but a dwindling bank balance and the hope of a better day.
Jehan Mendis writes, teaches economics and runs Colombo’s only pub quiz. You can find his stuff at www.ravana.wordpress.com.