PLAYING BY THE RULES
The Amnesty International (AI) has been out hit wicket. The international organisation that was brought into the vocabulary of the ordinary man by Prince Gunasekera would have been horrified by the turn of events in the West Indies. The AI had wanted Sri Lanka to play by the rules, of course those introduced by none other than the English themselves. In cricket the rules had been created by the English, and the rest including Australians have to follow them, though the International Cricket Conference (ICC), even today dominated by England and Australia, may tinker with some of those rules from time to time. Sri Lanka has been playing cricket with such enthusiasm, we boast of the oldest cricket encounter, the Royal Thomian that had been played continuously from 1880. It is said that even the Harrow Eton cricket match was not played during the war years, but the Sri Lankans were not to be deterred by war or any other calamity.
When AI wanted Sri Lanka to play by the rules it is no wonder that almost all the political parties from the UNP to the JVP were united to protest against the self appointed guardians of the rules. The response of the TNA is not known but if their MPs are approached individually they would also protest against the unruly behaviour of the AI. Even some of the LTTE cadres would want the Sri Lankan team to win the Cricket World Cup, and any demonstration or any other measure that would obstruct the Sri Lankan players would be resented by almost all the Sri Lankans. It is known that when Sri Lanka won the world cup in 1996, even the LTTE sympathisers in the Tamil diaspora celebrated the event.
It is clear that the AI wanted to propagate the myth that the Tamils in Sri Lanka are discriminated against by the so called Sinhala government. The discrimination, perhaps according to them could include so called human rights violations. Some Sri Lankan cricket enthusiasts living abroad were quick to point out that in the Sri Lankan cricket team there are Sinhala Buddhists, Sinhala Catholics, a Tamil Hindu, a Tamil Catholic, and a Moor Islam. They could have included Dilshan who is a descendant of a Malay Islam.
It has to be pointed out that AI is not the only organisation that refers to the human rights violations of the Tamils. The UTHR (J) in their customary press leases had indicated that Tamils are being arrested merely because they are Tamils. They had wanted to find out if the state would have acted in the same manner with respect to the "human rights" if the suspected were Sinhalas. The UTHR (J) cannot mask their bias towards the Tamils, and this is one such occasion when the cat has jumped out of the bag. The UTHR (J) as well as the AI conveniently forget that during 1987 -90 period Sinhala youth were taken into custody merely because they were Sinhalas. When there is an uprising against the state the governments act against those who take up arms against the state, and not against a certain community. It so happens that in the eighties those who took up arms against the state were mainly Sinhala youth and today it is mainly the Tamil youth. Irrespective of whether one agrees with the governments or not that is how they respond to such situations.
Meanwhile Rev. Duleep Chikera has reminded that the Sri Lankan cricket team comprises players from different ethnic communities, and the country should take the cricket team as an example to emulate. Of course the good Bishop does not say this against the AI, but he is mainly concerned with "peace" in the country, and solving the "ethnic problem". In fact what he wants is to say that while the cricket team is engaged in "cricket" the rest of the country, perhaps excluding the Anglican (Lankan) church and a few other organisations, are not playing "cricket". I agree with the Bishop that the rest of the country should follow the example set by the present cricket team. I include the word "present" because as the Bishop would agree in the past the composition of the Sri Lankan (Ceylon) cricket teams was not in the same proportion. While the present cricket team has a representation of different groups roughly in proportion to the national percentages, in the past it was not so. Not only the national team but even the cricket teams of some of the "leading" schools in the country had a bias against the Sinhala Buddhists. It was not only in cricket that the Sinhala Buddhists did not have the correct numbers. In the "leading" schools, University of Ceylon, the professions, public service, not to mention the legislature, to say the Sinhala Buddhists were under represented is an under statement. I do not wish to come out with names but those who are interested can easily find out who dominated cricket in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) then.
The Sinhala Buddhists had from the very beginning wanted a change, and cricket would have been the last thing that they had in mind. The fifty six was essentially a mandate given to make the necessary changes, but the privileged were able to obstruct any steps that were taken in the right direction. They applied the rules of the British and wanted Sri Lankans to play by those rules, and not the rules with which this country had been ruled for thousands of years. It is to the credit of the ordinary Sinhala Christians and Sinhala Catholics that they understood what was happening and did not resist the change in spite of some elite Sinhala Christians and Catholics who wanted to continue to play by the rules of the British governors such as notorious Manning. Unfortunately the ordinary Tamils did not get the message, and they were misled by their so called leaders. The present LTTE is a creation of the Tamil leaders of the past who too were interested playing according to the rules of the British, by discriminating against the Sinhala Buddhists.
If these elite Christian and Tamil leaders had said that it was not cricket to play by the rules of the British, discriminating against the Sinhala Buddhists the bloodshed of the last five decades could have been avoided. Unfortunately it was not so and any step that was taken to remove any discrimination against the Sinhala Buddhists was interpreted as discrimination against the other communities. Recently the self claiming chairman of the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) Tissa Vitharana made use of his so called position as chairman not only to propagate the solutions of a party/person that cannot muster twenty five thousand votes, but to claim that there would not have been a LTTE if not for the discrimination against the Tamils. As a member of the APRC I have proved that this was not the case but it is clear that though he had no answers to my presentation he is all for playing by the rules of the British. I use the words self claiming chairman because he was elected merely to chair the meetings of the APRC, and his is not a position as such. The APRC could have elected chairmen on a rotating basis and it could be said that the chairmen coincided in Tissa Vitharana. If Tissa Vitharana is interested we can organise a public debate on the question of discriminating against the Tamils. In any event he is justifying the existence of the LTTE, and hence he is against defeating the LTTE by means of military operations against it, without removing the so called discriminations. This is the position taken up by India as well as the western countries.
Coming back to the present cricket team not only that there is no discrimination against the Sinhala Buddhists, it is heartening to note that there are many players from non urban areas. This does not mean that I am in agreement with some of their attitudes but one interesting feature that should be noted is that the lingua franca of the team is Sinhala, as it should be, and not English. Though there are still those who play by the rules of the British and who would be against making Sinhala the official language of the country, if left to "natural selection" without imposing British or other conditions, Sinhala would be the official language as well as the lingua franca of the country.
The Sinhalas have played by the rules of the country, but it is the AI and other such organisations that insist that the former should play by the rules of the British. In a sense Sanath Jayasuriya and Muttiah Muralitharan, though they play by the rules of the ICC as far as the game is concerned, are unorthodox, and success of the Sri Lankan team is somewhat due to this unorthodoxy, which most of the Sri Lankans enjoy very much and which the orthodox countries and people would love to hate. We may not be able to have our own game of cricket with our rules, but it is the unorthodoxy that will bring success in the other fields as well.
Professor Nalin de Silva
>
>
>