On Sunday, January 8, G. Parthasarathy, former Indian diplomat delivering a lecture in Chennai on 'Personal Recollections of Relations with Sri Lanka - the IPKF and Beyond,' hosted by The South India Heritage Programme, said that there is a need for India to rethink its policy and empower the Sri Lankan Tamils economically. He pointed out the necessity to set up industrial training and engineering institutions. He further articulated that in the present-day world where politics is invariably trumped by economics, India has to have a drastic rethinking of its policy in favour of economically empowering the Tamils in Sri Lanka as a sustainable solution for their rehabilitation.
Brilliantly said, Mr. Parthasarathy, but who in the first place told him that the Sri Lankan Tamils were lacking in all the above he had mentioned. The Tamils in the northeast were living in a kingdom for the last 2,500 years, until the British in 1833 unified them with the other two Sinhalese states and named it Ceylon. The Tamils, under King Cankili II, resisted Portuguese over lordship only to find himself ousted and hanged by Phillippe de Oliveira in 1619. At the time of independence in February 1948 the Sri Lankan Tamils were far more literate than any Indian community in India. At any one time there were far more Queens' Counselors among the Eelam Tamils per capita than in India. It was India that brought them to the pathetic state they are in today.
Then he let the cat out of his bag. "There has to be a basic rethink in Delhi to see in economic terms our neighbours as an extension of the Indian market," he said. "Such a rethink is hardly out of place against the backdrop of the bilateral FTA and the move towards a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA)." Rajapaksa is yet to agree to any of these partnerships, as he has no desire to see the Sinhalese overwhelmed by Indian entrepreneurs.
The main trust of his talk was that the Sri Lankan market has to be an extension of the Indian market. For this reason the Sinhalese has to be brought into the Indian fold by sacrificing the Tamil interests to appease them. They do not have to worry about the Tamils, as their centuries old relationship with Tamil Nadu, has already brought them into their fold.
In the euphoria of his great lecture, he had forgotten that the Sinhalese had other ideas. All throughout the centuries they maintained their independence by keeping at bay their enemies by cultivating new friends. To keep the Tamil Nadu kings in check, they looked for friends in the Burmese and Javanese kingdoms. Immediately after independence in 1948, they distanced themselves from India and befriended countries that are inimical to India. Now to counter India they have brought in China. India may have played its economic game well, but what about its security concerns when the Chinese have set up bases in many countries to encircle it and now it has made fantastic inroads into Sri Lanka as far as Palk Strait.
Providing an overview of the 1987 India-Sri Lanka Agreement, the tumultuous stand-off between the Sri Lankan Army and the militant LTTE, the dilemma of the Indian Peace Keeping Force -under pressure from every quarter trying to maintain peace without getting involved in a civil war-like scenario and the escalation of the situation into a bloody no-holds barred battle in which "every side is guilty of excess" and "the psyche of which was such that people went haywire." However, he failed to mention his role in the whole debacle.
He and J.N. Dixit were involved in formatting the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord of July 1987. They were the ones who advised Rajiv Gandhi to move Indian relationship closer to the Sinhalese and distance itself from the Tamil militants. The whole purpose was to bring Sri Lanka into Indian obit. Of course, there was no China on the scene at that time to worry about. Rajiv sought the advice of General Sunderji, the Army Commander-in-Chief, on how long he would take to neutralize the LTTE. He assured him that the Tamil Tigers could be disposed off in a couple of weeks. Thus began India's adventure in Sri Lanka, but instead of wiping out the LTTE in weeks the war dragged on for years, until the Indians had to return to India in 1990 without any of their objectives fulfilled.
It was only after in2007 when Sinhalese victory was in the horizon that the Chinese aided the Sinhalese to the hilt. India, being worried about the Tamil Nadu factor, silently encouraged Rajapaksa to purchase arms from China and Pakistan. That was enough for the Sinhalese. They not only sought military help from China, but also financial investment.
Then the Sinhalese started playing the game of China against India. Before they gave a project to China they offered it to India first, but they wanted India to do it almost free. When India rejected it they offered it to China. For example, Hambantota harbour project was offered to India first, but when they rejected it on the above grounds the Chinese took it over. The Chinese could undertake the project as they had earlier sold the arms at inflated prices to Sri Lanka. It is not that India is unaware of the Sinhalese mentality, but it is too late.
To please the Tamil audience, Parthasarathy paid tributes to the LTTE as an outfit that was "tough, motivated and ruthlessly singular" in pursuit of its objectives-"the word of the leader was law to which even human life was secondary"-his assessment was that the LTTE's bravery was not tempered with the wisdom that a guerrilla outfit never fights a conventional battle. The outfit's disastrous mistake was in engaging in a conventional warfare against a conventional Army.
Very well said, Mr.Parthasarathy. This conventional wisdom was clearly understood by Prabhakaran, a military genius. When he fought IPKF, he engaged it in guerrilla warfare. However bad India may have been, it was far more civilized than the barbaric Sinhalese. There were a number of murder and rape cases associated with IPKF as it was usual with Indian troops wherever they went in Kashmir or Indian Tribal Areas. One of those victims was the suicide bomber of Rajiv Gandhi, Dhanu. Her family was raped and murdered by IPKF, while she hid herself under the bed. However they were nowhere near the criminal conduct of the Sinhalese. In that scenario fighting against the fourth largest army in the world, guerrilla warfare was the only alternative.
After the departure of IPKF, LTTE built an army, a navy and an air force and they were defeating the Sinhala forces battle after battle. Soon the Tigers were in control of 15,000 square kilometers of land in Sri Lanka, a third of the island and 80% of Tamil Homeland. The oppressed Tamils moved into LTTE controlled areas for protection. Prabhakaran set up a proper administration with courts, schools and civil society intact, better than what the Sinhalese had in other parts of the country. The law and order situation in the territory he ruled was admired by the Nordic team, who were supervising the Ceasefire of 2002. Most NGOs and visitors were highly impressed by LTTE's capacity to rule. People could move about in the night without fear.
He soon realized that the signing of the February 2002 Ceasefire Agreement was a mistake. After a number of meetings with the Sri Lankan delegates, he had already agreed to a federal constitution, where the Tamils could rule themselves in their homeland. The total disinterest shown by the so called International Community to the ceasefire and the US refusal to grant visas to the Tamil delegation for a financial meeting in Washington led to the breakdown of the Tamil- Sinhalese negotiations. WikiLeaks revelations showed that the BJP was trying to revive the talks in 2004, but when they lost the elections to the Congress Party that attempt ended.
The coming into power of the Congress Party in 2004 was the start of the down fall of the LTTE. The Sonia administration trained Sinhalese officers in every field of warfare. India gave aerial surveillance to the Rajapaksa regime, that had come into power in 2005, to sink LTTE ships that were transporting arms to the Tigers. This coupled with the arming of Sinhala forces by China, Pakistan and many other countries made LTTE's conventional warfare unsustainable and hence their withdrawals in 2007 onwards.
The LTTE could not revert back to guerilla warfare, as the 460, 000 civilians, who had come under their care, followed the withdrawing cadres. These people didn't want to remain behind when the LTTE was withdrawing, as they would be raped and murdered by the undisciplined Sinhalese army. This would have been a reality, when the President's brother Defense Secretary, Gotabhaya, had already given orders to the soldiers that the land and sea must be red with Tamil blood and the Tamil women are fair game. The report that he used the civilians as human shield is nothing but Sinhalese propaganda.
If the US had succeeded in taking the civilians to safety in early 2009, Prabhakaran and the LTTE cadres would have melted into the jungle and reverted to the guerrilla warfare. This effort was scuttled by India. Confidential U.S. Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks showed how New Delhi operatives M.K.Narayanan and Shiv Shankar Menon played all sides and discouraged international attempts to halt the operations and save the civilians. If not for India, international pressure on Sri Lanka would have halted military operations and forced both parties to the negotiating table in the final days of the war in 2009. The wikiLeaks cables revealed that the Bengali Foreign Minister, Pernab Mukherji, conveyed India's concerns to Sri Lanka several times about the "perilous" situation that civilians caught in the fighting were, but it was not opposed to the anti-LTTE operations. It was, like Hitler, planning a final solution to the Tamil fight for liberation. Would this same Bengali reacted the same way when Bangladesh was liberated from Pakistan?
History will reveal Prabhakaran as a gentleman. He had set principles and he stuck to them till the last battle in Mullivaaikkal in May 2009. However, he was allergic to three crimes. The first one was traitors and informers; they had no place in Vanni. The second was rape of not only Tamils but also the Sinhalese. There was a case of a Tiger officer raping one of the women cadres under him. He was executed and made an example of. The third one is corruption.
When Prabhakaran received news from his intelligence sources that Karuna @ Muralitharen was involved in corruption and sex with his cadres, he invited all the officers to Kilinochchi for a meeting. All the invited officers turned up except Karuna, for he knew Prabhakaran could be very generous with funds, when it came to his devoted officers or cadres, but he would be ruthless when they were involved in the above mentioned crimes. For example, Prabhakaran financed Karuna's children's education in an international school in Malaysia; he footed all the bills for his wife and children's stay in Malaysia. During the wife's absence Karuna's misbehavior started. He also corruptly collected extra funds monthly by putting the names of phantom cadres on the list. His only way to save himself was to rebel and break away from the LTTE and turn a traitor. He committed all the three crimes.
On why the line of thought of the Tamil diasporas about condemning Sri Lanka for human rights violations should be abandoned, Mr. Parthasarathy reasoned that "while the Europeans might support India, the US was wavering while Beijing and the Islamic world -or for that matter the Asian bloc which holds sovereignty supreme -would vote against us." After doing all the harm to the Tamil cause, here he describes himself as one of us. How cunning could this great diplomat be?
His main problem is, if an international war crimes trial starts, India's contribution towards the genocide in Mullivaaikkal would be exposed. Seeman, leader of Naam Tamilar Party, put it approriately. "If Rajapaksa is brought trial, he will point his finger at Sonia, Priyanka and Rahul". That is the reason Parthasarathy is against war crimes trial. India vehemently opposed any attempt to condemn Sri Lanka in the May2009 Human Rights gathering in Geneva; in fact it supported a resolution congratulating Rajapaksa for his great victory over Tamil terrorism. It is left to be seen whether, in spite of its disappointment over Sri Lanka's failure to devolve power to the Tamils, India would repeat the same performance in the forth coming Geneva Human Rights Convention in February/March 2012 .
What the Tamils in Eelam need today is not industrial training and engineering institutions in the North and East of Sri Lanka, but peace and security - none of which are prevalent. Eelam is totally militarized. Every aspect of civilian life is controlled by the military. In Jaffna peninsula, the ratio between military and the civilian population is 1 to 11, which means about 40-50,000 soldiers out of a population of 600,000. Kumarvadiwail Kuruban, a professor in the Faculty of Law at Jaffna University, said "It is designed to maintain the military's hold on the country and the welfare of their families."
Sri Lankan military occupying the Tamil country had appropriated 30 per cent of the land in Jaffna district alone, under the so-called High Security Zones. What has been given back is only 3 per cent, contrary to what the SL Army wants outsiders to believe. More than 26,000 displaced people are yet to be allowed to resettle in their ancestral lands occupied by high security zones (HSZ) in Jaffna, according to Sri Lanka's main Tamil political party.
The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has submitted a report to the Supreme Court (SC) that detailed the HSZs in Jaffna which are still not made available to the original inhabitants by the Sri Lankan government. As a result the people are still living in tents in unhygienic conditions. The children are unable to go to schools; even if they did, the schools had no facilities or teachers. How could they go to colleges?
Cultural genocide is going on in full swing. Statues of respected leaders are vandalized. The statue of Tamil movement Father Chelvanayakam's statue was decapitated in Trincomalee on 01 November 2011. A group of men, who came in motorbikes 10 January 2012 around 00:30 a.m., destroyed the statue of Swami Vivekananda, a well known Vedantic spiritual leader of Hinduism from the 18th century. The statue located in front of a fuel filling station on Batticaloa Kalmunai Road (A4) and is regarded locally as a border mark of Tamil dominated Aaraiyampathi and Muslim dominated Kaaththaankudi in Batticaloa district. The destruction is viewed as an attempt to create further divisions between Tamils and Muslims in the district.
A suspect arrested by the Sri Lankan police in connection with the desecration of Swami Vivekananda in Batticaloa was released on bail due to the intervention of Hisbullah, a deputy minister in the Mahinda Rajapaksa led government. The SL Polic in Kaaththaankudi arrested Vahawan alias Vadi, a Muslim person who owns a hardware store in Kaaththaankudi, but had to release him under pressure. Obviously, erasing Tamil culture and identity is high on the Sinhalese agenda and they encourage the Muslims to carry out the job to create dissention between the Muslims and Hindus.
The Tamils have absolutely no freedom of expression. Sri Lanka occupying the country of Eelam Tamils continued for the third year in militarily preventing people observing the Heroes Day week for their fallen heroes. SL military's paranoia or arrogance of oppression has gone to the extent of ordering temples not to toll bells or light lamps during the week. Military is also placed near some temples to watch for any breaches. With the cemeteries of the heroes erased out of existence, temples became the solace for parents and relatives paying annual homage to the fallen heroes. Sanctions on temples too started in 2009, coinciding with Indian foreign minister, S.M.Krishna, choosing the day to visit Jaffna. In a latest development, hundreds of SL police personnel have entered into the University of Jaffna to prevent any observation of the week by students. Some masked men entered the university and destroyed student union's notice boards.
THE 2009 so-called victory of the Sri Lankan government over the Tamil Tigers in the country's long-running civil war may have brought peace, but it has been an uneasy one. Now people from all walks of life are disappearing. No-one knows why, but some blame the government.
Colleagues of two political activists-Lalith Kumar Weeraraj and Kugan Murugananthan-who went missing in Sri Lanka's north on December 9 2011, fear the men are in grave danger. On January 9 2012 hundreds of clamouring demonstrators marched through the capital Colombo. They demanded that the government release the activists, put an end to abductions in the north and pull the military out of former conflict areas. In fact, the opposite is happening.
Mr Weeraraj and Mr Murugananthan spent much of the past few months campaigning on behalf of hundreds of missing Tamils, many of whom were last seen in the custody of the security forces. The two were intercepted in the northern city of Jaffna by men on motorcycles, bundled into a white van and taken away.
Udul Premaratne, another prominent campaigner, insists that the army-controversially still deployed in large numbers in Jaffna-is responsible. But despite several eyewitness accounts (the incident occurred just before nightfall), the police say they have do not have enough evidence to proceed with the case.
Parthasarathy failed to mention any of the above. To him building a few colleges would, within a generation, result in the economic integration of the markets in these areas with that of Tamil Nadu-something that Sri Lanka could be persuaded to see as not beneficial merely for Tamils but for the greater common good. An experienced diplomat with years of experience in Sri Lanka should know by now the only good the Sinhalese would accept is the colonization of Tamil Homeland and subjugation of Tamils for eternity. This is something they had failed to do for thousands of years, but they hope to succeed this time with India, China and other countries help.
What Parthasarathy and other fellow intellectuals and think tanks in Chennai fail to realize is that they are sowing the seed of hatred for India among the eighty million Tamils worldwide. What happened in Mullivaaikkal in May 2009 is nothing short of genocide and Tamil history was written in blood on those days. India has made Prabhakaran a legend in Tamil Nadu. The best these intellectuals could do is to advise India to help the Tamils to live in their homeland in a federal Sri Lanka, if not an independent Eelam. All the great talk of integrating the economies of India and Sri Lanka is just wishful thinking; the Sinhalese are not interested in it either.
Visvanathan
By: Visvanathan
Source: TWG
Date: 20 January 2012
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