Paradise
Lost: The Endless
War In Sri Lanka
By Joseph Grosso
30 June, 2007
Countercurrents.org
Ask most decently informed Westerners
the following questions: What country has for most of the past two plus
decades been racked with ethnic and religious violence supported enthusiastically
by fanatical clerics, has a constitution that states the duty of the
state is to foster a religion, been manipulated by a large regional
power, and was the true incubator for horrifyingly calculated suicide
bombers? It’s a solid bet that the typical response would be a
country in the Middle East or at least one with a Muslim majority (one
shutters when contemplating how many responders would answer “Palestine”);
however the correct answer is the South Asian country Sri Lanka, the
combatants ethnic Tamil separatists against a majority Sinhalese government,
and the fanatical clerics in this case, Buddhist monks.
If the reality of war-crazed
Buddhist monks shatters the conceptions of good hearted liberals, the
largely overlooked Sri Lankan conflict features many other of the worst
hallmarks of modern warfare including the use of morally destroyed child
soldiers, a terrorized urban population, death squads, and a large internal
refugee crisis. Like most of Africa’s post-colonial civil wars,
the civil war in Sri Lanka takes place within an ecologically brilliant
ecosystem and an otherwise beautiful cultural environment.
Legend has it that it was
Buddha himself who on his deathbed pointed across the Bay of Bengal
and proclaimed “In Lanka, O Lord of Gods, shall my religion be
established and flourish.” Whatever the validity of this glorious
image it is true that Sri Lanka is one of the world’s centers
of Buddhism; indeed tourists can treat themselves to countless giant
statues of Buddha and other public displays of devotion, the result
of generous government patronage and Buddhism’s “foremost
place” in the country’s constitution. Even the 1972 name
change of the country from Ceylon to Sri Lanka was full of Buddhist
overtones; it was also however an ominous foreshadowing of what was
to come as well as an eerie precedent for the rise of Shiv Sena and
Hindu fundamentalism in next door India.
Like in India it was the
British who were the final colonial power to conquer Sri Lanka with
their vanquishing of the Dutch (prior to the Dutch came the Portuguese).
By 1815 the island was unified under British control. After some initial
good will based on the fifth clause of the 1815 Kandyan Convention (the
convention that formalized Britain’s colonial rule) which promised
maintenance and protection for Buddhism and its places of worship, it
wasn’t long before conflict arose with the Sinhalese (and Buddhist)
majority over the restoration of the country’s monarchy. When
the British refused to allow the installation of a new king events quickly
led to what is called in Sri Lanka the Great Rebellion in 1818.
Despite nearly being defeated
by efficient guerilla warfare and disease, the British were able to
survive the rebellion on the strength of a vicious scorched-earth policy
that included “the starvation of a substantial percentage of the
peasantry” according to William McGowan’s excellent book
Only Man is Evil: the Tragedy of Sri Lanka.
After crushing the revolt
British policy towards Buddhism shifted to one of confrontation, both
religious and economic (Buddhism came to be seen as an obstacle to the
dynamics of a market economy). Under the reforms proposals of Lord Colebrooke,
the British Colonial Office set about abolishing Ceylon’s feudal
caste system and granted missionaries a monopoly on education, thereby
requiring a conversion to Christianity and necessitating the learning
of English. In standard colonial practice these reforms favored minority
groups, in this case the Christianized elite created by the British
system and the Tamils (most of whom are Hindus).
Predictably this contributed
to fanning a militant Buddhist resurgence, a vehicle for Sinhalese nationalism,
that was aimed not only at the British but also eventually at the wealthier
minorities. That nationalism was symbolized, in part, by fraudulent
mythology about Sinhalese golden ages, Buddhist purity, and Aryan race
“theory”.
When the British gave independence
to Ceylon in 1948 it is probably fair to note that they left a well
organized civil administration, wide-ranging infrastructure, a secular
elite, and limited democratic structures. This may compare favorably
to the awful reality of Belgian Congo but like many other post-colonial
tragedies it was the legacy of division that would prove most sustaining;
whatever the positives these were offset by the ultra-nationalist Sinhalese
sentiment lurking below optimistic shadows.
National elections in 1956
saw the rise of Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike on a Sinhalese
nationalist program (particularly emphasizing the Sinhala language as
a replacement for English in government, the courts, and police) and
the sweeping away of the British inspired elite. When minority Tamils
began to protest nonviolently making the newly elected Prime Minister
hedge on his campaign sentiment, and flirt with granting limited Tamil
autonomy in the northern and eastern parts of the country, Buddhist
monks led Sinhalese crowds in protest. On September 29th, 1959 Bandaranaike
was assassinated on suspected orders of a shady monk in his government.
He was succeeded by his wife, the world’s first ever female prime
minister.
From there the government
began years of reforms designed to advance the interests of the Sinhalese
and, by extension, Buddhism. These ranged from educational reforms that
made major curriculum changes, separated students by language, and gave
Sinhalese admission advantages to universities, to economic preference;
the latter took place under a bogus socialist program that served to
ensure nationalized industries were dominated by Sinhalese.
By the mid1970s the protests
of alienated Tamils, met at times by harsh responses, became increasingly
more aggressive. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) emerged
as the most powerful (and brutal), though by no means exclusive, opposition
group. Led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE proclaims it is fighting
for an independent Tamil state to be named Eelam. After years of violence
outbursts and worse reprisals, matters came to a head in 1983, nearly
four decades after independence, when rioting Sinhalese mobs rampaged
Tamil areas in an old European style pogrom with complicity from local
security forces; estimates of the numbers killed run as high as 10,000.
What followed was prolonged war, massacre, and atrocity.
Suicide Bombings and Child Soldiers
Whatever instinctive sympathy
that the Tamil cause may draw, the same cause is severely tainted by
the antics of the LTTE. From its recruitment of child soldiers and use
of suicide bombings, the LTTE has earned its just characterization as
one of the world’s worst terrorist groups. The victim list from
suicide bombings is enough to make the Islamist equivalent swell with
envy; it includes Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister who oversaw
an Indian intervention in 1987 that initially forced the Sri Lankan
government to accept constitutional amendments that promised some autonomy
for the Tamils and made Tamil an official language (there is evidence
that Indian intelligence supported the LTTE before the intervention),
a Deputy Defense Minister and 18 others in March 1991, and Sri Lankan
president Ranasighe Premadasa in May 1993. Premadasa, and 23 other people,
were killed by a suicide bomber at a rally in Colombo after being stalked
by the same bomber for two years. There was also the April 1987 bombing
in Colombo that killed as many as 150 people (resulting in lynch mobs
being unleashed against Tamils), and a truck bombing against an army
base that killed 70 soldiers that same year.
Responsible for these and
other horrendous suicide bombings are an “elite” corps of
highly trained, disciplined killers known as the Black Tigers. Chosen
by Prabhakaren, himself an object of cultish worship within the LTTE,
for their discipline and loyalty, the Black Tigers are given six months
of further training before being sent on their suicide mission, before
which they have the honor to dine with the Great Leader. Theirs is indeed
a death foretold: just in case a Tiger is captured alive each member
sports a cyanide capsule around their neck to ensure the grim destiny
is fulfilled.
Indian journalist Anita
Pratap’s book Island of Blood gives a harrowing description of
the level of indoctrinated fanaticism of the bombers in waiting:
They are everything the ordinary Tigers are, but to a much higher
degree. They are more reticent, more disciplined, more motivated, and
utterly emotionless. I tried to get at least a flicker of emotion out
of them- nostalgia, homesickness, regret…But I got nothing. No
reaction at all…How could they not be afraid of death, especially
violent death? But all the Black Tigers I interviewed said more or less
the same thing: ‘I feel honored that my death will take our struggle
one step closer to Eelem.’
Like in many conflicts, the thousands of children forced to commit such
atrocities are often “recruited” from their families through
intimidation, violence, or outright kidnapping (an assessment published
in Jane’s Intelligence Review in 1998 found that 40-60% of LTTE
soldiers killed in the 1990s were children under the age of eighteen).
A 2004 Human Rights Watch report describes the ghastly process:
Tamil children are vulnerable to recruitment beginning at
the age of eleven or twelve. The LTTE routinely visits Tamil
homes to inform parents they must provide a child for the
“movement”. Families that resist are harassed and threatened…
The LTTE makes good on these threats: children are frequently
abducted from their homes are night, or picked up by LTTE cadres while
walking to school or attending a temple festival. Parents who resist
the abduction of their children face violent LTTE retribution.
After being recruited children are permitted no contact with their families
and face humiliating beatings for mistakes or escape attempts; Smoking,
drinking, and sex are forbidden. Subjected to brutal training that includes
the handling of bombs and other weapons, as well as hardcore totalitarian
indoctrination, many of these terrorized children are soon happy to
commit the unspeakable.
Pratap describes visiting
a Tiger hospital after a battle:
In one ward there were sixty young women, recuperating,
from serious wounds. Most had their arms or legs ripped
off, some did not have part of their face, some had craters
where there should have been stomachs. But what was even
more bizarre was the atmosphere in the ward- it was cheerful.
Sixteen-year-old Sumathi, who lost her right leg in battle, said
‘All I want is to get an artificial leg so I can go back in the
field.
If I stay home, how will we get Eelam?’
Never-Ending Conflict
From the beginning the Sri
Lankan civil war is a perfect demonstration of entropy. It has seen
years of violence, a disastrous intervention by India in 1987 (whose
intelligence agency had supported the LTTE) that eventually resulted
in something of a bizarre alliance between the LTTE and the government
against the Indian army forcing a chaotic withdrawal which allowed the
LTTE to capture armaments for the war.
The years following India’s
retreat were an orgy of suicide bombings against Sri Lanka’s political
elite and numerous reversals of fortunes for both sides- the military
forcing the LTTE back to guerilla tactics and retaking the northern
city of Jaffna, the LTTE regaining control of the strategically significant
Elephant Pass in a battle where as many as 1000 government soldiers
were killed and in 2001 capturing the country’s only international
airport and destroying half the air-fleet- until a full ceasefire (CFA)
was signed in February 2002.
The CFA did provide a few
years of stability allowing economic conditions to improve, though coastal
areas were devastated by the 2004 tsunami. However peace talks on a
final settlement stumbled over the extent of LTTE consolidation in areas
largely under their control and the issue of “high-security zones”
(from where the government’s counter-insurgency operation cleared
the population from their homes for “security” reasons);
of course there still remains the ultimate question of Tamil autonomy
and Eelam. Fighting erupted again in 2006, twenty-three years after
the 1983 pogrom, killing thousands and displacing over 100,000 people
with no end in sight.
While news from the current
phase features many of the same themes such as suicide bombings, including
a truck bombing last October that killed 94 people, Buddhist monks brawling
with antiwar demonstrators and publicly torching the Norwegian flag
in protest of Norway’s peace efforts (Buddhist monks currently
have their own political party called the National Heritage Party that
holds nine seats in the 225-member parliament), it also contains some
new twists: The LTTE has shown air capability by using light aircraft
to bomb a government air force base- also terrifying waiting passengers
at a nearby airport, and the government forces now have as an ally a
breakaway faction of the LTTE under the command of a man known as Colonel
Karuna, formerly one of the LTTE’s best and most brutal commanders.
He now engages in child recruitment, assassination, and extortion for
the state.
By now it may well be that
the Sri Lankan war has reached the stage that Bernard-Henry Levy has
described of wars “which have seemingly let go of the cord that
tied them to the universal”, i.e. the war has little actual meaning
or principle left. Whatever the case the international community has
an obligation to the children and civilians still caught in the war’s
deadly grip. Actions that could be taken, as suggested in a recent International
Crisis Group report, include targeted sanctions against the LTTE and
other factions involved in the use of child soldiers and pressure from
the UN Security Council to reestablish the cease-fire agreed upon five
years ago (which actually hasn’t been officially renounced by
either side). Multilateral support should also be provided to Norway’s
efforts to broker a lasting peace. After decades of ethnic and religious
nationalism along with cutting edge violence, it is long past due for
Sri Lanka to overcome a legacy of colonialism and bigotry. However long
the short-term odds, on this the world cannot abdicate.
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