MAD

by Roy Ratnavel

One Saturday early morning not too long ago, I was pleasantly interrupted by a phone call while I was in the middle of my usual Saturday morning ritual – reading the weekend edition of the ‘funny’ pages of my favorite national newspaper, especially Gary Larson’s 'Far Side' cartoons. When I answered the stubborn phone, a gentleman, having flawlessly executed the social mores of a civil conversation, introduced himself as a longtime reader of the Sangam website and gave me some words of encouragement after reading one of my contributions.

During this friendly chat he postulated an idea that the Tamils should focus more of their efforts on ‘building a nation’ from here on, rather than continuing to ‘justify our freedom struggle’ to the world and politely asked if I may be able to write an article on this topic. The argument he put forth was thorough, thoughtful and hard to argue against.

When I saw the front page of the National Post on April 8th, I was momentarily disoriented. “Tamil Tigers are outlawed in Canada,” it read. My first thought was I read the date wrong, that it was April 1, and this was an April Fool’s story. But it was April 8, not April 1. Then I thought perhaps they had delivered me a copy of the Times of London from the spring of 2001, when the Tigers were banned in the U.K. But the date was unmistakably 2006.

Suffice to say that it was not a steely-eyed look at the data sets and time series that has galvanized the so-called morally superior part of the world into believing that the Tamil Tigers are “terrorists.” They moved fast to ban them before the Tamils secured their own “terrorist nation.”

Part of the problem with the data is what statistics professors call 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions': it matters when you start the measurement period. If those making judgements had started looking in 1948 and ended in 2005, they could clearly see about 57 years of oscillating terrorization of Tamils in Sri Lanka by their own government, with the absolute peak of pre-war Sri Lankan atrocity in July of 1983. Since the last big pogrom by Sri Lanka against Tamils in 1983, for decades they were not able to repeat such atrocities against Tamils, fearing the Tiger’s wrath.[This has not stopped them from commiting crimes against civilians such as ethnic cleansing, crop destruction and bombing areas of civilian habitation such as Chavakachcheri in areas out of sight. -- Editor] Despite all the data on Sri Lanka’s expertise and credentials in the realm of anti-civilian, terrorist acts, nobody cared.                      

However sympathetic I am to some of the arguments put forth by policymakers, the undeniable fact is that their arguments are certainly one-sided. The policymakers may say I am wrong, or at least the newspapers do, as they continue on with their relentless attacks on Tamils. Do we need any more proof that the lunatics have taken over the asylum? Au contraire.

For the 2 to 3 weeks after I received that phone call I was consumed by the conversation, and first wanted to come up with a title that could best describe body of the article. Then I remembered an acronym I stumbled upon once in a journal that I quite enjoy. The acronym is M.A.D., and I wanted to use this as the title for this article. The title of this piece does not refer to the well-known and unpleasant state of mental agitation. Rather the title refers to a cold war acronym.

During the Cold War, a “M.A.D.” policy developed between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. M.A.D stood for Mutually Assured Destruction. The basic premise of this policy was a tit-for-tat approach to nuclear warfare: “If you launch a nuclear missile, we will respond with a launch of our own. No one wins and everyone loses.” Ever the optimist, I do not like such Armageddon scenarios. In the context of Sri Lankan political quagmire, M.A.D. is acronym that stands for ‘Mutually Assured Democracy.’

Sri Lanka is being ‘rewired’ from the beginning of this new century with the signing of the ceasefire agreement between the adversaries – a direct result of military pressure exerted by the LTTE. Prior to this Sri Lanka was a country where the Tamil populace mattered little. Thanks to the emergence of the freedom struggle in one form or another, Tamils now have a single political and economic ideology driving our resource allocations.      

In the not too distant past, the world’s sentiment towards the Tamil freedom struggle was extremely negative following years of erosion of transparency and trust due to years of intense war between two adversaries. At that time, a number of prominent journalists and politicians were publishing papers focusing on the unsustainable nature of this freedom struggle and making the case for further decline of the idea of a ‘Tamil Nation’. Now the opinion is slightly changing after witnessing the stewardship of the Tamil leadership – especially during the horrific tsunami of 2005. That said, consistent with history, even though ‘the idea’ itself may have some structural problems rooted within, despite this, it has enjoyed considerable support from Tamils at large.

It cannot have escaped anyone's attention – at least Tamils, that the race riots, bombings of place of worships, library burnings and deaths that marked the outcry for democracy and subsequent violent reaction by an ostensibly pious Buddhist regime, surpasses in substance and scale by immeasurable degree whatever the offence - intentional or unwitting - induced by the original freedom objectives conveyed by Tamils.  Some situations we face in life are difficult moral dilemmas. I do not see this stance as ‘unique to Tamils.’ The worst we are guilty of is refusing to be bullied by Sri Lanka and its Western allies.

Tamils' initial mission to oust the odious Sri Lankan regime after the attacks against them was the moral choice. And now to the toughest part of the freedom struggle – nation building. It is certainly an arduous task, but one cannot be quiescent about it. Nation building refers to the process of constructing and structuring a nation using the power of the state which aims at the unification of the people or peoples within the state so that it remains politically stable and viable in the long run to foster social harmony and economic growth – a state of ‘equilibrium’ per se.

Those with moderate interest in science probably remember that the phrase “Punctuated Equilibrium” was used by Stephen Jay Gould, the gifted and well-known evolutionary biologist and palaeontologist at Harvard, to describe how our world has evolved over many millennium. Equilibrium would exist for a while, only to be disrupted by an event of one sort or another, which would then start the planet down the path to yet another equilibrium.

A new nation is akin to an organism and evolves over time. The theory of evolution postulates that changes, such as speciation, can occur very quickly, with long periods of little change in between. For species, this means they must evolve or perish as the world around them changes. This is just as true for ‘nations’ as it is for organisms. I think it helps us to think of the ‘Tamil Nation’ as a new organism that will evolve stronger over time with incidents of many punctuated equilibriums.

In the sense of having a flag, a national anthem, army, its own laws, police force, and administrative infrastructure there are certainly signs of a state within a state – whether recognized by the world or not. The world’s lofty rhetoric about democracy-building and human rights is all very well, until you realize that democracy and human rights, such as they are, do not extend beyond the Southern part of the thug state of Sri Lanka and will not be delivered to the people in the North any time soon – so it is up to us to deliver them.

This means building new universities, schools, libraries, hospitals, roads, bridges, factories training centers, sewage treatment systems, strengthening the judicial framework and its infrastructure, etc.. Can we do this in a hurry? Can this ultimately deliver what we set out to do? How will we know if we are making a difference? How do we measure our success? How will we deliver and maintain MAD – mutually assured democracy? I have no answers, but I am just asking these questions to stimulate our ‘collective mind.’ 

The problem is that it appears that our success so far towards nation building has also become our failure. We are our own enemies per se. The great thing about this predicament is, of course, that there is nothing the morally superior world’s brave contingent of forces can do about that. The challenge we face goes beyond the almost impossible task of simultaneously bringing order and reconstructing the fragile economy, showing a hard and kind face at the same time – the proverbial ‘carrot and a stick.’

One can say that the Tamils' political equilibrium is constantly being punctured in Sri Lanka by its goon squad, resulting in the de facto nation going from one condition of equilibrium to another.

Change is uncomfortable; it is also inevitable.

In the immortal words of Star Trek physician Dr. McCoy, "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it." With this philosophical backdrop in mind, we are always going through change, but sometimes the pace is quickened by an event. Tamils' equilibrium was recently "punctuated", not only by Sri Lanka but also by some Western countries – however, our freedom struggle will not perish, and it is the history of history, so to speak. Rather, it will evolve to another more efficient and higher equilibrium, resulting in much stronger and agile nation – the 'Tamil Nation.'

Yes, the time has come; let’s build a nation, and stop wasting our valuable resources in justifying the Tamil freedom struggle to the world!

MAD!

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