The Vanquished and the Victors

By Tisaranee Gunasekara

"We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities,
Than in our love…" WB Yeats (The Stare’s Nest by My Window)

Vellupillai Pirapaharan could have become the saviour of his people. The LTTE could have won for the Tamils a substantial degree of devolution up to and including federalism. Instead he brought an all consuming devastation on his people, his organisation and ultimately himself because of his fatal and irredeemable addiction to maximalism. Like Adolf Hitler, he did not know when and where to stop; like Adol Hitler he believed in ‘going for the broke’; and like Adolf Hitler he ended up an ‘epitome of suicide and murder’ for himself and his people. Intoxicated by the heady brew of fanaticism, he gambled with the future of an entire community, and lost.

History of the Lankan conflict did not begin with the LTTE. Two extremist mindsets, which, at differing times, became the dominant ideological dynamic of Sinhala and Tamil societies, created a language issue, exacerbated it into an ethnic problem, paved the way to a devastating civil war and rendered a negotiated solution impossible. Vellupillai Pirapaharan was just a toddler when the South became infected with the insanity of Sinhala supremacism. Had it not been for that phenomenal error, the little boy who murdered birds with his catapult would have, in all probability, grown up to be a thug or a smuggler. It was the ‘Sinhala Only’ and its disastrous consequences which enabled Vellupillai Pirapaharan to achieve iconic status, albeit of the egregious sort.

From 1956 until 1987, Sinhala supremacism constituted the primary impediment to a political solution to the Tamil question; it stymied the BC Pact and the DC Pact; it also gave rise to a number of anti-Tamil legislations and riots, culminating in the Black July which gave the fledgling LTTE its biggest break. But by between 1987 and 1990 Sinhala Supremacism became weakened and discredited, as its disastrous consequences piled up. Consequently from the Indo-Lanka Accord until the Tiger-assisted victory of Mahinda Rajapakse in the Presidential election of 2005, a political solution to the ethnic problem was a realistic possibility. It did not happen because Vellupillai Pirapaharan scorned moderation as weakness and abjured compromise as betrayal; he was wedded not only to his goal but to his road, his way of doing things. The LTTE heaped a calamitous defeat on itself and unimaginable devastation on the people it claimed to represent, because it did not accept the existence of limits.

The wages of that maximalism are evident in the stripped corpses of Tiger leaders, once looked up to as heroes and worshipped as demigods by millions, and in the faces of the wretched men, women and children, coming out of the war zone, on their way to internment camps which would be their meagre and unfree homes for the foreseeable future.

‘Principiis obsta’ (Resist the Beginnings)

When a leader decrees himself to be infallible and invincible and his followers degenerate into sycophantism, there is no room left not just for criticism but also appraisal, introspection and course correction. Errors go unacknowledged because errors cannot happen; setbacks are denied because setbacks are impossible. A Maya is created of an omniscient and omnipotent leader who can never do wrong or go wrong. That illusion, created and sustained by a mixture of opportunism and delusion on the part of millions, defies reality for a while, exuding an aura of permanence. But it cannot last, as demonstrated by the remarkably similar fates of Herr Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich and Mr. Pirapaharan’s nascent state of Eelam.

Beginning with the Sinhala Only of 1956 and culminating with the Black July of 1983, the Tamils were humiliated and terrified by repeated acts of discrimination and violence. To such a community the military successes of the LTTE would have come as a balm, restoring a sense of pride and dignity. Unfortunately this understandable appreciation blinded and desensitised many Tamils to the LTTE’s gradual descent into the abyss of barbarism. Their elation at the many defeats the LTTE imposed on the Sri Lankan armed forces also kept them mute when the same LTTE murdered venerable Tamil political leaders, conscripted Tamil children and turned Tamil women into human bombs. Lost in admiration of the military prowess of the LTTE, they failed to realise the corrosive effects of the Tigers’ perversions and instead of condemning them used specious arguments to excuse them. This ‘carte blanche’ created a permissive atmosphere which encouraged rather than discouraged abuses, until the unregenerate LTTE became intolerable to India and the West, despite their genuine sympathy and support for the Tamil cause.

The Tamil Diaspora, given the relative immunity it enjoyed from the punitive actions of the Tiger, could have acted as the conscience of the Lankan Tamils. It could have stood up to the Tigers when they acted in a manner contrary to civilised norms and inimical to the enlightened self interests of the Tamil people. But the Diaspora, with a few honourable exceptions, opted to become cheerleaders for the Tigers. By doing so it abdicated its responsibility towards its brethren in Sri Lanka. Even at the bitter end, when the LTTE was holding hundreds of thousands of unarmed Tamils as human shields (intentionally exposing them to bombing and shelling by the Lankan Forces), the Diaspora, failed to raise its collective voice against this outrage.

The defeat of the LTTE has left a vacuum in Tamil polity and society, within and outside Sri Lanka. The TNA has discredited itself with its slavish backing for the LTTE while the EPDP and the TMVP have degenerated into ciphers of the Rajapakse administration. The Tamil community still has a handful of principled entities (such as the UTHR) and courageous individuals, but whether they can provide the political leadership that is the need of the hour is debatable. The continued existence of a leadership vacuum can spell danger (especially if the South succumbs to Sinhala supremacism), as it can be filled by either a regenerated LTTE or a Tiger-like organisation. Such a development will not only endanger Lankan peace; it will also prevent the maimed Tamil community from emerging from the rut it is in. Thus, the importance of a Tamil leadership that is anti-LTTE but independent of Colombo, self critical of the monumental errors of the LTTE as it is critical of the mistakes and excesses of the regime, a leadership which, unlike Mr. Pirapaharan, understands the importance of moderation and abides by the values of democracy.

‘Finem respice’ (Consider the End)

A leader cannot transform himself into a ‘Superhuman’, without turning his people into ‘Subhumans’, slaves without rights, who live to obey and who live because they obey. Mr. Pirapaharan’s history making journey, which went from Thambi to Annay to Surya Thevan and ended on a desolated strip known as the Sea of Conches constitutes a morality tale that is relevant both to the people he claimed to represent and the enemies who defeated him. He commenced his momentous career espousing the cause of Tamils alienated by Sinhala supremacist legislations and frightened by intermittent mob violence. En route, he veered towards empowering the Tigers as the sole representative of the Tamil people and then enthroned himself as the God-Leader. Placing obedience as the sine qua non for membership in the Tamil speaking community, he waged a racist battle against Muslims, expelling them from their ancient lands. Inebriated by his own success he succumbed to that sin the ancients repeatedly warned against, hubris.

The Sinhalese are naturally grateful to President Rajapakse for ending the Tiger menace. That overwhelming feeling of appreciation and admiration is no different from what the Tamils felt when the LTTE began to prevail against the Lankan Army, which many Tamils regarded as a force of ‘enemy aliens’, especially after the searing events of July 1983. We should not blind ourselves to the errors and excesses of our own government and state today, as the Tamils did to the errors and excesses of the Tigers yesterday. When Vellupillai Pirapaharan was anointed as a God-leader, on the basis of his historic politico-military achievements, most Tamils went along, partly out of fear and partly out of conviction. These days President Rajapakse is blatantly hailed as ‘High King’ (Maha Rajano) in official propaganda. These sycophantic outpourings will not turn Sri Lanka into monarchy or President Rajapakse into King Mahinda, anymore than the Tiger propaganda and Pongu Thamil worship turned Mr. Pirapaharan into a God. But it can blind and stupefy us, kill out critical intelligence and spirit of independence and turn us from citizens to subjects. It happened to Tamils and it can happen to us.

Tiger fascism has been defeated, but Sinhala supremacism remains, and is an integral component of the winning side. The President’s decision to include a couple of paragraphs in Tamil in his Victory Speech is a welcome gesture of conciliation. That apart, his offering to the Tamils amounted to the usual platitudes about unity and equality. The reiteration of the ‘zero casualties’ lie denotes either amazing naivety or horrendous cynicism. A few words of common human sympathy for the displaced Tamils, bereft of homes and families and facing an uncertain future in internment camps, were conspicuous by their absence as was any admittance of past errors in managing inter-ethnic relations. Instead the President said, portentously, “We have removed the word ‘minorities’ from our vocabulary three years ago. No longer are there Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays or any other minorities. There are only two peoples in this country. One is the people that love this country. The other comprises the small groups that have no love for the land of their birth” (quoted in Defence.lk).

An ethnic divide cannot be made to disappear by a Presidential fiat, however sincere. Most Sinhalese rejoiced at the defeat of the Tigers; most Tamils did not. Those antithetical responses demonstrated, yet again, that psychologically Sri Lanka remains a land divided, even in the moment of its geographic reunification. A Sri Lankan nation is something that can emerge only as the outcome of a long process of reconciliation characterised by moderation and a spirit of compromise. It cannot be created by an order, especially at the culmination of a long and bitter internal conflict, in an atmosphere characterised by gloating. In such a context, denying the existence of minorities can be tantamount to denying the reality of minority fears and grievances as well the need for any concrete measures to address these. The Manichean divide of patriots vs. non-patriots can be used to deal with opposition and dissent in extra-democratic ways.

“There are not two Germanies, a good one and a bad one, but only one whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt and ruin”, said Thomas Mann in the aftermath of Germany’s defeat at the Second World War (Germany and the Germans). That analysis is apposite for every nation. A nation, like an individual, can loose its way and stray into killing fields or wastelands when it succumbs to the dark side of its national psyche. That process of contamination and corrosion may have seemingly unexceptionable beginnings; it may happen so gradually, that its progress passes unnoticed. For all that, its end will be calamitous. That was the fate of the Tiger. It could be the fate of the Lion too, if, intoxicated with triumphalism, we succumb to delusions of infallibility and invincibility, as Mr. Pirapaharan did, once upon a time.

- Asian Tribune -