Thursday, September 12, 2013
Sri Lanka's path to peace
By Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor
The Australian
September 13, 2013
GOTABAYA Rajapaksa and Selvarasa Pathmanathan used to be the deadliest of enemies. Now they have the same message.
I meet the two within a period of 24 hours in Colombo, Sri Lanka's largest city.
Pathmanathan, or KP as he's widely known, was for several months in 2009 the supreme leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, for many years the world's most ruthless and bloody terrorist group. For a long time before that he was effectively No 2 to the Tigers' leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. When Prabhakaran was killed in May 2009, Pathmanathan took over the LTTE leadership until he was arrested in September of that year.
You may not know much about the Tamil Tigers. They were the most supremely deadly and effective terrorist group to emerge at any time in the second half of the 20th century. They pioneered two terrorist innovations -- suicide bombings, later copied by al-Qa'ida, and child soldiers and child terrorists.
Digital Pass $1
One of their signature gestures was the cyanide capsule each cadre was given to facilitate suicide in the event of capture.
The long Tamil Tiger war against the Sri Lankan government ran from 1983 to 2009 and resulted in perhaps 70,000 dead. In the course of this bitter conflict some members of the Sri Lankan army certainly committed human rights abuses. But there is no overall moral equivalence between the government of Sri Lanka and the Tigers.
The Tigers were ultimately defeated by a military campaign designed and run by Rajapaksa, secretary of Sri Lanka's Ministry of Defence. A brilliant career soldier, he had migrated to the US after retiring from the army but came back to help his brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, become President. From 2005 to 2009, Gota, as he is popularly known, oversaw the military campaign that finally crushed the Tigers.
But in one of those remarkable quirks of history, Pathmanathan tells me it was Gota who ensured he was treated properly in captivity and rehabilitated him so that he can now play a role in the reconciliation process under way between the minority Tamil and majority Sinhalese communities.
The Sinhalese-Tamil division is the central fault line of Sri Lankan history. They follow different religions -- the Sinhalese are Buddhists, the Tamils are Hindus. They speak different languages. They are ethnically different.
The situation is complicated by the presence of 50 million Tamils next door in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Some Tamils would like a separate nation in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, although most Tamils live in Colombo and the south, and don't support separatism. The majority Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan state will never allow partition. So it's best if they work out a way to get along.
Meeting Pathmanathan is quite a business. It takes many days of arranging, lots of phone calls and lobbying of friends and acquaintances. A tall, straight-looking man, cool enough, he strolls into the lobby of a big Colombo hotel. The government provides him with a couple of bodyguards and I have been asked to arrange somewhere discreet for our interview. Lacking a better alternative, I take him up to a small coffee lounge on the hotel's 18th floor.
The lounge has two rooms and we choose the less densely populated one, but I notice that quite soon people have recognised him and we are left alone. The bodyguards wait outside. The hotel staff serve coffee and scurry away.
Pathmanathan's English is not bad, but over a long discussion I find it gets less good when I ask him about personal matters, or about some of the Tigers' more controversial tactics.
Where did the idea for suicide bombing, which the Tigers used to devastating effect, come from?
"It was Prabhakaran's own idea," he says. "We used it first in the 1980s. Actually, I remember early in the 80s some people sat with us and we talked of the Japanese in World War II and the kamikaze bombers. Somehow that came from Prabhakaran's mind. Also, in Tamil Nadu there was the tradition that people sometimes set themselves on fire (in protest)."
Pathmanathan was in charge of procuring military supplies for the Tigers and for years lived in India, then Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, with periods in Singapore and Europe.
"The state government of Tamil Nadu used to give us direct support for a period in the 80s," he says. Before Rajiv Gandhi came to power, the national Indian government also gave the Tigers some support, he says.
"When that stopped we raised money in Europe and North America. We raised some in Australia, but Europe and Canada were the main source of funds."
At one time Western intelligence believed the Tigers raised $200 million to $300m a year from the million-strong Tamil diaspora, and from a variety of illegal businesses. They used this money to buy heavy conventional weapons, artillery and heavy-duty guns, and even to buy ships. For many years the Tigers controlled a substantial swath of territory in the country's east and north; they had a small but formidable navy and even a small air force.
No other terrorist group has ever reached that degree of sophistication and Pathmanathan was its central organiser. For a time he was wanted not only by the Sri Lankan government but by the Indian authorities, who believed he played a role in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, as well as by Interpol, MI6 and the CIA.
"Prabhakaran made the decision to kill Rajiv Gandhi," Pathmanathan says. After India sent a peacekeeping force into Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers and the Indian army became enemies.
"Prabhakaran thought the Indians had tried to kill him, so he thought he'd kill Gandhi first."
Certainly the death of Gandhi, killed by a female suicide bomber, was a turning point, both in showing the world what the Tigers were really like and in turning India into an implacable enemy of the LTTE.
Pathmanathan now admits much that the Tigers did was wrong, but he also lists a series of injustices and provocations that he believes the Tamil community suffered, such as a language policy that favoured Sinhalese. But he recites this list reluctantly. He wants his fellow Tamils to stop thinking always about the past, because that kind of thinking only leads to more bloodshed.
When I ask him directly about Prabhakaran, he responds, but with some reluctance: "Prabhakaran was a very charismatic leader. When I met him he was a genuine, friendly character. He was always willing to die for the Tamil cause. From the first day when I met him, in 1974, to the last day when he died, in 2009, he never changed from his philosophy, his determination.
"But also he was never flexible, never willing to change to accommodate the changed world.
"He should have been more flexible. It was wrong for him to kill his own people. Prabhakaran became more like a dictator as the years went by."
There are two themes on which Pathmanathan and Defence Secretary Rajapaksa are strikingly in tune: the key role the Americans played in the final defeat of the Tigers, and the role they would both now like the Tamil diaspora to play for Sri Lanka.
Pathmanathan believes the transformed international environment after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led directly to the Tigers' defeat.
But let's have Rajapaksa take up that part of the story. Gota is a national hero in Sri Lanka and his office, next to the President's compound in central Colombo, is crisply military. He is sharp and precise and very businesslike.
One of the greatest problems the Sri Lankan military had, he tells me, was that the Tigers would bring in heavy-duty weaponry on big ships that would loiter outside Sri Lanka's waters while flotillas of small craft would go out and collect the weapons from them.
"Most of their weapons they bought on the open market," Rajapaksa says. "Many of their artillery pieces were North Korean in origin. They even had anti-aircraft missiles. "Their artillery and mortar was often enough to match the Sri Lankan army, or even more than the Sri Lankan army had. Their artillery caused a lot of our casualties."
One turning point in the war came when the Sri Lankan navy was able to sink these Tiger supply ships: "Between 2006 and 2008 we destroyed 12 of these floating armouries." What made this possible? "The Americans were very, very helpful. Most of the locations of these ships were given to us by the Americans," Rajapaksa says.
American satellite technology located the ships and enabled the Sri Lankans to hit them. Before that, the Americans had been somewhat ambivalent about the Sri Lankan struggle. They never remotely justified or approved of the Tigers, but nor would they supply weapons to the Sri Lankan forces. Yet throughout the conflict, Sri Lanka got most of its military hardware from Israel and Pakistan, two military allies of the US that would probably have been susceptible to American entreaties not to supply arms.
Pathmanathan believes the transformation of American and international thinking generally after 9/11 meant the Tigers' path of armed conflict was no longer a viable long-term strategy.
"We couldn't oppose the whole world," he says. "But Prabhakaran was opposed to peace negotiations. He used peace negotiations only as time out to rebuild his army." Pathmanathan says he constantly urged a negotiated settlement on Prabhakaran, but to no avail.
The other issue on which Rajapaksa and Pathmanathan present an odd unity ticket is the role they would like the Tamil diaspora to play in Sri Lanka. Pathmanathan wants the diaspora groups to drop all ideas of separatism, to stop trying to stir up trouble, and instead come back and spend time in Sri Lanka, and above all invest and build there.
Pathmanathan is now involved in running orphanages and vocational training centres.
Rajapaksa makes the same point. He thinks there is a danger of the Tamil diaspora promoting extremism within Sri Lanka: "The diaspora should understand that they live in countries distant from Sri Lanka. Mostly they live in developed countries and enjoy all the facilities of developed countries. But some of them want the poor people of Sri Lanka in this difficult environment to take up arms to further their (the diaspora's) ideology. They don't send their own children, who go to university in developed countries, who enter the professions. But they will talk of the fight for a Tamil homeland -- who is doing the fighting?
"The diaspora can raise money and make propaganda, but who will suffer from their efforts?"
Pathmanathan makes a similar case: the situation in Sri Lanka today, especially in the Tamil areas, is infinitely better than it was during the Tigers' war. Who would want to go back to the killing and the suffering? What his people want now, Pathmanathan says, are jobs and development.
Rajapaksa understands the challenge of reconciliation: "This is not an easy task, especially for the people of the north. More than 55 per cent of Tamils live outside the north and the east and have no issues of reconciliation.
"They mingle with other communities all the time.
"But people in the north were so long isolated from the rest of the community and brainwashed into separatist attitudes. Although we have built a lot of infrastructure in the north, reconciliation won't take place fully overnight.
"It will take time and the concentrated efforts of all the major parties involved.
"The majority community also has to extend its hand to show that we can live as one nation."
Later this month, provincial council elections will take place in the Tamil north. They may be a positive political development, or conceivably an occasion of difficult polarisation.
But if Rajapaksa and Pathmanathan can come together on the need for reconciliation and development, and given the booming economy all across Sri Lanka, there is surely a lot to be hopeful about.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
204 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 204 of 204“But while the past must always be remembered — and, at times, interrogated — does it need, as Cameron says, to be apologized for?
Is this THE SAME DAVID CAMERON … who threatens Sri Lanka with HELL, FIRE and BRIMSTONE for not repenting for faked alleged war crimes …. trying to DODGE THE BULLET fired at Britian’s own well documented MONUMENTAL CRIMES? Is this the same guy, or is he a totally new Englishman BORN-AGAIN with a BLANK MEMORY in the last few days?
As I said before, here is a HYPOCRITE INCARNATE ….. exercising the WHITE IMPERIALIST’S inalienable birthright to ADOPT DOUBLE STANDARDS with IMPUNITY against former “subject” peoples!
Bah! .. A POX on HIM & HIS ENTIRE HOUSE!
................
David Cameron in India: Should U.K. Apologize for Its Imperial Past?
At the Jallianwala Bagh memorial, David Cameron called the 1919 massacre “a deeply shameful event,” but didn’t extend a formal apology on behalf of his government
By Ishaan Tharoor
World.Time.com
February 20, 2013
On Wednesday, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron became the first serving British Premier to pay a visit to the Jallianwala Bagh memorial in the northern Indian city of Amritsar. The site marks the 1919 massacre of scores of unarmed Indian protesters by British colonial troops — imperial officials at the time put the body count at 379; subsequent Indian investigations claim more than 1,000 died. The incident is firmly embedded in India’s 20th century historical memory and inflames nationalist passions. It reached the rest of the world’s imagination when immortalized in a scene in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning 1982 film, Gandhi.
After laying a wreath at the memorial for those slain, Cameron commented in a handwritten note at the site, describing the slaughter 94 years ago as a “deeply shameful event.” But, as all the media have noticed in both India and the U.K., he didn’t extend a formal apology on behalf of his government. Aware of the full weight of scrutiny on his visit, Cameron offered this defense to reporters in Amritsar:
In my view we are dealing with something here that happened a good 40 years before I was even born, and which Winston Churchill described as ‘monstrous’ at the time and the British government rightly condemned at the time. So I don’t think the right thing is to reach back into history and to seek out things you can apologize for. I think the right thing is to acknowledge what happened, to recall what happened, to show respect and understanding for what happened.
Fair enough. Cameron was in India (he had earlier stops in Mumbai and New Delhi), after all, on a trade mission, focused on a rosy future of Indo-British cooperation. Why bother with the sulfur stench of the past?
Yet in India and other countries once ruled by the British, there are of course lingering resentments and historical grievances. For all the railroads and courthouses built, the British were always in India for pragmatic (read: rapacious) reasons. “India was bled white,” wrote Cambridge historian Piers Brendon, author of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire. The British Raj “rested on a mountain of skulls,” said the well-known India-based British writer William Dalrymple in a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph. “And people need to know that.”
....Continued 1...
As a moral buffer, Cameron cites the contemporary outrage of Churchill, then the British Secretary of State for War, upon hearing reports of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Churchill and a whole rank of latter-day defenders of the empire maintained an earnest belief in the otherwise “liberal” effects of British dominion. But the man lionized in the West as that bulldog of liberty and democracy brimmed with racist contempt toward Indians and their aspirations for freedom. He also perhaps criminally neglected their plight. In 1943, as many as 3 million people in Bengal died in a famine instigated by British imperial policy during World War II and deliberately ignored by Churchill.
But while the past must always be remembered — and, at times, interrogated — does it need, as Cameron says, to be apologized for? It’s difficult enough for countries these days to retrieve treasures plundered by the 19th century’s empires; symbolic state apologies are even rarer. Think of the decades of silence and shame that yawned between Australia’s apology to the aborigines or the U.S.’s apology to those harmed by the Chinese Exclusion Act and the cruelties for which they atoned. This past December, French President François Hollande stood before Algeria’s Parliament and spoke of the “brutal” and “unjust” effects of French colonial rule, but stopped short of an actual official apology. “I recognize the suffering the colonial system has inflicted,” uttered Hollande. That’s probably the most people from the decolonized world can expect from a European head of state.
The obvious argument here is that once the apologizing begins, when does it stop? If Cameron had tendered a formal apology to India for Jallianwala Bagh, shouldn’t his government have also considered the inept British blundering that led to the hideous communal slaughters of Partition in 1947? (The current crises in the Middle East could also be laid at the feet of British cartographers.) Shouldn’t London also then turn to the deeper past and the grotesque rapine and pillage the East India Company inflicted upon whole swathes of India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries? And shouldn’t postcolonial governments then adopt a similar pose and consider accounting for the mistreatment of marginalized minorities or the misdeeds of their revolutionary wars? As some of the lingering geopolitical disputes in Asia prove, history can become both the most tedious and thorny of battlegrounds.
But history is also rich with irony. Cameron was in India less as an imperial of old and more as a supplicant to a rising power, eager to boost trade. He faces stiff competition from the likes of Hollande — France recently beat the U.K. to win a lucrative fighter-jet contract with New Delhi. And then there was that moment of pleasing cultural contact: Cameron’s other stop in Amritsar was at the city’s famous Golden Temple, the holiest shrine for Sikhs. He knotted his head in a blue turban and spent an hour among its altars. The visit was a gesture not simply to Sikhs in India, but the large diaspora in the U.K. “What [Punjabi Sikhs] contribute to our country is outstanding,” said Cameron. The past may be a foreign country, as the saying goes, but the future should be about finding a better home there.
Well said Shenali!
NO Half-Hearted Solutions! NONE!
1. REPEAL the 13th Amendment
2. DISMANTLE the Provincial Council System
3. ELIMINATE Indian Involvement in Reconstruction & Rehabilitation efforts in the North & East
4. REDUCE Indian Involvement and Investment in Sri Lanka's economy
5. END Military cooperation with India; they can't and don't help SRi Lanka with any weapons ANYWAY!
6. SECURE Sri Lanka's coastline with coast guard and naval bases within EYESIGHT of each other to protect Sri Lanka's Maritime resources and PREVENT illegal immigration, gun running, and goods smuggling
7. LAUNCH a thorough investigation of the CITIZENSHIP STATUS of the residents of Sri Lanka to IDENTIFY & DEPORT upto 1.6 MILLION ILLEGAL aliens from TAmil Nadu as indicated by the 2012 Census.
8. ADOPT Ethnic Integration as National Policy with the goal of achieving a UNIFORM ETHNIC DISTRIBUTION nationwide, without REGIONAL ethno/religious concentrations.
9. INCREASE the number of Armed Forces camps and Personnel in former LTTE-infected territories, PERMANENTLY SETTLE military personnel AND their FAMILIES in the North and East as part of Ethnic Integration, providing land, good hmes, schools, hospitals and other INFRASTRUCTURE to INCENTIVIZE PERMANENT SETTLEMENT by Sinhala people in these areas. In the Final Analysis, Ethnic Integration of this kind is the only permanent hope for peace and security of the people of Sri Lanka.
The END of CHOGM, and the CLEAR DISPLAY OF ENMITY by India, Tamil Nadu, and Western Nations with large Sri Lankan Eelamist Tamil Populations, has given the GOSL the PERFECT OPPORTUNITY to IMMEDIATELY IMPLEMENT the above 9-POINT PROGRAM in the National Interest.
Carpe' Diem! Seize the Day!
As Shenali Waduge said elsewhere, let us NOT HAVE ANY Half-Hearted Solutions NOW! NONE but FULL-THROATED Complete Solutions!
1. REPEAL the 13th Amendment
2. DISMANTLE the Provincial Council System
3. ELIMINATE Indian Involvement in Reconstruction & Rehabilitation efforts in the North & East
4. REDUCE Indian Involvement and Investment in Sri Lanka's economy
5. END Military cooperation with India; they can't and don't help SRi Lanka with any weapons ANYWAY!
6. SECURE Sri Lanka's coastline with coast guard and naval bases within EYESIGHT of each other to protect Sri Lanka's Maritime resources and PREVENT illegal immigration, gun running, and goods smuggling
7. LAUNCH a thorough investigation of the CITIZENSHIP STATUS of the residents of Sri Lanka to IDENTIFY & DEPORT upto 1.6 MILLION ILLEGAL aliens from TAmil Nadu as indicated by the 2012 Census.
8. ADOPT Ethnic Integration as National Policy with the goal of achieving a UNIFORM ETHNIC DISTRIBUTION nationwide, without REGIONAL ethno/religious concentrations.
9. INCREASE the number of Armed Forces camps and Personnel in former LTTE-infected territories, PERMANENTLY SETTLE military personnel AND their FAMILIES in the North and East as part of Ethnic Integration, providing land, good hmes, schools, hospitals and other INFRASTRUCTURE to INCENTIVIZE PERMANENT SETTLEMENT by Sinhala people in these areas. In the Final Analysis, Ethnic Integration of this kind is the only permanent hope for peace and security of the people of Sri Lanka.
The END of CHOGM, and the CLEAR DISPLAY OF ENMITY by India, Tamil Nadu, and Western Nations with large Sri Lankan Eelamist Tamil Populations, has given the GOSL the PERFECT OPPORTUNITY to IMMEDIATELY IMPLEMENT the above 9-POINT PROGRAM in the National Interest.
Carpe' Diem! Seize the Day!
Post a Comment