|
|
|
 |
 |
|||
|
|
(reproduced from the The Island Sunday Edition of October 17, 2004) "`85 The possibility of a ‘moral opposition’ that can be far stronger and more effective under certain circumstances, than any political opposition." - Antonio Gramsci (15 Nov 1924, Political Writings 1921-1926) The good news is that there is an overarching policy consensus. The bad news is that it will never be put into bipartisan practice. President Kumaratunga and the Leader of the Opposition agree that an/the ISGA must fall within the Oslo framework of a federal, united Sri Lanka. In politics as in martial arts it is important to get your stance correct. This is quite the correct negotiating stance for the Sri Lankan state. However, if the two biggest parties, the government and the alternative government, agree on a federal framework, why not simply cooperate in so transforming the state? If a federal system is set up, any ISGA will have to fit into that or the Tigers will have to reject it, thereby exposing to the world that they seek to go beyond federalism and the Oslo accords. The exercise doesn’t have to rely on either the LTTE or the JVP. Sun God turning 50 Velupillai Prabhakaran hits the big five-o in several weeks (though Sinhala Only arithmetic made him 50 last year: "panaha labuwa", meaning 2003-1954=50!). The logic of the cult of personality and the workings of megalomania demand a grand achievement. This doesn’t mean he will go to war on Nov 26th, but that while he is still 50, he will make a decisive, historic move, and I don’t mean a conversion to federalism. So if I were CBK, I’d avoid an ostrich posture on security, and not return from Delhi this time around without signing a solid defence agreement. I’d also repair that Palaly runway, fast. Prabhakaran’s devotees are already preparing for his birthday. The Tigers are applying pressure, Pongu Thamilishly, in Trincomalee, hoping for a Sinhala backlash. Historically the East has been the flashpoint (’56, ’58), and a Sinhala communal response could politically drown Karuna if the Tamils rally around Prabhakaran, reminded that their Sinhala neighbours are the oldest foes. The Tigers are also murdering Muslims so as to trigger an Islamic response that can be depicted as fundamentalist to the US, India, and the world community. Consider also this context, the latest columns by Taraki, Tamil Net editor who recently received a dishonourable mention from his former homeboy (or "area mate", in Peradeniya dialect) Karuna. Taraki whips out a mean analysis, reconstructing the strategic interests and perspectives of the USA, India and China in the region and as they impinge on Sri Lanka. It’s a doosra, trying to simultaneously deter and signal each power that it is functional to have the Tigers around to counter the others. The old game: cross-dressing as an Israel-in-waiting, hustling for a sugar daddy. LTTE and Liberation The Frontline magazine’s recent cover story Tamil nationalism, with its excellent interviews of Tamil leaders by correspondent VS Sambandan, make it both a collector’s item and essential reading for every Sri Lankan politician. It should be translated to into Sinhala and Tamil and republished in the Sunday papers as an essential act of public pedagogy. Traversing the same historical terrain recently mapped by the UTHR-J’s ‘15 Years After Rajani’, the surviving leaders of the Tamil Left zero in on 1986-87, when the entire character of the struggle changed from that of liberation, with the horrific massacre of TELO and the EPRLF by the Tigers; the opening of space for reform with the Indo-Lanka Accord and Prabhakaran’s closure of that space by war. Since 1987 at least, Prabhakaran’s war no longer meets the philosophical criteria of Just War, while by comparison, the defensive wars of the State approximate them more closely. My own Pauline paradigm shift from anti-state to pro-state, criticised explicitly (see box) by (TamilNet editor) Taraki/DP Sivaram in the Daily Mirror and at some biographical length in the Sunday Veerakesari (Oct 10th) sprang precisely from that tectonic shift, the Southern aspect of which was the murder of Vijaya and the slaughter of the anti-racist Southern Left by the JVP. By settling on (a) the individual (especially the exceptional, outstanding, creative or heroic) and (b) the State, as privileged agencies, I am a prodigal son returned home to political philosophy. Many in the Tamil community tend to justify, in public, private or within themselves, Prabhakaran’s campaign of murder, his repeated recourse to war and his boycott of talks, by the argument that a single monolithic leadership (even if the means to achieve it are lethal) gives the Tamil community greater cohesion and therefore greater strength. But is this true? How successful have the Tigers been after eliminating most of their rivals and competitors? The Tamil New Tigers (TNT) was formed in 1972, which is when Prabhakaran took up the gun. The LTTE was formed in 1976. So that’s roughly 30 years. In half that time Lenin had liberated the world’s most vast country. In two thirds of that time Mao had liberated the world’s most populous country. In the same time span the Vietnamese had beaten the Japanese, the French and the Americans. In less time the African liberation movements had overthrown Portuguese colonialism. In one tenth of that time Fidel Castro had liberated Cuba under the nose of the USA. Prabhakaran has not been able to liberate a land the size of a postage stamp - the North east of a small island - after 30 years! Furthermore he could neither retain Jaffna in 1995 nor retake it in 2000. In 2001 he was dodging the Sri Lankan armed forces LRRP units and was saved by Ranil Wickremesinghe. He is militarily strong and tactically brilliant, but has so far, been a strategic and historical failure. His project is doomed because even if he drives the Sri Lankan forces out of the Northeast, India will not permit a Tamil Eelam (controlling Trincomalee) on its doorstep, a neighbour of Tamil Nadu. And given their new strategic alignment, the US will always respect India’s strategic interests in this regard. Strategy, Morality, Ethics Unity is not monopoly, and there is no correlation between strength and political monopoly. Are the Tamil people stronger today than they were before the killing spree commenced (with the elimination of TELO in 1986)? When you are an arithmetical minority to begin with, and you murder your own, you reduce the numbers of your own nation. You also serve the cause of majoritarianism because however many it loses, the majority community can numerically afford to! Therefore, to seek to strengthen your cause by eliminating members of your own ethnic group is an act of lunacy. Arguing that such elimination somehow strengthens the minority vis-a-vis the majority, meaning "minus" is more than "plus", needs to see a doctor. In the mid 1980s, India, the mightiest state in the region and one of the most powerful in the global South, was tilting against the centralised Sri Lankan state. Today it is against the Tigers, Tamil Eelam and the ISGA, and an ally of the Sri Lankan state and supposedly even of Sinhala majoritarian forces. Its voice is not raised on the issue of devolution, unlike in the 1980s. Is that an enhancement or diminution of the strength of the Tamil nation? In the mid 1980s, the Tamils’ educated political elite was intact. Today Prabhakaran, who deprived the Tamils of the education of Neelan Tiruchelvam and Rajini Rajasingham Tiranagama, to give only two illustrations, has truncated it. The Tamil people have been turned into a nation disintegrated and dispersed: refugees overseas and in Sri Lanka. This would not have been the case had Prabhakaran accepted and worked the Indo-Lanka Accord and the Interim administration granted him in September 1987. Fanatical The most nonsensical part of the fanatical Tamil nationalist argument is the correlation of strength with a monolithic leadership that has eliminated internal political rivals. If that is so the United States of America cannot be the mightiest power in world history – that position should go to Hitler’s Germany or Pol Pot’s Kampuchea! The most significant independence struggle in history was the American War of Independence, which won in 1776. Its leadership was not formed by violent unification. In the areas uncontrolled it didn’t kidnap children and force them into the army. When it triumphed, it did not set up a totalitarian dictatorship but a liberal democracy with a separation of powers, not a centralisation. It is that adherence to liberal democratic values and a political system that made the American Revolution more durable than either Oliver Cromwell’s or the Great French revolution - or indeed the Socialist revolutions. When Abraham Lincoln fought the Civil War in the 1860s, preserving the unity of America and abolishing slavery, he didn’t overcome the many political differences in his Government and in Congress, by murdering his rivals. It is one thing to emerge as the vanguard of the struggle in a process of competition and manoeuvre. It is another to murder your rivals and opponents. Why did Lenin write 45 volumes (the Collected Works)? The whole process of the revolution was one of ideological struggle against various erroneous lines, within the Russian Revolutionary movement, the Marxist movement in Europe, and his Bolshevik party. Lenin struggled against the Narodniks, the Mensheviks, and various tendencies within the Bolsheviks, to ensure the triumph of his line. On more than one occasion (the first time in 1917 itself) he threatened to resign! The vanguard role of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was ensured by competition and the battle of ideas, not executions and massacres, as in the case of Prabhakaran. Mao had to defeat many erroneous lines within his own party, before his correct line was accepted at the Tsunyi conference in 1935. None of his opponents, like Chen Tieu Hsieu, Li Li San and Wang Ming, were executed: they served in the ranks of the Revolution. Mao Ze Dong was a theorist and practitioner of the united front tactic. You don’t need a united front if your idea of strong leadership is monopoly, and a monopoly achieved through murder. In order to defeat Japan, Mao united with Chiang Kai Shek, who had massacred thousands of Communists including Mao’s own wife! Mao did not insist on the sole leadership of China’s Communist party in the struggle for national liberation. Mao was the master theoretician of contradictions, and in "the Correct Handling of Contradictions" he argued that contradictions could be divided into antagonistic and non-antagonistic ones. Antagonistic contradictions are those between you and the enemy, and which have inevitable to be solved by violence. Non-antagonistic contradictions are within the ranks of the people, and must never be solved violently. It is true that there were horrific excesses during the Cultural Revolution as there were in Stalin’s Russia: but those were many years after the seizure of power, not before or during - unlike in the case of the Tamil Tigers! And even during the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s opponent Deng Hsiao Ping was not murdered, therefore he was around to lead China to its present success as an economic superpower. Britain fought alone against Hitler in 1940, and that moral fibre was not due to political monopoly. Churchill didn’t eliminate his political opponents and critics. Israel’s stunning military successes from its War of Independence in 1948 on were not based on political monopoly: Israel has been a volatile civilian democracy from the outset. United Front tactics Fidel Castro won through a series of united front tactics, and outmanoeuvring of competitors. There were many other armed revolutionary groups, like the Revolutionary Directorate, and the Second Front of Escambray, which were in competition with him, as were a great many so-called moderate political parties. He did not use violence against a single one of them. The same is true of the Nicaraguan revolution, which united the broadest forces by convincing rather than coercing them. The ends do not always justify the means; the means must be proportional to and not undermine the ends. Socialism collapsed because it had killed its own, thereby diminishing it own pool of quality human resources. The reason Fidel Castro’s Cuba has survived, and is respected globally is because it did not murder within its ranks or any of its political rivals. It never killed unarmed enemies, or civilians, and it often spared the lives of its armed enemies as well. As Fidel disclosed "to me it is a question of Christian morality and Marxist–Leninist morality, and that’s what we go by". (War and Crisis in the Americas, Speeches 1984-5, p 141) He speaks for me too. In a travesty of Liberation Theology, the Christian (mainly Catholic) clergy who support Prabhakaran have, like the Jewish chief priests, opted for Barabbas, or like the Jews of the Exodus, worship the camouflaged Tiger, version of the Golden Calf. However fanatical or dedicated its followers, no cause or movement can be strong if it is morally and ethically weakened by assassination and terror, shedding the blood of non-combatants, enslaving children and keeping prisoners in secret underground jails. Antonio Gramsci, the greatest political scientist of the 20th century, makes a fundamental point: to win, you must first win the moral war. Prabhakaran will lose because his struggle, though it retains its spirit, has long since lost its moral-ethical compass, its soul.
|
|
Contact
Information: Send mail to
