Moderate Tamils chart new course
By Ameen Izzadeen
COLOMBO - Now that Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader Velupillai
Prabhakaran is dead, the question is which way the Tamil cause will go. The man
who resorted to armed insurgency to achieve his goal of setting up a separate
state for Sri Lanka's 12% Tamils is history, but the factors that created him
are very much alive.
Prabhakaran did not spring up in a vacuum. He was a product of an oppressive
system which existed beneath the veneer of democracy. As days passed after
Independence in 1948, the Tamils' perception that they were being marginalized
drove them to desperate tactics.
Leaders like S J V Chelvanayakam resorted to Satyagraha, or non-violent
fasting, but the state apparatus unleashed force on them. One such fast was
over a demand that the government declare the precincts of the Thirukoneshwaram
temple, a Hindu
shrine, which, according to Tamil records, predated the arrival of Sri Lanka's
first "Aryan" king, Vijaya, from north India, as a sacred area.
The declaration never came. Instead, the fasting protesters were beaten up by
the military. The high-handed action of the police in disrupting the 1974
International Tamil Research Conference in Jaffna, the cultural capital of Sri
Lanka's Tamils, made the Tamil youths lose faith in democratic means to win
their rights. Nine Tamils were killed and the Tamils saw the police action as
humiliation in front of their guests from all over the Tamil-speaking world.
State-sponsored colonization projects - some overt and some covert - were soon
carried out in Tamil areas.
The Sinhalese were settled in Tamil-dominated areas in what Tamil rights
activists called demographic engineering aimed at weakening the Tamil's
political power. In 1956, Sinhala was made the official language of the
country, much to the dislike of the Tamils. More blows came in the form of
education reforms in the 1970s. The reforms slashed the intake of Tamil
students to universities, which were state-run. These moves by successive
governments alienated the Tamil community and drove them to demand federal
state; when this did not come, they called for a separate state. Fiery speeches
by Tamil leaders galvanized the youth into action. An ideology that was a
mixture of Marxism and Tamil nationalism fueled the Tamil militancy.
The Jaffna youth had a history of political activism. Not many Sri Lankans know
today that the youth of Jaffna played a key role in Sri Lanka's independence
struggle. The Jaffna Youth Congress (JYC), which drew inspiration from the
Indian independence movement, advocated secularism, a non-sectarian
nationalism, the eradication of caste and independence from Britain.
Some Sinhala leaders had great admiration for the JYC. One of them was S W R D
Bandaranaike, an Oxford-educated Sinhala leader, who in a pre-independence
address to a JYC session called for a federal constitution for Sri Lanka. But
Bandaranaike, when he became the prime minister in 1956, made Sinhala the
official language to the exclusion of Tamil. His election pledge in 1956 was to
make Sinhala the official language within 24 hours.
The Tamils saw this as the tyranny of the Sinhala nationalism and attempted to
counter it with Tamil nationalism, which took a violent form when the state
used strong-arm tactics in the mistaken belief that the Tamils could be
browbeaten into submission. There were little or no genuine attempts at
reconciliation.
It was the myopic policies of the successive Sri Lankan governments that
created Prabhakaran, who believed in violence and refused to accept any
solution short of a separate state. Sri Lanka's Chief Justice Sarath N Silva in
a recent newspaper article to mark Vesak, the birthday of the Lord Buddha,
admitted that government policies over the past 50 years had contributed to
communal suspicions which erupted in outbreaks of violence:
The use of
force to negate the demands for a federal and later separate state led to the
emergence of the fearsome Tiger terrorists who had no appreciation of the true
nature of the causes of the conflict. Tamil political leaders who made
unreasonable demands as a solution to the conflict themselves became victims of
the fearsome Tigers. The use of military force to put down the violent
activities of the terrorists do not form the part of the Buddhist perspectives
of conflict management.
He noted, however, that many of the
original grievances of the Tamils had been successfully addressed by the
governments. For instance, the language issue and the question of
decentralization of power, he said, had been redressed adequately by amendments
to the constitution.
V Anandasangaree, leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), a party
which in 1976 adopted a resolution for a separate state, agreed. In an
interview with Asia Times Online, Anandasangaree, a former parliamentarian for
Kilinochchi, not so long ago the capital of the de facto state the LTTE had set
up in the Wanni region, said that new problems had cropped up over the years.
Solving these war-induced problems, such as resettlement of the displaced
people, reconstructing the infrastructure of the highly neglected Tamil and a
reconciliation process to heal the wounds should be the priority, he said.
He noted that the same Sinhala nationalist voices which gave rise to violent
Tamil nationalism were once again active. "If they are true patriots, the
greatest contribution they could make to Sri Lanka is to keep their mouths
shut," said Anandasangaree, the 76-year-old former teacher and lawyer who was
the only TULF leader who refused to endorse the LTTE as the sole representative
of the Sri Lankan Tamils.
He was obviously referring to calls by some Sinhala nationalists to set up
Sinhala colonies in Tamil areas as a means to defeat Tamil separatism. Some
even want the roads in Tamil areas named after military officers who died in
the war.
Anandasangaree said the only way forward was the introduction of a
power-devolution system based on the Indian model. "The Indian model is a big
success. It has silenced the voices that raised the cry of a separate state in
Tamil Nadu state in the 1960s. It will work here, too," he said, adding that he
strongly believed that President Mahinda Rajapaksa would come up with a
solution acceptable to the Tamils.
"When the president said in his victory speech in parliament on Tuesday that
there are no minorities in Sri Lanka today, he was speaking from his heart. I
am confident, he will offer a solution that meets the Tamil aspiration," he
said.
Anandasangaree said he did not believe that the Tamil struggle would return to
violence. He said he believed that this was the time for the moderate Tamil
voices to speak.
Over the past two decades, the LTTE hijacked the Tamil cause. It not only did
not allow moderate Tamil leaders who believed in democratic approach to speak
up, but it also intimidated and killed them.
The moderate Tamil voice is now coming to the fore. The Tamil National
Alliance, the party which was forced to act as the mouthpiece of the LTTE in
parliament, is now free to chart its own course. Tamil leaders who fled the
country to escape from the LTTE are willing to return.
The Tamil political landscape is being relaid. Will Rajapaksa listen to
moderate Tamil voices or will he make the same mistakes some of his
predecessors made in alienating the Tamil people?
Anandasangaree says the president is so popular now that he could sell any
devolution proposal to the Sinhala masses.
Ameen Izzadeen is a Colombo-based journalist.
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