by Dayan Jayatilleka, [source not recorded], October 17, 2004
sangam.org/articles/view2/622.html
The Sangam makes no endorsement in the American election campaign. This is an interesting article speculating on the implications of one outcome of the election. Jayatilleka is a voice crying in the wilderness for a a non-sectarian, pluralistic, federal state on the island. If that were possible in a real sense there would be no need for war. Why did the current president’s father not stick to his Pact with Chelvanayagam in the 1950s creating such a state? Because to win elections in Sri Lanka one must be a Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist. — Editor
” Friends, the high road may be harder but it leads to a better place.” – John Kerry (Acceptance speech, Democratic Convention 2004)
While every rational, moderate and progressive minded person the world over hopes John Kerry will beat George Bush, invader of independent Iraq, Sinhala hardliners already denounced him some months ago for allegedly supporting the LTTE (Sunday Island, Aug 1). This man is possibly the next leader of the most powerful nation in history, and if indeed he has been soft on the Tigers it is prudent to meditate on the reality of the emerging situation:
(1) Under a Kerry administration, the post Cold War global leadership of the US will be reasserted and will reach its zenith, through the rebuilding of alliances, the practice of multilateralism, the refocusing of ‘hard power’ and the revitalizing of ‘soft power’.
(2) A Democratic administration is far likelier than a Republican one, to be permeable to liberal, humanitarian, civil society, Asian American and minority rights lobbies.
(3) Historic, ideological and personal ties make for closer convergence between Washington and Delhi under Democratic and Congress administrations.
(4) The Sinhala paradigm of a non-secular unitary state, as distinct from a united Sri Lanka, will have no takers, and will be unsustainable. If the Lankan crisis has a Yugoslav outcome, it is likelier under a liberal Democratic US administration.
(5) Kerry is set to shift back to an anti-terrorist line, post 9/11, pre-Iraq, which can be made to work for the Sri Lankan state rather than the LTTE, if we use the security argument, delete ‘unitary’, and reform the state.
The Tigers’ South African connection gives the LTTE a bridge to Black Congressmen in the US, who will have an enhanced say in a Kerry Administration.
There is no way the Sinhalese can maintain a non-secular unitary state in a conflicted, multiethnic and multi religious society, on a small, economically dependent island, in the 21st century and the moment of liberal-democratic American hegemony.
A Democratic victory will make the world a safer place while enabling the USA to get back on the track of a focussed war on terror, with a multilateral approach. Historically India’s Congress party has been more comfortable with the Democrats, and Washington and Delhi will draw still closer than they are today. Lakshman Kadirgamar and Jayantha Dhanapala have good relations with the US Democrats and their supportive liberal intelligentsia, though one trusts that these will be used in a manner quite distinct from that in which Ranil used his contacts with the Republicans – for special pleading for the Tigers and an appeasement approach!
Thus as this year closes, Colombo could insert itself into a closely congruent equation between Washington and New Delhi. The biggest losers would be the ‘local Republicans’ Ranil & Co, and potentially the Tigers, but the Sinhalese must know that there is a price to be paid.
The US Democrats are infinitely more concerned with minority rights, multiculturalism, secularism and federalism than the Republicans, and will push for liberal reforms along those lines in a way that the Bush administration did not. Democrats are into ‘humanitarian intervention’: the break-up of Yugoslavia took place under a Democratic administration. The Sinhalese have some soul searching to do and hard choices to make. Who is the main enemy: Prabhakaran or Tamil nationalism? What is the main danger and which the lesser evil: Tamil autonomy or the ISGA; federalism or Tamil Eelam?
Under JR Jayewardene we could not benefit from a closer relationship with Washington because we had antagonized Delhi, and Washington would never help us against India. We swung around under pressure and signed the Accord, but India alone could not help us against the LTTE and JVP, because the Cold War wasn’t over and the US, which was about to win, merely watched from the sidelines as the Accord unraveled. Today Sri Lanka can manage her crisis by using the US-India relationship. Unilateralism did not help India in Sri Lanka any more than it has done the US in Iraq. Only an Indo-US condominium on Sri Lanka can generate enough leverage to crack our crisis. However, if the Sinhalese display a Serbian profile and discourse, the emerging constellation of a Democrat victory, the Congress government and a strengthened US-India axis can help Prabhakaran more than it does us!
Sri Lanka’s great disadvantage is that though a legitimate state, the formation that poses a threat to it – the LTTE – has a far more extensive global network. Even the best researchers and analysts focus on the Tamil Diaspora, oblivious to the fact that this Diaspora is compatible and interface with two far larger cultural hinterlands or zones of potential support. The first is linguistic: that of Tamil speakers the world over, from Singapore to South Africa (the LTTE’s breakthrough to the ANC is worth a dissertation), the second, religious: Hindu co-religionists. (Since there are more Sinhala Christians than Tamil, and no Sinhala Hindus, the Hindu factor bulks larger than does the Christian). This is evident in the social behavior of expatriate Sri Lankan (Eelam?) Tamils who interact most consistently and overlap readily with Tamilian (South Indian) and Hindu expatriate communities.
The LTTE’s international support must be seen in the form of these concentric circles. It is by no means true that all or most Tamil speakers and/or Hindus worldwide are in sympathy with the Tigers: the truth is probably the contrary. But the compatibility and connections with these communities give the LTTE a cocoon within global society, a bridge to important segments of the international community, and vital contacts for its global logistics network.
By contrast the majority of Sri Lankans cannot count on any axiomatic or ready relationships. It is not a matter of being a small island in the Third World. Cuba is one, but the Spanish language gives her a bridge to Latin America, African blood links her with Black Africa, and even the Catholic background enables her (the Papal visit of 1998) puncture the US blockade. The majority of Sri Lankans do not have linguistic links with the world outside (except of course with other Sinhalese overseas) or readily accessible communities of co-religionists. This would not have been an insuperable obstacle if our country had wisely invested its social capital i.e. if the question of the minorities, ethnic, linguistic, religious, had been properly handled. The Tamils (both Northeastern and Hill country), Muslims, Burghers and Christians could have been the bridges and beachheads of Sri Lanka’s interaction with the world. But it is precisely those cultural “externalities” that made the majoritarians regard the minorities as alien.
How then did the Bandaranaike administrations, which enacted discriminatory domestic policies, also have so successful a foreign policy? The answer is twofold: the existence of world socialism, the US-Sino-Soviet competition for Asia, the Non-aligned Movement, all formed the tides we surfed. They are gone, never to return. Secondly the state, the system, still had the personalities and profile, the standards and quality human resources that permitted successful external presence and projection. The policies of the Bandaranaike administrations would produce their consequences decades later. We live downstream from those socially toxic policies that were released into
the Sri Lankan body politic. Today we are almost at the terminus of that “ecological” process.
As the base, the substructure, of Sinhala-Buddhist rural society erupts and incrementally captures the Sri Lankan State through its organic vanguard the JVP (its advance registered in absolute and relative electoral terms), the greater the lack of commonality, the greater the gap, between the world and us. There are two ‘geological’ almost ‘tectonic’ shifts underway: from bottom up, as manifested in the JVP’s surge; and the resultant, the drift which distances Sri Lanka from the rest of the world. As Sri Lanka reconfigures to look more and more like its base rather than its totality, as the organic vanguard of its utterly unique (and therefore isolated) inner cultural core dictates overall strategic direction, as its values become increasingly hegemonic in society and State, the less there is in common (in ideology, culture and values) between us and the world; the less the
world recognizes when it looks at us.
This mutual alienation is vastly accelerated and enhanced because we live in what President Clinton defines as “the global information age”, and whatever the spin put on it in translation, the JVP’s hardline on Tamil autonomy, communicated globally, is dangerous fanaticism (if not gibberish) to anyone who isn’t a like-minded Sinhalese! In the information age, the international mass media are the medium we exist in, the mirror that reflects us, the mould of our destinies.
Fatally, this trend of ideological, paradigmatic and philosophical isolationism takes place just as the LTTE is widening its reach and embedding itself in electoral democracies from Canada to South Africa, from Britain to Australia, socially enabled by its Tamil language, Hindu and Christian components. Sri Lanka is a former British colony, outside the Indo-Pak nuclear equation and Afghan-Pakistani ‘Jihadi’ turf, so the US is far likelier to take on board her staunchest ally Britain’s inputs concerning our island, come crunch time. Since ’56, Britain has felt guilty about the unitary settlement it was persuaded by DS Senanayake to install in ’47 ignoring Tamil warnings and entreaties. As the processes unleashed by ’56 come to fruition with the Second ’56 that is unfolding, and collides with its Tamil ‘Other’, Britain could be moved to compensate with accumulated interest for that ’47 settlement by helping undo it, and could tilt the views of Washington.
That is the real challenge for our foreign policy. Coping with (a) a structural problem: a demography that provides little axiomatic purchase on the world and (b) a process, a political, ideological and socio-cultural ‘power shift’ that can culminate in the world system drifting away from us, or worse, being alienated and repelled, effecting triage on the Southern two thirds of the island, the Sinhala nation. Those who fantasise that India or China will afford us alternative patronage must be reminded that its fellow Slavic identity notwithstanding (the kind of affinity we have with none) Moscow pulled the plug on Milosevic’s Serbia.
In the 1980s our ethnic problem not only became externalised, it became internalized within other countries, most notably India, with the exodus into Tamil Nadu, but also the West, with the flow of refugees. The outside world had – and continues to have – a legitimate reason to concern itself with how we manage our affairs. In a new turn of the spiral, the international community, with its diplomatic, donor/developmental and conflict resolution/humanitarian arms, has now become internalised within Sri Lanka, and constitutes a powerful pressure group. This is an irreversible reality, or reversible only by a JVP or JHU type regime at horrendous economic cost. The challenge is to manage the new dynamics, not entertain xenophobic fantasies of reversing them. The problem is that today there is more international pressure on us – more nudging of us – than there is of the LTTE! This is a cruel irony because given their record at least since 1987, and the world system’s allergy to tyrants and suicide bombing terrorists since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the Tigers should be occupying the moral low ground and the Lankan state – democratic and accountable – should be in possession of the moral high ground.
The Tigers have made their case globally, making significant new politico-diplomatic breakthroughs as in South Africa with the ANC. For them the struggle is global, from weapons procurement to fundraising to propaganda. For us it is neither a struggle nor is it truly global in scale and scope, mobility and outreach. If the problem is international (“jathyaanthara”), the solution cannot be national (“jathika”) – however many times one uses the latter as adjective or incantation in policy prescriptions! If the problem is international so too must be response and solution. It is a global contestation. It requires the construction of a global united front.
This means a settlement of the ethnic issue that is a compromise between Sri Lankan needs and international compulsions, and can be communicated internationally, not only to audiences of monolingual Sinhalese. It means combating the Tigers in a language that the world can comprehend. It means exposing, explaining, convincing and persuading world opinion. It means regarding the world, especially the global media which creates the public opinion that governments are sensitive to, as a single arena and fighting that war with ideas, arguments – in sum, a discourse – that the world can identify and empathize with more closely than it can those of the Tigers.
“Think globally, act locally”, goes the slogan. We Sri Lankans tend to “think locally, act locally”, or “think locally, act globally”. But we must convert (ethically, of course) to globalize in our outlook; globalize our thinking. We must think globally, act globally. We are in a historical period that is simultaneously post Cold War and post 9/11, interweaving the dynamics of both periods. In the post Cold War reality with only one superpower, the US, one system, the world capitalist system, and one economy, the world capitalist economy (Cuba is sui generic), we can only make marginal gains, reap marginal benefits. We must however, strive for the accumulation of marginal gains. Many marginal gains on the widest canvas (reaching out for instance to Latin America and Africa) can yield a significant cumulative advantage.
“The age of ideology” has been replaced by “the age of identity” (as Mervyn de Silva put it). Sri Lanka’s majority, its political leadership (elite and counter-elite) and intelligentsia, have not understood the implications: the enhanced intellectual legitimacy and power of Tamil claims for federalism, regional autonomy, and internal self-determination. The boundaries of the nation state are no longer sacrosanct (eg Yugoslavia). But the God of History (Stalin’s phrase) is merciful, and this is also the post-9/11 conjuncture. So while the nation-state is not sacrosanct, there is a recrudescence of the State, as machine, as apparatus – against terrorism. We must ride the new winds and waves of history, which bear two big ideas: “the war on terrorism”, and “a secular, federal democracy”.
It is almost too late for us to realize that internationalism is not a luxury but an imperative, which cannot be an intermittent gesture, but a permanent posture and relentless practice. “Internationalism isn’t just a necessity. It’s a condition for survival.” (Fidel Castro: 1977)