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Living with a life of contradictions

Chaturanga Janaka Bandaranayake

A Chinese proverb once said “a wise man can see more from the bottom of the well, than a fool from the top of a mountain”.

Peace in Sri Lanka is much the same as this proverb. To put it bluntly for the past quarter of a century, it has been a land plagued by a people who believe that indeed wisdom can be seen from the top of a mountain. Both sides do not see the real cost of war, for the future generations of a country in which much of its people still struggle to live from day to day.

For twenty three years of my life, all I hear from people is a fondness of the past, when Sri Lanka had a potential to be a prosperous country in which it believed in its place among the community of nations. But as a generation grown up in the midst of war, this fondness comes with a very shallow promise of a future.

I no longer cannot accept potential; there is a burning desire for results.

To illustrate a vivid example, one day my father showed me a photo of his university batch from Sri Lanka before the conflict. These young men and women in the photo were some of the best the country had to offer. What was greater than that was that they were Singhalese, Tamil, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian and many other young people from different groups all sitting in that memory.

I can no longer see a community

Politics is a no longer an idealistic enterprise which was looked to at Sri Lanka’s independence. Caste, economic and social standings of the past generation now define who we are, and discriminate those people who are less fortunate to enjoy such fine trappings of life.

Ethnic and religious boundaries are drawn up with the petty excuses of suspicion of the other side. Buddhists against Christians, Tamils against Singhalese, rich against poor, high caste against lower casts, north against south, the list just continues on and its not only one side which perpetuates such an argument, but both.

They both seek to define that their moral fiber is stronger than the other. It does not matter if its people fighting against each other in same ethnic background or the other for example.

In my life I have sought to define these arguments through social, psychological and environmental understanding, but it continues to contradict with basics of fundamental human principles of peace, equality and freedom in which all societies claim in a very general sense to uphold. Then why then such disagreements on such matters?

It is perplexing to grasp the fact that war, corruption and injustice on all sides continues to prolong the country into a quagmire.

A country cannot continue to understand that with each death of a person, each building destroyed and each life tortured through violence and corruption, we seek to pass this legacy on to our future generations to solve and pro-long it.

I look to the legacy of our previous generations made up of our immediate past, who have on very general sense failed to uphold law, order but also peace and prosperity for the country.

What we are left with is a country corrupt in its political dealings; regions heavily mined with thousands of rounds of unexploded ordnance strewn all over the land.

The gap between the rich and poor is greater than ever, a population which is traumatized with war resulting in divisions along social and ethnic lines.

Which leaves us a country which will pay for its violent war for the next century economically and physiologically?

It is only through people’s tiredness to war that a hollow victory from one side is being achieved today.

An underlying deniability comes into play from the generation holding the levers of power today. In which they seek to transform the actions of Sri Lanka away from similar conflicts throughout the world.

Sri Lankan’s looks at conflicts in the rest of the world but cannot draw parallels with its own tragedy.

This is the hard and simple truth

We are a country exploited by arms dealers whose sole purpose is the business of war, which trickles down to how much they earn for their shareholders, corrupt officials who only seek to buy votes instead of earning them and mercenaries masquerading as security consulting companies.

In a broad sense we no longer hold the values of tolerance, transparency and community in high stead. Every aspect of life is manipulated to achieve individualistic goals of officials from full spectrum of politics who seek only the short term votes of their constituents.

When I ask people why we cannot aspire to something greater for the country, the excuse people come back is that we are a small and poor country who cannot attain this or it’s not possible in our life times.

No longer should we tolerate such discrepancies from those we put into positions of power. They have a responsibility to uphold the country and its entire people in every sense of the word.

I take the famous quote of Odysseus in the battle of Troy, when he said “war is old men talking and young men dying” and writings of Plato when he defines peace as only seen by the dead”

The fundamental question is do we have the right to sacrifice so many young men and women? We have lost the cream of a crop of a generation from all sides.

I can accept disability of a person from birth to some degree, but I cannot accept it from intentional violence.

Sri Lanka holds a beautiful history of a people in which differences exists but also have merged into providing an everlasting identity for a land rich in tradition and culture.

What each of these unruly elements has sought to do is not realize the true cost of war can do to its people.

Wars in the past have occurred, but people have not realized that it only puts of what is truly inevitable as a result of this violence.

What we must do is seek to understand the grievances of each other through constructive dialogue and action accordingly and always continue this process in order to move away from the mistakes of our past.

This does not just stop there, we must instill in our future generations, and the state and its people that we must continue to serve each other.

In the words of the late J F Kennedy “ask not for what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”

With this, I do not necessarily seek to criticize unilaterally, but to provide this through constructive means.

To look at our task at hand, we have a range of items which we must complete.

- firstly to reconcile the violence in each of our conflicts, possibly through a commission such as the truth and reconciliation commission of South Africa
- Prosecute through proper legal means those of us who have moved away from the standards of conflict.
- secondly to seek a peaceful solution to the conflict in amongst the Singhalese and Tamil possible through exploring the possibility of an autonomous region within the sovereignty of Sri Lanka but with greater representation of each of the ethnic minorities in the federal parliament including our indigenous population.
- to rehabilitate the hundreds and thousands of young men and women who have participated in conflict through social integration programs, job skilling
- Providing greater transparency and economic integration of Sri Lanka into the global market place.
- Begin the process of removing the hundreds of thousands of unexploded ordnance and shells which litter the country.
- Redefine our contextual history in which we accept all differences as playing an integral history of who we are as a nation.
- Rehabilitating the hundreds of thousands of children who have either participated in conflict or been affected by this.
- Providing social programs and benefits to the thousands of internally displaced refugees within our country.
- Reconstruction of infrastructure of physically affected zones from the conflict.

For too many years all I have seen is each ethnic or social group from Sri Lanka identify each other through individualistic means and not reach out to each other to talk and set an example to their children.

By writing this peace I cannot claim to be an idealist, I will come to realistic conclusions.

But what I am seeking to understand is that what is so wrong in seeking to maintain idealistic principles in which people inspire themselves for the betterment of their future generations and each other.

Some may accuse such a writing of being too vague and general, but what is so wrong in casting the first stone to think differently.

I go back to the principle of a stone being dropped in the pond and the ripples that come from it.

To be truly a nationalist, you must inspire your children to love the land and its people. To love the differences in culture and tradition and to embrace each of these elements.

To love your country does not mean siding with one or the other but to see that we have duty to the land and sea which gave us a home and to protect it so that our children may enjoy it the same way we did.

So far we have failed to achieve such an ideal

At the end of the day it comes back to grassroots and planting a seed in which we maybe be able to compromise and to work for a better country and world.

For peace and prosperity, I hope these thoughts truly represent our duty to our coming generations.

Written by

Chaturanga Janaka Bandaranayake

“This island is the most beautiful on earth”
Marco Polo

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