Sri Lanka’s Struggle In The Post-War Period
Dr. Imtiyaz Razak
It is now crystal clear that the Sinhala leaders will never put forward a just resolution to the Tamil national question. Therefore, we are not prepared to place our trust in the impossible and walk along the same old futile path…. We therefore ask the international community and the countries of the world that respect justice to recognize our freedom struggle.”
This is the key sections of the annual Heroes’ Day statement delivered by the slain leader of the disabled Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), V. Pirapaharan. The LTTE cadres silenced their guns in May 2009, and we are being told that V. Pirapaharan is dead.
Whether such a statement from the LTTE leader represents accurate or not, the statement does represented the Tamil disappointments and distrust, but also it effectively exposed the duplicity of five decades old southern Sinhalese politics, which categorically refused to do meaningful political business with the Tamil leaders who represent the North and East Tamils.
Now Sri Lanka is not only politicians who are commonly considered as liberals lead walking on post-war Sri Lanka, but also Sri Lanka and thus more incline to seek inclusive society. Though extreme form of Tamil nationalism did not gain any significant inroads during August election of this year that should not be interpreted, as the total failure of extreme form of Tamil nationalism would not appear in Sri Lanka. Identities and mobilization based on ethnic identities would not function a certain way all the time. There are leverages and there’s a polarization. These occur when a group of people would perceive certain moves differently, for example, if and when politicians who would represent a certain group feel like their demands are being ignored, politicians can resort to identity politics. This occurs in deeply divided societies where there’s competitive electoral process. Sri Lanka does have such competitive electoral process and dynamics.
Whether the Tamil Tigers, for that matter, violent Tamil nationalists are freedom fighters as they claimed themselves or deadly terrorists as the Sri Lanka governments describe, history will answer it. My point here is that the birth of Tamil Tiger movement had roots in Sri Lanka’s history and its anti-Tamil agendas. It is important to point that there was not an overnight decision among the ordinary Tamils to approve the agendas of the Tamil Tigers: the failure of Sri Lankan polity to meet the demands of the Tamil moderates was a key foundation for the origin of the Tamil extremism in Sri Lanka. Instead of listening to the Tamil leaders and accommodating their reasonable demands, the Sinhalese ruling leaders of the time assaulted and stoned the Tamils and their leaders, and even hired the Sinhalese to become butchers to kill innocent Tamils and moderate leaders. One needs to realize that successive governments since 1956 controlled by the Sinhalese miserably failed to engage the Tamil moderates such as the Federal Party (FP). Read More
