V-Day May 18: Right to do, but do it right

By Dayan Jayathilleka

(May 12, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) Opinion in and on Sri Lanka today is divisible into eight strands, streams or categories: those who agree that the war which was fought and won was basically a just war and those who do not; those who believe that what Sri Lanka now has or is headed for is a just peace and those who do not; those who hold that a just peace is desirable and imperative and those believe it is desirable but not imperative; those who believe that a just peace is possible and those who do not.

I believe that the war was basically just; that the peace is not or not yet; nor are current developments unambiguously in the direction of a just peace though there is space for one. I also believe that a just peace is desirable, possible and necessary.

Due to my support for both ‘just war’ and ‘just peace’, I believe that the holding of victory celebrations is legitimate. In fact I might have been the first to suggest it on the public record in an article carried on June 15th 2009, in these pages entitled May 19 should be V Day, 2009 the Year of Victory. A just war deserves a victory celebration; a just peace requires a victory celebration of the right kind: a celebration of broadly inclusive ‘nation-building’ character, not a divisive, ethnocentric or ethno-religious one.

We owe an annual victory commemoration to our armed forces for their incredible sacrifices, bravery and brilliance. We owe it to our citizens who refused to be cowed by decades of terror bombings, refused to reward appeasement of fascism, and refused to accept anything less from their leaders than a commitment to definitive victory. We owe it to those who lost their lives, limbs and eyesight in the fight against the Tigers or because of Tiger bombings.

Victory celebrations are valid also because this was a high point in our long history; and it was a breakthrough achieved by our generations, in our lifetime – an example that must be handed down the years, decades and centuries. If a nation and a people do not celebrate their martial victories and honour their heroes, they lose something of their moral fibre.

The celebrations should either be multi-ethnicised or de-ethnicised; made multi-religious or non-religious. It should be the commemoration of the victory of the democratic Sri Lankan state and its armed forces and people, over fascism and secessionism, not a victory of the Sinhala Buddhists over the Tamil community or people. The victory celebrations must surely include Karuna – without whose rebellion, victory may have been far more difficult and taken far longer— and Douglas Devananda, a symbol of Sri Lankan Tamil Stoicism that Prabhakaran’s killers repeatedly failed to destroy.

The victory celebrations should not be devalued and made subject to criticism by attempting to rewrite history in such a manner as to erase the role of former army commander Gen Sarath Fonseka—just as Trotsky was erased from histories and photographs of the Russian revolution and Tukhachevsky from the history of the Red Army. While Gen Fonseka’s role was not as enormous and exclusive as he attempts to depict, it was certainly not as small and insignificant as his political enemies attempt to portray. In any case it would be counterproductive, for as anyone acquainted with Freud knows, that which is repressed, returns. There are many interpretations as to why we won the war, and I prefer to attribute it to the coming together, finally, of Carl Von Clausewitz’s ‘strange trinity’ (though arguably in re-shuffled order): ‘the passions of the People, the free-ranging soul of the war Chief and the regulatory sovereignty of the political Chief’. A commemoration must honestly and honourably reflect all three factors of this trinity. A failure to do so and a falsification of history would not only detract from the valuable celebration and generate speculation as to whether the motivation for the celebration was more parochial politics than lofty patriotism, but also make the mistaken assumption of mass amnesia afflicting a resilient, passionate, heroic people.

Those who oppose the holding of victory celebrations use two arguments. One is that those who died were citizens of Sri Lanka. The other is that the Tamil people will be hurt because the defeated and dead Tigers were "our army" (that’s from the TNA MP Sivagnanam Sritharan’s irrational and imprudent maiden speech in parliament, a sharp contrast with the courageous yet responsible speech of Mr Sumanthiran). As for the first argument, I’m sorry, but the Tigers who died, did so precisely because they did not consider themselves Sri Lankan and considered themselves members of a separate state of Tamil Eelam which was inimical to Sri Lanka. That they weren’t Sri Lankan citizens is an assertion they were willing to die for and proved by blowing themselves up. Let us grant that they’ve convinced most of us. Those Fascists who died in the Liberation of Europe were hardly from another planet. They were also citizens, but I do not see Europe mourning their passing or refraining from celebrating the great victory, simply because the fascists were citizens of their countries. This is also true closer home, of the Khmer Rouge: were they not fellow Cambodians? Does this mean that the Cambodian state and people are moved by pathos and poetic sensibility to mourn their passing as well as those of their victims? On the contrary, the memory of their atrocities is kept alive through the permanent memorial exhibition at the Tuol Sleng death camp! If at all, we should keep Prabhakaran’s prisons and torture chambers as places for remembrance and hand them over to Tamil survivors from the other groups for recording the history of Tiger atrocities!

The reason for the universal practise of commemorating victory over fascisms and not collectively mourning fascists and their victims, is not only the sheer evil that fascism represented, but that greater moral-ethical value was placed on those anti-fascists in each society who were victims of fascism. Thus in celebrating the victory over fascism, we also salute antifascists. Similarly, non-commemoration of the victory over Tiger fascism would mean non-commemoration of those anti-fascist victims, Sinhala and Tamil, from President Premadasa and Gamini Dissanaike to Lakshman Kadirgamar and Kethesh Loganathan. At Nandikadal, a massive blood debt was repaid and justice finally served.

What of the argument that the Tamil people would feel hurt because this was their army, their boys. Well, either this is untrue and the Tigers were oppressing the Tamils as well – in which case there should be no problem with the commemoration, which should be welcomed – or it is true and the Tigers were their boys, in which case, this heartache is the price for backing fascist monsters. If the counterargument is that Prabhakaran was fighting for Tamil rights, the answer to that is that there were many others who were not evil, who did not murder Nehru’s grandson, who also fought for Tamil rights, ranging from Sri Sabaratnam and K Pathmanabha to A Amirthalingam and Neelan Tiruchelvam. They could have been rallied around instead, and their murders could, even now, have generated mass revulsion against the Tigers and repudiation within the community. Did the option for Barabbas have no echo in the fate of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70?

It is faddish liberal chatter to oppose the razing of Tiger monuments. I have cautioned against and am opposed to the use of archaeological and religious claims as tool of Sinhala hegemony over the Tamil areas, and have read my committed antiracist and multi-culturalist friend Prof Sudharshan Seneviratne’s rejection of these charges, while remaining unconvinced that there is no track 2 hegemonic agenda (that he is doubtless unaware of). That however is an argument about antiquity and different from the issue of Tiger monuments and memorials. Nazi memorials are not usually kept standing. Nazi regalia are banned. The only memorials to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia are those of their victims! Why should it be different here in Sri Lanka? Shouldn’t memorials be erected in the North and East, for those Tamil leaders and intellectuals murdered by the Tigers? In democratic Poland, member of the Western bloc, the picture of Che Guevara is (absurdly) banned—and Che Guevara never set foot in nor wrote a word against Poland! After a Thirty Years War in which we lost some of our finest leaders (Sinhala and Tamil), hopes and prospects, who is to say that Tamil Eelam is undeserving of the fate of Carthage (Carthago Delenda Est)?

The Tamil people today are divisible, albeit unequally, into three: those who understand that the war was unavoidable because of Prabhakaran’s obduracy and had at least a liberating aspect which has opened space for them, those who simply do not see it that way and those (chiefly overseas) bitterly plotting the eventual success of secession. The first category of Tamils (a minority) must be our strategic partners and allies while the second will have to be our negotiating partners inasmuch as they have been elected by the people of those areas. We must cherish and strengthen the first and engage and convince the second.

As for the third category, the enemy in the Diaspora holding referenda for secession, we must (re?)build the institutional and intellectual capacity – ‘smart power’—to compete with and defeat it in the battle for world opinion. The external Eelamist enemy cannot be defeated by capital punishment for ‘sedition’, the seeding of the North with religious statues and a model of economic development in which even retail commerce (a chain of tea boutiques) is run by a mono-ethnic military (see the critique by Dr. Muttukrishna Sarvanandan, economist, and outspoken critic of the Tigers and the CFA). Such moves will not stop the secessionist scenario but only hasten it by making us look an abnormal, closed country, an ethnocentric or ethno-religious garrison state, not a pluralist democracy with an open society. That will only isolate us on the global battlefield.

If there is no just peace we shall not only fail abysmally to fulfil our potential as a country, we shall not only fail our future generations, we shall also face a new cycle of conflict in whichever form, with an accumulation of world opinion and external support for a new secessionist surge (the Georgia scenario).

A year after victory and with new, external threats on the horizon, we must be conscious that while we grew strong in some respects and won the war, we have also declined drastically in others, causing the brightest among our educated youngsters to vote with their feet, head for the exits, run away as soon as they can from the atmosphere in the country. We must reverse this trend, negate the New Claustrophobia by making our institutions, society, arts, culture and politics open, fair and attractive to the most intelligent and best performing of our youth, so that they voluntarily remain or return. In this ‘globalised knowledge society’ where ‘information is power’ and education the best investment, they are the indispensable vanguard, and this is the only way to win future wars and struggles, be they hot or cold.