‘PEACE release me; let me go…’

   Return to Sanity, Human Dignity and Freedom

            Fr Chandi Sinnathurai, February 5, 2007

VARIOUS reports coming out of Sri Lanka are both dark and depressing.  Conversations over telephone calls are often punctuated by sighs and choking silences.  There is an urgent desperation.  People want normality and peace.  This undeclared war has already gobbled up over some 2000 civilian lives within an year.  Slowly news – or more precisely ‘call for help’ is seeping through that the abductions by the White Van Squad, Kidnapping and forced recruitment of children and young adults are rife particularly in the North East Tamil territories.  Parents of such children are disillusioned and fraught with feelings of betrayal.  Starvation, lack of sanitation and sanity are looming over innocent Tamil civilians – the internal refugees.  There is also a blockade of information.  People are carefully kept in the dark and a manufactured consent is the consequence. The truth of the ground reality is distorted by propaganda. No one takes responsibility for the suffering humanity. The Government blames the Tamil Tigers and vice versa.

When one talks to Tamils in general, one can detect a depressing sadness and suspicion.  They seem to be at a loss not knowing any longer who to turn to with trust.  Over a crackling telephone line, this writer asked a colleague who is residing in the conflict zone, what is the general feeling of the people regarding the liberation struggle?  He quietly responded thus: “Every one is frightened for their lives, the lives of their children, young adults specially, as though they are living in a fascist state. We have no freedom. We can’t live under such conditions of fear no? No one trusts any one. Every one is looking over one an others shoulder and people want peace. Nothing else.”

This response hit this writer to the core.  On reflection, this writer asked himself whether truly the liberationist agenda has slowly eroded its moral ground.  There ought to be more than a singular reason for that. It pained me to think that. Already, since the 1980s the conflict has claimed over 68,000 precious lives.  There should be a complex answer to the helpless cry of the Tamil people to simply stop the war in all its form.  Just because the conflict takes a breathing space and a semblance of normality resumes temporarily does not mean, in any shape or form that the perennial political grievance of the Tamils will be settled. Far from it.

Talks between the Sinhala Governments and the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) have been a recycling of constant comedy of errors. It has been duplicitous.  Some proponents of liberation are currently putting forward the idea of a UDI on the part of the Tamil Tigers as they already have a parallel defacto government.  However, since the fall of both Mavilarru in Trinco and Vaharai in Batticaloa -- the strategic points in the East are in the hands of Sri Lanka Armed Forces. The Tamil Tiger control over the east is challenged – perhaps not yet threatened. Not only that, minus Trinco - the proposed Capitol of Eelam, plus the lucrative Trinco harbour and now the oil-deposited Mannar are still being elusive to the grip of the Tamil Tigers. With all that to be hard-won, a single-handed declaration, with out yet the wider recognition and endorsement of international Monetary systems, could prove to be a premature move. The Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) is in tatters. Harking back to these agreements is futile.

There is no easy answer.  There is however, a serious credibility problem within and without.  Hard facts and brutal truths have to be faced with honesty.  Tamils no doubt have to be freed from the clutches of Sinhala hegemony.  How sensitively this will be done is the bigger question.  President Rajapaksha has not gained the trust of the Tamil people. Nor any Sinhala leader for that matter.  This writer’s main concern is this, we should not, at any cost mistreat, abuse, mislead or defraud our very own people, let alone protect and defend them. As some liberation illuminati seem to advance the idea, it is the goal that matters nothing else.  If such illumined minds would only put their very own flesh and blood on the firing-line and hold such a lop-sided view then of course, one can say, such ones are indeed walking their talk. Alas, talks can be flowery, superficial, shallow, plastic, and cheap and even have a pretence of sophistication especially, when spoken in the comfort of lofty ivory towers.

Humans matter. Emancipation, liberty and liberation matters most to humans. Rights without humans is worthless. That is what essentially makes us human – free entities. Concluding with a quote from Orientalism:

“The secular world is the world of history as made by human beings.  Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence, and judge.  Above all, critical thought does not submit to state power or to commands to join in the ranks marching against one or another approved enemy.  Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.  But for that kind of wider perceptions we need time and patient and sceptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.”

[Edward W Said, Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, p. xxix.]