Shame: A disturbing inability to treat Tamils as fellow human beings

by Tisaranee Gunasekara

"You who live safe,
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man…" - Primo Levi (If this is a Man)

The next cycle of the ‘Tamil problem’ has commenced unseen and unheeded, in the rain clogged internment camps up North.

The timing of the monsoon season was no secret, and yet hardly a thought was given by the authorities to its all too predictable consequences. The monsoons have barely begun and already most of the camps are deluged by rain water, placing every basic facility, from cooking to sanitation, beyond the reach of their wretched inmates.

The seasonal rains will cause floods in many parts of Sri Lanka; but unlike other affected citizens, the more than 250,000 Tamils in the Northern ‘welfare villages’ cannot leave their inundated places of residence for shelter and dry ground. Imprisoned by barbed wire fences and gun toting soldiers, the IDPs have no choice but to bear this latest horror just as they have borne every other calamity, with sullen, festering silence.

If the rains flooded the camps holding two hundred and fifty thousand Sinhala Buddhists imprisoned, depriving them of every basic facility, the South would not have ignored their suffering and the Southern media would not have permitted the government to deny their plight. Our collective silence in the face of the unfolding tragedy in the North indicates a disturbing inability to treat Tamils as fellow human beings, let alone citizens with equal rights.

Our collective failure to condemn this massive injustice that is being perpetrated in our name demonstrates that the mindset which enabled the Black July, not so much the evil of an active minority as the indifference of a silent majority, is alive and well in the South. We know and yet we chose to ignore. To paraphrase Bruno Bettelheim, ‘when hundreds of thousands are incarcerated, none but a guileless child remains innocent. We are all tainted by it. The rest of us are not innocent, but intent on keeping ourselves ignorant’.

The regime knows that the monsoons have turned the camps into a watery hell, and yet, it does nothing. Rhetorical flourishes apart, the Rajapakse administration never concerned itself with the safety and wellbeing of civilian Tamils in the North and the East during the war. When an occasional concession was made (such as ceasing/limiting the use of bombing and shelling during the last phase of the war), it was in response to Indian or international pressure. With the conclusive defeat of the LTTE, India and the world have lost whatever capacity they previously had to nudge the Rajapakses away from more extreme measures.

Armed with a near total sense of impunity, the regime is treating Tamils with a degree of injustice that was inconceivable just one year ago. After all, the thought of the entire population of Killinochchi and Mulaitivu districts being imprisoned in barbed wire enclosures, after the war, was unthinkable - until it became a fait accompli. Today it is an integral part of reality which many ignore, some justify and only a few oppose. The unthinkable has become normal with a degree of rapidity and a measure of completeness which bodes ill for the future. (The pledge to resettle the incarcerated IDPs in 180 days will meet the same fate as the promise to implement the 13th amendment in full as soon as possible and to explore ways of devolving even more power, made by President Rajapakse to the then Indian Foreign Minister, on January 27th this year - according to a statement tabled in Sri Lankan parliament by Deputy Foreign Minister, Hussein Bhaila).

Normalising Discrimination

The Northern internment camps are a leitmotiv of the Rajapakse approach to peace, just as child soldiers and suicide bombers were a leitmotiv of the Tiger approach to ‘national liberation’. The fact that almost the entire population of Killinochchi and Mullaitivu districts is being forcibly kept in open prisons is not a mere detail to be overlooked or brushed aside. It is an essential element, a formative factor of post-war Sri Lanka. The Northern camps would have been not just impossible but also inconceivable, without the retrogressive paradigmatic shift towards a Sinhala supremacist ethos. If any Tamil can be a Tiger, it makes sense to incarcerate every resident of those Northern districts once under LTTE control, in order to capture a few thousand Tigers.

If most Tamils are prone to Tiger sympathies, trying to win them over makes no sense; it is better to treat them with suspicion and cow them into obedience. An administration which sees a Tiger in almost any Tamil is likely to eschew a political solution to the ethnic problem (or even development) in favour of more soldiers and more weapons, as the best path to peace and stability. The statement by the Chief of Defence Staff, General Sarath Fonseka that the number of security forces personnel deployed in the Jaffna peninsula has been more than doubled from 15.000 to 35,000, post-war, makes sense in this politico-psychological context, as does the declaration by the Defence Secretary that military expenditure for 2010 will remain at 2009 levels (US$1.6 billion). The peace envisioned by the regime is not a peace based on consent but on force.

The country had a glimpse of what abusive authorities do to free Sinhalese in the South (not to mention baby elephants), when they think they can get away with it. If in the South power wielders feel free to abduct and kill until the media and the public intervene, what could not happen in the isolated Northern camps, to unfree Tamils, devoid of any rights, penned like animals, with no media to record their wrongs? The abductors of Nipuna Ramanayake and the killers of the two young men in Angulana are being brought to justice, because of incessant media criticisms and an outbreak of public protest.

But Southern media and Southern society are largely silent about the plight of the Northern displaced, because, where the Tamils are concerned, we seem to be thinking and acting sans a sense of proportion or a measure of humanity. Otherwise how can we not feel a sense of shame about the Northern internment camps or experience a measure of sympathy for the suffering of their inmates? Is our complaisance of rampant injustice and discrimination not a sign that we consent to a peace building premised not on acceptance and tolerance but on fear and force?

The local or international media does not have free access to the internment camps; consequently there are hardly any visuals or eye witness accounts of the human tragedy that is unfolding daily and hourly there, accounts which could have stirred our dormant collective conscience. Without such pictorial or verbal evidence, it is easy for most ordinary, decent Sinhalese to remain unmoved by the abomination that is being perpetrated in their name.

The Tamils outside the camps are too cowed to protest about the plight of their brethren since any such protest is likely to be labelled ‘terrorist’ and treated accordingly - imagine how an ‘Angulana type’ popular protest in Wellawatte would be reacted to by this administration. Given the Sinhala supremacist ethos currently dominant in state and society, being branded a Tiger is a permanent sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of every Tamil.

Two arguments are being used to justify the Northern internment camps. The ‘humanitarian’ argument is that the inmates cannot return to their villages until the de-mining process is complete. This argument does not hold water, as these people have been living in their villages, amidst the land mines, for a long time. Most of them would know where the land mines are and how to avoid them. In any case, the solution is to give the displaced a choice – so that those who want to return can do so, while those who are willing to wait for the de-mining to be complete can stay in the camps (plus permit those who can, to go to friends and relatives outside the camps).

Had such a choice been given, the camps would have truly become the welfare villages the state claims them to be, rather than the open prisons they actually are. The second, ‘national security’ argument is that the displaced have to be kept in camps until the Tigers hiding amidst them can be weeded out. To justify the incarceration of the innocent to catch the guilty, without even the lame excuse of an ongoing war, is an abhorrent act which has no place in a democracy or amongst civilised people, especially in the 21st Century. It violates the very essence of proportionality; it is as extreme as any Tiger crime. Injustices such as these breed resentment and hatred and pave the way for even bloodier conflicts.

As citizens of the de facto Tiger state, Tamils of Killinochchi and Mulaitivu had literally lived in the belly of the beast. They knew the brutal and oppressive reality of Eelam as the Diaspora or even the Colombo Tamils never could. With a little humanity, a little decency, they could have been turned into the most staunch bulwark against the rejuvenation of the LTTE or of Tamil separatism. Instead, we are treating them as enemy aliens, miring them in wretchedness and despair, thereby making them forget the past brutalities of the LTTE. What is being undermined in the Northern internment camps is not Tamil separatism but the idea and the hope of a common Sri Lankan future.

The Southern Dimension

Workers in several key areas, especially the CEB and the Colombo Port, are threatening trade union actions to win their demands, including promised pay hikes. The government has responded with an unequivocal no, saying that wage hikes for the public sector are impossible in 2010, given the high costs of war and the global economic crisis. Will the Sinhalese understand that there cannot be an economic peace dividend for the South without a political peace dividend for the North? If the North is to be treated as occupied territory, if hundreds of thousands of the Northern Tamils are to be kept imprisoned, resources that could have been spent on alleviating the economic burden of Southern masses will have to be spent on subduing the Northern masses. Without demilitarisation and democratisation in the North, there cannot be higher wages or lower prices, better working or living conditions in the South

The regime will need to stoke Sinhala fears about Tiger revival and Tamil expansionism in order to justify not only the treatment of Tamils as ‘Untermenschen’ but also to explain away the expansion of the armed forces and gargantuan military spending, in peace time. Consequently the threat posed by Tiger remnants here and abroad will have to be magnified; and political demands by Tamils for more devolution will have to be depicted as manifestations of separatism, and treated with corresponding harshness. The hair raising discovery by the Colombo Crimes Division (CCD) of an explosive laden van, about to be sent to Colombo on a suicide mission, was dismissed as ‘suspicious and questionable’ less than 24 hours later by the DIG of the Northern Province (and former STF Commandant) Nimal Lewke (incidentally the CCD arrested the van but released its driver!).

Last week, the newly appointed police spokesman was busy, revealing details about a plot to assassinate the Defense Secretary, declaring the reactivation of units, divisions and bureaus established to counter terrorism and related intelligence’ deactivated after the crushing of the LTTE… Are the Tigers, like Lazarus, coming to life miraculously, just three months after they were pronounced conclusively dead? Or is Sri Lanka about to experience her own version of ‘discovery of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs)’ (augmented by a new ‘Naxalite Plot’), in time for the parliamentary polls. Parliamentary polls from which the ruling family is expecting a two thirds majority, so that a Rajapakse Constitution can usher in a Rajapakse era. [Courtesy: The Island]