{"id":41569,"date":"2015-02-15T22:48:55","date_gmt":"2015-02-16T04:48:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=41569"},"modified":"2015-02-15T15:48:18","modified_gmt":"2015-02-15T22:48:18","slug":"wigneswaran-damanaya-taming-the-shrew-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/02\/15\/wigneswaran-damanaya-taming-the-shrew-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Wigneswaran Damanaya (taming the shrew!) \u2013 Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"

C. Wijeyawickrema<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Given below is an essay printed in the Island newspaper on May 23, 2009, a few days after the defeat of Prabakaran, which now appears to me as a waste of time and energy, playing violin to a deaf elephant. However, I find the two parts of this essay and several others written by me \u00a0then have relevance in tackling the Wigneswaran genocide document of Feb 10, 2015, by ignoring it!<\/p>\n

This Wigneswaran thing is nothing but a rehash of the 1976 Vaddukoddei thing or the Thimpu-Oslo thing or 2003-4 ISGA-PTOM things or the 2009 GCTCSL thing, mentioned below. \u00a0Freed from Ranil-Managala-CBK-Raajitha, black-white federal influence, president Maithreepala, could solve this so-called Tamil separatist issue, once and for all, if he takes the Buddhist Middle Path. When two ex-Indian presidents, not born as Buddhists, recently declared that the solutions to world\u2019s problems could be found via Buddhism\u201d they must have meant the application of the formula, 4NT+8NP, in a secular setting.<\/p>\n

Digging from the past writings (I am tired of writing anew), an attempt will be made to present that solution, which, if followed then, would have made Sri Lanka, a model state for the world by now. It was a national tragedy that one or two individuals took a decision to cancel the Jana Sabha Director General\u2019s Office, and to derail the successful Gami Diriya Village Development Program, reminiscent of the Rural Development and Crime Eradication Society Program floated by the late Ven. Kalukondayawe Panngasekara MahaThero in the 1940s, \u00a0with the support of ASP Osmand de Silva and Justice Akbar.<\/p>\n

===============================<\/p>\n

Concerned Tamil citizens and the \u2018Karuna paradigm\u2019<\/p>\n

by C. Wijeyawickrema<\/p>\n

“Tell our king to save all our people from the LTTE”
\nA distraught Tamil mother in an IDP camp<\/em><\/p>\n

Prisoners of pride and prejudice<\/strong><\/p>\n

The statement issued recently by GCTCSL (group of concerned Tamil citizens of Sri Lanka) (The Island, 5\/18\/2009) is as unreasonable as the letter written to the president previously by a group of eminent citizens (A \u2018concerned\u2019 group of Sri Lankans and the Kamatha test, The Island, 3\/7\/2009). These Colombo-living groups of people are so out of touch with reality. They still live in the shadow of the separatist sub-paradigm which thrived under the larger Colombo paradigm (milk to Colombo, fodder to villages, kolambata kiri apita kakiri -Youth Commission Report, March, 1990, p. xvii), which in turn helped to sustain the separatist sub-paradigm.<\/p>\n

Even if they think that the army has staged those scenes of Tamils marching in the streets of Jaffna and Vavuniya carrying the lion flag (lion flag came from the last Sinhala king who was a Tamil), how can they ignore the evidence from those who escaped torture and killing and entered the army territory? Is it fair to say that they came from liberation to detention? The opinion that “the current war has greatly increased the sense of alienation\u2026among the Tamils” has no objective basis.<\/p>\n

Rights of Tamil IDPs<\/strong><\/p>\n

With Prabakaran and his top generals dying without the cyanide necklaces on them those Tamil moderates living in air-conditioned apartments, some receiving generous INGO dollars who maintained silence on Prabakaran\u2019s murders for all these years have no moral right to talk about IDP rights. Writing books on some aspect of the Sinhala society with funds from the Marga Institute, ICES or the Center for Policy Alternatives did not help the Wanni Tamil crushed under the iron boot of Prabakaran. There were no HR or R2P help for people living under Prabakaran\u2019s jackboot.<\/p>\n

Some foreign visitors have already testified that the IDP camps are in reasonably good shape. Considering the fact that former terrorists have infiltrated the IDP camps and that the black cat who came to bomb the army commander was a pregnant woman, a child in the womb cannot become a free pass for entry and exit for at least some more months. Anybody with any sense of shame cannot come forward to defend the “impartiality and the monitoring ability” of INGOs who cheated the people in the Wanni by misusing the funds meant for the development of their localities and for their personal welfare.<\/p>\n

Sir Isaac Newton and the apple<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is said that if Isaac had asked, “Why did this apple fall on my head?” he would have written a long novel. Instead, he asked, “Why apples fall?” Similarly, GCTCSL should not have asked, “What is the just and credible offer of a political package acceptable to the population of the North and East?” but, “What is the best method to empower all the people (not politicians) of the East, West, North, South and Central?” Prisoners in a separatist prison cannot formulate a new question of this nature despite the clear evidence that the Karuna paradigm and the Mahinda Chinthanaya Programme effectively ended the Tamil separatist plans in Sri Lanka. The demise of Prabakaran is a direct result of the joint application this new political philosophy. We can no longer talk about the B-C and D-C Pacts, Indo-SL Accord, 1995 and 2000 Neelan-GL Packages or the 2002 CFA. The last was rightly identified by the Englishman [Scotsman] Paul Harris as \u2018the greatest give away in modern world history.<\/p>\n

Hasalaka hero\u2019s mother<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is however, heartening to see that the English-speaking, Colombo-living citizens have finally escaped from “this war is not winnable” mentality. But they and the international crowd shifted gears hoping to get what they could not get by the gun by way of a peace bonus called 13-A plus devolution. They are so excited and cannot wait at least until the dead bodies are buried. Six U.S. senators and all kinds of white newspapers, the IC and even the departing ambassador Blake are in a hurry for devolution of powers. Any discussion that even hints at language-based spatial units will be a betrayal of the Hasalaka hero\u2019s mother. 13-A should only be a temporary measure until a home-grown solution to empower people at the village level is designed. When SLFP proposed one such method (Grama Rajya) in April 2007 only the Chinese government supported it! If India decided after 40 years of neglect to constitutionally resurrect the Panchayathi Raj Institutes, APRC has no reason to look for examples in Belgium or Scotland. Both are in trouble as federal models.<\/p>\n

When we think of a solution still the 1947 Constitution is better than anything we saw. Section 29 can be modified with a different fundamental rights clause. It was based on the Ministers\u2019 Draft which was prepared after meetings held at different locations in the island. This did not happen in 1972 or in 1978!<\/p>\n

Tamil Buddhists<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Prof. Sunil Ariyaratne\u2019s book “The Tamil Buddhist” (2006) is not available in English for the Tamil moderates to read. The monk Buddhagosha, who translated the Sinhala Tripitaka to Pali was a Tamil from South India. Tamil Nadu is strewn with ancient Buddha statutes dating back to the 3rd and 2nd century B.C. So many soldiers who sacrificed their lives happened to be Christians. Therefore, telling the truth about the elite-establishment Christians in Colombo or overseas is not anti-Christian propaganda. One does not become a SBC (Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist) for telling the truth. It is strange that 99% of all NGO mudalalis are Christians and they supported Prabakaran, openly or secretly. There was even a Wanni-Colombo wine trade.<\/p>\n

There are all kinds of stories about Prabakaran\u2019s family. In 1979, I spent one full year in Canada with Prabakaran\u2019s younger brother [cousin] and he went to church on Sundays. They were fishing caste Christians. It is possible that the 33 bullets on the LTTE flag mark the 33rd year of the life of Jesus, the age at which he resurrected from the dead. The former president of India, Abdul Kalam, a scientist, who has a Tamil-Muslim ancestry, once said, that the solution to world\u2019s problems can be found in Buddhism. It is sad that in Sri Lanka, the separatist Tamil leaders were almost all Christians. Thus the younger Prabakaran hated yellow-robed Buddhist monks roaming in Jaffna and did not like Vesak as a holiday in Jaffna. Yet, monks did not try to convert even the hari-janayas in Jaffna (some believe originally were Sinhala people) to Buddhism.<\/p>\n

Most of the Sinhala politicians in Colombo also had strong Christian connections by blood or by marriage. A reasonable path to solve the frictions that naturally arise between ethnic groups after the end of a divide-and-rule colonial enterprise could have been found, if the Buddhist way of the Middle Path had been followed. Instead, we had Sir Ivor Jennings, Sir Olivers, Sir Johns and the colonial CCS cadre. The latter category comes forward as born-again crusaders only now and long after their retirement. This must be the reason why the late Mahanayaka Ven. Balangoda Anandamaitreeya Theo once said, “If Sir D.B. Jayatilleka had become the first PM of Ceylon the history of the island would have been different.” The modern version of the Middle Path is the reasonableness doctrine central to the western jurisprudence. The R2P guys (Gareth Evans) and gals (Rama Mani) would most probably do not know about this connection.<\/p>\n

Reasonableness test <\/strong><\/p>\n

Can the press statement of GCTCSL pass the reasonableness test? Was the demand since the 1920s for a separate country in Ceylon\/Sri Lanka by a Colombo-living, English-educated, western-trained class of Tamils reasonable? This question makes Tamil moderates nervous and they never tried to answer it. More recently, they thought that they had found an escape route by trying to equate reasonableness with the word moderates. This is a western-hatched strategy as a method to continue old colonialism by way of remote-controlled commercial colonialism. When Hillary Clinton says that “this is not the appropriate time to consider an IMF loan” she is with the moderate crowd! When the UK Foreign Office Minister Bill Rammell talks in a Parliament debate about “a war crimes probe on President Mahinda Rajapaksa\u2019s administration on how the war was finished,” the oxygen for him is the Colombo moderates\u2019 voice. This group is called the black-whites (in Mexico they are called coconuts – brown outside, white inside).<\/p>\n

A moderates\u2019 dilemma<\/strong><\/p>\n

One does not become a \u2018moderate\u2019 because there are or there were \u2018extremists\u2019. These labels (definitions) are relative terms. They are contextual and time and space dependent. Israel\u2019s Arial Sharon is a good example. The Jews in the settlements that he helped to create for decades later wanted to kill him for asking them to leave the settlements. But the objective-reasonable definition, then and now, is that the Jews settlements are illegal acts of invading and robbing Palestinian lands. The reasonableness test is not just a dilemma affecting only the Tamil moderates (ref. Prof. Rajan Hoole\u2019s human rights award, The Island, 10\/16\/2007). It affects all other Colombo-based English-speaking Sinhala folks too. For example, recently another eminent citizens\u2019 group totally ignored the bahubootha nature of the present constitution and pleaded for the implementation of its 17th Amendment to save democracy in Sri Lanka (The Island, 3\/7\/2009).<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.island.lk\/2009\/05\/23\/features1.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

C. Wijeyawickrema Given below is an essay printed in the Island newspaper on May 23, 2009, a few days after the defeat of Prabakaran, which now appears to me as a waste of time and energy, playing violin to a deaf elephant. However, I find the two parts of this essay and several others written […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c-wijeyawickrema"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}