Part 1 of a 2-part series
Demonizing the Other - The Eelamists' construction of the Sinhala as
devils
By Sesha Samarajiwa
The Sinhala - every man, woman and child - are devils. They have discriminated
against the Tamils when all we did was ask for 50:50 parliamentary parity
with them back in 1948 and, in 1975, for one-third of the landmass of
an island half the size of England for an exclusively Tamil homeland,
although we accounted then for 12% of the island's population.
The unreasonable Sinhala rejected our reasonable demand. So we had
no option but to take up arms to carve out a monoethnic state for Tamils,
a separate state flowing with milk and honey, with a bit of help from
our ethnic cousins across the Palk Straits in Tamil Nadu, the homeland
of 63 million Tamils. The Sinhala are racists, enamored of their mythological
chronicle, the Mahavamsa; they suffer from the Mahavamsa complex. They
are Buddhist Nazis. They are a despicable people, tormentors of innocent
Tamils, bloodthirsty demons.
So proclaims a god, the Sun God or Surya Thevan, no less - the same
god who butchered all rivals, real and imagined, mostly Tamil, and thousands
of Sinhala and Muslim men and women, soldiers and civilians, farmers
and infants, peacemakers and prelates, prime ministers and presidents,
at home and abroad, in a three-decade-long orgy of bloodlust, to lay
claim to the mantle of the savior of the Tamils from Sinhala devils;
and thus also proclaimed proto-Eelam ideologues such as S J V Chelvanayakam
in the 1940s; and thus echoes the well-oiled Eelam propaganda machine
now.
The reach and skill of the Eelam propaganda apparatus come starkly
to the fore when an obscure U.S. publication like the Cincinnati Enquirer,
in its 18 September 2007 issue, published a letter to the editor by
a Tamil, Ahilan Sivaganesan , which appeared in the LTTE propaganda
websites Tamil Net and Tamil Voice the very day, purportedly as a reproduction
of a Cincinnati Enquirer 'editorial'.
Sivaganesan has the crude but strategic audacity to charge that "Although
Nazism may be dead in name, the philosophy behind it is alive and well
in Sri Lanka.
" To back up his outrageous claim, Sivaganesan plays on the recent
security search of lodging houses in Colombo, patronized exclusively
by Tamils from distant places and known to be used as safe houses by
Tiger agents on frequent terror missions in the city, and the Government's
ill-advised, but understandable, security prerogative to compel those
who had no definite purpose to be in the city to return to their places
of origin; the defense establishment figured that extreme times sometimes
demand extreme measures. But the Supreme Court of the 'Nazi' Sri Lanka
state rapidly ruled such a move illegal and immediately halted the Government
from proceeding. Sivaganesan conveniently ignores that fact because
it would have nullified the virulent charge of Nazism he leveled against
democratic Sri Lanka.
The editors and sub-editors of the Cincinnati Enquirer - on perusal,
a light read focusing in the main on popular entertainment and sports
- who casually published Sivaganesan's propaganda piece, obviously have
not heard of, or do not care about, the very real genocidal attacks
by the LTTE on Sinhala and Muslim villagers or the mass slaughter of
teenage Buddhist novice monks in or on the periphery of the so-called
Tamil territory, or of the mass eviction of Muslims from their Tamil-Only
turf.
The Strategic Demonization of the
Sinhala
While the LTTE's propaganda machine enhanced its reach and effect in
the West over the years, making people take for granted that the conflict
in Sri Lanka was a battle between victimized Tamils against 'Sinhala
oppression', the Sun God's minions in the Vanni brainwash and poison
young Tamil minds with equally relentless messages demonizing the Sinhala,
the hated Other. Then they are draped with cyanide necklaces and sent
to fight the devils, usually ending up as cannon fodder.
The Eelam propaganda machine has efficiently disseminated their carefully
crafted canards to target influential audiences around the world, swaying
sympathy, overt and covert, in their favor; their spin has been bought
uncritically by the naïve, especially in the West - ordinary citizens,
politicians, academics, journalists, and various institutions with power
and influence to affect Sri Lanka's destiny.
Clearly, it is the Eelamists' demonization of the Sinhala that persuaded
certain individuals and institutions in the West to grant the Tamil
separatists free rein to do as they pleased for such a long time, although
many of them - with the notable exception of Norway which fought hard
on behalf of the LTTE to prevent the European Union, the U.S. and Canada
from proscribing the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organization - were
jolted awake in the wake of the Al Qaeda attacks on America, the UK
and Spain. Until then, the carnage and horrendous suffering wrought
in Sri Lanka by Tamil Tiger terrorists- for all intents and purposes
the most ruthlessly devastating terrorist outfit in the world - for
three decades made hardly a blip on their psyches, much less their policy,
policy which, until recently, had been accommodating towards terrorist
groups not posing a direct threat to these Western countries, even if
they used these sanctuaries to plan, lobby and raise funds for mayhem
in a distant island.
The strategic demonization of the Sinhala is vital for the Eelamists
to achieve their goals; it justifies their claim to a monoethnic state
based on true Nazi principles because, according to them, they have
no other options; they just can't live with Sinhala devils, when in
truth, what Piripaharan, like Hitler, wants is lebensraum, the imperative
that propelled expansionist Nazi aggression.
Are the Sinhala devils?
Let me share an anecdote. The other day, a humble casual worker I employ
for occasional odd jobs, came bearing glad tidings.
"Ayubowan, sir," the old man greeted me. "My two boys
are getting married. Finally they are settling down. The two brothers
are marrying two sisters - Tamil girls. Nice girls. I'm very happy to
have them as my daughters-in-law. You know, sir, we Buddhists have no
animosity towards them. We try to live by Buddhist principles as much
as we can. Live and let live!"
This ordinary Sinhala's attitude, in fact, is the dominant ethos of
the vast majority of Sinhala people. Yet, they are demonized. Wholesale.
This has been an effective strategy for Eelamists; every single news
item in the world media about the Sri Lanka conflict ends with the standard
end-tag stating that the Tamils are fighting for a separate state to
escape Sinhala discrimination. Repeated ad-infinitum by unthinking journalists
who cut and paste the standard round-off, they are rendering the Eelamists
a priceless free service. Every time someone reads that statement, Sri
Lanka comes down a notch in the reader's mind, while sympathy for the
ostensible victim-hero-underdog goes up a notch.
Of course a tiny handful of misguided Sinhala thugs were guilty of
an anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983, engineered by execrable Southern political
cretins t, who used as a trigger the killing by Tamil Tigers of 13 Sri
Lankan soldiers at Elephant Pass, that abominable episode, during which
some 3000 innocent Tamils are believed to have lost their lives. There
is no excuse for that barbarity - a permanent blot on Sri Lanka's conscience.
But compared with the magnitude and monotonous regularity of such incidents,
for example in neighboring India, between Sikhs and Hindus, Hindus and
Muslims, Low Castes and High castes, or in Indonesia where Malays attack
Chinese or China during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 or in
Africa where worse incidents take place, that aberration in Sri Lanka
pales. The West has not been immune to such violent aberrations: the
Balkans, Ireland, Spain, the United States, and to a lesser extent,
Australia have experienced violent communal clashes.
Of course, many wrongs don't make a right. Perpetrators of such crimes
against humanity, be they in Sri Lanka or in Europe, would be found
guilty in courts of law and in the courts of conscience. But it is unfair
and unreasonable to demonize an entire group for the crimes of a few
and, worse, gain perpetual propaganda mileage - using an incident that
occurred more than a generation ago, never to be repeated, despite continuous
provocation - to continue the conflict and wage an illegal war against
a democratically elected state. In Western countries, such groups would
be found guilty of high treason. In America, they would be hunted down
and executed.
The LTTE gives relentless coverage to the 1983 tragedy, but do they
tell the world about the thousands of Sinhala who spontaneously came
to the aid of their Tamil friends and neighbors, giving them sanctuary,
solace and sustenance, often at grave risk to their lives from frenzied
mobs? Do they tell the world about Buddhist temples which gave them
refuge or of Buddhist monks who stopped mobs in their tracks exercising
their time-honored authority, the prelate of the Gangaramya Temple in
Colombo, being one such whose deeds I can personally vouch for? (There
were some young thugs in yellow robes among the mobs.) Do they tell
the world about the countless Sinhala who condemned that cruelty, condemn
it still? No, that would be counter-productive; devils don't display
such humanity.
Since then, the LTTE tacticians have tried hard to engineer more similar
episodes, to cite a few provocations, by: slaughtering over 100 Sinhala
pilgrims worshipping at the Sri Maha Bodhi in Anuradhapura, which had
been protected, nurtured and venerated by the Sinhala people for 2300
years; driving a truck bomb into Sri Dalada Maligawa, the most hallowed
shrine for Sinhala Buddhists; and murdering a dozen novice monks in
Kebitigollewa. The list goes on.
Despite these tactical desecrations, designed to be intense provocations,
the LTTE never succeeded in engineering a repeat of Black July 1983.
Repeats of such an incident would clearly have been a boon for the Tigers:
apart from winning hearts and minds abroad, they would have hoped that
the 52% of Tamils, living among their Sinhala, Moor, Malay, Burgher,
Bora and Sindhi compatriots outside the Utopian Eelam, would leave the
south to take refuge in Tigerland. The Sinhala were not taking the bait.
They held the peace.
Coming Up: Sanctifying the Self: the Eelamist
construction of Tamils as heroic victims
Editor's note
Sesha Samarajiwa commands theoretical expertise in separatist conflict
and the modes and effects of political propaganda.
|
