ON SOVEREIGNTY
At the outset let me congratulate the air force in particular and the armed forces and the police in general for giving a send off to the fascist murderer Thamilselvan who pretended to be the leader of a political wing of the LTTE. The LTTE has only one leader and only terror politics and the leader is none other than Prabhakaran himself. My only grudge is that Thamilselvan was not given a send off early. This may be due to two reasons. Firstly the armed forces have access to better intelligence now and secondly that they have a political leadership that does not lean before the so called international community. The humanitarian operations have to be continued until the LTTE is defeated completely. The Sri Lankan armed forces now have more experience than any other armed forces in the world in fighting terrorist outfits, and neither they nor the political leadership have to listen to the "pundits" who proclaim that a terrorist movement cannot be defeated. The Sri Lankan armed forces also have the experience of fighting the JVP. The difference between now and then is the appearances and utterances of Evans and Arbours, which the armed forces missed about twenty years ago.
Incidentally Karuna has been arrested in Britain for allegedly entering that country on forged documents. However, apparently he has a valid visa issued by the British High Commission in Colombo, which means that in the first place Britain had no objection to Karuna entering that country. However, in the meantime an organisation on human rights wants the British government to frame charges against Karuna for at least some of the mass killings in which he took part in. This is an interesting development and the information coming from Britain has to be monitored carefully. There was no request or demand from any one of these watchers to arrest Anton Balasingham or Thamilselvan when they were either living in or visiting Britain. I have no brief for Karuna who was mainly responsible for Atantalawa murders but my complain is that the human rights watchers are not consistent either in their interpretation of human rights or in their watching. However, as we have mentioned sometimes ago consistency depends on what one wants and in that sense, the watchers may not be inconsistent at all.
As we have said on number of occasions there are no human rights but individual rights as against the society or the state. These rights have been evolving during the last five hundred years or so since Europe changed from Catholic Chinthanaya to Greek Judaic Christian (GJC) Chinthanaya. In the Catholic Chinthanaya the whole society dominated over the individual, but in the GJC Chinthanaya the individual began to ascend. In the GJC Chinthanaya the individual in the binary opposition 'individual - society' dominates, the individual is encouraged to seek sensory pleasures and abstract chinthanaya becomes more important than concrete chinthanaya. It is the GJC Chinthanaya that gave rise not only to what is known as modern science, capitalism and nation state but to Protestantism as such. The Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modernism and what some western intellectuals call post modernism are only different stages of one movement that can be called western Christian modernity based on GJC chinthanaya and Judaic Christian culture. The western modernity has one important item in its agenda. It is to propagate and establish its chinthanaya and culture in the entire world imposing its economy and political structures on the others. We call this western Christian colonialism with the three components economic, political and cultural which are not mutually exclusive. This colonialism did not end and no neo colonialism began in the forties and fifties, as some westerners want us to believe. The process continues and as long as western Christian modernity exists there will be western Christian colonialism.
The concepts such as limited sovereignty, responsibility to protect arise as a result of western Christian colonialism that exists. It is not neo colonialism, a concept formulated by the western intellectuals and imitated by their so called counter parts in the rest of the world who know only to repeat and imitate what the westerners do. What are the countries that are subjected to these concepts? Do USA and UK have limited sovereignty? If so who would impose limited sovereignty on them? In general is this so called limited sovereignty imposed on the western countries? Further would UN forces or any other force would be sent to any of these western countries in the name of responsibility to protect individual rights that have been given the more abstract concept human rights, though it is not clear at all who this abstract creature human is.
The defendants of western Christian modernity would say that in the western countries the so called human rights are preserved and thus there is no need to impose limited sovereignty or to send an army in the name of responsibility to protect to the western countries. It is clear that these countries which, those who are happy with echoing their masters' voice would want to call the former colonial countries, have unlimited sovereignty while the so called former colonies have limited sovereignty. Western Christian colonialism has not ended and it could be seen that it operates especially as economic and cultural colonialism.
Those imitators of the western concepts, for some people imitation brings them "dignity", and the supporters of western Christian modernity would want limited sovereignty on those countries that resist western Christian colonialism in one way or another. These so called intellectuals would think of individual rights or human rights as they call them as something more important than sovereignty. They prefer to be under the yoke of western Christian colonialism as they are rewarded for their subservience. Almost all the so called intellectuals do not mind "understanding" the world using the concepts and theories created in the west and hence have a western conception of the world. They are conditioned to think as westerners in the idiom of the latter and in the process become dignified idiots.
The western countries did not have the individual rights in their present form throughout the last five hundred years. These rights evolved and the states know how to give these rights superficially to the individuals without making them effective. For example in England anybody can go to Hyde Park and criticize the government, but what effect it has on the masses. How many people get the opportunity to appear on electronic media or contribute articles to the print media? Even if they appear what is their chance of influencing the others when the hegemonic message given is that of the ruling culture and the chinthanaya. Though a person of the calibre of Noam Chomsky is of the view that there is democracy in USA his ideas are not heard effectively by the vast majority of the population in that country. If democracy is about freedom of speech among others then there is democracy in USA. However if it is about being heard then only people such as Chomsky enjoy democracy, but even they do not have access to democracy if it is all about being heard effectively or being able to influence others. There are stages of democracy and in a sense there is more democracy in Sri Lanka than in the west, simply because state hegemony has not developed in Sri Lanka to the extent that it has developed in the west.
The western countries are not under threat from other countries and thus they can afford to give individual rights to the people under normal circumstances. However, when the state is under threat individual rights are curtailed and the states have mechanisms such as emergency rule to deal with such situations. We could see this happening even today in the west as well, very often without declaring an emergency situation. Incipient national states in the west did not give the individual the rights that have been given now and even in the west a distinction is made between the individual rights of an individual and those of a group of people. When a group of people takes up arms against the state no body would expect the state to give the individual rights to those members of that group.
In the case of the LTTE that has taken up arms against the state the members of the group will not have all the rights the other individuals in the society enjoy. The members of the LTTE, the terrorists in fact, would lose some of the individual rights the moment they challenge the state. No sane person would tell any government in the world to give the same individual rights to an ordinary person who abides by the law of the country and a person who takes up arms against the state. The moment the so called human rights are named individual rights this distinction becomes clear. What the west has done over the years is to hide this distinction in the case of other countries by appealing to the abstract concept of human rights while making that distinction in their countries by other means. It is unfortunate that in curtailing the individual rights of the terrorists sometimes the individual rights of innocents are also curtailed when for some reason or other they become suspects.
When the west helps certain groups to take up arms against states it becomes the "duty" of the west to safeguard the groups. The groups are used by the west very often to dismantle governments not to their liking or governments that do not see eye to eye with the western Christian modernity. In such situation when the individual rights of their pet groups are curtailed the west comes up with the slogan of abstract human rights and try to intervene in the internal politics with concepts such as limited sovereignty which is in any event an asymmetric concept as the west is not subject to limited sovereignty. A reader had tried to compare this situation with that of a husband bashing the wife and the neighbours interfering to "liberate" the wife. However, unfortunately the situations are different as in a household the husband is not the state and the wife an individual. Both are individuals and good neighbourliness would make neighbours to interfere in such matters. However, even in the western Christian culture there is no equivalent of love thy neighbour when it comes to states and citizens.
Professor Nalin de Silva
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