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We reproduce the following article by Dayan Jayatilleka by courtesty of
the Daily Mirror of 24th
May 2002:
Who’s Afraid of the Thimpu
Principles?
The
Tigers and their fellow-travellers are using the Thimpu
principles as a human shield. The Sinhala hard-liners are
shooting at the human shield and not the foe behind it. By
doing this they are only depicting- or
revealing-themselves as chauvinists and playing into the
hands of the extreme Tamil nationalists. The Thimpu
principles are to do with the assertion of Tamil
nationhood, the territorial claim to the North and East;
the right of self-determination and the rights of the
hill-country Tamil people.
In
and of themselves, I see nothing objectionable in the
Thimpu Principles.
Their recognition certainly does not necessitate or entail
a soft stand on the LTTE, just as decrying them in no way
assists the anti-LTTE struggle. Are the Tamils a nation?
The Tamils fit the social scientific criteria as much or
as little as the Sinhalese. Sri Lanka is a bi-national and
multiethnic country that thinks of itself as a nation
state. Hence the crisis. The existing 'superstructure'
i.e. the state must be reformed so as to correspond to the
'base' i.e. the bi-national and multiethnic character of
the social formation.
But
then again why get into that debate? The fact is that an
effective number of Tamils not only perceive themselves as
a nation, they are willing to kill and to die on the basis
of that belief. If they weren't a nation, they could not
have sustained this protracted struggle. The Sinhalese
ideologues can do head-stands and assert that the Tamils
are not a nation, it does not affect the real situation
one bit. But that in no way means that the Tigers should
be indulged. The Germans were a nation- and indeed they
had been humiliated as one , by the iniquitous Treaty of
Versailles. But when the vanguard of the German nation
became Hitler's fascism, Nazism, then the fact of German
nationhood and Germany's right of self-determination moved
to the back-burner.
What
of the Right of self-determination? The concept derived
from VI Lenin and Woodrow Wilson, in that order. The
recognition of the Tamil nation's right of
self-determination does not mean appeasement of the
Tigers. It is perfectly feasible and logical to recognise
Tamil self-determination and oppose the Tigers - as does
the Indian Left i.e. the CPI-M and CPI, and the residual
Eelam Left, the EPDP and EPRLF (V). But let me illustrate
my point. Each of us adults has an inalienable right to
own and drive a car.
But
if we prove to be homicidal maniacs, hell-bent on hit-and
-run driving, our licences are revoked, and we are clapped
in jail. So it is with the right to self-determination.
As Lenin said so memorably, the right of
self-determination is akin to the right of divorce. No
civilised person can refuse to recognise it, but it does
not mean the advocacy of divorce in the case of each and
every marriage! To extend the Leninist argument, if an
unhappy spouse takes his/her family hostage, kills some of
the kids, threatens to murder the marriage partner and
burn down the house unless the right of divorce is
recognised, then it's no longer a matter of recognising
the right to divorce. It's the time for an 'armed
response'.
Please
note that the LTTE never uses the term 'traditional'
homeland. Though they think in those terms, their
discourse is far more modern and sophisticated than that
of the Sinhala hawks. I have yet to hear a Tiger
spokesperson talk of 2,500 years of Tamil history, while I
have yet to hear a Sinhala ideologue who does not. The
LTTE does not bring religion, be it Hinduism or
Christianity, into its discourse, while the Sinhalese
hawks are incapable of a secular multi-religious
discourse. I haven't yet seen Mr. Prabhakaran in veshti
either, though the key Sinhala spokespersons look like
they've stepped off the Lumbini stage. Somebody should
tell these guys that it isn't in the Sinhala interests to
yell about a plot against the Sinhala-Buddhists by
Christians, Hindus, Jews, Marxists, Muslims or any
permutation or combination thereof, because that's pretty
much the whole world and anyway the only military
assistance we can get is from one of these sources (US,
Russia, India, Israel, Iran, Pakistan).
It's
not as if the Burmese, Thais, Laotians and Kampucheans are
capable of airlifting us equipment when the Tigers launch
their final offensive! No wonder the Tigers are ahead in
the global propaganda war. The problem is not in the idea
of a Tamil homeland. The problem is that the LTTE/TNA idea
of a Tamil homeland incorporates areas that belong to the
Sinhala homeland. If the Tamil nationalists were to limit
their claim to the Northern province and some contiguous
areas at the top of the Eastern province, they would have
a case. Take Mr. Prabhakaran's favourite argument of the
TULF's mandate for secession obtained at the 1977 general
election.
Yes,
it did obtain such a mandate, but there are three problems
with the argument. Firstly, where did they get it from?
Not the whole of the North and East, but from the North, a
bit of the East. Secondly, that mandate is over 25 years
old. A lot has happened since then - including the murder
by Mr. Prabhakaran of the political leaders who obtained
such a mandate.
Thirdly,
if the mandate obtained at an election is quite so holy,
at which election did Mr. Prabhakaran obtain his mandate?
(When, for instance, was he elected the Surya Thevan ?)
The recognition of the right to self- determination in no
way means the endorsement of a separate state. This is
only one of the options. The others are regional or
provincial autonomy within a unitary state (China);
regional autonomy within a state that remains silent on
its unitary or non-unitary character (Britain, South
Africa); quasi-federalism (India);
confederation/independence; independence/no confederation.
The
main theorists of the right of Self-determination always
subordinated it to the overall needs of democracy and
social progress; they refused to absolutise national
rights. Furthermore, they stressed that the exercise of
the right of self determination in this or that form - and
support for that specific form - was conditional upon
time, space, circumstance. It depended on the concrete
situation. The LTTE has traduced and debauched the slogan
of self-determination. The question of the LTTE is no
longer that of self-determination, it is a question of
Fascism.
The
end of the cold war produced two famous conceptual essays,
Francis Fukuyama's 'The End of History,' a brilliant and
erudite neo-Hegelian consideration (by way of Kojeve)
first published in the Atlantic Monthly, and Prof. Samuel
Huntington's piece on 'The Clash of Civilisations,'
originally in the Foreign Affairs Quarterly. Lesser known
but perhaps more relevant and even more prophetic is a
typically lucid essay by the distinguished diplomatic
historian and specialist on the cold war, John Lewis
Gaddis-also writing in the Foreign Affairs Quarterly
(Spring, 1991). Gaddis's thesis is best expressed in his
own words, even at some length:
"…Another
form of competition has been emerging that could be just
as stark and just as pervasive as was the rivalry between
democracy and totalitarianism at the height of the cold
war; it is the contest between forces of integration and
fragmentation in the contemporary international
environment ... There are forces of fragmentation at work
that are resurrecting old barriers between nations and
peoples-and creating new ones-even as others are
tumbling.... The problems we will confront in the post
cold war world are more likely to arise from competing
processes-integration versus fragmentation-than from the
competing ideological visions that dominated the Cold
War….
Fragmentationist
forces have been around much longer than integrationist
forces and now that the cold war is over, they may grow
stronger than at any point in the last half a century. The
forces of fragmentation lurk just beneath the surface, and
it would take little encouragement for them to reassert
themselves, with all the dangers historical experience
suggests would accompany such a development. We need to
maintain a healthy scepticism about integration; there is
no need to turn into some kind of sacred cow. But we also
need to balance that scepticism with a keen sense of how
unhealthy fragmentationist forces can be if allowed free
rein."
Velupillai
Prabhakaran is the world's prime exponent of fragmentation
and ethnic war. The Tigers are the most successful
vanguard organisation of the forces of fragmentation. If
John Lewis Gaddis's thesis is correct, then future
historians will identify Prabhakaran as a father of
fragmentation in the 21st century and Sri Lanka as a
disease vector from which the bacillus of fragmentation
spread. The LTTE may be both symptom and prototype of the
newly emergent global tendency of fragmentation. And it is
that struggle, between the forces of integration and
fragmentation, that is the defining historical trend, just
as the grand ideological contest was in the century past.
If so, Sri Lanka plays the same historical role that Spain
played in the last century-and most so for the South Asian
region.
In the case of Pol Pot the world had the excuse
that it did not know what he was capable of until after he
had won. Prabhakaran though, has been a model of
transparency. Nobody, however, seems to see what is going
down and probably will not until its way too late, with
the Ebola virus of successful armed ethnic secession
having been released into the atmosphere.
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