In the last week of February, two interesting public discussions were held in New York City on the deteriorating situation in Sri Lanka. The two events were different from the many other Tamil Diaspora organized events and protests in capitals around the world in the way they offered critical perspectives on the current situation and engendered an open debate. The first event hosted by the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York on February 25th was billed as the ‘The Problem of Armed Struggle in Sri Lanka’.  The second event co-hosted by the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) and the Sri Lanka Democracy Forum (SLDF) was held at Alwan for the Arts on February 27th and was titled, ‘War and the Future of Peace in Sri Lanka: Some Critical Perspectives’. While the war and humanitarian catastrophe has taken a center stage for international agencies including the UN and has been gaining more and more attention in the international media, the two events gave a deeper historical context for the current situation and attempted to articulate the possibilities for a political solution in Sri Lanka. The seeming intractability of the current situation and the gravity of the humanitarian situation prompted heated discussions challenging both the audience and the speakers.

The public discussion on the problem of armed struggle featured Ragavan and Nirmala Rajasingam, both of whom had been active with the LTTE in its early years and now live in exile in the UK.  They gave critical and insightful perspectives on the history of armed struggle in Sri Lanka. The dialogue which weaved in the rise of Tamil militancy with their own personal experiences provided a rich historical context of armed struggle.

The first set of questions were aimed at understanding how the LTTE so quickly lost military control over the North and East. Unlike many media assessments, which point to the power and strategy of the Sri Lankan Army, the speakers highlighted the internal and structural faults of the LTTE as the cause for its defeats.

Ragavan, who was himself a founding member of the LTTE in the 1970s, and parted ways in the mid-1980s, claimed that the LTTE’s alienation from the Tamil people in the North and East contributed to their eventual demise. From the mid-70s, in the first ten years of the organization, Ragavan explained that the LTTE was comprised of only a small group of 20-30 members and  it’s ideology  reflected the political interests of the Jaffna Tamil middle class and upper caste, and was confined within Jaffna peninsula. It was after the 1983 riots in Colombo, that Tamil militancy would mushroom, where this small group would become the core leadership joined by thousands of young Tamils enraged by the events in the capital. Ragavan also explained that around this time the Indian state would give military assistance and training to the Tamil militant groups, which truly catalyzed the growth of the armed movements.

Ragavan also noted that from the early years in the 1970s, internal repression was very much part of the ideology of the LTTE, particularly in the way it branded ‘traitors’. This political culture erupted in internecine conflict between the various militant movements by the mid-1980s, where internal power disputes between the different Tamil militant organizations paralleled insurgency against the State. In this environment, the LTTE massacred the leadership and often the cadre base of the other militant groups, and thus dissolved the other militant organizations; PLOTE, TELO, EROS and EPRLF. During the last two decades, this became the LTTE’s approach to dealing with the general Tamil population. Any critical views against the leadership or cause was not tolerated, dissent inside the community was silenced. The LTTE would also insist on retaining one child per family from the North and East to be trained and to fight, families that did not comply were threatened and children were forcibly taken away. Ragavan articulated how the relationship of the Tamil population to the LTTE leadership might have begun with confidence in their military capacity but soon turned to fear. This situation made the predicament of the Tamil community difficult in the context of the aims and wishes of the militant leadership that claimed to be its sole representative.

According to Ragavan, militarism was the ideological core of the LTTE; it lacked a popular political platform that met the political, economic, and social interests of the general Tamil population. He attributed the organization’s lack of accountability to the Tamil people in part to the unconditional economic and political support they were receiving from expatriates that secured professional employment in the West. Though the LTTE imposed a system of taxation on people in the North and East, expatriate donations from Western salaries would set the financial basis for the LTTE to become and sustain a conventional armed force that would attempt to match the military might of the State.

He also claimed that the high social status of the LTTE leadership, compared to the ordinary Tamil population, made it difficult for them to form a platform based on popular interests. Once again he recalled events in the 1970s and claimed that Tamil militant sentiment originally came out of the middle class sections of society. He cited the ‘standardisation’ policy set forth in the early 1970s by the government, which required Tamils to score higher marks than Sinhalese to enter universities, and which disaffected middle class Tamil youth. This standardisation policy, which followed the first JVP insurrection and was meant to quell anti-government sentiment in the South, would mobilize many young Tamils who looked to university education as a means to secure employment in the state sector, despite the very low percentage of the Sri Lankan population that actually entered universities.

In this way, Ragavan showed the social contradiction between the leadership of the militancy and the general Tamil population in the North and East. Caste, regional, and class contradictions and hierarchies would be reproduced in the years after the 1983 riots when Tamil youths of different social backgrounds entered into the fighting force. This structural problem would come to light in 2004 when the eastern commander, Karuna, would defect from the LTTE taking a huge section of the LTTE fighting force with him. The basis of this rested on the Jaffna middle class Tamil view of the Eastern Province, which was seen as the main cadre recruitment ground for the LTTE, as opposed to the North, which was the home of the leadership. Ragavan explained that the loss of the East, which was in part a result of social differences within the organization, would cripple the LTTE and also contribute to its eventual defeat.

Nirmala also added her own experiences from her affiliation with the LTTE to talk more generally about the external factors that led to the decline of the organization. Nirmala, who was imprisoned in the early 1980s under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), claimed that the government has used the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’ as a license to aggressively push into the North and East with little concern for the civilian population. She in fact explained that besides the LTTE’s claim of sole representation, the terrorism discourse also conflated the Tamil people with the LTTE, drastically affecting the civilian population.

Nirmala further explained how the abuses of the state and Sinhala chauvinism were an impetus for Tamil nationalism. She recounted the history of State discrimination towards the Tamil community from independence onward. The Sinhala elite in government initially disenfranchised the Up-Country Tamil community soon after independence from Britain in 1948. This removed a voting block that challenged the Sinhala elite’s position in government. This was followed by the Sinhala Only Act, passed in 1956, which made Sinhala the only official language, limiting Tamil speakers’ access to the state sector.

Nirmala discussed how the Sinhala elite that appropriated the State on a majoritarian platform prompted disaffection from the Sinhala areas as well. In particular, she recounted the poor economic conditions in the 1960s and early 1970s that prompted an uprising in the South of the country by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). This movement, which was lead by students and made up of mostly poor rural Sinhala youth was mercilessly put down resulting in ten of thousands of deaths. She made a parallel of this to what was happening in the North at the time and claimed that the conduct of the centralized and majoritarian Sri Lankan state was at the heart of grievances. Regardless of the community, it prompted the push toward militarized solutions.

Nirmala noted this history of repeated and failed insurrections was proof that armed struggle and nationalist rhetoric proved highly destructive in the Sri Lankan context. As an alternative, she voiced the importance of working towards a political solution that could reform the Sri Lankan state to be more democratic by involving minorities in the political process.

The second event, included Nirmala Rajasingam as the main speaker, with Ahilan Kadirgamar of SLDF delivering opening remarks on the current situation, and chaired by Bhavani Raman of SASI. The event which saw a packed audience at Alwan for the Arts began with musical spoken word and dance performances by Sri Lankan Tamil artist YaliniDream and her musical group that included cellist Varuni Thiruchelvam, guitarist Ranjit Arapurakal, and percussionist Seema Pandya. The themes of the performance related to the current situation in Sri Lanka; YaliniDream’s performance focused on topics such as the plight of refugees and the violence within the Sri Lankan Tamil community. The performance set a heartfelt tone, which prompted Nirmala to begin her talk with a political poem on oppression and resistance set to Carnatic music.

The discussion was initiated by Ahilan and Nirmala, who discussed the current war situation, which has trapped a Tamil civilian population ranging between 70,000 to the two hundred thousand in a small geographic area that places them between security forces and LTTE. They claimed that both the security forces and the LTTE are responsible for war crimes against the civilian population. They raised concerns about how the government was placing the refugees into detention camps, restricting their movement, and enacting secret screening processes for the detainees. They stated that increased international involvement in the rehabilitation and resettlement processes would ensure a smoother and more just transition for the war affected. The speakers noted how the government’s conduct in the current situation was not different from their previous conduct, including the actions and policies that fomented the conflict in the first place.

Though critical of the government and its role in aggravating armed resistance, the speakers were weary of using armed struggle to pressurize the government. Instead, they called for restructuring the State in a way that would allow regional autonomy and power sharing at the center, which would need to involve those sections of the marginalized minority communities in Sri Lanka (Tamils, Muslims, Up-Country Tamils, Dalits, the rural poor etc.) in order to work. They noted that at particular moments, bodies like the All Party Representative Committee (APRC), who articulated devolution and power-sharing, came close to building a political solution. However, attempts were offset by the return to war and President Rajapakse’s interference. They stated that these measures should also be pushed through a grass-roots movement that involved the different actors on the ground, instead of a violent armed campaign. It was up to all actors including progressive sections of the Diaspora to buttress actors on the ground to build a broad democratic movement. Nirmala aptly posed the idea and question; “cohabitation and co-existence with other communities in Sri Lanka, that is where the Tamil community’s future lies. So now we have to think, how we now reformulate reshape our struggle for our democratic rights. How do we challenge the Sri Lankan majoritarian state?”

Once the speakers set the platform around the need for a political solution and state reform the discussion was opened to the audience and moderated by Bhavani. Opening questions asked more generally about the details of the current situation including the activities of international NGOs on the ground. The most noteworthy opening comment lauded the speakers’ position on their assessment of armed struggle and the path going forward. The commenter stated that he was a Sinhala Buddhist against the war and that the presentation was unique in the way that it did not lump the communities into whole groups (Tamil / Sinhala), noting in particular the discrepancy between a rural Sinhala farmer and the Sinhala elite in government. He thought it constructive as well to imagine a national grass-roots movement that would involve different sections of Sri Lankan society to challenge the majoritarian State, which he regarded to be at the center of the conflict as well.

The discussion became livelier once members of the Tamil Diaspora in the audience began to ask questions critical of the speakers; including the possibilities of democratic state reform through non-violent movements. Emotively delivered questions and statement like, “how can you talk to the Sinhalese without a Tamil force to fight?”, “what’s the guarantee that your political solution would work?” and “you’re abandoning a dying fighter”, were voiced, with some claiming that militancy was the only effective way for engaging the government.

The speakers responded that the Tamil militant movement in the last 25 years has not provided any solution to the conflict, they reiterated that it had the alternate effect of destroying the Tamil community. They spoke of the abuses within the Tamil community where the LTTE conscripted children, assassinated Tamil dissidents, violently marginalized the Tamil speaking Muslim community in the North and East, and alienated the general Tamil population. Nirmala responded emphatically that, “Tamil unity was destroyed by militancy”.

They also delved into the history of the conflict beginning in the 1970s, where Tamil militancy took over and stifled attempts of other Tamils to push for state reform. Nirmala claimed the reason for political reform being ineffective so far was that it had not yet received the attention it deserved. They also doubted whether the Tamil militancy, successful in attained succession or not, would actually benefit common Tamils, and not just the leadership. “Who am I to guarantee anything”, responded Ahilan, “but we feel the armed struggle has gone through a full cycle, to an end, and we don’t see that taking us any further.”

Bhavani, the chair, noted that one of the concerns voiced from the audience was that a democratic movement was difficult to imagine in the wake of the current humanitarian situation where masses of civilians in the North and East were under continued danger. One question from an especially vocal participant asked how the government could be pressured given their conduct toward the civilian population that had escaped the war area and were placed in “concentration camps”, which connoted that they were being ethnically cleansed. Ahilan responded, “using terms like genocide, holocaust, and concentration camps was unproductive”, which immediately drew a critical vocal responses from members of the Tamil Diaspora in the crowd. The speakers went on further to explain that when Tamil and Sinhala Diaspora media outlets loosely use the language of “genocide” and “terrorism” and exaggerated figures of war causalities, it did not help too pressure the State to improve its conduct. On the bloating of casualty statistics, Nirmala added it, “Trivializes the deaths of those people. We should not blur and fudge the patterns of killings, the establishing of evidence”.

Based on another set of questions from the crowd, the speakers also turned to a critical assessment of Indian engagement. They questioned the mobilization in Tamil Nadu along Tamil nationalist lines. Nirmala felt that the emotive language did not really translate to substantive actions that could really have an affect on the ground. As an alternative, the speakers laid out a set of actions from Tamil Nadu that would be constructive, these included; calling on the LTTE to allow the trapped civilians to leave, leveraging the Indian central government to address the situation of civilians, pushing the central government to be more involved in the UN forums and address humanitarian efforts for civilians, and pushing central government to call for a political solution beyond the 13th Amendment and state reform with a non-unitary structure, which would decentralize state power.

Along with their criticisms of non-state military actors and external actors, at many points in time the speakers would relate their comments back to criticisms of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and pressure on the Sri Lankan State. After explaining how nationalist ideology is developed and strengthened through competing nationalisms, Nirmala explained how Sinhala Buddhist nationalism at its current state has turned into a destructive force that has been unleashed on the minorities in the South as well, “the burning of churches in the South against minority Christians and other communities are also under attack by the same Sinhala nationalist forces. It would be intelligent to make common cause with all these people.” In this way, Nirmala aimed at showing the importance of political engagement that remained critical of all actors that were challenging human rights and democratization. She used an example of a submission SLDF made to the Geneva Human Rights Council in 2006, “it was one of the most robust pieces of information because it had evidence of human rights abuses by the State, the LTTE, and other armed groups. We were absolutely even handed about that, and that is what is required.”

The discussion and dialog got to the heart of the complexity of the situation and frustrations that go behind attempting to wrap one’s head around the problem. However difficult, and often tense a debate, the event was necessary and engaged anyone concerned about the current situation. Both events complimented each other in the way that themes and topics discussed in the first were reiterated in the other. It was a fulfilling experience for those, like myself, that had the opportunity to attend both events. It was a rare occurrence, to have such open discussion and debate in New York on these topics with the political perspective and experiences of Ragavan and Nirmala.

An April 2009 interview in Himal Magazine of Nirmala and Ragavan:
http://www.himalmag.com/The-collapse-and-after_nw2888.html

Category: Article

Tags: Diaspora, Humanitarianism, Political Solution, Public Event