WAR COMES CLOSE TO HOME
For those of us with small children, it is always a dilemma how much we need to (or indeed are able to) shelter them from the full horror of what goes on in the world.
On Sunday, I was giving my eight year old son. Oscar, a lift home from his Tae Kwon Do lesson, along with a friend he has made from Sri Lanka, and the boy’s mother. I asked her why her son had not been at the last Sunday’s session, and she candidly replied that it was because they had just received news that her husband’s sister and her whole family, including the children, had been slaughtered by the Sri Lankan army.
Oscar was not too fazed by this information, I think because he has learned about what happens in wars at school, and for him modern day Sri Lanka is no more part of his day to day reality than Ancient Rome or the London Blitz. He asked what started the war; his friend’s mum did not have the English to reply; but his ten year old mate breezily chirped up that he had no idea; he only knows it has been going on for 35 years. The family are in Swindon because they have fled Sri Lanka due to the fighting.
The struggle has been going on for decades, as Tamils in the north of the island want to secede from the country, in the face of undoubted ethnic discrimination from the Sinhalese majority. The war in Sri Lanka has now taken a desperate turn, not least because the national liberation organisation of the Tamils, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) have become firmly categorised as “terrorists” in the new post 9-11 world order, giving the Sri Lankan government far greater scope for a repressive military “solution”. Recently there has been a major offensive from the government who have captured former rebel stronghold of Kilinochchi. This has forced the Tamil guerrillas into a small enclave in Mullaithivu, where they seem to be preparing for a last stand.
On the government side there has been a wave of chauvinist and racist propaganda. Much of this goes unchallenged by the press, and to make sure of this there has been government terror, including the brutal murder of Lasantha Wickmeratunge, one of the country’s most respected journalists. The Socialist party website reports that even the German ambassador to Sri Lanka was called before the government and criticised after speaking out against media suppression at Lasantha’s funeral. Since Lasantha’s death another editor has been stabbed and numerous other attacks on journalists have taken place.
But the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), have also played their part in creating the current crisis. There are some 400000 civilians trapped in one small area of Mullaithivu district, without food or supplies, with no contact from relief agencies.
The “Tigers” forcibly moved the Tamil population out of Kilinochchi as government forces advanced, and refused to allow civilians to leave when the government offered them safe conduct on 31st January. Even though there may be reasonable grounds from some scepticism about this offer of “safety”, evacuation must be a better option for the helpless civilians. The LTTE has seemingly not made any attempt to create a safety zone in the area they control. Instead they are moving people further back into areas where there are no facilities - water, food, medicine or shelter.
The Morning Star reports the LTTE refusing international calls for a ceasefire:
Balasingham Nadesan said in the letter to the UN that international calls for the rebels to lay down their arms are “not helpful for resolving the conflict” and that the weapons “are the protective shield of the Tamil people and their tool for political liberation.
“When a permanent political solution is reached for the Tamil people, with the support and the guarantee of the international community, the situation will arise where there will be no need for the arms of the LTTE,” Mr Nadesan said.
“We are ready to discuss, co-operate, and work together in all their efforts to bring an immediate ceasefire and work towards a political settlement.”
What is most remarkable is that the world is almost completely silent. Sri Lanka is not an inaccessible country - there are direct flights there from London, but politicians and journalists in the west seem to take no interest in a humanitarian disaster that has been described by some as a “silent Tsunami”.
If the Tamils were Muslim every atrocity by the Tigers would be headline news. As it is the fact that the LTTE used suicide bombers before Bin Laden was ever heard of doesn’t fit the Islamophobic script so the powers that be have no interest in reporting it.
Comment by attila — 24 February, 2009 @ 12:53 pm
If comrades are interested in more first hand accounts of what is happening in Sri Lanka they can visit the CWI website and read the reports from the United Socialist Party, the CWI’s Sri Lankan section.
http://www.socialistworld.net/zbin/maps/map.cgi/s?id=80
The comrades work in semi-illegality, under constant threat of attack and death because of their defence of the right of the Tamil people to self determination and their struggles against landlordism and capitalism.
We are very proud of them.
Comment by Neil — 24 February, 2009 @ 4:30 pm
The treatment of the Sri Lankan – Tamil conflict in the left press is perplexing. Over the last few months I have witnessed huge pro Tamil events in London (in Parliament Square and at the Excel Centre) but the only left group I ever saw at them was the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Since I read in the Morning Star that in fact most ethnic Tamils in Sri Lanka do not actually live in the part of the Island that the Tiger’s claim, I have been unenthusiastic about the latter’s righteousness, although I am convinced that Tamils are hard done by in Sri Lanka.
The conflict does raise two issues. First that the Dali Lama’s co religionalists can be just as nasty at prosecuting the ‘war against terror’ as anyone else. And second that the anti war movement is blinkered towards wars that can be linked to the movement’s leaders archenemy namely, yawn, ‘imperialism’
Comment by Hugh — 24 February, 2009 @ 9:56 pm
“the Dali Lama’s co religionalists “
Imperial Japan would be another example
Comment by Andy Newman — 24 February, 2009 @ 10:23 pm
I was interested in Oscar’s response to the war and his relationship with his friend of Tamil origin…and how Oscar’s schooling prepared him to deal with war.
When my son reached 8 years old the war against Iraq was just a few months old…. he was even more enthusiastic about demonstrating against the war than me! He was always asking questions about things he saw on the news. He seemed filled with a gobal vision an instinctive understanding of right and wrong in which war was the greatest crime of all. To be honest I was bedazzled by the simplicity and purity of his spirit and ashamed of my own incapacity to act.
I was really demoralised at the time but I distinctly remember him dragging me by the hand and saying ‘dad… you should be helping out here..’ basically forcing me to join a peace vigil which we stumbled upon when out in town.
What is interesting is that when I rediscovered my energy and committment to anti war activity… in the mean time my son had inculcated the message of the mainstream. Muslims are a problem. Terrorists are the enemy. Protest is futile… and war is something play on the X box.
Now my son is officially a teenager… at his age I was becoming radicalised and took part in my first anti NF demo’s…last month he met Manal Timraz the coventry restaurnteur and Palestinian who lost 15 members of her immediate family during the first week of the Israeli assault on Gaza.
My son displayed none of the simple human compassion that would come naturally five year earlier… in fact he seemed to be amoured aginst this. My son views my current anti war activity as a source of acute embarrassment…
As for school… the only stuff on war they have done recently is a very distorted and abstracted account of the English Civil War…. and much to my horror when I asked my son about his perspectives on the Civil War … he said he thought that Parliament were disrespectful to King Charles and interfered too much in his private life…therefore he supported the Royalists against the Parliamentarians.
I dare not ask him to consider the conflict in Sri Lanka for fear that he will call me a wanka.
Comment by abu jamal — 25 February, 2009 @ 2:18 am
Hi Hugh,
The Socialist Party has been campaigning on the issue’s of the Sri Lankan civil war, atrocities against Tamil, Singhala and Muslim civilians by armed groups both government and guerilla for many years now in solidarity with our comrades in Sri Lanka.
We also had a presence at the recent big demo’s. We are currently about to launch an international campaign through the CWI to link up the work of our sections that have big Tamil Sri Lankan populations such as India (Tamil Nadu has been in a state of constant uproar for the past month and a half over Sri Lankan government forces atrocities in the North) the UK, Australia, Malaysia and obviously Sri Lanka itself.
I think the point about where Tamils live is neither here nor there. The fact remains that a separate national consciousness does exist in the north of the island. At the moment war weariness has dampened that, but the perspective of the Tamil population becoming reconciled to a capitalist state dominated by the Singhala elite over the long term is ruled out.
In this case the right to national self determination is a legitimate demand of the Tamil population. That is not to say though that it is uncomplicated.
We should be careful not to fall into the mistake some on the left do in relation to Palestine or Iraq and identify national consciousness and the dominant groups fighting for it as one and the same. In the case of Sri Lanka the LTTE has an extremely violent and sectarian (both in the political and religious sense) past that in some ways has undermined the struggles of the Tamil people’s and aided the rise of reactionary and chauvinist forces in the south particularly the Rajapakse government and the JVP.
As well as this there is the question of the Tamil Muslim population in the east of the island. They do not share the same sort of national consciousness as Tamil Hindu, who make up the majority of Tamil’s in Sri Lanka. They have often been attacked by the LTTE because they are seen as unsympathetic to the independence struggle of the LTTE. So included in any struggle of the Tamil’s for self-determination must also be the guarantee of minority rights for Tamil Muslims, something conspicuously absent from the program of the LTTE.
This is a key demand of the comrades in the USP in their program on the national question in Sri Lanka.
Comment by Neil — 26 February, 2009 @ 12:20 pm