Contexts count.
Hostage rescue operations are different from wars. Responding to military aggression is
different from declaring war on a country on a pretext such as the possession
of non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
July ’83 is different from July ’16.
Clashes between raggers and anti-raggers are different from the clash
that took place a few days ago at the Jaffna University. Contexts count. And they frame the assessment of responses.
No surprises then that the Minister of Higher Education Lakshman Kiriella
stole a page from the FUTA handbook to pooh-pooh it all: ‘This was a clash
between two students groups as it happens in any other university.’
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) called it
right. Well, almost right, but that ‘almost’
can be understood, again given the context of constituency. “We regret that several students have
sustained injuries and that the Sinhala students had to be evacuated from the
university and Jaffna as a precautionary measure," was what the TNA
said. The TNA, moreover, urged the
evacuated Sinhala students to return and called on their Tamil counterparts to
welcome them.
The University of Jaffna Teachers Association (UJTA),
in comparison, fudged it a bit. They
expressed dismay, concern and condemnation.
They pledged to protect cultural rights.
They flagged the communal element without naming names.
The Jaffna University Science Teachers’ Union
(JUSTA) embarrassed itself by the vagueness of its statement. They sought to ‘educate’ the public thus: “Some
unwanted incidents related to the freshers’ welcome party led to violent
clashes.” Drawn from an uneasy template
obviously. Less understandable, but let’s
leave it at that.
The Federation of University Teachers’ Associations
(FUTA) tied itself in knots. Although
calling authorities to identify perpetrators and bring them to justice, FUTA
studiously (!) avoids stating the main facts.
Condemnation is easy. Calling for justice is easy. However, if you want to give ‘context, seek
the indulgence of an audience for a historical rigmarole and outline a sociological
treatise it is silly to beat around the bush. On the face of it, for FUTA, this was just one
of those clashes between two groups of unnamed (unnamable?), unidentified
(unidentifiable?) university students. Sweeping
‘ethnic’ under the carpet and then urging everyone to be vigilant about ‘brutality,
ethnic conflicts and violence,’ is plain silly.
The Government Information Department undressed itself. The
official position of the Government, which came to light a full three days
after the clash, was slightly better than the FUTA in terms of ‘sociologizing’
the incident, but was a worse howler because it was an absolute lie. The Government Information Department said “although
some people tried to stress that it was a racially motivated conflict, this was
a clash between two groups of students and the government condemns the violent
behavior of some students.” Just compare the above with the TNA statement. Dr Ranga Kalansuriya and Deputy Ministry
Karunaratne Paranavithana have embarrassed themselves here.
The 'Left' suffered the worst knicket-twisting. It is almost as if it
were they and not the Sinhala students of the Science Faculty, University of
Jaffna, who were attacked. Anuruddha
Pradeep Karnasuriya describes this undressing thus:
‘It is not the Sinhala students but the leftists in
this country that got the worst beating.
Nothing in the recent past has made these people this vulnerable. They cannot bring themselves to say that the
attack was unjustified. They can’t urge
authorities to take action against the perpetrators. They cannot issue statements about the freedom
of art. They cannot offer scholarly
opinions on tribalism. What is this
tragedy that has befallen them?’
Karnasuriya singles out Ajith Perakum Jayasinghe as
an exception. There are probably others, but by and large he is correct about
the malaise that has afflicted self-proclaimed leftists.
The lords and ladies of rights, reconciliation and justice kept mum. Let us also not forget that those who are quickest to respond to
any clash that has even the faintest communal trace blanked out: the UN, diplomats
from the USA, Canada and Europe, the BBC and other news agencies. Telling.
It is about context, yes. It is also about the truth. Truth, let us not forget is what we are told
reconciliation is all about. Well, truth
and justice. The Jaffna University
incident tells us that one’s political preferences and the particular incident
confer varying degrees of truth-comfort. Certain ‘truths’ are privileged while others
are typically downplayed or even dismissed.
This is the ‘natural’ issue of power structures. However, truth-advocates cannot demand
half-baked stories. Indeed, when
truth-demanders utter barefaced lies or resort to scandalous and laughable
distortion, they can kiss truth goodbye.
The Jaffna incident is mild and thanks to statements
such as the one issued by the TNA shows encouraging signs of being resolved and
more importantly forging a more wholesome embrace between Tamil and Sinhala
students. If it was left to Kiriella,
FUTA, the Information Department and the leftists it could have got worse. Indeed, these entities by their political
jugglery still have the potential to add fuel to unnecessary fires.
What is important here is to understand the power of
truth, equal in power only to falsehood, and the power of half-truth. If reconciliation is truth-based then it has
to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. This is where we move away from the Jaffna
incident. This is where we draw from the
Chilcot Report, its good and its bad.
The ‘bad’ is about gaping holes and language-comforts
that give life-lines to the guilty, Tony Blair and George W Bush in
particular. The ‘bad’ is also about the
readiness to receive truth, i.e. by the grandmasters on the subject in the
international community, namely Ban Ki-moon (UN Secretary General) and Prince
Zeid (UN High Commissioner for Human Rights).
Yes, that’s about an Orwellian world of human rights advocacy and what
Ayca Cubukcu calls “21st century platitudes: democracy, the people, human
rights”.
The ‘good’ is about (at least on paper) the mandate
for the whole nine yards; the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth. John Chilcot’s team had to look
at the build-up, the period of engagement and the aftermath. And this is where it becomes most relevant to
Sri Lanka.
Just one example would suffice to drive home the
point. On October 21, 1987, the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) massacred
over 50 Tamil civilians in Velvettiturai.
The Daily Telegraph (UK) observed editorially, ‘This massacres is worse than My Lai. Then
American troops simply ran amok. In the Sri Lankan village, the Indians seem to
have been more systematic; the victims being forced to lie down, and then shot
in the back’. The
IPKF killed doctors, nurses, attendants, patients and members
of public in a 24 hour period.
The ‘whole truth’ is not only about what happened during the
last stage of the historic hostage-rescue operation leading up to May 18, 2009
and all the wrongdoing that may have taken place as alleged. It is about everything that happened since
the LTTE killed Alfred Duraiappah on July 27, 1975. Indiscriminate killings, crimes against
humanity, suicide bombs, extra-judicial killings, shelling civilian areas, conscription
of children, political assassinations, everything, everything, everything must
count. And it is not about the Sri
Lankan security forces and the LTTE only.
The IPKF and the other militant Tamil groups such as the EPRLF, EPDP,
EROS, TELO and the Karuna-Faction cannot be ‘counted out’.
It’s the full truth-story that ought to count if reconciliation
is to be truth-based, because there are contexts and there are contexts. There are ‘small’ contexts (like the Jaffna
University incident) and there is the larger context (of the entire period of
conflict and all acts that yielded dispossession, dismemberment, displacement
and death). Certain kinds of deceit (such as we saw over
the past few days) can be ‘understandable’ but none are ever ‘pardonable’ in terms
of the truth-reconciliation matrix and certainly not the larger contexts that
frame the reconciliation discourse.
Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer. Email: malindasenevi@gmail.com. Twitter: malindasene. Blog: malindawords.blogspot.com. This article was publishedon July 21, 2016 in the 'Daily Mirror'.
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