It has been four and a half years since the utter destruction of the LTTE. And by saying that, we should still remember the destruction of the LTTE is very much intertwined with the genocide of the Tamil people, as it is the punctuated form of a 65+ year history. But the presence of the Tigers has not left. We saw TNA rely on LTTE imagery and terminology during their campaign for the 2013 Northern PC elections 3 months ago to cajole a politically astute, unimpressed Tamil electorate. We have also very recently seen reports that Gotabaya Rajapakse was in contact with form LTTE commander Pathuman to artificially revive an artificial reincarnation of the LTTE that would be compliant to the GoSL. And GoSL leadership and representatives have taken to unequivocally attributing any criticism of Southern Lanka to "remnants of the LTTE" and those paid off by them, a clear absurdity. As evidence of Southern Lanka's war crimes and genocide (and unwillingness to investigate either) mounts, the GoSL rebuttal intensifies, and so does the decoy invocation of the LTTE in that rebuttal. What is it about the LTTE that even their enemies try to keep the memory of the LTTE alive?
These are strange times, where Southern Lanka tries to over-credit a nonexistent foe that it had annihilated in order to hang on for survival. This is strange on top of what is already strange, where Mahinda Rajapakse has styled himself as a modern incarnation of the Mahavamsa's Sinhalese king Dutugemunu, who bloodily defeated the righteous and formidable Tamil king Ellalan, and erected a great monument to Ellalan out of respect to his honour. The Mahavamsa chronicle is as much mythological with gory violence against Tamils (in the name of Buddha) as it is historical. The Mahavamsa has so much staying power in Southern Lanka because during the recent birth of Southern Lankan nationalism, namely Singhala Buddhist nationalism, which happened only 100-150 years ago, the Mahavamsa was appropriated and championed as the reference point for such a nationalism. It's as if France had decided that they were the descendants of the glorious, triumphant Asterix and Obelix, whose fables of defending the "country" against the ancestors of those subhuman, untouchable Italians were told in the recently discovered [comic] book[s]. You would have to also suspend logic on where French language and culture as we know it came from! And in Southern Lanka's case, there was no invasion. The notion of "country" in the Westphalian sense is a relatively very recent thing, and by extension, so is post-colonial hegemonic demagoguery by majority national formations. But at least Asterix and Obelix have a clearer, non-ironic sense of right and wrong, there's no gore or death, and even though they may not conform to standard definitions of beauty, they have great personalities.
(On the subject of the Mahavamsa Mindset, D. Sivaram explains why nations need states, and why states need homogenous nationalisms, to the detriment of those who do not belong. He also explains why in states where more than one national formation exists, the project of a homogenising nationalism naturally provokes a reactionary nationalism. These ideas better explain how the introduction of the nation-state system to arbitrarily defined geographical boundaries, ex: former colonies, would be the confounding factor in a way that Western-centred discourse on the subject might stand to gain from.)
Perhaps the only times that are stranger than these days are the times from 1987-1990, from the Indo-Lanka Accord to the defeat and withdrawal of the Indian IPKF forces. This period started off with the Indo-Lanka Accord, which was a collusion by India and Lanka to contain, weaken, and ultimately defeat the LTTE, since the LTTE was growing well beyond the complete control of the other two. LTTE leader Prabakaran was brought to India to meet Rajiv Gandhi and effectively coerced to sign the accord, whether he liked it or not. This gave cover for India to achieve its own tactical goal, which is sending the IPKF army to Tamil Eelam to defeat the LTTE, whether the Southern Lanka liked it or not. Yet, strangely enough, the communist JVP experienced a resurgence, perhaps enabled through tapping into the historical Sinhalese anti-Indian sentiment and fear-mongering over India's entry into SL. (And just prior to then, the anti-Indian sentiments had been most recently whipped by the SL government when it orchestrated the anti-Tamil pogroms of Black July in 1983.) Since the Singala government cares more about the South and the Singalese, whenever push comes to shove, it diverted all of its military resources during the JVP rebellion to annihilating the rebellion in the South. In order to simultaneously resist India's strong-arm maneuvers of physically setting itself up in the island (namely, Tamil Eelam), the Singala government fully supplied the LTTE with arms and weapons to fight the IPKF! This is old and very public news. Just like the news that Mahinda Rajapakse spent time in his political beginnings as a human rights crusader and supporting the 1989 JVP insurrectionists at the UN in Geneva as a human rights lawyer.
Watching the lull in geopolitical competition ending
The story of the strange IPKF times is worth re-telling because it is so analogous to what is happening in 2009-now. But first we have to fill in a gap. Remember, the US has always coveted a foothold in the island of Lanka. J.R. Jeyawardene, Ranil's uncle, was pro-Western. Ever since India's independence from colonial Britain and the onset of the Cold War, India was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movmement (NAM) and an exemplary member. The NAM was created to represent the coalition of post-colonial "Southern Hemisphere" states that officially wanted to remain neutral in the Cold War. But unofficially, India has historically had a soft corner for the USSR ("Second World"?) and China ideologically. If India wanted to be represented in the UN Security Council, it would ask the Soviets to act on its behalf. In India, like certain other places in the world, you can tell which leaders the society looks up to based on whose names were copied when naming kids. If, for example, you might find a kid in Africa named Clinton or Nixon, you might find people in India named Lenin or Stalin. So when India feared that the US influence in Southern Lanka was becoming too much of a concern, India's plan, during Indira Gandhi's time (after the 1983 pogrom but before the Indo-Lanka Accord), was to destablise the island through the funding and training of the LTTE and the creation of other Tamil paramilitaries. (Which is why Indira Gandhi didn't want Britain's SAS to train GoSL.) The purpose of creating other Tamil paramilitaries was to attempt to prevent Tamil resistance from getting so strong that India could not control it (ex: pre-empt potential growth of the LTTE by "saturating" the capacity of Tamil society to recruit - see: Sivaram's explanation of Military Participation Ratio (MPR) and Money where the (Sinhala) mouth is). Conveniently for the US, Indira Gandhi was assassinated after only 3 years in power, but when her son Rajiv Gandhi democratically inherited the power of PM, he resumed his mother's policies with more vigour and with less subtlety and pretense. What is diplomacy without pretense? (And why do significant, thought-changing leaders in India always die after 3 years? C. N. Annadurai, after being elected in 1964 as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu on a platform of anti-Hindi as the national language and a separate country for Tamil Nadu, died in 1967. And M. G. Ramachandran also was a dynamic figure elected as CM of Tamil Nadu in 1984, only to die so soon in 1987, exactly 3 years to the date he was elected.) The US maintained a low-level presence in the island's affairs, but not so much as to provoke India. (The US-led West put an indefinite hold on Tamil Eelam recognition by banning the LTTE in 1997 and 2006 under the terrorist label, while supplying GOSL with military hardware and strategy.) The understanding was that SL was India's turf, and anything that happened had to go through India. It wasn't until the Norwegian-led peace process, and India's refusal to recognise the LTTE as an equal partner, that India therefore had no choice but to allow the US to have an overt, large presence in the island's affairs. But the US has always been involved. The US needs a replacement for the naval base in Diego Garcia (read: the capital of Tamil Eelam, Trincomalee) to lie in the strategic middle of the Indian Ocean, and it needs to do the job of countering China's aggression in the region that India is quite unwilling to do, even though India is very clearly being undermined by China more by the day.
Throughout all these intrigues, the LTTE remained the symbol of Tamil resistance to occupation. This is why India tried many times to assassinate LTTE leader Prabakaran unsuccessfully (especially in the 1980s), unlike what they did for any of the many other Tamil militias. The LTTE grew from strength to strength throughout the entire war, and this would not be possible without the support of the civilian population it was fighting for (see: Sivaram's explanation of Military Participation Ratio (MPR) and Money where the (Sinhala) mouth is). The current leadership of the TNA found this out to their chagrin when they campaigned for the September 2013 NPC elections, trying to maintain their conciliatory, neither-here-nor-there strategy, before realising that the Tamil electorate did not care for nor trust them much. In order to gain the trust of the Tamil people as representing their interests, the TNA decided to clearly employ the terminology of and veiled references to the LTTE. The TNA's party publication right before the elections sported a full-body picture of Prabakaran in camouflage fatigues with the caption "Maveeran Prabakaran". The Tamil electorate response, during relatively free and safe voting conditions, was to vote en masse for Tamil political rights (which was more a vote for Tamil resistance than it was a vote for the current TNA leadership -- the obviousness of which is bolstered by rumours that Jaffna newspapers unofficially ignored Tamil nationalist campaigning before the NPC elections, or that Tamil nationalist candidates ranked higher in the NPC vote count list than Southern Lanka would like to believe).
While many comparisons are made of the current situation to the 1987-1990 IPKF / JVP uprising period for the reasons of turmoil caused by direct US-India jockeying in the island, the situation isn't exactly the same. In 1987, India supplanted US influence in the island with its own, while now, the US is trying to supplant India. India is much weaker of a country than it was 25 years ago, even in its own backyard, while China is much stronger, even in India's own backyard. So even if the Non-aligned Movement (NAM) enters the discussion, which made sense in a post-WWII/post-colonial, Cold War context, and in which India was a big fish in a small pond, such a discussion nowadays is only a passing fad.
Evolution of tiger as a symbol of Tamil resistance
First, Tamils have a martial history of many millennia. And even in times as recent as the British, they were tough to conquer by the British. And remember that the Kandy king was the hardest to defeat, which is why the British defeated him last, and this king was a Tamil. The Kandy king signed his surrender papers to the British in Tamil, not Sinhalese. During the last Sangam period of Tamil literature, 2000 years ago, there were 3 main Tamil kingdoms — the Chera, the Chola, and the Pandiya. The literature of the time had talked about the antiquity of the Pandiyas, as the Pandiyas were said to have been around for much longer than we have recorded history. (Although, the exact dates of the Pandiya antiquity are more legendary than factual, as any reader of the Mahavamsa would well understand.) The Chera kings were said to have once traveled north through present-day India conquering kings all the way until he reached the Himalayan mountains. It wasn't until well after the Sangam period, in 1100-1300 AD, that the Cholas made their own unique mark in history by growing their military and economic influence into an empire that controlled all the land surrounding the eastern portion of the Indian Ocean -- South India, Ceylon, Malaysia, and parts of Thailand and Indonesia. Each of the 3 kingdoms had a symbol for themselves which they would put on their flags: Chera - bow and arrow, Pandiya - fish, Chola - tiger.
So when we think of the LTTE's use of tiger symbol, there's a statement being made, and other statements are being passed over. Namely, the LTTE chose to harken back to Tamil influence crossing all over the Indian Ocean, for which we still see its legacy today. Tamil Eelam, with its capital being the top-notch natural harbour Trincomalee, and affixed right on a major artery of world shipping, would be such a country that would call on those historically-created linkages in every direction on the sea. The images being passed up in this symbolism are a resurgent dominance in South Asia (Chera - bow and arrow) or an antiquity lasting from time immemorial (Pandiya - fish).
But of course, there's another obvious reason, which is that the tiger is a fierce creature in nature, and one that inspires the imaginations of the people it represents and their foes. After all, England's symbol is a lion, America's is a bald eagle, Germany is an eagle, Russia is a bear, India is a lion, and Southern Lanka is a lion. But believe it or not, Southern Lanka's symbolic lion on their national flag is quite a violent one, even when compared to England's or India's. The Lanka lion has a drawn sword in its front paw, blade outwards. In the original version of the flag in 1948, it was surrounded by 4 arrowheads, but later on, those arrowheads were changed to Bo leaves to represent Buddhism, and 2 colored stripes (to represent Hindus and Muslims) were added to the flag on the side right next to the sword blade. In the same way that the British flag is an amalgamation of the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Jersey flags, the LTTE flag is amalgamation of the Chola flag and Pandara Vanniyan's flag, and updated for modern times. Pandara Vanniyan was famed for his military might and the resistance he put up to the British. It was Tamils like him that stymied the British the most, for which the British had to collude with Tamil turncoats to eventually defeat him. His flag was 2 diagonally crossed swords with a shield on top in the middle. The LTTE flag updated the swords to bayonets, and the shield was changed to a circle. Inside the circle was a yellow-on-red tiger, like the Chola flag, but it was updated to face the viewer instead of be drawn in profile. The tiger was drawn in detail with its mouth open to look fearsome, and its paws were drawn over the bottom of the circle to evoke the image that it was pouncing towards the viewer. The decision process perhaps involved more than one person, but certainly not any person or firm steeped in marketing. (Where would guerrilla fighters find the time and money for hiring consultants for brand design?)
The special ingredient that makes the tiger symbol endure, however, is the spirit of the people who invoked it. That is to say, the LTTE to the very end held unwaveringly to their goal of a free and independent Tamil Eelam for the Tamil-speaking peoples who have historically lived there. In the final analysis, their dedication and ethics stand out well above all interested armed parties (that is, other governments) who involved themselves in Sri Lanka, including the West. In the endgame, the LTTE chose to die on their feet than live on their knees, as has always been their operating principle, despite the challenges. In fact, the more that India and the US tried to manipulated and/or assassinate LTTE leader Pirabakaran, the clearer it has become how steadfast the LTTE has been in maintaining Tamil interests. Pirabakaran had once said that fighting the IPKF with so few soldiers at such an early stage was the most difficult challenge he had faced, and perhaps that is why, in November 2008 when the end game was nigh, he said, "We have had direct confrontations even against superior powers, stronger than us. ... Standing alone, we have blasted networks of innumerable intrigues, interwoven with betrayal and sabotage. ... When compared to these happenings of the past, today's challenges are neither novel nor huge. We will face these challenges with the united strength of our people." And it has also been made clear how many others (including foreign governments and non-governmental organisations and the UN itself) who profess to champion justice and Tamil rights are never truly credible or can never be taken at face value. As Frances Harrison has reported, and as has been admitted by Erik Solheim publicly, America was willing to save all the Tamil civilians and the entire membership of the civil, political, and military structures of LTTE through the ICRC so long as Pirabakaran and Pottu Amman surrendered back in 2009. What this implies is that the US had the capacity to save so many tens of thousands of Tamil clivilian lives in the face of clear, ongoing genocide but chose not to for pure political arm-twisting that ended in a lose-lose situation. Human rights alone cannot save human lives from genocide, it seems.
...And lions, and eagles, and dragons -- so what?
As the ongoing March 2014 UN Human Rights Council session progresses, the maneuvering in the HRC appears weak and uninspired. The US brought forth a draft resolution on Sri Lanka that is not much different from the resolutions on both of the 2 previous years. Even the strengthening of the 2nd draft, that inserts language of an "independent, international investigation" is also not any improvement whatsoever compared to the previous 2 years. The reason is that independent investigations by panels formed by UN bodies have already been undertaken, from the Darusman et al. report to the recent report from the UN High Commission for HR Navi Pillay. The only type of investigation that would move beyond recent, ineffectual efforts would be to specifically have a Commission of Inquiry (CoI), something that is commissioned by the full resources of a UN body with a full team of people and resources and a requirement to report to the entire UN body. And this is why Tamil diaspora organisations all around the world condemned the weakness of the first draft of the US-led first draft of the resolution on SL. Surprisingly, though, the TNA immediately welecomed the second draft, even though it calls for nothing that we haven't already seen since 2009! If the US and/or India would like to woo the TNA to sycophantically play along with their designs -- whether continuing dozens of rounds of fruitless negotiations with GOSL or immediately welcoming weak UN HR resolution drafts -- they should realise that Tamils of Tamil Eelam realise this too. Eelam Tamils today know what deacdes of Tamils have sacrificed for the sake of Tamil-speaking freedom. Those sentiments can now be focused in a single symbol, and thus the spectre of the Tiger looms large and casts its shadow over the whole island, 5 years after its disappearance.
All of America's designs to gain a foothold in the island, especially in Tamil Eelam, for the past decode, at the expense of Tamils, have failed miserably. In a time where they should be forging more strategic alliances with Eelam Tamils and India as a bulwark against creeping Chinese instability, there are no signs that America is moving beyond options that are futile. It is almost 5 years since the end of the war in 2009 and the end of the Tigers, and the lessons we should have learned then still ring true, as written back then by Anita Pratap. She first wrote of how the West's strategy against the Tigers was disastrous and self-defeating. She described the unwavering commitment of the Tigers to Tamil Eelam, and their resolve to never give up in spite of any losses or setbacks, as their history shows. In her next piece, entitled "Lion, Tiger, and Lies", she wrote how the memories of the Tigers, and by extension all that they symbolise, will be left to last forever in the minds of the people. And finally, she wrote about the important stakes at play for the world in the current era of geopolitics that we find ourselves in now.
So will America allow the current resolution on SL to call for nothing more than what we already have and know? Will the US allow the resolution to not receive a majority for any reason? Either option will be a defeat of the same order -- GoSL will have won once again, akin to their victory in the UN HRC in 2009. More importantly, the West has to act quickly and decisively, for neither they nor their natural allies can afford to wait anymore. And to understand what Tamils think, don't ask the TNA leadership -- filled with its share of elite class, droning lawyers, some with checkered pasts and dubious character. Judge it by the people on the ground, most of whom are constantly thinking of freedom and wondering, from time to time, "What would the Tigers do?"
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