Genocide! What?
Genocide! Yes, Genocide, here in Sri Lanka among us, under our feet, above our heads and over our shoulders! From the first, since independence, Genocide!
The Northern Provide Provincial Council has tabled and passed a resolution stating that since independence the Sri Lanka state committed Genocide against the Sri Lanka Tamils. That’s it. It is done. No going back. Or, is there a going back at some point, and soon?
Drs. Coomaraswamy and Jayatilleka have eloquently explicated the terrible and dangerous aspects of this resolution. It is terrible and dangerous for the country as well as for the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. The Provincial Council has been irresponsible it would seem to have done this. But do it did. The Chief Minister, a judge who practiced administering justice has seen it fit to do this.
Genocide, did it continue to happen in Sri Lanka. Some commentators are quick on that, yes they say, despite erudite legal opinion to the contrary. Of course there will be legal opinion learned no less that will be contrary to the contrary and insist Genocide it was and is. But why go there? What can we discern for ourselves? Is it possible, will we lack objectivity, acumen, purpose, will? Maybe, but then, maybe not.
The resolution tabled at this point in history, when a government that is accommodative, up to a reasonable point, of the political aspirations of the North of Sri Lanka, seemed designed to scuttle the present conversation. It now seems that the 13th Amendment and plus, discussions about police powers, control over land are but mere dressing when the subject is unwilling to be dressed but wishes to be a different subject. Major surgery!
The Chief Minister of the Northern Provincial Council has distinguished himself by “preferring to go hungry without eating what has been given but asking for more”. A strange position to take by one with a legal background. But take it he has. Flip the page, Oliver Twist eat your heart out!
If Genocide was the program from the first since independence then there is no cohabitation. And all of this after a terrible war where at some previous time some of those who are considered to be victims of Genocide by the resolution waged war on their own kind and eliminated them.
The rest of the world, India, US, China and the EU are now forewarned. The Northern Province wants something different, so it says. The resolution has not gone to a democratic referendum. The people of the north in the past three decades have been more familiar with military dictate and fascist rule by their own kind. Their leaders would perhaps lead the people as they were led to the east coast of the Vanni. We hope not.
All of this is terribly sad in many way. The war that was won by the Sri Lanka sate was to stop the “parting of ways” and to get back to a notion of a single territory, Sri Lanka where we will struggle and make accommodations for the differences in history and culture and live together. Now when it seems that a new “dawn is breaking” here we are again, some people are breaking through with “cannot live together”.
If one looks at this as a bargaining strategy for the Tamil Leadership in the North and East, bargaining with the outside as well bargaining with the inside, what is on offer? Is this a “let my people go”? Go where? Where is this Promised Land? Surely not the North and parts of the east. A war was won! This is a fact. Maybe this fact is not a fact for some. Does that mean another war has to be fought? Do the people know this, agree with it? Will they flock to other parts of the country? Is this a plan to move the people again and out of the North and the East?
In order for the North and Vanni areas to develop there will have to be a large increase in population and population density. Development requires aggregations of populations into dynamic settings we call cities. The misbegotten notion that we can have a network of village republics idyllic and separate but all with high human development is simply that, misbegotten. They have “never been seen nor known to have existed”[1].
The increase in population of the north and Vanni does not have to happen overnight but over time. There has to be a change in population unless there are unprecedented transfers from various sources that enable the mass of the people in the North and Vanni to live, as would rich retirees, without earned income. Is that possible? Will their kith and kin, some who helped support the LTTE, make large transfers of financial resources to improve substantially the standards of living in the North and East without going through the normal processes of development, which involve processes of work, livelihoods, accumulation of capital, savings and investment?
So Genocide it is? The path is clear. For the North and Vanni to develop further population must come from the rest of the country, another country or both. What should it be, what must it be? After a war the nation of Sri Lanka decides. If it is unable to decide and other nations try to decide, they would also have to either fight a war or use their might to prevent a war. But nevertheless it will start a new war.
So all right thinking people should, must, demand that the Northern Provincial Council with supplicant apology withdraw the resolution on Genocide, on bended knees offering their necks to be cut!
But I guess we will not take what is proffered. Any mention of Genocide deserves a compassionate hearing. The least of it in consideration for all the lives lost, lives eviscerated, blasted, torn asunder over some deeds and misdeeds that cannot be remedied by going down the paths we did. Throughout this land there will be many places destined for remembrance, for reflection, for expression of grief. For the land will not yield the dead but the living should do well to remember why they died. Blood shed will not redeem any slights perceived or real. It was so then and it will be so later.
[1] Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Chapter XV. Bantam Books, New York.