From Beirut To Muttur: Reclaiming Our Future In The Shadow Of War

 

-- Vasuki Nesiah

 

How can we dance when our earth is turning
How do we sleep while our beds are burning

- From the lyrics of “Beds are Burning”, the 1988 hit by Australian band Midnight Oil[1]

 

Writing in Al-Ahram during the bombardment of Lebanon, Hamid Dabashi asks, ‘how can we sleep when Lebanon is burning’ - when the very earth on which we walk is set a fire by the war.  Years of difficult recovery from the civil war, the struggle and dialogue on religious pluralism, a fragile and fraught conversation about accountability for fratricidal violence – will all this be burnt to cinders?  He said prior to the war, in June 2006, “Beirut was thriving. Lebanon could have been a model of productive ideological conflicts, of civil discourse, progressive politics, foreign investments, domestic contestations, intellectual diversity, moral variations. Beirut was civil, civilizing, cosmopolitan”[2]  Will that Beirut has survive?  “They are pounding Beirut. Their ships, their fighter jets, their artilleries, their unparalleled barbarity, pounding Beirut like there is no tomorrow, burning it to ashes, murdering its fragile peace, shredding its imperceptible harmony to pieces, its gloriously cantankerous and divided thinkers, journalists, artists, writers, historians, poets, photographers, filmmakers…”  Against this scorched earth it is no wonder that for many Hizbullah’s missile launcher is the only possible representation of a redemptive political space.  In the shadow of war, the one other political intervention is by those recording war crimes, writing briefs for security council intervention, for more troops on the ground – calling for a halt to hostilities, a withdrawal of troops.   Our political engagement with Lebanon is dominated by counting the number of the dead, citing the Geneva conventions and estimating the humanitarian costs of the war.

 

This emaciated theater of politics also has its resonances in Sri Lanka.  Today our discussion too is dominated by the rhythms of the battlefield.  We discuss competing stories of military gain and loss, tally deaths and report war crimes.  With the war renewed, we have bracketed away questions of pluralism and justice; our interventions are dominated by accounts of the humanitarian costs of the GOSL and the LTTE’s attacks and counter-attacks.  Overwhelmed by the horrors of the present we find little space to critically reflect on the past or debate contested visions for our future.  News of whole communities starved, of places of refuge and worship attacked, of children bombed, others recruited to die - against this, our discussion of federalism and language policy sputter and die.  The work done over past decades by our anthropologists and historians to contest hegemonic accounts of nation and community are alienated from the terms of today’s ‘political’.  Our old debates abut the relationship between class and ethnicities have little traction against the numbing toll of death and destruction.  Against the bleak assault of sieges, forced displacements and bombings, our best case scenario is a war with rules.  Thus we call for a war that’s constrained by ethics and proportionality, limits civilian deaths and abides by international protocols.

 

Yet should we not ask more of ourselves if we are to reclaim our future- isn’t the sphere of the political much more than a regulative politics clarifying violations and condemning war crimes.  Does not fighting the horrors of war also demand that we expand our political imagination not just to call for peace, but to debate different visions for peace?  One of the great victims of this battle has been the erosion of democratic space, the space for deliberation and discussion in teashops and parliaments and the streets.  The space for popular participation has been overun by ‘leaders’ and representatives commanding moves on the battle field.  The space for dissent has been wiped out by talk of enemies and traitors.  The space to unpack our history and our own complicity in current trajectories is stymied by the imperative towards a defensive politics of self-legitimation.  The space to explore new solidarities and alternative communities has been displaced by partisan nationalisms.  Alongside the many dead wounded and displaced, this deeper democratic space needs to also be recognized as a casualty of war.

 

In that light, is not a sole focus on war crimes, an abdication of our responsibility to fight for a peace that depend, expands and revitalizes democratic space?  This is not to say that we should not focus on war crimes and civilian death tolls; but that alongside this we should also focus on other trajectories and spaces of the political.  It is difficult to not be merely reactive to a context where brutalities abound; but reaction itself may need to be multi-pronged and responsive to immediate realities, while also pushing to change that reality.

 

This difficult, fraught balancing is something that Kethesh Loganathan struggled with – at least the Kethesh that I came to know over the last few years.  In a salute to Kethesh and his acute sense of political responsibility to be relevant to the demands of the times, but in ways that are aimed towards a critical, transformative politics I want to cite two examples that were close to his heart.  Firstly, the question of Tamil militancy and the ethics of oppositional politics for armed groups.  Secondly, the question of the relationship between Tamils and Muslims.  Both these cases take us away from the immediacy of the battle lines on the ground today but, I would, argue, they do so in ways that reflect a commitment to be relevant and honest about the causes and consequences of today’s situation, and possibly, they point to a path out…

 

The ANC was hounded by accusations of torture and ill treatment within its camps.  Former cadre and others narrated horrific stories of what happened to those who were branded as ‘traitors’ to the cause, particularly those suspected of collaborating with the apartheid government or the Inkatha Zulu party.  In response to these accusations the ANC launched a series of internal inquiries into the treatment of its detainees and former prisoners.  The last and most interesting version of these was the 1993 Motsuenyane commission[3].  The commission made its findings public, acknowledged its record of human rights violations and opened at least some space for the ANC to reflect on its founding norms and guiding principles, the relationship between its stated aims and its everyday practice.  Kethesh was inspired by this experience and read the literature on these commissions with an eye to EPRLF’s own history of political violence, and the violations that the culture of violence had legitimated in the name of the ‘struggle’.  He even spoke to some of his former comrades to sound out the possibility of EPRLF launching such a process in relation to its own history of child recruitment, internal killings and the targeting of civilians.  Of course, many members of EPRLF and other militant groups have seen themselves as under attack by the LTTE and in that context have thought such a process would only render them more vulnerable; they have been concerned that it would expose their weaknesses, lay bare their internal differences and generally open up old wounds for their enemies to exploit.  Proposals such as these have been seen as naïvely disconnected with reality, with the need to defend one’s position, protect old turf and erect shields against new attacks.  Yet Kethesh himself was interested in the fact that the ANC launched such a process even when it was still in the thick of struggle.  He thought the EPRLF working through such a process could positively impact the Tamil community’s expectations of militant groups; a public process of coming to terms with past violations, acknowledging and condemning them could help combat the usual repertoire of excuses about violations being an inevitable part of armed struggle.  Rather than allowing the brutalities of the GOSL license brutalities by oppositional groups, this initiative could set the stage for a new direction in democratizing Tamil politics – in holding it accountable to the people it claimed to represent, underscoring the point that the ends of the struggle should be tied to the means.  Kethesh reflected a rare courage and honesty in this position not only in his willingness to examine his own past, including his long term EPRLF roots, but also in his willingness to do this even when he (and EPRLF) was under threat.  While many may see the everyday demands of war as calling for caution and the building of barriers, here there was also a willingness to ensure that the imperatives of one’s political actions were not circumscribed by the imperatives of war.  Rather than retreat into a focus, this was a call to expose a fraught history, and build towards a revitalized political space.

 

The second example I want to cite is not unrelated.  This is the question of the relationship between Tamil and Muslim communities.  This is again an area where Kethesh wanted to address and reverse Tamil nationalisms’ exclusionary impulses – its history of opportunistic invocation of ‘Tamil speaking’ people when it wanted to swell the numbers behind its claims, while excluding and evicting Muslims from their lands in the North.   In recent weeks, particularly following the events in Muttur, there have been soft calls in a variety of quarters for a Tamil Muslim alliance.  In this issue of lines we publish a call by the coalition against fratricidal violence that calls for unity at a civil society level.  Others, most recently UTHR, have called for unity at a political level.  I have heard proposals for a parliamentary alliance linking the Muslim parties and non-militant Tamil politicians (including the CWC).   These are challenging times, and the call for efforts to revitalize a parliamentary tradition may have few takers in a time when the majority are focused on rising body counts on the battle field.  Some have responded directly to such proposals by arguing that parliamentary politics is irrelevant to a situation where the system has failed so fundamentally; it is argued that we are naïve if not blind to the realities on the ground if we imagine parliamentary solutions have any credibility.  The political realm has become monopolized by crimes against humanity; where war has itself become not just a mode of politics, but the mode of politics.  However, I would argue that to surrender to the logic of war is also irresponsible.  We need to find the nooks and crannies in the system to push against it; and we don’t find it we need to create those spaces.  A merely reactive politics focused on war crimes and military deployments may provide a secure and ‘clean’ politics, but we must also take risks engaging with a system that’s deeply flawed, and seek to create openings for a deliberative politics regarding these wider set of proposals for expanding democratic political space.

 

Just as Lebanon dusts of the embers from the fires of these past months, it will also need to explore and widen democratic space; a politics that goes beyond missile launchers and somber records of crimes against humanity.  Hamid Dabashi is confident that it will – because, already he says, the politics of Hizbullah itself is not just about whether missile launchers can reach Haiffa or Tel Aviv; rather it is fundamentally shaped by the politics of the Dayhila, the “seething despair of its wounded pride of place”.  This is about a politics where “Injustice will demand and exact attention” even against the shadow of the war.  Dabashi is hopeful that Beirut has the roots of a politics that will go beyond the battle field, beyond ‘tribal’ affiliations and military mind sets – a politics with new visions for collective trajectory, new solidarities and differences.  Democratic politics is not the province of those removed from the horrors of war and military conflict. Indeed, Dabashi locates his Lebanese engagement in a “Beirut that was definitely beautiful, and decidedly joyous, albeit seething with pain, with abandoned hopes, hidden labour, illegal bodies suffering the indignity of an exposed and abused life -- all thriving along a bustling bourgeoisie, an intellectual cantankerousness that marked anything but a moral apathy.”  Grief and suffering may well prove to be the conditions for producing a visionary politics for a new tomorrow outside the battlefield.  Thus in Sri Lanka too should we not fight our deficit of hope and expand the terms of our political engagement in the present; should we not only respond to this war, expose its horrors, condemn its violators, but also look beyond its shadows to mobilize a deeper democratic space - to reclaim out future.