FROM THE REVOLUTION TO NEW FORMS OF STRUGGLE

A REVIEW OF NO MORE TEARS SISTER – ANATOMY OF HOPE AND BETRAYAL

-- Aaron Moore

“We did not consider human rights work as politics.  Politics was the armed struggle and the revolution.  Rajani [Thiranagama] completely departed from this type of position to new forms of struggle,” says Dayapala Thiranagama (Rajani’s husband), to a nodding Nirmala Rajasingham (Rajani’s older sister) as they look back on her life and therefore, their own lives as active participants of militant movements.   This difficult search for “new forms of struggle” in the face of a disillusionment with simplistic revolutionary and nationalist politics, and the utter hopelessness and despair of Sri Lanka’s civil war is indeed the highlight of No More Tears Sister – Anatomy of Hope and Betrayal, a documentary film directed by Helene Klodawski and released in March 2005 by the Canadian National Film Board (NFB), and soon to be released in the United States at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.  The film focuses on the life of Rajani Thiranagama, Sri Lanka’s most famous human rights activist, who dedicated her life to bringing social justice and democracy to the Tamil people and meticulously recorded the human rights crimes of the Sri Lankan state, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF) in the North.  The LTTE murdered her in 1989, putting an end to all democratic space and independent political organization in Jaffna.  Using everything from testimony by Rajani’s family, her letters and writings, family pictures, primary sources, re-enactments by family members, and historical news footage, Klodawski skillfully re-constructs her life and the complicated socio-political context that shaped it.  This was a very difficult task considering that there are few surviving materials on her life, that it was virtually impossible to film in Jaffna due to security concerns, and that many of her students and associates were afraid to speak because of fear of LTTE retribution. 

By carefully tracing the intertwined lives of Rajani, Dayapala, and Nirmala, the film shows how Rajani eventually came to embrace and practice “new forms of struggle.” Influenced by Nirmala and the general support for Tamil militarism among Sri Lankan Tamils in the militancy’s early years, Rajani began to help the LTTE in Jaffna and in 1984 became a leading figure in their political office in London while campaigning for her older sister’s release from a Sri Lankan state prison.  She began to question the organization, however, after Nirmala’s escape and subsequent break with the LTTE.  Nirmala recounts how she and her husband sought to “inculcate progressive values of human rights and democracy” among young LTTE cadres through political training, but met with fierce resistance from the leadership.  “We realized that this was a military outfit that operated with cutthroat ruthlessness operating at the center,” Nirmala adds.  After hearing Nirmala’s experiences and descriptions of internal killings, and escaped cadres’ descriptions of the LTTE targeting other militant groups, crushing dissent, and creating an atmosphere of fear in Jaffna, Rajani also breaks with them.  However, unlike Nirmala, who was forced into exile in London, Rajani returned to Jaffna in 1986 to “be with her people.” In the context of indiscriminate bombing, disappearances, torture, rape, and harassment by state forces, internal and external killings, torture, kidnappings, recruitment of children, and intimidation by the LTTE, and random shelling, shooting, and detentions by the IPKF, Rajani struggled to listen and meet the various needs of the Jaffna Tamil people, and more importantly, gave them a voice against these powerful actors.  Rather than the top-down, simplistic politics of LTTE fanatical nationalism, Sinhalese racism, and high-handed Indian interventionism, Rajani worked from the bottom up, developing multiple forms of struggle against all of these harmful ideologies.

The film shows her dedication to rebuilding Jaffna University, which was gutted by war, the destruction of Jaffna civil society by militancy, and the migration of the intelligentsia abroad.  According to Nirmala, Rajani’s commitment to the students was legendary.  She never discriminated against them based on political belief, and often went to the Indian IPKF brigadier general to demand their release from arbitrary detention.  She was the only one to confront the IPKF when they raided Jaffna University, according to an anonymous human rights activist.  Women also held a special place in her politics since they bore the most hardship and suffering during the war.  The LTTE used them as suicide cadres or frontline fighters or in Nirmala’s words, “cannon fodder for their war machine.” The Sri Lankan army bombed their homes, kidnapped their husbands, and raped them.  The IPKF did much of the same.  It was women who “kept the homes going and civil society running” during the war, Nirmala adds.  Rajani was an advocate for women desperately looking for their disappeared husbands, who were kidnapped or killed by one of the three parties.  She started the Poorani Home for Destitute Women, which gave strength to raped women who were shunned and ignored by everyone.  “Her sharp tongue” spared no one, not even the LTTE (“the so-called leaders of the people”), who were no different than the Sri Lankan army or IPKF in not caring for the people.  The LTTE mandated death and destruction for the Tamil people, even calling for the death of five hundred to a thousand Tamils at one point.  “The bloody Tigers have withdrawn while we the sacrificial lambs drop dead in lots,” she writes, describing how the LTTE used civilian death to advance their cause.  In sum, Rajani tirelessly strove to create a “politics of the people” in a context where no one bothered to listen to or empower them.  Such a politics had no ready-made formula.  In fact, Rajani said that she at first “did not know where to start organizing,” and simply threw herself into the lives and needs of the people.  “One needs enormous energy to restart, lose, restart lose, restart, lose,” she writes in one of her letters.  Yet out of this unceasing commitment to students, women, the displaced, the disappeared, the destitute, and so on, Rajani was able to plant the seeds of a renewed civil society that was rapidly being destroyed by narrow, fanatical nationalism.

Many of her human rights accounts have been published in The Broken Palmyrah (1990) by the University Teachers of Human Rights (Jaffna), a group of university teachers fighting for democratic space and human rights in Jaffna.  This collection of eyewitness accounts carries on the spirit of Rajani’s original idea to “expose the atrocities of the IPKF and the irrationality, fanaticism, and blindness of the Tigers” in a report on the plight of women to be called No More Tears Sister.  The Broken Palmyrah exhibits Rajani’s people-centered politics and commitment to “stand up and fight” for the Tamil community.  It is not merely a “neutral” documentation but rather a testimony to how the LTTE, other militant groups, the Tamil democratic parties, the Sri Lankan state forces, and the IPKF failed time and time again to root their politics in the people, and in fact, used and abused them, thereby destroying civil society in the process.  More importantly, however, it documents the various resistances of the people within that very context.  The LTTE, however, would not tolerate any outspokenness that “undermined the struggle,” and shot Rajani in September 1989, thus ending the open activities of UTHR in Jaffna.  The powerful pictures of the October 1989 commemoration protest for Rajani in the film demonstrates the persistence of civil society even within such a climate of fear.  One of Rajani’s colleagues at Jaffna University told me recently how she expressed fear at publishing her accounts but in the end was determined to speak out for her community.  “If intellectuals are scared to speak out, you can imagine how the average person feels,” he added.  The film and book both attest to the latent strength of people to find new forms of struggle and the continued importance of politicized human rights work that would enable the people to speak out against oppression even in a context of killing, abduction, and intimidation.  Only then can the culture of fear and silence be broken.

One question running through my mind was how this film could serve as a means for further political organization both in Sri Lanka and abroad.  The film is an excellent introduction to the complexities of the conflict through its skillful use of historical footage, succinct summaries by the narrator (Michael Ondatje), rich family testimony, and striking personal pictures.  This piecing together of history through visual and aural fragments brings events such as the JVP insurrection of 1971 and its brutal repression, the 1983 anti-Tamil riots, the rise of Tamil militancy and the LTTE, and the Indian intervention very much alive.  Moreover, personal accounts bring out the difficult struggles and negotiations of the participants.  We see Dayapala’s determination to build a multi-ethnic mass revolutionary movement, his personal struggles between family and politics, and his political conflict with and eventual turn to Nirmala’s human rights politics.  We also see Nirmala’s grappling with LTTE politics, her pain at being in exile, and guilt over involving Rajani in the Tamil militancy.  Rajani’s letters often show frustration and despondency over the situation in Jaffna.  History is not a simple linear narrative but is actively shaped by the hard decisions and struggles, victories and defeats of real people.  As a means of political organization, the film de-naturalizes the notion of “timeless ethnic conflict” and shows the central place of political action in changing the course of events.  There are no ready-made formulas for peace nor any objective or neutral position from which to view the conflict dispassionately – only the hard-fought gains and painful losses of everyday struggle.  For those who are committed to solidarity work or social change in Sri Lanka or elsewhere, the film demonstrates the importance of always trying to understand the problems from the view of the people, not simply from the view of the parties or international NGOs or think tanks.  In the example of Rajani, only a committed engagement to the difficult, changing realities on the ground with the firm goal of creating a democratic, plural, and equitable society can bring about any kind of significant social change. 

The film, however, could have done better in forging links between first-world and third-world politics.  It could have used the fascinating trans-national histories of all of the actors more effectively to show the mutual influences of third-world and first-world politics.  Both Nirmala and Rajani spent significant time abroad and were politically involved there.  How exactly did Nirmala’s experiences in the U.S. anti-war movement/civil-rights movement influence her politics in Sri Lanka and how did her experiences in Sri Lanka influence her politics in the U.S.?  Was she politically involved while in India? What other domestic politics was Rajani involved with while in London and how did these affect her politics in Sri Lanka (and vice-versa)? Did Dayapala do solidarity work with other groups abroad? The film unfortunately seems to focus solely on what is happening in Sri Lanka, making it seem that the family members are inactive or even just passive observers of events abroad.  Real politics seems to happen only in Sri Lanka.  This has the danger of making the film be about “the difficult, sad, and tragic history of faraway Sri Lanka” rather than about common questions of human rights, revolutionary change, discrimination, democracy and so on.  While it is necessary to look at the specifics of Rajani’s life and the concrete situation in Sri Lanka, it should not do so at the expense of exploring the rich links between Sri Lanka and other countries, and the common questions that people face.  Perhaps Klodawski was too engrossed with her stated goal of finding a specific “feminist critique of both state and guerrilla violence” (NFB press release) to dwell on the above questions in more detail.  Yet this concern tends to imprison Rajani within the confines of “third-world feminist in an ethnic conflict,” when in fact the film shows that she was indeed much, much more.  Even worse, the film might make it easy for audiences abroad to simply dismiss it as a “third-world film” or to just be sympathetic.  Or in Sri Lanka and in diasporic communities abroad, it could make people more and more engrossed in domestic politics rather than seek inspiration from or interact with movements abroad (a common phenomenon among many Sri Lankan activists).  While film should not merely be an instrumental means for political organization, they should at least try to forge better links with international audiences abroad and maybe inspire them to action.  Film has the capability of linking together audiences from different backgrounds and cultures, and it is unfortunate that this capacity was not better used.  Rajani’s life was not confined to Jaffna and the Sri Lankan conflict is not a unique phenomenon but has commonalities with many political situations.  This point should especially be brought out now that the Sri Lankan conflict has been thoroughly internationalized. 

But despite this danger of particularizing Rajani’s life and exoticizing the politics of Sri Lanka, the film is an excellent testament to the importance of committed political engagement with the grinding realities of the people, rather than with empty slogans, shiny utopias, and academic theories.  The civil war in the north and east of Sri Lanka is the story of betrayal after betrayal of the Tamil people, to the point where the average Tamil person no longer trusts politics and is fearfully resigned to continued exploitation and disempowerment.  Unfortunately, the so-called “peace process,” involving many international governments and NGOs, as well as billions of dollars in promised money, continues this tradition of ignoring the people and being complacent on political killings, child recruitment, the stripping of democratic rights, and the harassment of minorities in the north and east.  I have personally heard Yasushi Akashi, Japan’s special envoy to Sri Lanka for Reconstruction and Rehabilitation, tell a large group of Japanese college students about his “realistic” approach to resolving the Sri Lankan civil war, which also explicitly meant not pushing the LTTE too much on human rights.  I have also heard a leading “conflict resolution expert” say how he “thinks very highly of the work of UTHR, although finds their approach unproductive.” Yet despite this so-called “realistic and productive” dismissal of the people by the peace experts, there are still many like Rajani who continue to speak out against violence and injustice and for a plural, democratic society in Sri Lanka (often anonymously and at great risk to their lives).  This film is part of a growing chorus of voices inside and outside Sri Lanka who are refusing to be silent and are finding innovative ways of making their voices heard.  This could only bode well for the Tamils of the north and east, who have been brutalized by those in power for too long. 

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