Buddha’s Savage Peace

Wirepullers: con la morte di Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader strico delle Tigri Tamil ucciso dall'esercito regolare dello Sri Lanka a maggio 2009, sembrava essersi chiusa definitivamente una pagina di guerra, che affonda le proprie radici nell'epoca del colonialismo britannico. Restava il tempo della riconciliazione, come promesso dal presidente dello Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Ma la riconciliazione tra singalesi buddisti e induisti tamil, sull'isola che un tempo si chiamava Ceylon, sembra lontana. A renderla difficile una maggioranza, i singalesi, che vive con le paure tipiche delle minoranze e una minoranza, i tamil, che si comporta da maggioranza, forte della vicinanza di 60 milioni di correligionari che vivono appena oltre lo stretto di Perth, nel sud dell'India. In poche parole, una guerra tra religioni. (3)

After 26 years and 70,000 casualties, Sri Lanka’s civil war has ended—for now. The key to easing the fears of the country’s historically beleaguered Buddhist majority while protecting its Hindu minority? Rediscovering the blend of faiths that laid the foundation for the ancient kingdom of Kandy.

I had always wanted to go to Kandy, for no other reason than that I was in love with the name: so airy, fanciful, and obviously suggestive of sweet things. I first found Kandy on a map of what was then called Ceylon, decades ago as a young man. Little did I know that it would one day have urgent revelations for me, more dark and poignant than sweet.

My journey began at Colombo’s crumbling train station, with its white facade like a cake about to melt. The first-class ticket cost a little more than $3 for the three-hour journey from Sri Lanka’s steamy Indian Ocean capital, through deep forest, to an altitude of 1,650 feet. The rusted railway car rattled and groaned its way uphill. Soon banana leaves were slapping against the train as we entered a relentless tangle of greenery.

The forest thickened with the crazy chaos of dark hardwood foliage. Vines choked every tree. The torrential rain of the southwest monsoon invigorated the pageant, shrieking and beating against the leaves as sheets of mist moved across the jungle. Then came swollen brown rivers, with water buffalo half sunk in mud near the pottery-red banks. Here and there the forest would break to reveal a shiny, rectilinear carpet of paddy fields, only to close in again, denser than before. I saw scrap-iron hutments and tiled rooftops the color of autumn leaves, and smoky blue hillsides creased by waterfalls and half-eaten by gray monsoon clouds. Other breaks in the forest revealed the occasional bell-shaped Buddhist dagoba, or stupa, with its soaring-to-heaven whiteness against the otherwise fungal-green tableau. As we drew near to Kandy, we passed through several narrow tunnels. In the pitch black, the creak of the train reverberated against the rock walls.

Kandy in early evening was a study in rust and mildew, with a crawling-uphill line of food stalls and other storefronts, so tattered and musty they seemed about to disintegrate. Yet that was only a first impression. Later ones would reveal how I had misjudged the scene. The storefronts—eateries, jewelers, mini-supermarkets, five-and-dime shops—were merely in need of new windows and paint jobs; they were in fact doing a brisk business. The streets were clean, the overhead fans worked in every shop I entered, and few beggars were visible. The middle class was evidently thriving, as demonstrated by the number of lavish, assembly-line weddings at my hotel during these auspicious days at the beginning of the monsoon.

A motorized rickshaw brought me to the Hotel Suisse, a seedy, dark-wooded British-colonial pile built in the mid-19th century. It had a well-stocked bar with boxy sofas and a billiard room, and was half empty: a cliché, in other words. My room cost $50. It lay off a portico overlooking a garden and Kandy Lake, which at dusk was tinted a mystical gray and dotted with lizards that crawled out onto the rocks. A thing of rare beauty, the lake was created by the last king of Kandy, Sri Wickrama Rajasinha, at great cost. After a stretch in Colombo’s punishing heat, I sat on the portico, yes, with a gin-and-tonic, and enjoyed the energizing coolness of a higher altitude, watching and listening to the rain on the lake.

Kandy defines quaintness, to such an extent that you begin to see the town in the black-and-white of a photo negative. But Kandy is also gaudy and magical. Within this forest town are Sri Lanka’s principal Buddhist shrines, swimming in gold and Technicolor. Across the lake from the Hotel Suisse is the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, or Sri Dalada Maligawa, a shrine complex that was built in the 17th and 18th centuries by Kandy’s Sinhalese Buddhist kings and holds a tooth of the Buddha—Prince Siddhartha Gautama—said to have been taken from his funeral pyre in 543 B.C.

The Temple of the Tooth is a site of mass pilgrimage, where the tourist instinctively knows to dress modestly, remove shoes, stay quiet, and lurk in the background. Within the mottled stone walls of the complex is an immense layout of gardens lined with striped Buddhist flags: the blue stripe signifying loving-kindness, the yellow the middle path away from extremes, red the blessings of practice, orange the Buddha’s teachings, and white the purity of the dharma, or universal truth, leading to liberation. Hundreds of Sinhalese sit in a two-story room in meditative positions, softly chanting and offering up mountains of pink lotuses, purple waterlilies, and white jasmines in front of the gilded casket that holds the tooth. Babies are everywhere, remarkably silent, held tightly against the chests of women in long cotton wraparounds. Leaf monkeys watch the whole scene from the massive, fanlike roofs.

From this and the other temples and monasteries around Kandy radiates the overwhelming and studied richness of the two chief colors of Buddhism: a rich, maroon-like red and a dazzling gold, painted on stone statues and sumptuously draping the giant sitting Buddha in each temple. The murals in these temples are faded and blackened with age. Only in the Eastern Orthodox churches in the Balkans have I come across a clutter of magnificence to match what I have seen in the Buddhist sanctuaries of Sri Lanka. Even as you experience this whole sensual feast, your bare feet press against cold and wet stone, since the rains are constant during the southwest monsoon.

Here, you are alone with your thoughts. Sri Lanka is in general a less panicky, less frantic, less intrusive version of India. Only rarely are you hassled. And Kandy, up in the hills, away from the crowded coastal highway, is a concentrated version of the country’s charms.

Alas, when you fall in love with a place, you encounter its history, which is often tragic. In fact, Kandy has remained seedily quaint, its monuments and ambience unravaged by mass tourism, only because Sri Lanka has experienced more than a quarter century of civil war between ethnic Sinhalese Buddhists and Hindu Tamils. And the origins and conduct of that savage conflict have drawn, in many ways, from the same emotional wellsprings as the tradition of worship at Kandy’s tranquil Buddhist shrines.

Buddhism holds an exalted place in the half-informed Western mind. Whereas Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism are each associated, in addition to their thought, with a rich material culture and a defended territory, Buddhism, despite its great monuments and architectural tradition throughout the Far East, is somehow considered purer, more abstract, and almost dematerialized: the most peaceful, austere, and uncorrupted of faiths, even as it appeals to the deeply aesthetic among us. Hollywood stars seeking to find themselves—famously Richard Gere—become Buddhists, not, say, orthodox Jews.

Yet Buddhism, as Kandy demonstrates, is deeply materialistic and demands worship of solid objects, in a secure and sacred landscape that has required the protection of a military. There have been Buddhist military kingdoms—notably Kandy’s—just as there have been Christian and Islamic kingdoms of the sword. Buddhism can be, under the right circumstances, a blood-and-soil faith.

Kandy may be the Buddhist world’s best example of this. From the late 16th to the early 19th centuries, the kingdom of Kandy sturdily held out against European invaders: the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the British in their turn. “Like many other armies in peasant and tribal societies,” writes Channa Wickremesekera in Kandy at War: Indigenous Military Resistance to European Expansion in Sri Lanka 1594 to 1818 (2004), “the Kandyan army fought in loosely organized and highly mobile units depending on a flimsy logistical base,” making optimum use of its rugged, jungly terrain. It was very much like a 21st-century guerrilla insurgency, in other words—inspired, in this case, by the need to defend faith and homeland against heathen Europeans. The dense forest through which I had passed on my train ride constituted the graveyard of European attempts to reach Kandy, with many a Portuguese, Hollander, and Briton dying or giving up, exhausted and demoralized, afflicted by disease amid the cruel jungle so well described by Leonard Woolf in his 1913 novel, The Village in the Jungle:

For the rule of the jungle is first fear, and then hunger and thirst. There is fear everywhere: in the silence and in the shrill calls and the wild cries, in the stir of the leaves and the grating of branches, in the gloom, in the startled, slinking, peering beasts.

Eventually, the improved muskets and light artillery developed in Europe proved too much for the Kandyans. The British, explains Wickremesekera, unlike the Portuguese and Dutch, had the added advantages of “mastery over the neighboring Indian subcontinent and an army of over 100,000 soldiers when they clashed with Kandy.” They toppled King Wickrama of Kandy in 1815. He may have dug the lake, but he had been a tyrant and torturer. At least that was how the British rationalized their actions.

Thus the redoubtable kingdom of Kandy, for centuries such a rebuke to European attempts at conquest in Asia, became a trope in the warrior imagination of the Buddhist Sinhalese. To be sure, the quest to recover Kandy’s lost honor and glory played a role in the bloody and morally unclean victory that the Buddhist Sinhalese won over an ethnic Tamil insurgency in May, after 26 years of fighting. More broadly, the history of Kandy—a cultural and artistic repository of 2,300 years of Buddhist worship that the Europeans rarely left in peace—has imbued Sinhalese with the sense of being repeatedly under siege.

Regional demography hasn’t helped. Indeed, the majority-Buddhist Sinhalese, who constitute three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s population of 20 million, have lived in fear of being overwhelmed by the Hindu Tamils, who, although they are only 18 percent of the population, can theoretically call upon their 60 million ethnic and religious compatriots living just across the Palk Strait in southeastern India. The history of Tamil invasions against the only homeland that the Buddhist Sinhalese possess is not just the stuff of ancient history, but a living reality underpinned by latter-day Tamil terrorism. Writes the Sri Lankan scholar K. M. de Silva:

Sri Lanka’s location off the coast of South India, and especially its close proximity to [the Indian state of] Tamilnadu, separated by a shallow and narrow stretch of sea serves to accentuate this sense of a minority status among the Sinhalese. Their own sense of ethnic distinctiveness is identified through religion—Theravada Buddhism—and language—Sinhala. They take pride in the fact that Buddhism thrives in Sri Lanka while it has practically disappeared in its original home, India. Their language, Sinhala, has its roots in classical Indian languages, but it is now a distinctly Sri Lankan language, and one that is not spoken anywhere else.

The Sinhalese, argues de Silva, see their historical destiny in preserving Theravada Buddhism from a Hindu revivalist assault, with southern India the source of these invasions. As they see it, they are a lonely people, with few ethnic compatriots anywhere, who have been pushed to their final sanctuary, the southern two-thirds of Sri Lanka, by the demographic immensity of majority-Hindu India. The history of the repeated European attacks on their sacred city, Kandy, the last independent bastion of the Sinhalese in that southern two-thirds of the island, has only accentuated the sense of loneliness.

The Sinhalese must, therefore, fight for every kilometer of their ethnic homeland, Bradman Weerakoon, an adviser to former Sri Lankan presidents and prime ministers, told me. As a result, like the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, the Jews in Israel, and the Shiites in Iran, the Sinhalese are a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution.

The Hindu Tamils, for their part, have been labeled a minority with a majority complex, owing to the triumph of Hinduism over Buddhism in southern India in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., and the subsequent invasions from India’s south against the rich and thriving Buddhist city-state of Anuradhapura in north-central Sri Lanka. These invasions resulted in the creation, by the 14th century, of a Tamil kingdom that, in turn, helped lay the groundwork for Tamil majorities in the north and east of the island.

Sri Lanka’s post-independence experience, including its civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils, has borne out the worst fears of both communities. The Sinhalese have had to deal with a guerrilla insurgency every bit as vicious and suicidal as the better-known ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tamils, for their part, have had to deal with coercion, discrimination, and the utter failure of Sinhalese government institutions to protect their communal rights. There is nothing crueler than a majority that feels itself a minority.

In 1976, a certain Velupillai Prabhakaran founded the Tamil New Tigers, who would later become known to journalists around the world as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE: “Tamil Tigers” for short. Prabhakaran would develop into one of the world’s most hunted terrorists, as well as one of its most feared and capable guerrilla leaders. The young Prabhakaran had killed animals with a slingshot and air gun, and practiced building homemade bombs. He stuck pins under his nails to build up his tolerance for pain, and killed insects with needles to prepare himself to torture the enemy.

Prabhakaran turned the Tamil Tigers into a quasi-cult terrorist group that venerated him as a demigod. To comprehend the Tamil Tigers, wrote the late American scholar Michael Radu, “imagine Jim Jones’ Temple cult of Guyana in possession of a ‘navy’ and ‘air force,’ as well as (at its height) some 20,000 fanatical and armed zombie followers.” Indeed, Prabhakaran’s Tamil Tigers constituted the world’s first guerrilla insurgency with its own air force (Czech-made Zlin Z143s) and navy (explosive-packed fishing trawlers and a small submarine force). He imposed a blood tax on the population under his control in the north and east, requiring each family to provide a son to the Tigers. One wing of the organization—the Black Tigers—was dedicated to murder and assassination. Until the early 1990s, the Tigers held a record for suicide bombings, a tactic that they had largely pioneered. The Tigers used many tens of thousands of civilians as human shields and children as porters during combat. The very history of the Hindu Tamil Tigers shows that perverse violence, the embedding of warriors amid large numbers of civilians, and the rampant use of suicide bombing are not crimes specific to Muslims.

To defeat such a group, the Buddhist Sinhalese relied on a powerful sense of communal religious identity. This identity has been embodied, in particular, by the current Sri Lankan government of Mahinda Rajapaksa and two of his brothers: the defense secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa; and the president’s most trusted adviser, Basil Rajapaksa. Together, the three brothers have marked a decisive break from previous Sri Lankan governments. Whereas the governments of the Senanayake and Bandaranaike family dynasties hailed from the relatively moderate Colombo-centric elite, the Rajapaksas are more representative of the somewhat xenophobic, semi-literate, and collectivist rural part of the Sinhalese Buddhist population. The Rajapaksas, with the full backing of the Buddhist clergy, have reconstituted something out of the Sinhalese past: an ethnically rooted dynasty, like the Buddhist kingdoms of Kandy of old, dedicated to ethno-national survival, unaccountable to the cabinet and parliament.

Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected in 2005 to win the war outright, and he succeeded in the most brutal fashion: by abducting or killing journalists and lawyers to silence the media, even as he conducted a counterinsurgency campaign that had no moral qualms about the deaths of the thousands of Tamil civilians that the Tamil Tigers were using as human shields. Of the 70,000 people killed in the war since 1983, 10 percent, mainly civilians, were killed in the last few months of fighting in 2009.

I was in Sri Lanka on May 18, 2009, the day the war was declared over, and the body of Prabhakaran, killed in last-ditch fighting, was displayed on television, as government forces mopped up the final few hundred yards of Tamil Tiger territory. The next morning, May 19, I drove through the southern coastal heartland of the Buddhist Sinhalese. Everywhere there were parades and flag-bedecked, horn-honking rickshaw convoys, with young men, many of them unemployed, shouting and setting off masses of firecrackers. An effigy of Prabhakaran’s body was dragged and burned. I sensed a scary and wanton boredom in these young men, as if the same crowds, under different circumstances, could be setting fire to Tamil homes, as had been done in earlier decades. I noticed that the closer I got to the ethnically mixed population center of Colombo, the fewer such demonstrations I saw.

President Rajapaksa came to Kandy a few days later, on May 23, to receive the blessings of the chief Buddhist monks at the Temple of the Tooth for winning the war. He expressed no apologies or remorse for the victims of the war, and he promised the monks, “Our motherland will never be divided [again].” He told them that there were only two types of Sri Lankans, those who love the motherland and those who don’t. Because he conceives of the motherland as primarily Buddhist, his words carried too little magnanimity.

The monks had acquiesced in this descent into communal intolerance. They have long enjoyed the uses of political power and hark back to a past when they were the rousing nationalist force behind Ceylonese kings. Now they could close a long historical chapter that began at the Temple of the Tooth in March 1815, when the Kandyan Convention was signed, ceding all of Ceylon to the British after the defeat of the last Kandyan king, Wickrama. British rule in Ceylon, lasting until independence in 1948, was followed by decades of communal unrest culminating in the civil war. At last, these monks could look forward to a Buddhist-run state that would have full sovereignty over the island.

But even if the artistic grandeur of Kandy has helped form the emotional source of Buddhist nationalism, which has proved itself as bloody as other religious nationalisms, Kandy’s religious monuments also offer a much deeper lesson: the affinity—rather than the hostility—between Buddhism and Hinduism. Buddhism arrived in Sri Lanka from India as part of the missionary activity of the great Mauryan emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C. And later eras of Indian history would witness an amalgamation of Buddhist teachings into Hinduism. A few miles from Kandy, deep in the forest amid glistening fields of tea, I saw statues of the Buddha and of Hindu gods under the same roofs, together in their dusky magnificence: in dark stone vestibules at the 14th-century temples of Gadaladeniya, Lankatilake, and Embekke. At the temple of Embekke, I lifted aside a veiling Hindu tapestry to behold the Buddha. At Lankatilake, I saw the Buddha surrounded on all four sides by devales (shrines) devoted to the deities Upulvan, Saman, Vibhisana, and Skanda—of mixed Hindu, Buddhist, and Persian origin. At the Buddhist shrine of Gadaladeniya, I saw stone carvings based on the style of the Hindu empire of Vijayanagar in Andhra Pradesh, in southern India. Each of these temples “reflects the fusion of Buddhism and Hinduism,” writes SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda in Eloquence in Stone: The Lithic Saga of Sri Lanka (2008).

In fact, Wickrama, the Buddhist king who was deposed by the British, became the last in a dynasty, the Nayakkars, that was South Indian and Hindu in origin; even as its members patronized Theravada Buddhism, they sought Hindu brides for their male Buddhist heirs. The British, by ending this dynasty and thus breaking the link between Buddhism and Hinduism, helped set the stage for the polarization of politics in the postcolonial era. The truth was that Theravada Buddhism, so concentrated on ethics and the release from worldly existence, was too austere for the Kandyan peasantry, who were drawn to the color and magic of the Hindu pantheon. Kandy and its forests are a monument not only to Buddhism, but to Hinduism as well. The historical and aesthetic legacy of Sri Lanka that long predates modern statehood is, in the final analysis, deeply syncretic. Only when Sri Lanka’s political leadership recognizes that legacy will communal peace be at hand—and with it the arrival of globalization and chain hotels, and the end of Kandy’s quaintness.

Autore: Robert D. Kaplan

Fonte: www.theatlantic.com

The Man Who Tamed the Tamil Tigers

Wirepullers: con la morte di Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader strico delle Tigri Tamil ucciso dall'esercito regolare dello Sri Lanka a maggio 2009, sembrava essersi chiusa definitivamente una pagina di guerra, che affonda le proprie radici nell'epoca del colonialismo britannico. Restava il tempo della riconciliazione, come promesso dal presidente dello Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Ma la riconciliazione tra singalesi buddisti e induisti tamil, sull'isola che un tempo si chiamava Ceylon, sembra lontana. A renderla difficile una maggioranza, i singalesi, che vive con le paure tipiche delle minoranze e una minoranza, i tamil, che si comporta da maggioranza, forte della vicinanza di 60 milioni di correligionari che vivono appena oltre lo stretto di Perth, nel sud dell'India. In poche parole, una guerra tra religioni. (2)

Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war between the government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) came to a dramatic end in May with a decisive military victory and the killing of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers' fearsome leader. President Mahinda Rajapaksa is the man who tamed the Tigers. Now his task is to heal a nation still divided by tensions between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils. In a rare, wide-ranging interview, Rajapaksa, 63, talked with TIME's Jyoti Thottam at the President's official compound in Colombo on July 10.

TIME: Prabhakaran had become practically a mythical figure in Sri Lanka. What went through your mind when you heard he had been killed?

Rajapaksa: Thank the Lord. Thank the [Buddhist] Triple Gem. That was a gift. (Read "Prabhakaran: The Life and Death of a Tiger.")

How did he die?

We know that he was shot — that's all. I was not interested in finding out how he was shot, but whoever that was deserved some credit. The most important thing is that he's no more. I would have preferred to bring him here and have a chat with him. I have never seen this man.

What would you have asked him?

Why he did all these mad things. [Laughs.] What else can I ask him?

You came under fairly intense pressure from the U.S. and European governments to call a cease-fire during the final offensives against the Tigers. You resisted that pressure, and yet these are some of your biggest trading partners. Are you worried about jeopardizing those relationships?

I don't think they're so petty-minded. They're the people who encouraged us to defeat terrorism. We followed what [George W.] Bush said. We accomplished what he wanted: eliminate terrorism. They must give credit to us. We fought their war. We showed that you can defeat terrorism.

Some foreign policy analysts saw the last stage of the war as a test case for the idea that the international community has the responsibility to protect civilians caught in a cross fire.

It's my citizens. I am responsible for them. I have to protect them and get them out. If I allow some foreign country to come and do that, they would have killed most of the people. It is my soldiers who will protect my citizens. They are my people, they are my voters ... The international community must help the government if a government is elected properly by the people. (Read "Viewpoint: Obama Failing Sri Lanka Test.")

What if an elected government is acting against its own people?

Are you going to punish [all the] citizens for that or the man who is responsible? Take me. Say that I violated all these human rights, killed people, right? Do you punish me, Mahinda Rajapaksa, or the innocent people of this country by sanctions, embargoes, travel advisories? There are ways of punishing me if you want. There, now by saying that, I will get punished. [Laughs.]

Many people feel that the way you ended the war sets a dangerous precedent — that the cost in terms of human rights, in terms of civilian casualties, was too high.

I reject that totally. There was no violation of human rights. There were no civilian casualties. If I did that, it wouldn't have taken 2½ years to finish this. I would have done this in a few hours. These are all propaganda. (Read "How to Defeat Insurgencies: Sri Lanka's Bad Example.")

The U.N. stands by its number: 7,000 civilian casualties.

Seven thousand? No way. In the eastern province, zero casualties. I won't say there are zero casualties in the north. The LTTE shot some of them when they tried to escape.

There is so much that is not known. Would you be willing to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

We must find out what has happened. The thing is, if you start something, I don't want to dig into the past.

Many people feel that's exactly what Sri Lanka needs, to talk about what happened in the past. There must be a way, that it must not be felt that they will be punished again. Then you will have the north and the south fighting each other again; you can't have that again. I don't want to dig into the past and open up this wound.

Sometimes a wound needs airing to heal.

That is where the West is different from the East.

What is your priority now?

Over 300,000 people are in the IDP [internally-displaced persons] camps. The whole area is mined. We must de-mine the whole area, give basic facilities, water, electricity, roads, resettle them. (Read "The Tigers' Last Days.")

What is your time frame?

We have a 180-day program. That is our plan. In 180 days, we want to settle most of these people.

What would you like to accomplish before the next presidential election [which could be held as early as November]?

At least 50% must be released. I would say 60%.

Is that a promise?

It's not a promise, it's a target.

There is a sense of relief in the country now that the war is over, but there is also some anxiety among Tamils over what happens next.

If you ask the IDPs, they'll say, We want to go back to our villages. If you ask politicians, they'll say, We want this and that. But yes, we need to give a political solution.

Do you believe in some kind of self-governance for the Tamils?

Don't say Tamils. In this country, you can't give separate areas on an ethnic basis, you can't have this. With the provinces, certainly there must be powers, where local matters can be handled by them.

What if the people in the north want a model of governance that's somewhat different from the rest of the country?

That I will not allow. The whole country must have a system. You can't have one system for the north and one for the east.

There are already signs of development — new roads, new bridges — but I've also heard some concern that the roads, for example, instead of connecting Tamil-majority areas to one another, are connecting the Tamil-majority east to the [Sinhala-majority] south, making it easier for people from the south to do businesss there, to move there. Is there some kind of effort to change the demography of the Tamil-majority areas?

No, but it's happening in Colombo. The eastern-province Muslims have come here. The Tamils have come here. You ask them, Why are you coming here? Can I stop them? No. If anybody wants to come and live in any part of this island, it is the right of a man.

The port project at Hambantota — that's a massive new Chinese project.

It's a Sri Lankan project. China helped us. It's a commercial loan. Hambantota is my area, and it had been neglected for so many years. It's my duty, my obligation to develop that area. We must develop not only Colombo, but other districts too.

What do you think China's strategic interest is in this port?

I asked for it. China didn't propose it. It was not a Chinese proposal. The proposal was from us; they gave money. If India said, Yes, we'll give you a port, I will gladly accept. If America says, We will give a fully equipped airport — yes, why not? Unfortunately, they are not offering to us.

Is China becoming more important than India as Sri Lanka's ally?

I don't see that. We are not thinking like that. India is our neighbor, our relation, our friend — we have a special relationship. For a small country like us, for development, you need money, you need assistance. In this world, who can afford to give us money? We can go to China. We can go to Russia or Brazil. Very few countries can afford to give. Japan is helping us a lot. Our biggest development partner is Japan. India is helping us.

The last time I came to Sri Lanka was in January for the funeral of assassinated journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge. The posthumous editorial that his newspaper published was a very emotional piece. It addressed you.

He was a good friend of mine. He had informed somebody to inform me [that he was in danger]. But unfortunately, I didn't get that message. I would have told him to go to the nearest police station. No one knows what happened. (Read "Dying for Journalism: Lasantha Wickrematunge of Sri Lanka.")

He was very sure that it was the government.

He wouldn't have called me if it was a government thing ... I hope we will know the truth. Otherwise, I am getting blackguarded and I am getting the blame.

Autore: Jyoti Thottam

Fonte: www.time.com

Sri Lanka : la réconciliation nécessaire

Wirepullers: con la morte di Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader strico delle Tigri Tamil ucciso dall'esercito regolare dello Sri Lanka a maggio 2009, sembrava essersi chiusa definitivamente una pagina di guerra, che affonda le proprie radici nell'epoca del colonialismo britannico. Restava il tempo della riconciliazione, come promesso dal presidente dello Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Ma la riconciliazione tra singalesi buddisti e induisti tamil, sull'isola che un tempo si chiamava Ceylon, sembra lontana. A renderla difficile una maggioranza, i singalesi, che vive con le paure tipiche delle minoranze e una minoranza, i tamil, che si comporta da maggioranza, forte della vicinanza di 60 milioni di correligionari che vivono appena oltre lo stretto di Perth, nel sud dell'India. In poche parole, una guerra tra religioni. (1)

Le président Mahinda Rajapaksa a remporté en mai dernier une victoire militaire retentissante. Après trois décennies d'effusion de sang, les Tigres de libération de l'Eelam tamoul (LTTE), un mouvement séparatiste qui a multiplié les attentats meurtriers, étaient vaincus. L'offensive finale de l'armée sri-lankaise a fait des milliers de victimes ­civiles, les Tigres ayant pris en otage de nombreux Tamouls dont ils se sont servis comme boucliers humains.

Très critiqué en Occident pour le traitement des Tamouls pendant et après la guerre, le président Rajapaksa réussira-t-il à remporter la bataille de la paix ? Au cours d'une longue interview (publiée dans le Figaro daté de mardi) dans son palais de "Temple trees", à Colombo, le président srilankais s'est employé à dénoncer les critiques dont il est l'objet comme de la "propagande" des Tigres tamouls.

Il y a sans doute dans cette défense une part de vérité. Les Tigres tamouls se sont illustrés par leurs atrocités. Ils disposent de relais parmi les Tamouls exilés en Europe et en Amérique. Mais, sans parler de la discrimination dont fait l'objet la minorité tamoule, le traitement réservé aux organisation humanitaires et aux journalistes soulève, à juste titre me semble-t-il, de vives critiques en Occident.

À l'ONU, le Sri Lanka a échappé à une enquête sur les crimes de guerre demandée par les capitales occidentales, grâce au soutien de pays comme la Chine, l'Inde, le Pakistan, l'Arabie saou­dite et Cuba. Malgré les pressions d'organisations des droits de l'homme, le FMI a accordé un prêt de 2,6 milliards de dollars pour aider le Sri Lanka à se remettre de la guerre.

Comme dans le cas d'autres pays dénoncés par l'Occident, la Chine profite de l'isolement international du Sri Lanka. Pékin est le principal investisseur. Un port en eaux profondes, muni d'installations pétrolières et situé stratégiquement entre le ­Golfe et l'Extrême-Orient, est en train d'être construit à Hamben­tota (sur la côte sud) par les Chinois pour un milliard de dollars. Les Indiens redoutent cette présence chinoise à leur porte.

Malgré la fin de la guerre, l'état d'urgence reste en vigueur et le gouvernement du président Mahinda Rajapaksa continue d'être l'objet de vives critiques en Europe et aux États-Unis. La condamnation, le 31 août, à vingt ans de prison, du journaliste J. S. Tissainayagam, accusé d'avoir critiqué le traitement des Tamouls par l'armée, a soulevé l'indignation internationale.

Depuis lundi, un représentant de l'Unicef est sous le coup d'une décision d'expulsion pour avoir dénoncé le traitement des Tamouls dans les camps de réfugiés.

Au moment où l'Union européenne envisage de sanctionner son pays en mettant fin au régime de préférence généralisés "GSP Plus", le président Rajapaksa voudrait que l'Occident "cesse d'écouter la propagande" des Tamouls et apporte son aide au Sri Lanka.

Il promet des élections pour le début de l'année prochaine. La paix revenue, le président Rajapaksa, qui sera sans doute aisément réélu, ne pourra échapper aux exigences de la population - et notamment de la minorité tamoule - en ­matière de développement et de libertés. Avec la fin de la guerre, la cruauté des uns ne peut plus excuser celle des autres. Pour éviter que le conflit ne renaisse de ces cendres, il serait bon que le président Rjapaksa profite de sa victoire militaire pour tendre la main aux Tamouls.

Autore: Pierre Rousselin

Fonte: www.lefigaro.fr

Sri Lanka: after war, justice

Wirepullers: con la presunta morte di Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader delle Tigri Tamil, sembra che la guerra in Sri Lanka possa volgere finalmente al termine, dopo anni di sangue e stermini. Ma come sempre succede in questi casi, a pagare il prezzo più alto della guerra tra due contendenti è chi sta in mezzo e non ha la possibilità di andare da nessun'altra parte: la popolazione civile.

The long war in Sri Lanka is, it seems, finally at an end. But for many Sri Lankans, even those who have longed for this day - and for whom the last few weeks have been especially intense - it has not ended in the way that we would have wanted. The prolonged siege in the northeast pocket, the shelling, the further loss of life, the vanquishing of the enemy - all this means that the conclusion of this twenty-six-year war is likely to be defined in terms of military victory alone, with no reference to a political solution and the return of democracy. This too is a tragedy.

There is a great responsibility now to make sure that Sri Lanka's future is not defined by the way the war has ended - and that the questions of democracy, justice and accountability are addressed fully in its aftermath. This article is a modest first contribution to that agenda.

The post-war search

There are many ways to view the terrible conflict that has sundered the island since 1983. When the war turned in the 1990s-2000s into a binary battle between the Sri Lankan state and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE / Tamil Tigers), it was ever clearer that for both sides thought and acted solely in terms of the aspirations of states, nationalisms and counter-nationalisms; and that in consequence they regarded the lives of civilians were becoming less and less important. Some of us responded by seeking to establish a position that placed the rights of the individual citizen at the centre of concern.

This outlook had but one result: to see the war as a series of horrendous injustices committed against the citizens of Sri Lanka. This perspective is highly relevant to the war's end: for it suggests that the country and its people cannot - and must not attempt to - recover from the collective trauma without addressing and (where possible) redressing these injustices.

However, there is a good chance that this is precisely what will happen. Soon, the focus will shift to matters of administration, reconstruction, and political "normalisation". The thrust - aided, no doubt, by the decline in international media attention - is the need to "move on", with the implication that progress beyond conflict requires forgetting the past.

This pragmatic view has the merit of warning against imprisonment in the past, which itself is a prime source of conflict. But it is also the case that confronting the past - as seen from the examples of Germany and South Africa, among others - is also an essential part of "moving on", and ensuring that the worst experiences will never again recur. In any event, there is a moral imperative in facing what has been perpetrated and experienced; is it right that (for example) a father who saw his 2-year old daughter blown apart by an army shell, or a mother who saw her infant hacked by the LTTE, be told that what happened to them should now be forgotten as the nation needs to "move on"? And could such an attitude, if institutionalised, create the foundation for a peaceful future?

There are thus compelling moral and practical reasons why Sri Lanka should frame what has happened in terms of the wholesale injustices done to its people, and to face them openly in a shared, collective process.

Here, however, a problem arises. Where to look for redress: international war-crime tribunals, local post-war mechanisms, truth commissions...? The fact that the war has ended via the military defeat of the LTTE, it is likely that the primary focus now will be on the crimes of this group. There must proper legal process in this respect: everyone, including the leaders of the LTTE, is entitled to a fair trial (indeed, fair trials are a crucial mechanism of recognition and redress). But the military conclusion to the war means that it is the government side that will pose the greater problem. The members of victorious armies are hardly ever prosecuted for war crimes. This makes it likely that the crimes committed by the Sri Lankan state will now be forgotten, and necessary that a process is established to ensure that they are not.

Two paths to justice

In order to create a sound starting-point for such a process, it may be worth learning from two developments elsewhere in the world.

The first is the attempt by the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute Omar al-Bashir, the president of Sudan, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Sudanese government forces in Darfur (see Martin Shaw, "Sudan, the ICC and genocide: a fateful decision", 11 March 2009).

The fact that Omar al-Bashir is the first sitting president to be charged by the ICC makes the case interesting and relevant. Yet he remains free, and able with impunity to travel to selected countries (such as other member-states of the African Union). In his own way he is presenting a defence - but in the international media rather than in court (see Zeinab Badawi, Hardtalk/BBC interview, 14 May 2009).

The arguments of Sudan's president are not dissimilar to those put forth by the Sri Lankan government when it too is accused by western governments of human-rights violations and war crimes. Colombo's response focuses on the issue of sovereignty (the state has a right to territorial control and to defend itself from internal rebellion) and seeks to shift the blame (it is the rebels who have used terrorist tactics, used civilians as human shields, and employed child-soldiers). Yet the very fact that an effort to prosecute al-Bashir exists and that he feels the need to justify himself are positive trends in the evolution of international justice.

The second international development is the decision of Barack Obama's administration to release the memos written by officials within the United States department of justice during George W Bush's period in office, providing brutal interrogation techniques (that is, torture) with legal sanction. The publication of the "torture memos" was immediately followed by calls for prosecutions of their authors - which President Obama initially resisted, only to relent under pressure. There are legal and other hurdles still to be overcome, but an acknowledgement has been made that prosecutions are at least a possibility.

The US's overall relationship with international law (particularly the ICC) has in recent years been ambiguous at best and abrasive at worst. It is plausible to see the pressure being exerted on the Obama administration as coming lessfrom any reverence for international law and more from a particular democratic tradition within the US. The principle argument seems to be (in Philip Gourevitch's words) "...what all this [the use of torture] has done to who we are?" Amy Davidson echoes the point in outlining the "one defense...against the charge that we are a nation of torturers", namely "our common, native outrage at these crimes."

The next journey

If it is difficult to see how these two processes will unfold in the weeks and months ahead, it is easier to recognise the different traditions that seem to be driving them. The momentum of the first - from the Nuremberg trials to the Rome statute which set up the ICC - is the desire to extend the scope of international justice, to refine international responses to war crimes, and to establish international jurisdictions. The momentum of the second is more an appeal to a particular internal tradition of right conduct appropriate to American ideals.

These parallel processes offer an interesting sidelight on how Sri Lanka might deal with the painful injustices of its long war. On one side, appeals are already being made for international investigations into war crimes in the country; on the other, the question arises as to whether the society as a whole can summon a collective sense of "native outrage" over the crimes of the last three decades.

Can Sri Lankans now find something within ourselves - a shared set of internal resources and traditions - as a basis for examining the crimes committed by Sri Lankans against Sri Lankans in Sri Lanka? Or has the effect of this devastating and divisive war been to destroy even the possibility of a single, collective moral voice? The answer to these questions will help to shape Sri Lanka's post-war journey.

Autore: Luther Uthayakumaran
Fonte: www.opendemocracy.net

Wirepullers consiglia l'articolo di Arundhati Roy pubblicato da Internazionale Nr. 789, 3/9 aprile 2009, "Il silenzio sulla tragedia dei tamil".