Make Up Your Mind Forthwith to Let the Tamils Go
by V. Navaratnam, Daily Mirror, Colombo, October 7 and 8, 2004
sangam.org/articles/view2/594.html
People used to cite the trio: Professor G. L. Peiris, President Bill Clinton, and Premier Bob Rae, all contemporary Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, as examples for high level of intellectual calibre among national leaders. It was at Oxford that former Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike imbibed ideas about the usefulness of a federal system of government for countries like Ceylon long before Bob Rae.
V. Navaratnam. Photo courtesy of TamilNet October 2005
Soon after his return from Oxford Bandaranaike wrote a couple of articles in the Independent, a popular newspaper in the 1920s, advocating that federalism is an ideal system of government for bilingual Ceylon. His baby daughter, the future President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaranatunga, must have been romping about in his spacious gardens when I was seated in the conference room of his Horagolla residence as a member of the Chelvanayakam team and confronting Mr. Bandaranaike with his Independent newspaper articles which I had preserved from my student days at Ananda College, Colombo. This was in 1957 when the Bandaranaike – Chelvanayakam Pact was signed.
The story of the signing of the Pact may be of some interest to the present younger generation of leaders as an object lesson in how leaders in the past led in national affairs. I had better recapitulate it by quoting a passage from my book, The Fall and Rise of the Tamil Nation, published in Canada ten years ago.
The Pact was finalized at a conference of Mr. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and his Ministers on the one side and Mr. S. J. V. Chelvanayakam and his team of Federal Party leaders on the other held at the Prime Minister’s Office in the then Senate Building.
This is what I wrote 10 years ago when things were fresh in my mind:
“The conference drew to a close about 2 o’clock in the morning (of 27.7.1957). I had taken down full notes of the terms as each point was agreed to. The Prime Minister ordered the waiting Press to be let in. Representatives of the local as well as the world Press trooped into the room. As their cameras and flashlights clicked, the Prime Minister announced the terms of the agreement from my notes.
“S.J.V. Chelvanayakam announced that in view of the agreement he was withdrawing the Federal Party’s campaign against the Government.
“I went with Chelvanayakam to his residence when the conference was over. He knew that I was not happy. It was obvious that he was not either. He looked very grave, and would not utter a word of comment. I voiced my misgivings, and remarked that whatever the agreement was worth, we did not even have a document to vouch for what either side has agreed to. We shall have to rely solely on newspaper correspondents’ reports. He looked bewildered and stared at me.
“He then recovered his composure and said that he would make an appointment with the Prime Minister that day itself and get a record embodying the terms of the agreement signed by him. He asked me to take a little rest and prepare the document in duplicate. Chelvanayakam took the document to the Prime Minister’s Office at noon and got it signed by both parties. He told me on his return that Phillip Gunawardene was with the Prime Minister when he called, and that the document was read over by Gunawardene before the Prime Minister and he (Chelvanayakam) signed it. This Agreement came to be known as the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957.”
This was the document which the Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike tore up at the urging of a group of Buddhist monks in February 1958, thus abrogating the Pact in response to the agitation by J. R. Jayewardene of the U.N.P., but under the pretext that A. Amirthalingam, MP for Vaddukoddai, had violated it by starting the anti-Sri campaign.
Immediately, following the signing of the pact I wrote a little booklet of some 60 or 75 pages and issued it as a Federal Party publication explaining the position of the Tamils and what made the Federal Party under Mr. Chelvanayakam’s leadership have talks with Mr. S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike and his Government and enter into the B-C Pact. Let nobody mistake me as claiming to be a prophet when I say that, surprisingly, I gave the name “Ceylon Faces Crisis” as the title of that little booklet at that time. That indeed is precisely what Sinhalese politicians have since made Ceylon to go through, the climax of which is what we are witnessing now. The climax is so world-pervading that it has persuaded Mr. Bob Rae to undertake a long journey from Canada to Ceylon to urge the Tamils and the Sinhalese to sit round a table and talk about the benefits of federalism and adopt it. Did Mr. Rae undertake the journey on his own, or was he coaxed into it by some states of the international community trying to hide behind him?
No less than 57 years have elapsed since Mr. D. S. Senanayake of the UNP successfully persuaded Whitehall to act on the basis that what the Colebrook Commission did in 1833 was to politically unite the territories of the three kingdoms Britain had captured in Ceylon in three separate wars at different times (and not an administrative unification, as it really was) and to deliver the united island country of Ceylon solely into his palms, that is, into the hands of the Sinhalese. During that 57-year period the Tamils have been treated as if they are a subject people militarily defeated and conquered by the Sinhalese. Under the tyrannical rule of the Sinhalese for half a century and more, the Tamils have been crying hoarse, protesting against the Sinhalese misuse of power and demanding that the pattern of government be changed to a federal system under which the Tamils could look after and manage their own affairs in their own traditional homeland territory.
In a desperate show of protest and resistance to the Sinhalese tyranny, they organized mass demonstrations, marches, Gandhian-style Satyagraha movements, etc., all peaceful and non-violent, of course. The only response in answer from the Sinhalese governments, whether run by the UNP or by its rival SLFP, was always arrests, imprisonment in prisons and military detention camps, massacres and indiscriminate killings, pogroms, genocides, and what not.
All the while the world at large and the so-called international community deliberately kept their eyes and ears securely closed. Not a single country had the will to raise a voice of protest against the Sinhalese government’s treatment of the Tamils and their abuse of power in Ceylon — until, of course, Velupillai Prabhakaran appeared on the scene with his LTTE Army. Only now the international community have got astir; even so, it is no more than admonitions in the form of paternal advice to Prabhakaran: do only this, and not that; only this is acceptable, and not that; and so on.
What shall we say of India, as much a British-made union of conquered states and kingdoms as Ceylon was, which agreed to the partition of its eastern part to become the independent state of Bangladesh and its western part to separate and become Pakistan, but now sanctimoniously is demanding that the unity and territorial integrity of Ceylon should never be tampered with under any circumstances and should be preserved for all time! What shall we say of the United States of America, which came into being after the 13 colonies of Britain fought a fratricidal war against their mother country, sundering the umbilical chord of racial unity and historical ethnic integrity, now branding the liberation movement of the Tamils, the LTTE, as a terrorist organization and warning Prabhakaran to respect the political unity and the territorial integrity of far away Ceylon! How can Ambassador Cofer Black forget that it is his country which made the killing of U.S.A.’s Presidents, Vice-Presidents and Commanders-in-Chief into a perpetual cult of terrorism? After all, what is war if it is not expanded terrorism? Ask the Japanese, they will tell you all about terrorism going nuclear.
I am only too well aware that reason, logic, morality, virtue, altruism and the like have no place in statecraft and international diplomacy, much less in modern political strategies (thanks to Machiavelli and Kautilya). Nonetheless, it is not unusual that more often than not hypocrisy is the order of the day in politics, national as well as international. The more and more I think about it, the more convinced I become of the wisdom behind what a Canadian Federal Court Judge said to me when I was in the witness box in a court case before him in Toronto. “After all,” His Lordship said, “we live in this world, Sir, we don’t live by theories.” This was a rejoinder to my statement in my testimony that all the Governments in Ceylon which got themselves returned to office after June 1972 were illegitimate and violative of the laws and the established Constitution of Ceylon, and explained to His Lordship why.
What is the provocation for my saying all this now? There is of late a plethora of media articles and comments on the ongoing stalemate in the so-called peace process. The purport of almost all of them is well-orchestrated pressure on the LTTE and President Chandrika Kumaratunga to sit round a table and have talks.
But, talks about what? What is there now to talk about and discuss which has not been discussed threadbare by generations of Sinhalese and Tamil leaders? Have not the Tamils talked, talked, and talked enough during the last half a century and more with every Sinhalese Prime Minister and President clothed with totalitarian power? Each set of “talks” resulted in “pacts” supposed to meet Tamil aspirations. A self-governing federal Tamil state shrank down to regional council. Then regional council shrank down to district council. In time district council shrank down to village committees bundled into provincial councils. The Tamils saw none of these things. It has always been a case of the Tamils climbing down and down in their aspirations for the sake of compromise and racial harmony every time “talks” are held and the Sinhalese reneging on every one of them after getting the Tamils to commit themselves in signed “pacts.”
Continued from Thursday (07.10.2004)
So, what more is there to talk about? In a pretense of implementing the 1965 “Pact,” the Dudley Senanayake Government tabled in Parliament a White Paper in 1968 containing proposals for the district councils promised in the “Pact;” and it came up for debate. In the observance of Parliamentary decorum you don’t see prime ministers and senior ministers descending to the practice of heckling. When I spoke in the debate I was forced to recount the half a century history of Sinhalese leaders entering into solemn agreements and pacts with the Tamils and then reneging on their plighted word and refusing to honour them. I said that this White Paper before the House was an insult to the Tamils. I exposed the fraud and deceit underlying the White Paper proposals. My speech must have been so stinging as to hurt their pride that the Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake, his Deputy J. R. Jayewardene, R. G. Senanayake, and who else I cannot recall, kept on heckling me at every turn.
It was then that I concluded my speech with a spirited call to the Tamil youth to wake up and fight for the achievement of a self-governing Tamil state which Prabhakaran and a band of boys and girls took up earnestly. That Mr. Dudley Senanayake later took back the White Paper, provoking Amirthalingam to shout “coward” at the Prime Minister, is history.
History teaches the Tamils only one lesson: that no leadership is ever likely to emerge among the Sinhalese majority which will have the wisdom and courage to undo what Colvin R. de Silva boasted of as Colebrook’s “Re-unification” of Ceylon, or to provide unselfish public service for the welfare of the nation. The leaders of all the Sinhalese political parties are only after personal power and are least interested in the country or its people. In the race for this power, the Tamils are being conveniently used as scapegoats. He or she who can inflict the greatest harm to weaken the Tamils succeeds most in getting that power. Why don’t the Sinhalese people and their media realize that it is this situation which produced a Velupillai Prabhakaran and spawned the LTTE movement and Army? Or do they think that close upon 18,000 young men and women, the flower of the Tamil race, laid down their precious lives at the raise of his hand and some 150,000 Tamil civilians got killed for nothing, but only to let leaders like President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, the JVP, the Hela Urumaya, play war games by the use of the equally precious lives of the misguided Sinhalese rural youth?
Today, on what appears to be the eve of the Tamils regaining their long lost freedom, one wonders why the country is being inundated with a spate of media writings and platform utterances from all quarters on the Sinhalese side – university professors, academics, leaders of political parties, individuals in the learned professions – all waxing eloquent about the pros and cons of the different constitutional patterns suitable for the governance of Ceylon, taking the Tamil-Sinhalese problem to square one, as if the 57 years from 1947 to 2004 did not exist and the sun had stopped still without rising after the British handed over Ceylon to the Sinhalese.
There is only one remedy for the ongoing trauma that afflicts present day Ceylon. It is time that the Sinhalese side make up their mind forthwith to Let the Tamils Go. To let the Tamils go does not mean that the Tamils will slice off and take away the North-East part of the Island and drop it in the Akasha Ganga where it will be ruled by the Tamils as their Tamil Eelam. No, Sir, Ceylon will still continue to be the whole island it has always been from the beginning of time, only the Tamils will inhabit and administer self-rule in their well-defined North-East part of Ceylon, while the Sinhalese do likewise in the rest of Ceylon. Treaties will provide for common defence against external aggression, coordinated foreign policy, international travel, trade and commerce, and like matters of common interest. Experts on both sides can be trusted to formulate workable treaties and protocols. The late President Ranasinghe Premadasa, a truly patriotic Sinhalese lover of Ceylon and a genuine friend of the Tamils, once asked me: “Nava, I understand your concerns, but what is the economy which will make your Tamil state viable so as to survive in this modern world of cut-throat competition?” I told him to remember that two-thirds of the coastline and the seas that surround Ceylon are Tamil territory with some of the best seaports in the Indian Ocean region. Does he not think that the Tamil part of Ceylon is better blessed by nature than the tiny little independent state of Singapore which is able to hold its own against the covetous eyes of its neighbours and world powers?
The LTTE would appear to have foreseen what is happening today that opponents of the Tamil state would rouse up minorities to oppose, which is probably why they included Clause 8 in their Interim Self-Governing Authority proposals reproducing almost verbatim Article 29 (2) of the British given 1948 Constitution as safeguard for minorities. In Britain’s constitutional scheme for Ceylon before they quit the Island, they made provision for three institutions as safeguards for the minorities: (a) a bicameral Parliament, (b) article 29 which required a two-thirds majority to amend the Constitution, and (c) a right of appeal to the Privy Council. That the Sinhalese leaders had been entertaining hopes to amend the Constitution by having recouped to the amending procedure set out in Article 29 and wield absolute and unrestricted power and domination over the Tamils and other minorities in due course came to the fore only when the Privy Council interpreted Article 29’s vital significance to the minorities and dashed their hope. The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled that subsection (2) paragraphs (a) (b) (c) and (d) of Artcle 29 were inviolable and entrenched because “they represent the solemn balance of rights between the citizens of Ceylon, the fundamental condition on which inter se they accepted the Constitution, and these are therefore unalterable under the Constitution.”
It was to do away with this “unalterable” Article 29 that Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike abolished all the above three institutions for minority safeguards. She secretly planned with the socialist Dr. Colvin R. de Silva of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party to resort to the device of an illegal constituent assembly to enact a new constitution replacing the lawfully established 1948 Constitution which, in the opinion of no less an authority than Professor S. A. de Smith of Cambridge, “remained remarkably stable for nearly twenty-five years”.
Using this stratagem of an illegal constituent assembly Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike promulgated the illegitimate 1972 Constitution which plunged Ceylon into chaos and civil war. With this experience in the background, how can the Tamils be expected to be persuaded by pressure, whether local or international, well-meaning or otherwise, to place any reliance or trust on leaderships from South Ceylon?
If peace and orderly government is to return to Ceylon, the Government and the LTTE which fought the civil war and have now suspended it should be left severely alone to sort out things between themselves. It is they who represent their respective peoples. There should be no foreign intervention or pressure from any quarter whatsoever — regional, superpower, or otherwise.
Ten years ago in 1994, in my book The Fall and Rise of the Tamil Nation mentioned above, I thought it prudent to give this warning: “So, from time to time in the course of the struggle Tamil leaderships are likely to be subjected to tremendous pressure from friends and foes alike, both domestic and international, to sit down to talks and settle by negotiation.
The leaders must have the strength of will to resist any such attempts with the utmost firmness.” That is precisely what is happening today in the year 2004. Fortunately for the Tamils, they have in Mr. Prabhakaran a national leader who can be trusted to be firm like a mountain and never sway from the mandate he asked for and received from the Tamils for a self-governing Tamil state. I have a feeling that Karuna was telling the truth when he said that the leader got into a rage when told that the LTTE delegation had agreed to and signed the Oslo Declaration.
He had every reason to fly into a rage because he knew that the Oslo Declaration cannot be any different from Article 29 or the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact or the Dudley Senanayake-Chelvanayakam Pact.
Of course, there will be sabre rattling and war mongering on the Sinhalese side. The latest example is the recently reported outburst by the Defence Minister, Ratnasiri Wickremanayake, who is said to have told a gathering of his soldiers that he is ready to resume the stalled war against the Tamils, whatever his boss, the President, may say. Sometimes one is left to wonder why experienced columnist (name left out) picks only a subordinate in the Defence hierarchy like Colonel Sumedha Perera, who has to answer to a long step-ladder of superiors, as target for his acid tipped verbal arrows, but spares the Defence Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake and President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who both only know how to make a quick run to New Delhi.
Daily Mirror
[Dear Readers — We would like a picture of Mr. V. Navaratnam to accompany this article, but have been unable to find one. Can anyone provide one? Thank you, Editor]