But let me ask you
what did YOU do?
Did you hear the grenade
exploding in Koneswary’s abdomen?
Did your lips utter the screams
of Tharshini?
Did your face feel the warmth
of Krishanti’s tears?
Or did the hands that silenced Isaipriya
silence your conscience?

No!

You poured kiribath
in the mouths of men
who poured their hatred
on our bodies in Vanni.
Your children burst crackers
in Colombo, in Kandy
even as shells and clusters
burst on the heads of ours
in Nandhikadal, in Puthukudiyiruppu.
Your daughters danced
for your victorious sons
even as they danced around
our mutilated bodies.

No! I reject the notion
that I lost my ‘karpu’!
No! I do not want to curse
god, or fate,
or some unseeable force!
But a curse on the womb
that gave birth to death.
A curse on the breast
that fed a child-rapist.
A curse on the arms
that cradled executioners.
A curse on you,
even as you, ‘sister’,
are a curse on all feminity.
For it was you
who lost your ‘karpu’
through your silence
making you an accomplice
in the crimes of your sons.

Tears? Yes!
But the blood of my children!
But the despair of my love!
But the anger of my heart!

But the truth too!
I have realized
through a six-decade old lesson
that at the end of the day
you are Sinhalese
I am Eelam Tamil
and that, and that alone
defines our separate womanhoods
our separate homes
our separate futures.
And it is only in this separation
will there ever be
no more tears
‘sister’

The ‘Tamil Sovereignty Cognition’ declaration that was released today (Nov 27, 2011), on the momentous occasion of Heroes Day, appears as a significant step in building a political consensus among the Tamils, especially the Eelam Tamil diaspora, in order to pave a path for future politico-legal action that would ensure justice for the Eelam Tamils. It is clear from the declaration that the (much abused) terms ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ are impossible to think of without addressing “the chronic national question of the Eelam Tamils in the island, where genocidal and structural genocidal approaches continuously deployed against the Tamil people in their homeland in the North and East of the island, by the Sri Lankan state with tacit approval of world powers”.

The timing and the structure of the declaration is particularly important in that it is a concrete step in making a solution within the unitary system of Sri Lanka intellectually impossible. While the sham Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) report that is to be released soon completely whitewashes the Sri Lankan state and society of all involvement in a clear case of genocide while, maybe, just maybe, having token prosecutions (which again do not indicate any punishment corresponding to the nature of crime committed), the declaration clearly identifies the problem in the root of the conflict – the very socio-political and legal structure of Sri Lanka. It is impossible for a state structure that is based, since its origins, on a systematized oppression of a nationality to dole out any fair solution to them. The solution, then, needs to take place beyond the structure. And the declaration is clear in pointing this out in its assertion that “all outside players should drop insisting on finding solutions only within a united Sri Lanka”.

The signatories to the declaration – Poonkuzhali Nedumaran, writer and activist from Tamil Nadu, Krisna Sarvanamuttu, a student activist from Canada, Rajeev Sreetharan, affiliated to Tamils Against Genocide, USA and Lathan Suntheralingam, activist from Switzerland – who also spoke on the occasion of its release on Heroes Day, highlighted the impossibility of a united Sri Lanka and opined that a sovereign state of Tamil Eelam was the only solution to the problems of the Eelam Tamil people. While Poonkuzhali emphasised the role Tamil Nadu should play in the future struggle, Rajeev Sreetharan spoke of the need for the means of the Tamils’ struggle to evolve by innovative use of politico-legal mechanisms. Suntheralingam spoke of the pressing necessity for the Eelam Tamils to work with progressive and democratic forces world over who principally stand by their just demands. All were of the opinion that there was a need for a co-ordinated global action that would ensure justice for the Eelam Tamils.

Complementing Sreetharan, who observed that one cannot use the argument of ‘territorial integrity’ in the context of decolonization, Krisna Saravanamuttu asserted the need to reject “the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka” and the “constitutional monopoly of violence” that the Sri Lankan state possesses as both necessarily involved genocide of Tamils. Many years back, Sivaram, one of the leading intellectuals of the Eelam Tamil nation who was murdered by the Sri Lankan state, had elaborated this idea of constitutionally sanctioned violence through the following three points

“(a) Control of national wealth by the Sinhalese, as stipulated in the Constitution saying that the Parliament has complete control; (b) control of the monopoly of violence by the Sinhalese in a manner prejudicial to the Tamils – that is, the executive controls the army and the Parliament provides for it; but the executive is always Sinhala and so is the Parliament, and the army always remains Sinhala Buddhist; and (c) complete and inalienable control over the land.”

This is probably the shortest and most precise introduction to Sri Lanka. Sivaram was stating this at a time when these processes received a checkmate through the de facto state of the Eelam Tamils governed by the Tigers. Without the counter-hegemony of the LTTE, of course, it is back to square one.

These points of Sivaram and the arguments raised by Sreetharan and Saravanamuttu are of crucial importance as they compel us to reflect on certain key issues. First, in the inheritance of the colonial state apparatus that brought together two nations in a system that privileges the numerically superior one, conditions were laid to facilitate the socio-economic, political and cultural domination of the Sinhala nation over the Tamil nation. Second, the occupation of Tamil homelands emulates classical models of aggressive colonization where-in, through the direct use of or with the threat of violence, the natives are assimilated or if they resist, annihilated.

Third, a state of emergency is always maintained in the occupied areas so as to keep the subject population in a state of trauma wherein, let alone the right to a political solution, even the right to live appears to be an act of generosity of the Lankan state – this necessarily involves routinization of acts of interrogation, torture, sexual violence, abduction, desecration of cultural symbols, and tearing down of social fabric. The figure of the Sinhala is sought to be made omnipresent and omnipotent in Tamil territories. Fourth, ‘monopoly of truth’, silencing of voices that articulate Tamil national demands, propping up of dummy figures who speak in the name of Tamils but serve Sri Lankan interests, the creation of an intellectual discourse through a carefully cultivated ‘Sri Lankan Tamil’ elite that obfuscates the Real question of Eelam Tamil nationality.

The declaration conceptually challenges the ‘monopoly of truth’ that Lanka and its friends claim to wield in defending their unitary state, through its concise elucidation of the three types of sovereignties that the Tamils can lay claim to namely historical, earned and remedial. That the genocide of the Eelam Tamils is a structural and protracted process is made clear. The task now is for the youth, activists, legal professionals, intellectuals and others to use this declaration as a conceptual reference point for future activities and ensure that the question of Tamil sovereignty is never compromised.

It is harmless to remind here once again that the only democracy that the Eelam Tamils tasted in the sordid history of Sri Lanka was when their sole representatives wielded a parallel state power. It is naivety to expect anything democratic from a unitary state of Sri Lanka, no matter who leads it.

There have been quite some positions on ‘rights violations’ in Sri Lanka. Among those who recognize that there have been violations of the rights of the Tamils, two general camps can be observed. One are those influenced by liberal human rights discourse, who believe that certain horrific acts were committed in the war, but in a ‘post-war’ scenario, there is an urgent need for ‘reconciliation’, ‘peace-building’ and ‘rehabilitation’.

The understanding of this camp is that state violence happened as a onetime event, there were a few or many excesses in this event, but there is a possibility of a post-event condition within a united framework of a ‘better’ Sri Lanka.

On the other hand, the ‘structural genocide’ position contends that horrific violence on the Eelam Tamil body-politics is not a onetime event but is a process, and that it is not an aberration but is inherent to the system of united Sri Lanka.

The theme of structural genocide of the Eelam Tamil nation has been addressed in various articles, editorials and features on TamilNet. In this regard, the study of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek on ‘systemic violence’ provides some valuable theoretical insights.

Prof. Zizek, who is a Marxist and critical theorist, writes in his brilliant book ‘Violence: Six Sideways Reflections’ that systemic violence has to be taken into account if at all one is to make sense of visibly horrifying subjective violence.

Zizek writes that “We’re talking here of the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence.”

The thinker seeks to point out that subjective explosions of physical violence, like in the Eelam Tamils’ case what happened in Black July or in Mulli-vaaykkaal, cannot be seen in isolation from the various forms of psychological and symbolic forms of violence that are part and parcel of the system.

For such a system to survive, it needs not just a Weberian ‘monopoly of violence’, it always needs to point out to the subjects it colonizes that it has the will to exercise this violence as and when it deems fit.

So, acts like land grabbing, assaults on villagers by Sinhala army men and settlers, rapes, attacks on student leaders etc. are all required by the system to function smoothly till a point where the colonized Eelam Tamils themselves are psychologically conditioned by the system to become ‘true Sri Lankans’.

The Sri Lankan system’s threats of violence through the physical presence of army men in all Tamil localities, the military checkpoints throughout the occupied areas of Tamil Eelam, intrusion of private spaces and its symbolic violence through the desecration of all symbols of Eelam Tamil resistance and identity serve the purpose of this conditioning.

Writing about such political systems, Zizek argues that, “One of the strategies of totalitarian regimes is to have legal regulations (criminal laws) so severe that, if taken literally, everyone is guilty of something. But then their full enforcement is withdrawn. In this way the regime can appear merciful”.

This is precisely the case in occupied Tamil Eelam where practically every Tamil is a terror suspect under the draconian laws unless proven otherwise, that is, unless he or she is willing to work within the framework set by the oppressor.

The Sri Lankan regime makes itself appear democratic by allowing token elections conducted with the full supervision of the armed forces, symbolically hinting that if the Tamils do not vote for the parties whom it is comfortable in negotiating with then the other alternative is force.

The fact of such functioning namesake elections and kangaroo courts is thrown by Sri Lanka as an argument of its ‘democratic practices’ and to cover up its omnipresent threat of violence against Eelam Tamils.

Much of Zizek’s book is also an intellectual attack on the liberal theorists who promote a depoliticised human rights discourse.

Zizek writes that while they claim to fight subjective violence, such liberals “are the very agents of structural violence which creates the conditions for the explosions of subjective violence.”

Those who followed the Eelam struggle closely will know how certain dubious NGOs and academic institutions minted money out of the misery of the Eelam Tamil people and the propaganda they spread and continue to spread on the possibility of ‘post-conflict reconciliation’ while simultaneously evading the fundamental political question that confronts the Eelam Tamil nation – the right to exercise political self-determination.

The argument of charitable donations by such organizations is cruel in its apparent benevolence in that it requires that the Eelam Tamils be first reduced to a state of penury so that they can intervene and make their lives better.

As Zizek notes, “Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation.” Organizations such as these only help providing a system practising structural genocide a good face.

Contrary to what certain Tamil politicians who are manipulated by India and/or western powers and intellectuals on the payroll of ‘donors’ may claim, the Eelam Tamils did not fight for individual human rights or equality.

That is not just a fallacy of missing the wood for the trees, but to actually make a criminal claim that there were ever no trees in a wood that have been razed to the ground.

Any genuine politics must start from the position that Eelam Tamils as a people are unequal, and will continue to be unless they have political power in their hands, in their own state.

It is also imperative to point out Zizek’s message to certain genuine humanitarians in the diaspora who are keen on doing ‘something’, without considering the core politics of what they are dealing with:

“Better to do nothing than to engage in localised acts, the ultimate function of which is to make the system run more smoothly.”

Unless one has the correct perspective of the needs of the Eelam Tamil struggle and the corresponding political will to serve the same in all actions, one will always be engaged in futile actions and be inevitably co-opted by the powers that reign.

The recent cultural tour of T.M. Krishna, a Chennai based Carnatic singer, in the Northern areas of the occupied territory of Tamil Eelam, was praised by quite some in the Indian media and the Sri Lankan media. It was reported that there was a substantial turn out in Jaffna, where the artist had performed solely in Tamil. While observing the “conflicting images” in the Tamil homelands and asking some moral questions to himself, the singer concludes with an apolitical message in an article published later in The Hindu that “Artistes don’t stand for elections, don’t fight on the battlefield but we offer to everyone the very breath of life —happiness.”

The following article is, of course, not a comment on the performer’s artistic talents, but rather an introspection of the politics behind the performance.

Those familiar with Marxism would agree that there is no art that stands above politics. This is all the more true when art is placed in the context of a nation facing structural genocide. Krishna’s performance in Sri Lanka last year was held in memory of the collaborator Neelan Tiruchelvam, a virulent opponent of the Eelam Tamil struggle.

Krishna was then sought out by the Indian Ambassador to Sri Lanka Ashok K. Kantha who requested the artist to do a tour of the northern regions so that there could be a ‘cultural revival’.

When the emissary of India, a country that backed Sri Lanka in its genocidal campaign against the Tamil people, marks out an artist to promote ‘cultural revival’ in their homelands, can this act and the performance be devoid of politics? And what sort of ‘revival’ can one expect when the performance is allowed by a state that is bent on keeping the Eelam Tamils in a condition of permanent trauma?

Before philistines point out that promotion of such performances proves the liberalism of the Lankan state and that there is no threat to Tamil culture, let it be stated that that Lanka allows these performances precisely because they pose no threat to the state.

Indeed, performances like these also serve the purpose of numbing the effects of trauma.

The reports that the audience in Jaffna was enthralled by Krishna’s performance are believable.

Considering that this is the first tour of the occupied homeland of the Eelam Tamils by an Indian Tamil musician since 1983, the enthusiasm of the people who participated cannot be doubted.

All the same, it should be noted that when such performances are disconnected from real politics of the ground – structural genocide in this case – they only serve the purpose of providing a false illusory relief to the subject.

And this is precisely what the governments of India and Sri Lanka would want – a Tamil art form without a spine to stand as a reflection of the social life of the people, instead an impotent abstraction that is tolerated by the Lankan regime as such an art is powerless to accomplish anything substantial in the political sphere.

A culture in abstract may give a people some sense of identity, but it neither has the substance to resist assimilation nor the power to combat annihilation. Which is why the liberation struggle led by the LTTE followed Ho Chi Minh’s dictum “culture at the service of resistance, resistance at the service of culture” – there was no more talking of an abstract Tamil culture.

Culture was concretized in the Eelam Tamil resistance and its finest, progressive aspects were filtered and deployed by the movement. A simple historical practice of the subaltern Tamil classes, like the veneration of ‘veerakal’, symbolic stones installed to honor heroes fallen in battle, was revolutionized by the Tigers.

The result was ‘Maaveerar thuyilidam’ – the heroes’ graveyard, which got the dimensions of a sacred but secular space.

The popular enthusiasm of the Eelam Tamil people to honour the fallen cadres, irrespective of their gender, caste, subcaste or religion, produced a horizondalizing effect on a formerly vertical society.

For all practical purposes, the Eelam Tamil resistance was the pinnacle of Tamil culture.

But while the Sri Lankan government systematically destroys these popular symbols, hunts down Pongu Tamil activists, and ensures that no cultural traces of Eelam Tamil resistance is left, it promotes those forms of Tamil culture and art that are completely devoid of revolutionary content, that can be easily accommodated. Then, it goes without saying that the adherents of this Tamil culture can only be ‘cultural’ at the expense of the progressive culture of the Eelam Tamil resistance.

So T.M. Krishna is wrong when he claims that these types of artistic performances would give the Tamils “more self belief, pride and faith in themselves and their lives.”

For art to be emancipatory it cannot and it should not ever soothe a people facing oppression. Rather, it has to make them conscious of their existentialist condition, of the nature of the oppression they face and provoke them to fight it.

While Krishna’s tour was on, the SLA encroached a hundred acres of farmland in Kilinochi, forests were destroyed and lands were grabbed in Batticaloa, and foundations for Sinhala colonization were strengthened in Mullaitheevu with yet another Buddhist stupa built on Tamil lands.

Art, for it to be a true expression of the socio-cultural life of the Tamil masses, cannot but address these crucial issues. Else, it will just remain an opiate of a minority of Tamil elites in auditoriums in Jaffna or elsewhere.

The struggle for Eelam Tamil liberation, like all such liberation struggles, was in itself the highest expression of national culture. It is important for all cultural activists in the homeland and in the diaspora to carefully preserve this tradition and to invent and reinvent art forms, like those tried in the Pongu Tamil uprising and Maanudathin Tamil Koodal, and to provide a culture of progressive resistance to a people subject to meaninglessness.

The diaspora in particular has great potential to interact with cultural groups from various peoples fighting similar oppression and infuse into Eelam Tamil art forms new contents that dialectically enriches both the particular aspects of the art in the context of the struggle and the universal message it holds.

It goes without saying that for this, the political understanding of those dealing with culture must be rooted in the interests of the Eelam Tamil people. Failure to wage a resolute struggle in the field of culture will only allow the Sri Lankan state to destroy all progressive Eelam Tamil content in art while simultaneously promoting, with aid of its external patrons, depoliticized forms that are no expressions of Tamil reality.

“How long yet will the madness of despots be called justice, and the justice of the people barbarity or rebellion? How tenderly oppressors and how severely the oppressed are treated!”
-Maximillien Robespierre

The informal discussion held in Geneva on the 21st of September regarding Canada’s proposal to debate the outcome of Sri Lanka’s ‘Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission’ (LLRC) was revealing on the position of various countries that participated.

First and foremost, to even give legitimacy to the LLRC, a sham commission set up by a racist state in order to show that it cares for the people it has butchered and enslaved, is a fundamentally flawed proposition. This is but part of the agenda of certain western powers to initiate a discussion on Sri Lanka that focuses solely on human rights violations in Sri Lanka without taking into account the political demands of the Eelam Tamil people, have token prosecutions and token devolutions of powers, and maybe, a regime change without disturbing status-quo of the majoritarian political structure of the Sri Lankan state. The hidden logic is that such a process will whitewash the crimes of elements within their own polity who encouraged Sri Lanka’s campaign of state terror. Countries like India, Pakistan, China and Russia – who have openly supported the genocide of the Eelam Tamils – were hostile to even these token gestures, probably apprehensive of a possible exposure of their direct involvement and/or a questioning of their own treatment of national liberation struggles and people’s movements in their territories. And there were countries like Cuba who whole heartedly backed Sri Lanka under the argument of ‘anti-imperialism’.

Cuba and Venezuela (not to mention countries like Iran and Gaddafi’s Libya), who indeed are anti-American, have also stood by the Colombo regime in their war on the Tamil people. But the question radicals need to ask is whether they are genuinely anti-imperialist, that is, whether they promote a dialogue among movements of the oppressed peoples of the world, as a progressive left movement is meant to. If anti-west/anti-Americanism should be the only criteria for gauging standards of a revolutionary movement, then the Taliban should be the most progressive outfit in the world. But if progressiveness should be gauged by, in Che Guevara’s own words, “indignation at injustice anywhere in the world” and a political solidarity with emancipatory liberation struggles, then the ‘pink left’ countries like Cuba and Venezuela fail pathetically. James Petras points out how, despite claims to ‘anti-imperialism’ Chavez betrayed solidarity with radical movements in order to consolidate his own regime’s economic interests, giving the example of Venezuala’s arrest and deportation of activists affiliated to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in order to placate an ally in a murderous Colombia.

It is the creed of Robert Blake, the US Assistant Secretary of State who gave Colombo full support to execute its genocide of Tamils by means of war against the LTTE, who are also responsible for providing extensive funding to reactionary regimes like that of Colombia to brutally crush movements of indigenous people, popular classes and peasantry like those led by FARC and the National Liberation Army (ELN) by similar means. It was no coincidence then that after the military defeat of the LTTE, military think-tanks and pro-state intellectuals in Colombia started considering the Sri Lanka model as an effective way of crushing radical movements in their territory in a similar fashion. Now, by endorsing a genocidal Colombo, these pink left countries are directly endorsing the war on indigenous peoples, nationalities and progressive movements in countries like Colombia, Peru, Turkey, India etc – this is the only logical conclusion that their sad arguments can lead to.

Petras has also pointed out in the article earlier referred how Stalin’s deals with Hitler were a strategic disaster for the people of Soviet Union. But how much ever the then Soviet regime could be criticized for such arrangements of convenience, at no point did the Soviets endorse Nazism as a philosophy or hail Hitler in his military successes against other nations. No communist justified the atrocities of Nazism by pointing out atrocities of, say, French colonialism. For example, Aime Cesaire, a trenchant critic of colonialism, constantly criticized the hypocrisies of the colonial powers that denounced fascism but committed atrocities in their colonies – but that did not lead him to endorse Nazi brutalities. The argument of Hitler, which was as cruel as it was ridiculous, that critics of Nazi violence were unjustified because even the colonial powers have been brutal, was treated as a farce by all progressive leftists and rightly so. A progressive does not have the option of choosing between and justifying farces that dehumanize people. But the Cuban leadership seems to have exercised that option…

A darling intellectual in these countries is Sri Lankan diplomat Dayan Jayatilleka who campaigned amongst these so-called anti-west countries that the war on the Tamil people was an ‘anti-imperialist struggle’ – his counterparts in the west did a campaign that the war on the Tamil people was a ‘war on terror’. Jayatilleka, a self-proclaimed leftist, is one who believes that the Sinhalese are an ancient civilization like the Mayans, who may be threatened to extinction by a global Tamil conspiracy and thus, they need to be militarily strong and colonize the lands of the Eelam Tamils – failing to do so will lead to “the North converted into another Kashmir“, he argues. A Tamil intellectual remarked that when one reads Jayatilleka one gets the feeling a Jew would get should she flip through Mein Kampf, only that Jayatilleka (mis)quotes Marxists to justify a racist polity. Those on the Indian left are all too familiar with how writings of Marx and Lenin were twisted by the revisionist clique of CPM to justify implementation of neo-liberal policies in Bengal and Kerala, to quell popular protests in Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh, and to vilify national liberation struggles both at India and abroad. But one is yet to hear (the author seeks to be corrected if mistaken) a CPM intellectual stooping to such levels of calculated absurdity that is generally associated with unapologetic communalists like the Subramaniam Swamys of India. An apologist of fascist violence parading under a leftist façade, with abstract slogans of anti-Americanism, showering praises on the likes of Deng Xiaoping and Vladimir Putin, Jayatilleka won allies among the pink left in Latin America.

On the other hand, Viraj Mendis, an activist of the Sinhala radical left who is in exile for resolutely standing by the struggle of Eelam Tamils, points out the confluence of world powers in backing a despotic Sri Lanka and its genocidal campaign. “The process of Genocide is continuing here too. It is happening inside these buildings here in Geneva.” he said, addressing a Pongu Tamil rally. In Geneva, the representative of Cuba supported Sri Lanka with the argument that “If you want to engage in this kind of ID why don’t you prepare a decision for a dialogue on detention centre in Guantanamo or bombing of NATO in Iraq, Afghanistan?” By supporting a Sri Lankan state, whose nationalism is based on a native variant of Nazi concepts of blut (Sinhala racial-cultural supremacy), lebensraum (the living space required for the superior race) and which completed its anschluss (forcible annexation) of the areas of Tamil Eelam in May 2009 accompanied by what can only called as a campaign of wanton pillage, rape and murder, countries like Cuba turn out to be ethically and politically no better than the imperialists they claim to oppose. By justifying and endorsing a successful genocide like what happened in Mullivaikaal under the name of opposing atrocities in Iraq or Afghanistan, these countries are not aiding the people whom they claim to support by any stretch of imagination.

If a banana republic like Sri Lanka that executed one of the worst mass murders in South Asia with the aid of several world powers is allowed to walk free, what will act as a deterrent for much stronger countries that hold similar intentions towards similar struggles? The Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan had recently warned Kurdish civilians that unless they differentiate themselves from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), “they are also doomed to pay the price”. He was one of the leaders of state to congratulate Sri Lanka on its ‘successful war on terror’ and the Turkish government has also upheld the Lankan model for dealing with the PKK (partisans to the PKK goal, who have also extended solidarity to the Eelam struggle in a true spirit of internationalism, were also apprehensive of this possibility). Now, what does the ‘socialist’ Cuba convey to the PKK and the Kurds by its endorsement of the Sri Lankan solution?

The regimes in Cuba and Venezuela not only appear as what a Tamil leftist described as “clowns in the arena of left politics”, they end up as political opportunists by supporting mass murderers and despots like Rajapaksa who virulently implement neo-liberal policies in deed, but put up a sham ‘anti-Americanism’ in words. Maybe the radical left or whatever is left of it in Cuba should reread Lenin who said that “Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realise the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination i.e. the right to free political separation.” Maybe that would restore the red color to the pink left governments of Latin America and enable them to look at a fascist Sri Lanka and the Tamil Eelam struggle that is fighting against it differently.

Genuine anti-imperialism does not lie in mere abstract anti-American/anti-west sloganeering. In the wake of a ‘post-national world’ discourse framed by apologists of multi-national capitalism and equally regressive capitalist-bureaucratic models as upheld by states like Turkey, China and Russia – both aiding the logic of genocidal states like Sri Lanka, anti-imperialism in concrete requires solidarity with national liberation struggles and their progressive representatives. Anything else is mere social-opportunism that can only promote a world-wide strengthening of forces of reaction. And then history will not absolve the pink left states, but condemn them to its dustbins.

“Words are never “only words”; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”
-Slavoj Zizek

In the discussions that have taken place on the Tamil national question in Sri Lanka, the concerned subjects have been referred to, even by well meaning comrades, as ‘Sri Lankan Tamils’. Whereas the subjects, if one should go by the term used by various Tamil activists, intellectuals and just common people who stand for the struggle for a Tamil homeland, refer to themselves as ‘Eelam Tamils’. What is in a name, as the bard asked ages ago? While the word ‘Eelam’ has been part of Tamil vocabulary for ages to denote the geographical entity which is called Sri Lanka today, the latter name became popular only a few decades back. All the same, today’s ‘Eelam’ has a completely different meaning and connotation from the ‘Eelam’ of the ancient period. Followers of national liberation movements across the world be it Palestine, Kurdistan or Chechnya, would know that the terms used to describe the people and the geographies they contest were not the same in the past as they are now. Of more value than the etymology of self-defining terms of oppressed nationalities is the deployment of such terms in their present resistance and thus, the contemporary usage of such terms is more political than anything else. Keeping this argument in mind, the article seeks to explain the politics of the term ‘Eelam Tamil’ and what it means to the Tamil resistance and its participants.

The sociologist Manuel Castells defines idenity as a people’s sense of meaning and experience. He argues that though identities may originate from dominant institutions, “they become identities only when and if social actors internalize them, and construct their meaning around this internalization.” From the day Sri Lanka achieved its independence, the recognized powers defining Tamil identity were primarily Colombo-centred Tamil elites, who were mostly bureaucrats in service of the Sri Lankan state. The institution they served and the Sinhala elites whom it primarily benefited championed a Sri Lankan nationalism that was essentially based on suspicion and/or hatred of the Tamil people. At its racist worst, Sri Lankan nationalism aimed at annihilation of the Tamil identity. At its liberal best, it aimed at assimilation. The post-independence Tamil elites found it easier to negotiate with the latter aspect, and like all elites disconnected from masses, had only their sectarian economic interests in mind. Despite the rather obvious structural racism that was being installed against the Tamil people, the Colombo Tamil believed that a liberal balancing act between two loyalties was possible. Accordingly, they sold out on popular classes. The best example of such betrayal was their unquestioning support to the Sirimavo-Sastri pact of 1964 – the first major act of ethnic cleansing – by which over half a million upcountry Tamils, almost entirely belonging to the labouring classes, were stripped off their citizenship rights and shipped to India. Likewise, the process of colonization of Tamil territories and the phenomena of Sinhalization, where certain Tamil sections either owing to apprehension or seeking benefits ‘converted’ as Sinhalese, were also not challenged by these gentlemen.

For the Tamil popular classes the contradiction inherent in this identity project was becoming apparent even in the 50’s. Almost as if giving voice to this, V. Navaratnam, a theorist of Tamil nationalism and a doyen of the Federal party, wrote in 1957 in a short tract called ‘Ceylon in Crisis’ of the irreconcilable antagonism between the Tamil people and the unitary state. He was also highly contemptuous of the ‘Colombo Tamil intelligentsia’, a constant throughout his life – he would brand them as traitors later. While the Tamil people were unable to relate to the identity project of the pro-state Tamil elites, being unable to internalize it or relate it to their experiences, facing discrimination and violence at a day to day level from the very state they were called to be loyal to, they were still unable to come to terms with the terms of the radical nationalists. To use Sartrean terminology, the critical transition from seriality to a group-in-fusion was still incomplete. But not for long.

The Black activist Stokely Carmichael said that “We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted.” The 60’s and 70’s in Sri Lanka, periods that witnessed anti-Tamil violence, repressive laws, an escalation of colonization and institutional discrimination, were also periods where the Tamil political actors contesting the powers-that-be were fervently searching for the terms with which they would address themselves vis-à-vis the oppressor. Even as in 1972 Sri Lankan nationalists got a shot in their arm with the ethnocratic ‘republican’ constitution that effectively made Tamils third grade citizens, the political vocabulary of the Tamils was rife with an old word that got a new lease of life and meaning – Eelam. In 1973, S.J.V. Chelvanayagam, hailed later on as the father of the Eelam Tamil polity, pleaded for the recognition of a Eelam Tamil nationality as a distinct political entity with its right to self-determination. Three years later, the historical Vaddukkodai resolution that declared the necessity of the struggle for a “Free, Sovereign, Secular, Socialist State of Tamil Eelam” was passed under his aegis. After decades of attempted negotiations, reconciliations and compromises with the oppressors, the oppressed now had a paradigm, a terminology of self-definition of their identity. The Eelam Tamil discourse was set – and after 1976, one either recognized it or opposed it. It was then no coincidence that the birth of the most resolute defenders of the Eelam Tamil struggle, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), happened in the same year.

Identity formation was one thing – to wage an uncompromising political struggle to secure rights by/for the people who assert that identity is another. The assertion and struggle are interlinked and inseparable. Of the various organizations that emerged in the late 70’s, it was only the Tamil Tigers who were able to keep track of both. Rapidly winning support among the Tamil masses, they promoted an Eelam Tamil politico-cultural identity that was modern, secular while at the same time politically ‘intolerant’. An example of this ‘intolerance’ is a statement of theirs from the early 90’s that defines a traitor as “whoever accepts or supports the Sri Lanka unitary constitution, the Sinhala national anthem, the Sinhala national flag.” (The French Resistance was no less ‘intolerant’ of the Vichy regime collaborators who served Nazi Germany, sang the Deutschlandlied, saluted the Swastika.) Zizek argues that it is not enough that one finds new terms with which to define oneself outside of the oppressor’s tradition, one should go a step further and deprive the oppressor of the monopoly of defining tradition the way he wants it. The Tigers’ much criticized ‘intolerance’ towards renegades was then but a progressive negation of the discourses framed by the oppressors – not only was the Tamil subject required to denounce the oppressor’s polity, he was also required to denounce the oppressor’s political language and political symbols. In short, assimilation was to be made impossible.

What is Tamil Eelam?

For the LTTE, this was imperative. For the first time in the modern history of the Eelam Tamils, there was organization with a leadership that emerged almost entirely from the popular classes with an exceptionally high percentage of women at decision making levels – in 2002, 5 out of the 12 member central committee were women (If one subscribes to Marx’s belief that the progressiveness of a movement can be gauged by the position that it gives women, then this fact alone should vindicate the Tigers). The philistinism of the comprador Tamil elites of Colombo, long considered the face of Tamil culture, would have to be challenged and so would decadent cultural relics among the natives. The very historical fact of the massive support among popular classes, peasantry, women and backward sections for the Tigers, and owing to their cadre base and leadership being derived from such sections, they had to look at Eelam Tamil identity and culture not just as agents of political change, but also to radically remould them to fit a project of a progressive Eelam Tamil nationalism. It was pointless to talk Tamil culture or identity in abstract – it had to be rooted in the concrete, in the socio-political context that the Eelam Tamils found themselves in. Thus, Capt. Vanathi, a LTTE leader and poet martyred in 1991, did not find the subject of her poetry in a hoary Tamil antiquity – she found her revolutionary Tamil woman in the battlefield confronting the enemy, a political agent heralding a new culture and identity.

A Secular Faith?

Despite the different ways that supporters looked at the project of the Eelam Tamil identity and its protagonists, there was an agreement on certain fundamental points – recognition of Eelam Tamils as a unique national formation with inalienable rights to exercise their political and economic sovereignty, which includes their rights to oppose colonization of their lands and the concomitant mutilation of their cultural consciousness by means of assimilation. With the military crushing of the LTTE, the Sri Lankan state proclaimed the end of Eelam Tamil identity as such. Let alone recognition of nationality, Mahinda Rajapaksa declared that there are no minorities in the island and that all are Sri Lankans. This, of course, implies that the Eelam Tamil is beyond the frameworks of his definition. In this, he is complemented by both Sinhala and Tamil liberal intelligentsia.

While a Tamil using the word ‘us’ to refer to the Tamils as a community perturbs the liberal Sinhala, he nevertheless tolerates it. One can be anything as long as one is Sri Lankan. The Sri Lankan liberal views the Tamil as a minority whose rights must be protected, under his patronage of course. ‘They may be Tamils, but they are Sri Lankan citizens’, he argues while protesting against the abuses of the state. The elite liberal intellectuals of Colombo recognize a plethora of rights for the Tamils – citizen rights, human rights, women rights, children rights. All rights except that one right that the Eelam Tamil people fought for – right of a nation to self-determination.

It was pointed out before how the Colombo based Tamil elites pursued an identity project that was antithetical to the interests of the popular classes of Tamil Eelam. After the tragedy of Vanni, the farce of such intelligentsia became all too apparent. Take for instance, the Colombo based Centre for Policy Alternatives, an institute extensively funded by foreign capital, a hub of Tamil intellectuals following the collaborator Neelan Tiruchelvam’s line, opposes human rights violations while at the same time justifying the war on the LTTE. According to them, the Eelam Tamils deserve human rights accorded to a minority. The national question is blasphemy to them. Their demands for “non-violent conflict resolution and democratic governance” are nothing but cover language for their attempts to defend the economic interests of those privileged sections who defend the ‘Sri Lankan Tamil’ identity against the interests of the Eelam Tamil masses who would be stripped of their powers to resist assimilation at politico-ideological levels and are also left helpless to defend their national economy pillaged by colonization. The struggle of the Sri Lankan liberals, Sinhala or Tamil, is then at odds with the struggle of the Eelam Tamil people. Their struggle is for good governance. Our struggle is for self governance. This is the crux of Eelam Tamil identity politics – not a defence of abstract cultural rights or human rights, but a concrete assertion of political sovereignty.

But the limits of Sri Lankan liberal tolerance is tested when a Tamil questions the foundations of Sri Lankan nationalism, challenges the political economy of Sinhala colonization and refuses assimilation, that is, when a Tamil subscribes to Tamil Eelam – at this point, the lines are blurred between the Tamil liberal Saravanamuttu, Sinhala liberal Sanjana Hattatuwa and the racist Gothabaya whom they claim to oppose. All three are united in denouncing and denying the status and rights of the Eelam Tamils. No wonder that liberal and racist alike find the Tamil diaspora that adamantly refuses to be defined by them an eyesore (the ideological offensive that is being waged on diaspora requires a separate analysis in its own right). After all, only an Eelam Tamil nationalism has the power to negate the reactionary negation of Sinhala colonization, thereby ending privileges of local compradors as well. It would be naïve to expect the ruling class or their liberal apologists to recognize the same. The liberal Sinhala is only the human mask of a monstrous Sri Lankan nationalism and the Sri Lankan Tamil liberal is its make-up paint. The need to recognize and expose this is imperative for those who stand by the Tamils’ rights as a nationality and it is also imperative to deny the terms and definitions of those with the Sri Lankan establishment. For starters, the Eelam Tamils should be referred to as such, and not as ‘Sri Lankan Tamil.’ The political differences between the two terms are too much for them to mean one and the same.

To sum up, the Zizekian matrix of the Event* can be used to explain the state of the Eelam Tamil politics while also drawing equations for the future.

(1) Fidelity – Vaddukkodai resolution of 1976, LTTE & secular-modernist Eelam Tamil nationalism
(2) Reactive re-integration – politics of ‘Sri Lankan Tamil’ identity, minority rights
(3) Outright denial of eventual status – Sri Lankan liberalism, assimilation
(4) Catastrophic total counter-attack – Sri Lankan fascism, annihilation Vanni style
(5) Total enforcing of the Event leading to an ‘obscure disaster’ – emergence of a Hamas-styled Tamil nationalism
(6) Renewal of secular-modernist Eelam Tamil nationalism

(2) (3) and (4) all contributed at different levels to weakening of (1). (2) and (3) also require a weakening of (4) as it weakens the moral legitimacy of their advocacy of ‘co-existence’, especially in the wake of various gross abuses coming to light in the international arena. All the same, (2) and (3) will not hesitate to rally behind (4) in case of an emergence of (5) or (6). In case (6) does not emerge, considering the continuing betrayal of the interests of the Tamil popular classes by protagonists of (2), the probability of (5) cannot be ruled out – as an example, we have seen the Hamas fill the vacuum in Palestine in the face of a weakening of a progressive movement and sell out by elites. In the long run, (5) may deliver freedom, but its ability to be egalitarian is a question. Hence our case for progressives to lend their support to (6) and for the subscribers of (6) to pick-up the thread of the uncompromising emancipatory political tradition of (1) and take it forward.

So, the question “What is in a name?” is not appropriate with regards to the Eelam Tamils. After all, a people do not wage a struggle for decades and sacrifice over 200000 lives for a rose to be named differently. Considering the Eelam Tamils’ political struggle now, the more apt Shakespearean question to be posed is “To be or not to be”!

Sound, it can be said, is relative to the silence that precedes it. Deeper the silence, louder the noise. There was indeed relative silence in the world on the Sri Lankan war and the Eelam Tamils’ struggle, a silence that benefited a fascist state the most. The ‘Killing Fields’ video of Channel 4 came with a devastating bang and exposed to the world the horror that was Sri Lanka’s ‘war on terror’. While the news was already old for Tamil activists, something that many have been writing about for long, the powerful visuals of the 48 minute documentary created shock, especially among the ruling elites of Sri Lanka.

The Lankan government went on a hyperbole in its attempts to dismiss the video as false. The army spokesperson rubbished the video as ‘propaganda’. Der Fuhrer Rajapaksa, in an interview to his Indian Goebbels, an Indian journalist who was awarded the Sri Lanka Ratna and has remained loyal to the country that gave him that honour, remarked that the video was just a “film”. His brother Gothabaya, the defence secretary, was even more forthcoming – in his characteristic chivalrous manner that the Tamils are so familiar with, he wanted to know why one of interviewed war victims was not raped by the army men even when she was “a person so attractive”. Others in the Lankan defence were also more or less gender sensitive while commenting upon allegations of rape by the Lankan forces that the video has proved.

There were some comic gestures on the part of other Sinhala politicians as well. Chandrika Kumaratunga, for one, said that after watching the video one would be ashamed to call oneself Sinhalese. We laughed. When the Lankan Army overran Jaffna in 1995 under her rule, all the atrocities that we accuse them of today were committed then, maybe on a slightly lesser intensity. If the naked story of Vanni massacre is embodied in the face of Isaipriya today, the face of brutalities under Chandrika’s regime were depicted in the stories of Koneswary and Krishanty yesterday. Rajapaksa did not jump from the skies to commit these crimes. The wheels of genocide were set against the Tamils much farther back and Chandrika was as much a spoke in it as Rajapaksa. One thing is clear after the Channel 4 video now. No one can claim innocence over what happened in 2009. It is all a matter of taking sides.

But where is the Sinhala ‘civilian’ in this debate on genocide? The following is an excerpt from a conversation I had with a Jaffna Tamil friend who was personally affected by the war about the supposed progress of ‘reconciliation’ between the communities of Sri Lanka that Rajapaksa and his PR men were boasting about.

“What do you see when you look at a Sinhala army man?” I asked her.
“A murderer and a rapist,” she said.
“Ok. What do you see when you look at a Sinhala civilian?”
“The employer of murderers and rapists.”

Further enquiries on ‘reconciliation’ were unnecessary. There are those who are largely ill-informed of the Sri Lankan situation who would lay the blame of the war on the Lankan leaders alone owing to their being “mere instruments of class rule and national oppression” and/or because they are “puppets of imperialism.” Such an argument only partially exposes Sinhala racism for it ignores the essence of fascism in Sri Lanka.

The tragedy in Mullivaikaal in 2009, the largest massacre in the history of the Tamils, was celebrated by huge numbers of Sinhala ‘civilians’ across the island country. Over 100000 Tamils were butchered in the last stages of the war and while we mourn it, remembering our loved ones, the Sinhalese participate in government celebrations. The condition in Sri Lanka bears likeness to that state of a society that Hannah Arendt so famously described as ‘the banality of evil.’ The genocide of the Tamils in their homelands was not executed by a ruling class and its military alone, it had the wilful consent of the taxpayers-citizens who stood by the state in all its violent measures. Sartre was more explicit in condemning the inactivity of the passive citizen in such societies, if one did not protest when the government that one voted for commits genocide, then one was “undoubtedly a torturer”. What else explains the absolute absence of any major anti-war demonstrations from the Sinhalese side while there have been massive outpourings of support for the jingoistic rallies celebrating victory over the Tamils? How do we account for the anti-war Socialist ideologue Siritunga Jeyasoorya receiving less than 0.36% of the total votes in the Presidential elections after the war while Rajapaksa, with his fascist diatribes, emerged with a thumping majority as a national hero? Fascism has its roots deep in Sinhala society and the ruling class alone cannot be blamed for it.

Celebrating Sinhala triumph: dancers at a Lankan government's 'victory' function post-Vanni massacre

There is another layer that seems supposedly ‘in between’ in the whole conflict. The liberal multiculturalist, the likes of those who run ‘groundviews’ and other such outfits that use sophisticated jargon like ‘post-conflict reconciliation’ ‘coexistence’ ‘citizen’s alternatives’ to cover what they really are – apologists of state oppression. They are indeed a spectacle – they endorse all identities provided it does not hurt the general identity of ‘Sri Lankan’, which for the Eelam Tamils means occupier of their lands. And like all multiculturalist hypocrites, their organizations and positions resolutely deny the existence of the unique Eelam Tamil identity, the identity of an oppressed people asserting which they sacrificed over 200000 lives, serving the purpose of no one but the oppressors and their ideology. Collaborating with them are a group of Tamil intellectuals, an elite, steeped in liberalism and groomed in NGO politics. There are those who deny that there was a genuine liberation struggle led by the Tigers. There are those who say that the war on the LTTE was justified, but the govt needs to give the ‘right reasons’ – as if any such reasoning would assuage the wounded sentiments of those asserted their rights to their homeland and were thus hunted. And of course, there are those who say that let bygones be bygones. Against this academic onslaught, where does the politics of the Tamil patriots stand?

The ‘groundviews’ from Vavuniya, Kilinochi and Jaffna, the views of the Tamil natives, are this – the average Sinhala colonizer views the Tamil as a defeated person, to be pitied or to be held in contempt, if not to be trampled upon. The average Tamil views the Sinhala as a sadist who turned the other way while his army committed genocide in his name, a torturer, if not a killer. If the Sinhala colonizer’s gaze makes of the Tamil an object, it is because it is backed by an occupying army. If the Tamil’s gaze shows despair, a precursor to rage, it is because the most committed defenders of her interests, the LTTE, have only recently been militarily defeated, a defeat that the occupier flaunts in her face as the end of her genuine political aspirations. The raw material required for explosion, resentment and shared memories of persecution and injustice is prevalent throughout the territory of Eelam. And this is the truth in united Sri Lanka, no matter what its apologists like Sarvananthan and Ahilan Kadirgamar might like to portray.

Let me deploy a parallel. In colonial Algeria, there were compradors who betrayed their fellow nationals, collaborating with the occupiers, for privileged positions in the bureaucracy. Among Algerians, there were men who fattened themselves with the crumbs that colonialism threw, with the blood money of their countrymen, and could even buy luxurious villas in the occupying power’s metropolis. And there were Algerian intellectuals who sought to be more French than the French themselves, who would justify a peaceful coexistence between oppressor and oppressed, violator and violated, with colourful jargons and sophisticated prose. Did the FLN wage the Algerian independence struggle for such men? Or did they wage it for those countless men and women who saw the brutal face of French occupation and chose to assert their rights and their identity, for the martyrs of Setif and Phillippeville? I leave it to the sensitive reader to make her/his conclusions and draw appropriate parallels with the Eelam struggle and its protagonists. All I can say is that the Eelam struggle was, is, and will be waged for those Tamils who assert their legitimate right to their homeland, to be different and to secede, at the risk of sounding sentimental, for the thousands of young Tamil men and women who chose to fight and die even when they had a choice to collaborate and live, and at the risk of sounding metaphysical, for the vindication of their faith that one day there will a land called Tamil Eelam that we can call home.

So, the Tamil liberal who infests the elite circles of Colombo 7, who speaks of ‘post-war reconciliation’ or ‘citizen activism’ without addressing the fundamental political demands of the Eelam Tamils is as guilty of ethical dishonesty as his intellectual bedfellow, the Sinhala liberal who, like all liberals of oppressor nations, primarily serves his nation’s interests only. The Eelam Nation is still facing war – as even a cursory glance of Gothabaya’s recent statements would indicate. The reality of war, as Sartre observed, is always Manichean and all discourses of ‘plural identities’ and ‘multiculturalism’ is nothing short of a farce. And the intellectuals who take refuge in such arguments are as guilty of crimes as the rapists and murderers and their employers.