Post-Tsunami Debacle And Postwar Aggravations
Rajan Philips
Nine years ago, in 2004, the day after Christmas, Sri Lanka became one of the major victims of the Asian tsunami. The nature’s fury brought the best and the worst in Sri Lankan society even as it ravaged most of the island’s coastal areas. The best response was from the people who spontaneously stepped up to help one another, humanely crisscrossing ethnic boundaries, with Sinhalese soldiers rescuing Tamil and Muslim victims and Tamil LTTE rescuing Sinhalese and Muslim victims. They responded before the state could mobilize itself and before needed and unwanted foreign help arrived from far flung places. The cynics invariably called the deluge of foreign help as ‘NGO tsunami’. A very positive explanation and hopeful teaching, in my view, emanated from the pen of Rev. Dalton Forbes, Catholic Priest and scholar, and longtime professor at the Oblate Seminary in Ampitiya. Writing from a common religious standpoint, Father Forbes provided an explanation for the overlapping of the supernatural and the natural, and human interactions with both. More importantly, he dealt with interactions among Sri Lankans and their conflicts based on the false naturalizations and pseudo essentializations of their socialized and politicized differences. He raised the expectation that the tsunami aftermath could be the Tabula Rasa (black slate) on which our political leaders would write a new inclusive political charter for the future. That expectation was frustrated. Our ill-equipped leaders did not make even a semblance of effort to fulfill Forbes’s hopes. They showed the worst of Sri Lankan society.
The tsunami hit Sri Lanka towards the frustrating end of a much maligned and much abused peace process. It dramatically exposed the limitations of Sri Lankan society and polity. The articulated hopes of Father Forbes and many others, as well as the unstated desires of the silent Sri Lankans who are seen as voters but never heard as citizens, were that Sri Lanka’s political leaders and the LTTE leader would come together to lay the foundation for a more inclusive, plural and mutually reinforcing social and political order. However, they did not rise to the occasion but sank in a welter of petty egotism, devious opportunism, and juvenile grandstanding. On the one hand, Chandrika Kumaratunga, Ranil Wickremasinghe and Mahinda Rajapaksa were involved in a vicious circle of mistrust, pettiness and undercutting, while on the other hand, the LTTE leader was insistently intransigent and utterly unamenable to transforming his organization to become plural, tolerant and democratic.
