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Caught In The Middle?
-- S. Nanthikesan
In school, I was often reprimanded for making the same mistakes over and over again. Exasperated, my teacher exclaimed, “Why don’t you try making new mistakes for a change”. I think the warring parties and their cheer-leading squads could use this advice. It is déjà vu – all over again. We need to open the news dailies to be sent back decades. We now back to a murderous majoritarian state that sees the ethnic issue as a LTTE/terrorist problem and therefore, be addressed militarily. On the other side, we have an equally murderous LTTE, which has never shown the ability to understand that the military struggle is one of the dimensions of a much larger liberation struggle. Both sides think so much alike that they’d make perfectly cute couple..like, may be Bush and Idi Amin.. Caught in the crossfire are the people in the war zones – Tamils, Muslims, and the Sinhalese whose endurance is tested to its human limits and beyond by this myopic war. Arguably, LTTE wrote the script for this war when they pulled the rug under Ranil in the last presidential elections - they knew that will get their man in the Office and give them the war they badly needed. Upon being elected, Mr. Duttagemunu, (21st century- version), promptly obliged the LTTE and also their counterparts, the ‘halo monitors’ (aka JHU/JVP). From day one, he busied himself appointing hardliners in all key defense positions (see Qadri’s article). All in all, the LTTE has him exactly where they wanted– as the main provider of recruitment opportunities. (For conspiracy theory addicts: Is Mahinda on LTTE’s payroll?) We see number of heated debates about who is responsible for the current downturn of events. This question detracts from critical issues – issues such as the nature of the relationship between those who suffer the consequences of war (e.g. Muslims in Muttur) and the main parties to war (LTTE and GOSL); issues which go beyond the rhetoric and takes a closer look at the individual and collective suffering of all those affected; and necessary actions to mitigate this suffering, etc. In addition, they also deflect focus from our own responsibility in trying to stop this madness. For a longtime we have been too busy pointing fingers at self-seeking politicians in the South, and/or at LTTE leadership. We continue to believe that peace is strictly the business of the ‘top’; We continue to neglect to account and to address the chauvinistic base for this war, that is being provided by many of us from Sinhala and Tamil communities and over look our own impotence in mobilizing mass civil society protests against this madness. The mass based momentum for peace in the mid-nineties that bought Chandrika to power or the more instrumentalist business community-led initiative to ceasefire in the 2000s cannot be wished back. We continue to stand in the sidelines thinking that the overdetermining moment will magically appear galvanizing all anti war elements – the silent majority yearning for cessation of war and the plethora of civil society organizations calling out for peace. We are used to leaving this task to the much marginalized Left and progressive-liberal groups whose influence and number continues to dwindle without mass support. The current war has displaced countless civilians, dismembered families and communities and killed many. If the government and the LTTE can have their way, the carnage will continue. This war has been brewing for a while as evidenced from the escalating outbursts of hostilities. It has pushed those outside the affected areas back to the times when there was widespread preoccupation with the belief that every Tamil is an LTTE member; every Muslim is a traitor and every Sinhalese is a chauvinist. In pointing this out I am not referring to the stereotyping element - which of course, persists. I am referring to another specific dimension in which the links to reality gets suspended, where the irrational becomes the rational, where the preposterous becomes the normal. This climate is one that allows JVP to publicly proclaim sometime ago with impunity that Kethesh Loganathan who, by all accounts, was murdered by LTTE after he joined the government’s ‘peace secretariat’, is an LTTE agent; one that allows expat Tamil community to believe that every proclamation of LTTE to be true and all its actions/atrocities are inevitable last resort efforts in defense of Tamils; one that allows dons in senior common rooms to get away with branding any Tamil don who criticizes Sinhala chauvinism as an LTTE member; one that allows defenseless civilians getting butchered be subsumed under a military calculus; one that allows us to rationalize the current killings as necessary byproducts to bring about lasting peace. Turning reality and rationality upside down hinders more than anything else the democratic space for communities to discuss and debate; this inversion of rationality strengthens the barriers that make us talk past each other. War may stop but the conditions that created the war will remain – not a sustainable basis for peace. In short, changing this climate is the prerequisite for lasting peace. I do not mean to say that we all have the power to change this climate or the structural forces that buttress this climate. Obviously, those in the North and East have little power to act, but those living outside the affected areas, either in Sri Lanka or outside; the Sinhalese can collectively shape their government, while there are much more constraints for Tamils in changing LTTE. This asymmetry of power comes with added responsibility. not mean that both parties are equally guilty or equally harmful. This undeclared war is a reminder to us that there are many shortcuts to war but none to peace; A decree from the top can put a stop to this war, but cannot bring sustainable peace; To stop this mindless war, we need to build the pressure from many fronts - in the North and the East, in the South, and outside the country. Hopefully, some of these efforts will be also geared towards strengthening the efforts to change the mindsets at the grassroots - a change to facilitate a just solution to the ethnic and class problems facing us all. That means going to the fundamentals – specifically to restore the public space for democratic discussions in the public spheres: at the macro (district, national) and micro (community, neighborhood) level.
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