Dear Ambassador Ashley Wills,
From the Burning of the Jaffna Public Library: "With several high
ranking Sinhalese security officers and two cabinet ministers, Cyril
Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake (both self confessed Sinhala
supremacists), present in the town (Jaffna), uniformed security men and
plainclothes thugs carried out some well organised acts of destruction.
They burned to the ground certain chosen targets - including the Jaffna
Public Library, with its 95,000 volumes and priceless manuscripts, a
Hindu temple, the office and machinery of the independent Tamil daily
newspaper Eelanadu.. Four people were killed outright. No mention of
this appeared in the national newspapers, not even the burning of the
Library, the symbol of the Tamils' cultural identity. The government
delayed bringing in emergency rule until 2 June, by which time key
targets had been destroyed.�� - Nancy Murray, the State
against the Tamils in Sri Lanka - Racism and the Authoritarian State -
Race & Class , Summer 1984 |
I have a copy of the official text in English of a speech you have reportedly
made at the Jaffna Public Library on Wednesday, 7th March. I do not know from
which "Jaffna Public Library" you made your address, but as far as the Tamil
people are concerned THEIR
Jaffna Public
Library, consisting of ninety odd thousand volumes was burned down nearly
twenty years ago, on the night of 1st June 1981. Since in your speech you speak
of terrorism and violence, let us start talking of burning of libraries.
You will concede Sir that nowhere else in this "globalising world" that you are
referring to, are libraries put to the fire. I presume you are sufficiently
informed as to who did the burning? Would you consider that as an act of
violence? If terrorism is too strong a word for it? Or would you wave it
aside as a simple non-violent act of incendiarism because the criminals who
perpetrated that act were Sinhalese goons, inspired by the presence in
Jaffna of two Sinhalese cabinet ministers of the Sri Lanka government ?
Surely you can't?
Mr.Ambassador, you say you have lived in Sri Lanka for six months. I have
lived in that country for 53 years, born and bred there along with my Tamil
forefathers for several centuries; long before America was discovered. So I
should know that country better. Today, I am 70 years old, having spent 17
years in the evening of my life searching for some country in "this
globalizing world" to take me in.
You say you have lived in Romania, South Africa, the West Indies, Yugoslavia,
Belgium, India; in good comfort I believe. I have been to as many countries
as you have - even more - but as a refugee, a wanderer, cut off from my
family, looking for safety. That was because that country which in my
naivety I thought was my own made me a "wanted man". Not because I was a
terrorist Sir, not even by the American yardstick. All I did was to edit a
badly printed weekly paper from Jaffna - the SATURDAY REVIEW. In your own
country you are familiar with the power of the Press, where newspapermen
could even bring down Presidents like that unlamented Richard Nixon. What
happened to those newspapermen? Nothing. They only write books about their
achievement. They make money. They prosper and flourish, thanks to what they
did.
In my case I did not attempt to unmake Presidents. I wrote condemning, yes,
condemning the anti-democratic, anti-Tamil military actions of President
Junius Richard Jayawardene, who you might have heard of, was a great friend
of your country and was nicknamed "Yankee Dick" by his own Sinhalese people.
The price I paid for that was - the paper was banned, the editorial office
was sealed, and the police began hunting for me. I had to flee to India by a
midnight country boat to save my life. Thank God for small mercies they did
not burn down the office as they did to the Tamil newspaper - the EELANADU
in Jaffna in 1981; yes, by the same arsonists who burned down the Jaffna
Library.
Burning of libraries and newspaper offices and bookshops belonging to Tamils
(not to mention burning of Tamil humans in the Sinhala riots of 1958) has
been an interesting pastime in that country Sir, where fortunately you have
lived only for six months. (Incidentally, I have some news for you. One of
your predecessors in Colombo, Ambassador John Reed did extend the great
courtesy of calling on us at the SATURDAY REVIEW office on a weekend visit
to Jaffna in1982. That I think was a small American tribute to what was
after all an anti-Establishment paper)
History Sir is a great teacher. One cannot judge the present with any sense
of fairness unless one gets to know the past. Let me take you back to an
experience that happened to me 45 years ago ! Whatever happened to me has
been happening to thousands of my fellow Tamils over the years. So let me
only offer my own experience as a sample.
On the morning of June 6, 1956, I was nearly pushed out of a moving train
near Colombo by a gang of thugs.
But for some hand of Providence that saved me, I should not be living today
to write to you this. I would have been another nameless statistic among
other nameless Tamils manhandled, robbed, humiliated and killed by marauding
mobs over the years. Why did they want to kill me ? Simple. Because they saw
in me a Tamil.
Today, in the year of the Lord 2001 you make a nice, erudite speech, and of
all places in government-ravaged Jaffna, and believe me Sir, I get a funny
feeling in my solar plexus reading your good advice. You are after all
addressing the Tamil people in Jaffna, (although there is one Sinhalese
soldier there today to every ten Tamil, man, woman and child), a Tamil
people who have gone through violence from mobs and terrorism from the State
for 45 years now. Can you see that? You are of course asking these wretched
Tigers to give up terrorism and violence. What you are asking Sir is not
exactly that. No Sir. What you are really asking them is to stop overrunning
Sri Lankan army camps ! Let us be honest about it. This talk of terrorism is
only a neat cover to hide the
endless failures on the war front.
The Tigers are not
born-violent, born killers from Mars or some outer space. Believe it or
not Sir, they are also Tamils , a new generation of Tamils who are
sensitised to the endless sufferings of their people, and who are ready to
give up their lives so that succeeding generations of Tamils could live in
peace in what was once their homeland. They have watched their past leaders
making brave speeches in parliament, seen them crying hoarse about the Tamil
plight from public platforms, they have even seen their democratically
elected leaders led by that gentle Christian Chelvanayakam sitting in silent
Gandhian protest against the Sinhala Only Bill at Galle Face Green on June 5
1956 ,
only to be mauled by
a violent mob in the presence of the country's guardians of the law, the
policemen.
They have heard of their kith and kin slaughtered by the hundreds in the
anti-Tamil riots of
1958 , even poured petrol on their persons and burned alive ! Would you be
interested to know that the
Tiger leader Prabhakaran
was a 3-year old child when all that happened.
|
From
Human Rights & the Tamil Nation:"...The end of the Second World War saw
the birth of the United Nations Organisation. The
United Nations Charter
(signed on 26 June 1945) proclaimed the determination of the Peoples of the
United Nations 'to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which
twice in our lifetime' had brought untold sorrow to mankind. It is a matter for
irony, that this 'untold sorrow to mankind' was the result of two wars between
the so called 'developed' states of the 'First' World - wars which witnessed the
barbarism of the Jewish holocaust and the
nuclear terrorism of Hiroshima and Nagasaki..."
|
One cannot start reading history from a halfway point. If one wants to read
American history, or what little of it is there, one has to begin with George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson and come down the line. One does not start the
story by talking of the American chemical assault on the Vietnamese people. Nor
does one start writing American history with that best known act of
international terrorism - the
dropping of the
atom bomb on Hiroshima which killed well over one hundred thousand human
beings.
The
armed
struggle of the Tamil Tigers, Sir, is a late arrival in Sri Lankan
history, a logical consequence of a quarter century of Sinhala violence and
the
sorry failure of peaceful non-violent Tamil protest over the same period.
It was one of your Presidents, the late assassinated John F. Kennedy who
said : "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable". That Sir is where
our Sinhalese brothers who have been ruling the country for 53 years made
their mistake.
Mr.Ambassador, do I detect the tone of a world policeman when you say: "�.we
reject the idea of an independent Tamil state carved out of Sri Lankan
territory; we regard the LTTE as a terrorist organization and do not believe
it is the sole representative of the Tamil people of Sri Lanka�. With all
respect to you Sir, your syllogism is flawed. While your government is
certainly entitled to whatever views you hold about the LTTE, the question
of REJECTING or accepting the idea of an independent Tamil state is surely a
matter between the Sinhalese and the Tamil peoples. Suppose at some point of
time in history the Sinhalese people come round to accepting the idea of an
independent Tamil state, would your government still reject it?
| ".... in most cases the media present news and
events in a manner that not only agrees with the views of the powerful,
but actually supports their domination.... the maintenance of order is
the key idea to be examined in the media... in earlier times
violence and the threat of physical force was used to maintain order.
But today control is pursued through very different avenues; most
effectively.... through cultural control, or �controlling the common
sense�....'A class is hegemonic not so much to the extent that it is
able to impose a uniform conception of the world on the rest of society,
but to the extent that it can articulate different visions of the world
in such a way that their potential antagonism is
neutralised.'"(The
Media, Framing, and the Internet - John Harrington) |
You refer to the fact how some people fit facts to the theory as in the story of
the Procrustean bed. In quoting Salman Rushdie where you say: "�cultures collide
constantly in the modern world, crisscrossing at high velocity; one moment we
are in a village with a charming sense of remoteness; in the next, we turn on TV
and are connected instantly to a global village�" you are merely stating the
theory.
May I tell you why the facts
do not fit the theory when it comes to the Tamil people? Have you ever seen
on the American TV, the CNN, the war that the Sri Lankan government has been
waging in the northeast of the island? CNN has shown the bombing of the Central
Bank in Colombo, yes, but have you seen on your TV the bombing of the Navaly
Church in Jaffna? Or the bombing of the Nagerkoil school in Jaffna? Are you
saying, by fitting facts to your theory that Jaffna is OUTSIDE that global
village of yours?
One of the unfortunate facts in life Sir, is that peacemakers generally give
good advice to the victims, not to the villains. It was a well-thought out
speech that you made in Jaffna , as speeches go, but how one wishes you would
also make similar addresses in Colombo - at the Bandaranaike Memorial Centre for
example .
S.Sivanayagam, Paris France 11 March 2001
