{"id":60454,"date":"2016-11-05T11:05:36","date_gmt":"2016-11-05T18:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=60454"},"modified":"2016-11-05T11:05:36","modified_gmt":"2016-11-05T18:05:36","slug":"aborting-the-hard-won-peace-to-placate-the-implacable-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/11\/05\/aborting-the-hard-won-peace-to-placate-the-implacable-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Aborting the hard won peace to placate the implacable \u2013 II"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

Continued from Wednesday, October 26th, 2016 <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Samantha Power, the US Ambassador to the UN, Draper reminds the reader, praised President Sirisena for the government\u2019s \u2018extraordinary progress\u2019 in working towards \u2018a durable peace, an accountable democracy, a new relationship with the outside world, and expanded opportunities for all\u2019. Actually, Power\u2019s alleged observation is only hollow-ringing diplomatic rhetoric. However, she was not all wrong. The president was associated with the really extraordinary progress made towards achieving durable peace, restoring democracy to those who had been denied it under terrorism,\u00a0 expanded opportunities for all , and\u00a0 effective and\u00a0 independent relationships with the outside world, all of which were achievements of the previous government of which he was a prominent member. That is the factual situation that is being obscured by the West and its supportive media.<\/p>\n

One of the very few valid observations that Draper makes in his essay is that it\u2019s not Power or other foreign officials whom the government needs to win over, but the Tamil minority. But it is a truism as stale as old beer. Our national leaders realized this even before the end of British occupation. To stop\u00a0 the minorities, particularly the Tamils, feeling alienated has been a genuine concern of all post-independence governments. That is exactly what the previous administration focused on, and was in the process of doing everything possible to that end. This is evident in the fact that, during its tenure, while Sri Lanka\u2019s overall economic growth rate reached 7%, Jaffna\u2019s growth rate reached 22%! As soon as the conditions were settled enough there, the government held provincial council elections in the north in the full knowledge that the Tamil National Alliance, proxies of the defeated LTTE, would win, and that the government allies would lose despite all that it did for the region unconditionally as a national responsibility. Former Tamil Eelamist rebels like Douglas Devananda (EPDP) and Karuna Amman (LTTE), the latter Prabhakaran\u2019s erstwhile right-hand man, were included in the cabinet; and various peace building activities among young people of the north and south were organized, accelerated infrastructure development work was initiated even before the war ended, and so on. There is no space here to write more about the subject.<\/p>\n

Draper\u2019s assertion that Tamils have been left behind by the country\u2019s postwar progress and that they feel embittered by \u2018the Sinhalese majority\u2019s seeming indifference to their plight\u2019 is completely false, as borne out by the aforementioned facts. The people in the southern districts knew that the previous government allocated extra funds for the development of the north and east provinces, at their expense to some extent; but the southerners never grudged it. They understood that the government had to pay more attention to those provinces than to others because they were the worst hit by the separatist terrorism that had ravaged the country. Isn\u2019t that one reason less for the international community to worry about ethnic \u2018reconciliation\u2019 in our country?<\/p>\n

Draper\u2019s research on Sri Lanka has been perfunctory at best. That is because, apparently, truth is not an essential part of his epic purpose of rationalizing Western bullying of hapless Sri Lanka. That could be why he tries to put the political and military leaders of the government that rescued the country from terrorism in such a bad light. But, occasionally, he pays them unintentional tributes. For when he says that the \u2018well-groomed, galloping metropolis that bears no visible scars of war\u2019, he is mentioning something achieved under the able management of the former president\u2019s brother Gotabhaya, who headed the Urban Development Authority, in addition to playing a number of other roles, after the successful end of the war.<\/p>\n

As Draper has observed, roughly equal numbers of Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims populate Colombo and they have been living there in complete harmony. However, he adds an unnecessary reservation by saying that they do so with \u2018only occasional displays of hostility\u2019. It is only a figment of biased Draper\u2019s warped imagination. To suggest that there has been a tradition of \u2018occasional displays of hostility\u2019 among the Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim communities in Colombo is entirely wrong. Unfortunate, treacherously instigated clashes between Sinhalese and Tamils in 1958 and 1983 (where the latter suffered more) were isolated incidents (in which Muslims were left unharmed); the Sinhalese as a community totally and sincerely condemned those violent incidents. Both Buddhist and Hindu cultures abhor violence in any form.<\/p>\n

Draper writes: The city maintained a surprising\u00a0 show of composure on the night of January 8, 2015, when Sri Lanka astonished the world by ousting the autocratic regime of Mahinda Rajapaksa through a largely peaceful and untainted election.\u201d It was actually the outgoing government\u2019s achievement. Rajapaksa used periodically due elections to test public approval of his policies. He was not unusually authoritarian. But he or anyone else in the same position, must be sufficiently firm as a leader in order to rule effectively.<\/p>\n

In a sweeping observation that pays little regard to facts, Draper claims that the Sirisena administration has begun to reform the \u2018corrupt judiciary system\u2019, privatize \u2018bloated agencies\u2019, and reckon with immense debts incurred from \u2018dubious\u2019 infrastructure contracts awarded to Chinese companies. Any fair-minded observer will not fail to see that allegations of \u2018a corrupt judiciary\u2019, \u2018bloated agencies\u2019 (by which Draper probably means public corporations allegedly filled with too many cronies of politicians in power), and \u2018dubious infrastructure contracts awarded to Chinese companies\u2019 reflect a deliberate misrepresentation of what actually happened under the government that was later ousted. These things are for competent Sri Lankans to decide. Can any outsider, least of all a stooge of a manipulative external power, make derogatory statements that reflect on mutual relations between two sovereign nations that he knows nothing about, and has no connection whatsoever with?.<\/p>\n

Draper\u2019s contradictory characterization of the Northern Province as the (exclusive, as he implies) \u2018homeland\u2019 of the \u2018Sri Lankan Tamils\u2019 is wrong because of many reasons, of which I am going to mention only one or two here. One is that the whole of the island is the homeland of all Sri Lankans; there cannot be an exclusive homeland in it for each community. Another reason is that more than 50% of all Tamils in the country live outside the north and east provinces; these include Indian Tamils brought to Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which was then a part of the British empire like India itself, to work on coffee and later tea estates owned by British planters. If a particular region of the island is assigned to one ethnic community as its homeland on the basis of population size, then there must be at least three homelands in this country: one for the Tamils, one for the Muslims, and another for the Sinhalese majority. The majority of ordinary Sri Lankans are not asking for such fragmentation of the country, but it could be forced on them by the powers that be.<\/p>\n

Historically, however, Sri Lanka is the only homeland of the Sinhalese; they have no identity without reference to this their country of origin. Tamil Nadu means Tamil country. That is their historical homeland. That is where the Tamil Hindu culture developed.\u00a0 This does not mean that only the Sinhalese must live in this country, or that the others must go elsewhere. Draper says \u2018Eelam\u2019 is the Tamil name for Sri Lanka. That is not right unless it happens to have derived from \u2018Hela\u2019 (an ancient Sinhalese name of the island). However, as well known, \u2018Eelam\u2019 is the name of the Tamil state the separatists want to create in the north and east of Sri Lanka. Draper may not have been told by his Tamil informants that the Sinhalese call this island just \u2018Lanka\u2019, the same name that Tamils pronounce as \u2018Ilankei\u2019. In other words, Ilankei is the Tamil version of \u2018Lanka\u2019. Sinhale (from which \u2018Ceylon\u2019 comes) was also known as \u2018Hela\u2019 or \u2018Heladiva\u2019 (the island of Hela). \u2018Eelam\u2019 could have derived from Hela. But there is no historical or archaeological evidence to show that Tamil Hindu culture evolved in Heladiva (It evolved in Tamil Nadu, India). Instead, there is overwhelming historical and archaeological evidence to prove that the island civilization has been fashioned by the Sinhalese over at least 2600 years of recorded history. It was always the Sinhalese who defended the country against invaders. They fought the European invaders of the past five hundred years just as they fought off 17 South Indian incursions from time to time before. (To be concluded)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Rohana R. Wasala Continued from Wednesday, October 26th, 2016 Samantha Power, the US Ambassador to the UN, Draper reminds the reader, praised President Sirisena for the government\u2019s \u2018extraordinary progress\u2019 in working towards \u2018a durable peace, an accountable democracy, a new relationship with the outside world, and expanded opportunities for all\u2019. Actually, Power\u2019s alleged observation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rohana-r-wasala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60454","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=60454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}