THE FAILED MISSION
The concept of the failed state is one that western political scientists have come up with to refer to those states in which the westerners have failed to impose their economics, politics and culture, due to some reason or other. In that sense it is a failure on the part of the west rather than on those individual states referred to by this obnoxious concept.
Similarly, there have been missions of the west that have failed. One such mission is the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission that has failed miserably to promote and whitewash the LTTE and to implicate the Sri Lankan government for the commencement of any violence. Their latest attempt is to blame the Sri Lankan government for all the violence that has taken place since the "Geneva Talks" failed. They had wanted to say that violence at present is due to the killing of Vigneswaran on April 7, and to imply that he was killed by the government or with the knowledge of the government.
The westerners in general are of the view that the Sinhala Buddhists are responsible for the state of affairs in the country, and that any solution to the so-called national question should address the grievances of the Muslims and Tamils. They even talk of homelands of the Tamils (and the Muslims?) and are concerned of the welfare of those communities. If they have the same concern for the Muslims in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries this world would have been a much better place. Though many pundits may laugh, as far as the west is concerned Theravada Buddhism is a bigger threat than Islam. The latter is after all a theistic religion whereas the former is not. Even Mahayana Buddhism is tolerated by the west as the Bodhisattva concept in that religion could be extended to a theistic version without much difficulty. The western media would highlight the "plight" of the Muslims in Sri Lanka and Thailand, but not that of the Theravada Buddhists in Bangladesh.
The west (including Mahayana Japan) is working on the basic assumptions that there are grievances of the Tamils (and the Muslims) as a result of the hegemony of the Sinhala Buddhists, the Tamils (and the Muslims?) have traditional homelands, the Tamils (and the Muslims?) should be helped to defeat Sinhala Buddhist hegemony, and to overcome the problems, the solution to the so-called problems is devolution of legislative powers and creation of a federal state or a confederation with the eastern and northern provinces amalgamated as one unit, in order to achieve this solution the LTTE has to be helped as long as the latter does not become a nuisance to the west as well, and to support some other leaders in the LTTE if possible or to support another terror group if the LTTE becomes unmanageable. The west wants to devolve legislative powers and create a federal state or a confederation through "peace" talks. If Prabhakaran does not agree to that "solution" the west will most probably attempt to destroy him and find a new leader for the LTTE. If that too fails, the west will bring the UN forces, defeat the LTTE and force the government to devolve legislative power and create a federation or confederation with a different Tamil party in power in the northern and eastern provinces.
What are the Tamil (Muslim) grievances? (It has to be remembered that in the "democratic monarchy" of Britain even Brazilians can get killed for mistaken identity as Muslims! We still do not know how Diana Spencer, the mother of the second heir to the throne after Charles Windsor, died after being more than friendly with a Muslim.) The question I am asking is what are the grievances that a Tamil in Sri Lanka has, merely due to being a Tamil. Have the Tamils got more privileges in the west, where there is no Sinhala Buddhist hegemony, though there are other hegemonies. Even if one assumes that there are grievances, how does devaluation of legislative power become a solution to the "problem"? For how long have the Tamils been residents continuously in the eastern and northern provinces of Sri Lanka? What is meant by the homeland of an ethnic group? Would the so-called grievances be solved by devolving legislative powers to the Tamils (and Muslims) in the so-called homelands? Do the Tamils and Muslims have the same homeland or different homelands? What would happen to the Sinhalas living in the so-called homelands of the Tamils? What would happen to the Tamils (and Muslims) living in the areas not identified by the masters and the mistresses as the homelands of the former? How did the eastern and northern provinces that were demarcated by the British only in 1889, become the homelands of the Tamils (Muslims)? If the British had stuck to their original five provinces with Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa also belonging to the northern province, would the eastern province and the northern province still be called the homelands of the Tamils? How do these arbitrary demarcations lead to historical homelands? Was there a concept of Tamil Homeland in the vocabulary of the Tamil racists before 1976? What is the historical evidence for the so-called historical homelands being called so? If legislative power is devolved to the eastern and northern provinces as a solution to the so-called grievances of the Tamils, would the "problems" of the Tamils living in the other provinces including the western province be solved by such devolution? If not how the west proposes to find a solution to the so-called grievances of the Tamils in those provinces? Or does it mean that only the Tamils in the eastern and northern provinces have "grievances"? (I am tired of referring to the Muslims within brackets). What is the percentage of Tamil Sri Lankans living in the eastern and the northern provinces? Is it less than fifty per cent? What is the percentage of the Tamils living in the eastern and northern provinces with respect to the total population of those two provinces? Is it less than the Tamil Indians living in Tamil Nadu, and the Scots living in Scotland, when similarly calculated? Is the west trying to find a solution to the so-called grievances of the Tamils, or promoting the aspirations of the Tamils that were cultivated under the sponsorship of the British? When did the Tamil grievances first appear in the politics of Sri Lanka? When Ponnambalam Arunachalam and others agitated for separate Tamil representation for the western province in the legislative assembly, did they present it as a solution to a grievance or as an aspiration of the English educated Tamils, especially of the Vellalas?
A federal state is only an aspiration of separatism and not a solution to the so-called grievances. Inspired by the British, Tamils first had the aspiration to rule the entire country from the centre in Colombo with more power to the Tamils. When they failed to realise that particular aspiration they wanted a federation and then a separate state in the northern and the eastern provinces. That aspiration has been interpreted as a solution to the "grievances" that the Tamils have coined with the British. SLMM and Norway have failed in their mission to promote the LTTE, and those who oppose separatism should be watching carefully the developments in the next few months, as the west has not given up its intention of establishing a confederation and an Eelam.
Professor Nalin de Silva
>
>
>