It is a tragedy that members of my ethnic group, the Sinhalese, seem to have such difficulty in appreciating the problems faced by the Tamils. If my unqualified support for the struggle of the Tamil people to live with dignity, safety and without discrimination in the country of their birth, makes me a traitor, which Sinhala supremacists think I am, so be it. That is their problem.
I have had a vision of the liberation of the Tamil people from Sinhala domination ever since I first visited Jaffna in the mid-1940s. It was then that I appreciated the disastrous effects of the Colebrook-Cameron 'Reforms' of 1833 which unified three separate states (kingdoms) and made them into one (Ceylon), and then centralised developmental and administrative power in Colombo for the convenience of the Colonial masters. This British colonial construct has been a disaster in Sri Lanka as has been similar arrangements in numerous former colonies.
Almost everyone, myself included, who has supported the Tamil cause, has focused on the discrimination of the Tamil people in language, education, employment, job opportunities and attempts to make them a minority even in the area (North and East) where they are a majority. These are undoubtedly serious violations of the democratic rights of people and must be condemned and reversed.
However, an equally serious problem that has not been focussed on, is the developmental neglect of the Tamil areas. To appreciate this, one need only travel from Colombo with its 5-star life and business opportunities to Jaffna (even before it was destroyed) and see its striking lack of development. One could pass through the Vanni (pre-1983) and wonder whether human life even existed there. Such was the degree of neglect of the ‘periphery’ - which encompassed the entire Tamil area.
An important consequence of this was that the Tamil North-East has been prevented from making any meaningful contribution to the economy. This has damaged not only the life and welfare of the people in this vast area but also the country as a whole which was deprived of considerable income because of policies based on ethnicity and political opportunism.
Indeed on my very first visit to the area as a teenager, I told my very Sinhalese parents “Until this area is liberated from the clutches of the regime in Colombo, it will never develop”. More recently, I have stated in numerous talks and publications on the Sri Lankan crisis "Until the keys to the development of the Tamil areas are taken out of the hands of Sinhala politicians and put in the hands of the Tamils in the North and East, there will be no peace (or development) in Sri Lanka". One could call it a Federal State, a Confederal State or a Separate State. Words do not matter. What does is what they mean.
I said I had "a vision". In fact, I have had a series of visions. The first, as I have said, was when I first visited the Tamil areas and saw the appalling developmental neglect. My vision (and hope) was of people being freed from the stranglehold of Colombo, to develop the area they lived in, which was not short of resources or hardworking, intelligent, and very capable men and women.
As Sinhala political opportunists heaped load upon load of blatantly discriminatory acts on the Tamil people, my vision changed. It was now a vision of an area where people would cease to be second-class citizens, where they could speak their language, where their rich culture could flourish, where their children could get into universities without discrimination, and their people could compete for jobs on a level playing field.
As non-violent Tamil protests were met by Sinhala hoodlum violence, I had a vision that someone would whisper in the ears of the Tamils that non-violent protests do not work against thugs and hooligans and Governments prepared to unleash these hoodlums on peaceful protests. Gandhi-style protests do not work against the likes of Idi Amin, Suharto, Milosovic, or the Sri Lanka Armed Forces. Gandhi would have been blown off the planet by any one of them.
As the Sri Lankan government decided to bomb and shell its own people, I had a vision of someone telling the Sri Lankan government that the Tamils in the North and East were also citizens of the country and that it was not a responsible government that destroyed its own country and people.
As Sinhala soldiers acted like an army of occupation, I had a vision of a North and East where Tamils could live without the fear of having their homes, their properties, their businesses, market places, schools, places of worship and even their hospitals, reduced to rubble and then into dust. A vision of an area where women would feel secure that they would not be raped by every passing Sinhala hoodlum, some in uniform.
I had these visions, but whom does one take them to? Tamil politicians were not interested. With few examples, they could not conceive of a system of government based on regional autonomy. Seats in Parliament seemed adequate, cabinet positions even better.
Tamil politicians and political leaders must take full responsibility for the abysmal plight of the Tamil people from the dawn of Independence. A major problem has been that the Tamil leadership came from the same elitist group which also produced the Sinhala leadership. The Tamil leaders had more in common with Sinhalese leaders than with their own people.
They had the same business and professional interests, they lived with them and socialised with them and had the same class-consciousness of the privileged people whose ‘right’ it was to be where they were. It is abominable that Tamil politicians were prepared to grovel at the feet of Sinhalese politicians and pick up whatever crumbs came their way. The most they ever did was to make fiery speeches which no one took any notice of, or sign a series of Pacts with the Sinhala leaders which one knew from past experience would not be honoured. Yet they went on and on pursuing a useless strategy, an exercise in futility.
What was clearly needed was to stand up to the Sinhala leaders on behalf of their people (the Tamil people) and do something about their fast-disappearing rights. Did they do so? There is no evidence that they did. Gandhi, Nehru, Mandela, and others were prepared to go to jail for their people.
Would the Tamil politicians do the same for their people? Let alone going to jail, when they were asked to sign a document by President Jayawardene which was a contravention of the mandate they had received from the Tamil people at the 1977 Election, they put their tail between their legs and meekly withdrew from parliament, essentially depriving the Tamil people of representation
(not that they were doing much for them anyway in that ‘House of Talk’).
Then came the 1970s and the Tamil militants. What they did was to stand up to the Sinhalese and tell them that enough is enough. This is the contribution that Velupillai Prabakaran and his fellow militants have made. Were it not for the stance they adopted, Tamils would have not been second class citizens but probably third class citizens. They would be sitting, not at the negotiating table but grovelling under it to pick up whatever crumbs fell off it.
Is this an endorsement of all the actions of the LTTE? No, it is not. It is a factually correct statement of what happened. Am I 'pro-LTTE' as the Sinhala racists and, alas, even some Tamils say I am? I am neither pro- nor anti- LTTE. I do not need to be. I am, however, very 'pro-the cause of the Tamil people' to live with dignity, safety and without discrimination. Any individual or any group which supports these long-suffering people will have my support. I hope this clarifies the stance adopted by myself and several other Sinhalese such as Adrian Wijemanne and my uncle the late Edmund Samarakkody (and even some non-Sri Lankans), to Sinhala supremacists and racist bigots who have attacked us over two decades.
It has been claimed that the Tamil Tigers are the cause of the problem. I would argue that they are the result of the problem. The 'problem' is an attempt to make multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious Sri Lanka into a Sinhala-Buddhist nation. If that is the Sinhala objective (and of that, there can be no doubt), then there is no alternative to the establishment of a separate Tamil nation. In one of my recent books 'Self-determination for the Tamils', I said that it is the denial of this fundamental right that has been responsible for some of the bloodiest and most intractable conflicts across the world. Sri Lanka is a glaring example.
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. The time has come for freeing the Tamil areas from Sinhala domination. Liberation of the Tamil people is no longer a vision, it is a reality. A de facto reality but a reality nonetheless. Those who do not know what I am talking about should visit the Vanni and see what is being done and has been done despite every possible obstruction by the Sri Lankan government, the Cease-fire Agreement notwithstanding.
They will see an area where the writ of the Sri Lankan government does not run and has not run for over a decade. They will see an area which has its own army, police force, banks, schools, hospitals, law courts and much more. They will see a degree of efficiency and organisation which could well be exported to the chaotic Sinhala South and its incompetent politicians and bureaucrats wallowing in corruption and waste, Given the horrendous destruction wrought on the Tamil area by the Sri Lanka Armed Forces, the achievement to date has been remarkable.
This will take a quantum leap forward if a de facto state is made a de jure oneThose of us who have not had the courage to stay and support our people (the Tamil people are my people too) through their relentless trauma and suffering in the past two decades must surely have the interest to at least go and see what has been achieved.
It is for the expatriates who have done precious little for the Tamil people to at least generate the necessary international pressure to compel the Sri Lankan government to see sense and not precipitate another blood-bath and inflict another round of destruction on the Tamil people. The world acted against the apartheid policy of the South African government which was very clearly an 'internal problem' of that country. With a degree of hypocrisy that beggars the imagination, it has failed to do so against the blatantly anti-Tamil discriminatory policy of the Sri Lankan (read 'Sinhala') State. Why?
Brian Senewiratne Brisbane, Australia
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