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Thus have we seen in visions of the wise !."
-
Tamil Poem in Purananuru, circa 500 B.C 

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International Relations
in the Age of Empire

 The silent horror of the war in Sri Lanka

Arundhati Roy

Times of India, 30 March 2009

"While the killing continues, while tens of thousands of people are being barricaded into concentration camps, while more than 200,000 face starvation, and a genocide waits to happen, there is dead silence from this great country [India]. It�s a colossal humanitarian tragedy. The world must step in. Now. Before it�s too late." [Full Text]

Comment by tamilnation.org   Arundhati Roy's comments will be welcomed by not only Tamils but all those concerned to secure freedom and justice for the people of Tamil Eelam. Said that, the 'dead silence' of India and the tardiness of the response by the 'world' is not because they are all deaf. Arundhati Roy said it in her in conversation with Amit Sengupta in November 2005 -

"..The facts are there in the world today. .. But what does information mean? What are facts? There is so much information that almost all becomes meaningless and disempowering....To expose things is quite different from being able to effectively resist things..."

Velupillai Pirabakaran said it many years ago in 1993 -

"We are fully aware that the world is not rotating on the axis of human justice. Every country in this world advances its own interests. It is the economic and trade interests that determine the order of the present world, not the moral law of justice nor the rights of people. International relations and diplomacy between countries are determined by such interests. Therefore we cannot expect an immediate recognition of the moral legitimacy of our cause by the international community." Maha Veera Naal Address - November 1993

And we said it two months ago -

"...the international community will wait till Tamil resistance is sufficiently weakened or  annihilated before it attempts to intervene 'on humanitarian grounds' and in seeming response to 'world wide Tamil appeals'.  Meanwhile the IC will even welcome such world wide appeals by Tamils as that will pave the way (and establish useful contact points amongst the Tamil diaspora) for IC's eventual intervention with 'development aid' with the mantra of not conflict resolution but 'conflict transformation'. Give them cake when they ask for freedom from alien Sinhala rule. A conquered people should be grateful for whatever they can get - though there may not be not enough cake to go round. The Tamil people are being taught the truth of something which Subhas Chandra Bose said many years ago - Freedom is not given, it is taken... "  Sinhala Sri Lanka's  Genocide of Eelam Tamils - a Crime Against Humanity,  29 January 2009

We said it again one month ago -

" It was the Buddha who said that suffering is a great teacher. The Tamil people are being taught on the hard anvil of death and suffering appropriately enough in Buddhist Sri Lanka that human rights and humanitarian laws are more often than not, political instruments - instruments which States use selectively so that they may intervene to advance their own perceived strategic interests.   'Humanitarian intervention' to prevent the humanitarian tragedy that is taking  place in the Tamil homeland, had it been early, would have been kind. But the belated attempts that are being made today expose not the humanitarian concerns of the international actors but the strategic interests that impel the international actors to act the way they do. After all the simplest thing that the international actors could have done to protect the Tamil people would have been to remove the ban on the LTTE so that the capacity of the people of Tamil Eelam to resist the genocidal onslaught launched on them by Sinhala Sri Lanka may have been strengthened. The simple and humane thing that the international actors could have done was not to taunt the struggles against terrorism with the label terrorism but to adopt a  principle centered approach which liberated political language and also helped to liberate a people who have taken up arms as a last resort in their struggle for freedom from oppressive alien Sinhala rule. .." The Politics of Humanitarian Intervention, 24 February 2009

And, it seems that the 'world' has not yet begun to rotate on the axis of human justice. The people of Tamil Eelam and millions of Tamils living in many lands are being taught by the murderous Rajapaksa regime that political power  flows from the barrel of the gun.

Camp for Displaced Tamils - But Sri Lanka Bombs

Here, we are reminded again  of something which Arundhati Roy said to Shoma Chaudhury in March 2007 -

".. to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous injustice with the government which enforces that injustice is absurd. The government has slammed the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent resistance. When people take to arms, there is going to be all kinds of violence � revolutionary, lumpen and outright criminal. The government is responsible for the monstrous situations it creates...does this mean that people whose dignity is being assaulted should give up the fight because they can�t find saints to lead them into battle?. "

We agree with Arundhati Roy that 'to expose things is quite different from being able to effectively resist things.'


 The silent horror of the war in Sri Lanka

The horror that is unfolding in Sri Lanka becomes possible because of the silence that surrounds it. There is almost no reporting in the mainstream Indian media � or indeed in the international press � about what is happening there. Why this should be so is a matter of serious concern.

From the little information that is filtering through it looks as though the Sri Lankan government is using the propaganda of the �war on terror� as a fig leaf to dismantle any semblance of democracy in the country, and commit unspeakable crimes against the Tamil people. Working on the principle that every Tamil is a terrorist unless he or she can prove otherwise, civilian areas, hospitals and shelters are being bombed and turned into a war zone. Reliable estimates put the number of civilians trapped at over 200,000. The Sri Lankan Army is advancing, armed with tanks and aircraft.

Meanwhile, there are official reports that several ��welfare villages�� have been established to house displaced Tamils in Vavuniya and Mannar districts. According to a report in The Daily Telegraph (Feb 14, 2009), these villages ��will be compulsory holding centres for all civilians fleeing the fighting��. Is this a euphemism for concentration camps? The former foreign minister of Sri Lanka, Mangala Samaraveera, told The Daily Telegraph: ��A few months ago the government started registering all Tamils in Colombo on the grounds that they could be a security threat, but this could be exploited for other purposes like the Nazis in the 1930s. They�re basically going to label the whole civilian Tamil population as potential terrorists.��

Given its stated objective of ��wiping out�� the LTTE, this malevolent collapse of civilians and ��terrorists�� does seem to signal that the government of Sri Lanka is on the verge of committing what could end up being genocide. According to a UN estimate several thousand people have already been killed. Thousands more are critically wounded. The few eyewitness reports that have come out are descriptions of a nightmare from hell. What we are witnessing, or should we say, what is happening in Sri Lanka and is being so effectively hidden from public scrutiny, is a brazen, openly racist war. The impunity with which the Sri Lankan government is being able to commit these crimes actually unveils the deeply ingrained racist prejudice, which is precisely what led to the marginalization and alienation of the Tamils of Sri Lanka in the first place. That racism has a long history, of social ostracisation, economic blockades, pogroms and torture. The brutal nature of the decades-long civil war, which started as a peaceful, non-violent protest, has its roots in this.

Why the silence? In another interview Mangala Samaraveera says, ��A free media is virtually non-existent in Sri Lanka today.��

Samaraveera goes on to talk about death squads and �white van abductions�, which have made society ��freeze with fear��. Voices of dissent, including those of several journalists, have been abducted and assassinated. The International Federation of Journalists accuses the government of Sri Lanka of using a combination of anti-terrorism laws, disappearances and assassinations to silence journalists.

There are disturbing but unconfirmed reports that the Indian government is lending material and logistical support to the Sri Lankan government in these crimes against humanity. If this is true, it is outrageous. What of the governments of other countries? Pakistan? China? What are they doing to help, or harm the situation?

In Tamil Nadu the war in Sri Lanka has fuelled passions that have led to more than 10 people immolating themselves. The public anger and anguish, much of it genuine, some of it obviously cynical political manipulation, has become an election issue.

It is extraordinary that this concern has not travelled to the rest of India. Why is there silence here? There are no �white van abductions� � at least not on this issue. Given the scale of what is happening in Sri Lanka, the silence is inexcusable. More so because of the Indian government�s long history of irresponsible dabbling in the conflict, first taking one side and then the other. Several of us including myself, who should have spoken out much earlier, have not done so, simply because of a lack of information about the war. So while the killing continues, while tens of thousands of people are being barricaded into concentration camps, while more than 200,000 face starvation, and a genocide waits to happen, there is dead silence from this great country. It�s a colossal humanitarian tragedy. The world must step in. Now. Before it�s too late.

 

 

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