Sorry Lanka

I recall a while back I was hitting the books at DC. `Hey!" said someone seated behind me. "Oh, hey." Asian. Accent. Pretty smile. I vaguely recognized her from the ActSci Club - I was one of the coordinators, she was the treasurer. "So what's your background? Indian?" "No, Sri Lankan." "Ohhh same thing... So are you a Tamil Tiger?"

Was this a come-on? Did she fashion me the Che to her Eva Peron? When I laughed it off, she recounted the story from several years back of the two guys from Waterloo who were arrested by US border authorities for weapons procurement. She said she admired them. And she said she knew about, understood, and sympathized with the liberation struggle.

I was smitten.

It was jaw-droppingly refreshing to meet someone so well versed in one the world's longest-running, brutal civil wars. Most Canadians are appallingly ignorant about the matter - I'd be surprised if most could spot Sri Lanka on a map. Israel's bulldozing in Gaza drew headlines across the world; similar genocidal acts by the Sri Lankan military against a disenfranchised minority garner barely a footnote. If that. Poor brown people killing other poor brown people. Nobody cares.



The fact that this blog has been up for 4 years with me commenting on everything but the civil strife in Sri Lanka is quite remarkable. I must admit I view the happenings there with a semi-detached indifference, though I shouldn't. I was born overseas. I have never been to that country. I still have some family there, but I've never met them and my ties are fleeting at best, and they seem to be OK.

That's not to say I'm entirely ignorant about what's going on there. Growing up, I was lured into a lot of pro-independence, pro-Tamil Tiger rallies by my parents. And so I had some knowledge of the struggle. But why were things so brutal in a beautiful tropical island where the main religion was Buddhism!? What was getting their sarongs in a knot?

Being the precocious kid that I was, I began reading about the Tamil liberation struggle. I read about colonialism, of the onslaught of Christian missionaries on the island, their recruiting of mainly Hindu Tamils, of how they converted them, clothed them, taught them English, gave them jobs in the civil service, how the Sinhalese - their Buddhism more averse to religious conversion - resisted the European colonial incursion and lost out on opportunities as a result. I read of how, upon independence in 1948, the majority Sinhalese felt aggrieved, their numbers lagging in literacy, in the civil service, the professions, their majority-minority complex.

I read about how opportunistic politicians played up ethnic nationalism and rivalries for votes - making Sinhala the sole official language, enacting favouritism in already-scarce university admission spots, disenfranchising the minority Tamils as a result. I read of how the Tamils fought for their rights, through peaceful Martin Luther King-esque marches and rallies, how they were met with political inaction and violence and brutality for their efforts.

I read about the brutal 1983 riots in the capital, Colombo, in which Tamils and their businesses were torched, targetted by lynch mobs, while officials stood and did nothing. And how this was the precipitous straw that led to the drawing of arms and the call for a separate state, led by the guerilla Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or the more colloquial "Tamil Tigers". And the resulting back-and-forth between the LTTE and the military, with civilians caught in the middle and a mass exodus from the country.

That is not to say that the Tamil Tigers are not complicit in the violence. Though their objectives are noble, their tactics are far from Gandhian. They pioneered the suicide bomb, practice extortion on the island and among expats, and are infamous for their brutal suppression of dissident voices - knocking off moderate Tamils and rival paramilitary groups alike - and, most notoriously, of their conscription of women and child soldiers.



And so what is most tragic is that an island with so much potential on independence - an amicable, hardworking, literate population - has now devolved to this. 250,000 civilians trapped with nowhere to go. Conservative economist Tom Sowell said it best - Sri Lanka's civil strife was a conflict borne out of affirmative action. That's Third World Democracy.

Carving out a separate state on a small island for a million impoverished people along a resource-barren coast is absurd. And so if the Sri Lankan Air Force succeeds in neutering the Tamil Tigers, what next? Apartheid? A peaceful, semi-autonomous coexistence within a federalist framework ala. Quebec? Not likely. By now, the anomisities run dark and deep.

I don't see a future for the Tamils in that country. There are already more Tamils in the diaspora than on the island. And so if the most hardcore of nationalists see Lanka as a resplendent isle of and for the Sinhalese, a glorious oasis of Theravada Buddhism... they're well on their way to that end.

Glad to be Canadian.



MIA