Ethnic conflict: Restructuring the Sri Lankan State

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From Tamil Canadian,

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Ethnic conflict: Restructuring the Sri Lankan State to link political
citizenship to individuals

Source: The Northeastern Monthly - January 2006
By: Dr. S. Sathananthan

When a journalist queried the former president, J. R. Jayewardene, in
1995, about the then President Chandrika Kumaratungas promise to abolish
the executive presidency by the 15 July of that year, he famously quipped
that Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) politicians speak foolishly but act
wisely; shell keep the executive presidency. She did. Current president,
Mahinda Rajapakse of the SLFP, an avowed Sinhala nationalist, took a hard
line against the Tamil National Movement during the run up to the
presidential election held on 17 November 2005. But the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) Leader Veluppillai Pirabaharan assured Tamils in his
27 November Heroes Day address that Rajapakse is a realist, committed to
pragmatic politics.

The initial indications seem to confirm the LTTE leaders assessment.
Rajapakse abandoned his campaign pledge to jettison the Government of
Norway as facilitator of talks between the LTTE and the Sinhala
government; he invited Norwegians on 8 December to continue their
facilitation. On 11 December Rajapakse reversed the previous governments
refusal to hold future talks with the LTTE in a venue outside Sri Lanka.
He declared his governments willingness to do so in a foreign country
perhaps Japan. Of course, it is too early to conclude that Rajapakse is
undergoing a radical change of heart. Tamils remember very well how
Kumaratunga bought time with the 1995/96 talks to make changes in the
bureaucratic and military hierarchy, to procure weapons and to plan war.
Tamils remember also how Jayewardene kicked off the Political Parties
Conference in 1986 as a smokescreen to mask preparations already underway
for war.

Rajapakse reportedly told his coalition partners last week that he is
trying to play for time because it will take at least three months to
acquire the necessary firepower to begin the onslaught against the LTTE.
His explanation is ominous for two reasons. First, he has set aside three
months to reach a consensus among Sinhala parties and organisations. Is
consensus-building Rajapakses smokescreen for the same purpose? Second, he
still stands by his rejection of Tamils inalienable right to national
self-determination and of a federalist power sharing between Tamil and
Sinhala nations. So he is set on a collision course with the LTTE.
Nevertheless, the new president is entitled to the benefit of doubt for
now. In his 26 November policy statement he loftily hoped to ensure for
all communities, including Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim, Burgher and Malay the
freedom to exercise all the rights enshrined in the constitution -
including the right to live in any part of Sri Lanka on the grounds that
the entire territory is the homeland of all communities. He wishes that
individuals belonging to every community in the country should be equal
citizens under the constitution.

Does this mean Rajapakse proposes to re-establish the political link
between citizenship and the individual? If so, he and his Sinhala State
have to shed daunting Sinhala chauvinist baggage. In the British model,
the political concept the idea of sons of the soil of citizenship is
linked to the individual irrespective of ethnicity. That is the foundation
of a plural, inclusive polity. Sri Lanka (then Ceylon)  under British rule
inherited the seeds of this practice. Rather than groom those seeds, as
the prospect of independence grew brighter Sinhala nationalists set about
re-conceptualising citizenship: they sought to politically link
citizenship to ethnicity as in the German model before the Second World
War. In the latter case, citizenship was politically linked to German
ethnicity, defined by race (Aryan), language (German) and religion
(Catholicism). This combination of racial and cultural markers underpinned
German aggression.

The shift from the British to the German model (though not articulated in
these terms) in Sri Lanka had begun in the late 19th century. The Sinhala
nationalists dredged up the racial marker by re-inventing the Sinhala
people as a superior Aryan race. The second, linguistic facet of the shift
was evident first in 1944 when Jayewardene tabled a motion in the State
Council that Sinhala shall be the official language of Ceylon. His ploy
failed. But growing Sinhala chauvinism reinforced the shift, which
culminated in the 1956 Official Language Act that enacted Sinhala as the
sole official language and so excluded the Tamil and Muslim peoples and
restricted political citizenship to the Sinhala people. The third,
religious facet of the shift from the British to the German model
crystallised when Buddhism was granted the foremost place in the 1972
constitution and effectively made the de facto State religion. This
excluded Sinhala-Christians and further narrowed the political concept of
citizenship to Sinhala-Buddhist ethnicity. The first victims of this
reactionary trend were the Up-Country (or Kandyan) Tamils who were
disenfranchised under the draconian 1948 Ceylon Citizenship Act.

The design of the national flag adopted in 1952 symbolically expressed
again the warped Sinhala-chauvinist worldview. The Sinhala lion emblem was
given pride of place while demoting Tamil and Muslim peoples to saffron
and green stripes at the less important pole end of the flag. Dr N. M.
Perera, a progressive Sinhala politician (nowadays rarely any of them can
be found outside the Colombo Museum), condemned the new flag as a fraud...
perpetrated on the minorities. They [Sinhalese] are going to have the Lion
Flag and these stripes are for the outcasts (Hansard, vol. 9, col.
1565-1684). By the time the 1978 constitution was adopted, Sinhala
nationalists gave the Sinhala lion emblem a distinctly Buddhist touch.
They inserted the motif resembling the leaf of the Bo tree a symbol of
Buddhist worship into the four corners of the emblem. That completed the
shift from the British to the German model of political citizenship. Sri
Lanka today has a Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious State steeped in the
Aryan supremacist ideology that glorifies Sinhala-Buddhists as the bhoomi
putra (sons of the soil) while denigrating Tamils, Muslims and
Sinhala-Christians as politically second-class.

Significantly, progressive Sinhala politicians made repeated references to
the German experience. They displayed an instinctive grasp of the tragic
consequences of linking political citizenship to ethnicity. In 1956 one
progressive Sinhala member of parliament (MP) drew chilling parallels with
the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany during the parliamentary debate over
the Official Language Bill. He also predicted that it would become
necessary to send an army of occupation to the Northern and Eastern
provinces if Tamils are to be compelled to swallow the Sinhala language.
He warned that such actions will result in rioting, bloodshed and civil
war and will force Tamils to demand a separate State (Hansard, vol. 23,
col. 572-623). Another progressive Sinhala MP condemned the proposed
language policy as Hitlerism. But the voices of the sane few were drowned
by Sinhala-chauvinist cackle.  An MP arrogantly defended cultural
genocide: he declared, We [Sinhalese] want to absorb you [Tamils] into our
community (Hansard, vol. 22, col.  1754-55). Another Sinhala MP bluntly
told Tamil MPs (reported in translation), We want to absorb you. Why do
you resent that? And he helpfully explained, because there are 40 million
people speaking the Tamil language across the Palk Strait, you people give
up the Tamil language and get absorbed, get assimilated (Hansard, vol. 24,
col.  942-1917).

The myopic Sinhala chauvinists burst into uncontrolled merriment in
parliament when a Tamil MP, Professor C. Suntharalingam, issued a simple
but a stunningly prophetic warning in June 1956: We will learn to use
fire-arms before we learn Sinhalese. Make no mistake on that score
(Hansard, vol. 24, col. 1805). Over the next five decades, this anti-Tamil
bigotry spread wider and seeped deeper within the Sinhala polity. Sabre
rattling against Tamils during and after the July 1983 holocaust, baying
for Tamil blood in successive, largely futile, military campaigns through
the 1980s and 1990s, celebrating the Sinhala conquest of the Tamil
cultural heartland, Jaffna, in December 1995, are the more outrageous
benchmarks. The present generation of Sinhala people has been weaned on
this potent anti-Tamils brew; they elected Rajapakse, who is of that
generation.

If he wishes to resolve the Tamil National Question short of an
independent State of Tamil Eelam, then Rajapakse must de-fang
Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism by re-establishing the link between the
political concept citizenship and the individual, as the first step to
dismantle the ethno-religious State and retrieve a secular-democratic
State. That Sinhala cultural revolution requires some concrete actions.
Rajapakse may find it edifying to reflect on the German experience.
Liberal institutions established in the Federal Republic of Germany after
the Second World War have popularised the association between political
citizenship and the individual as an indispensable requirement to resist
fascism and re-establish and sustain liberal democracy. So far they have
made good progress (despite the vocal neo-Nazi movements preference for
the pre-War linkage between citizenship and German ethnicity).

Rajapakse would be well advised to redesign the national flag to the
satisfaction of the Tamil and Sinhala nations and other ethnic groups. The
president would find it to his advantage to honestly acknowledge that the
position regarding the official language has remained the same from the
mid-1950s to the present. Under Article 18 of the constitution, as amended
by the 1987 13th Amendment, the official language of Sri Lanka shall be
Sinhala (Art 18.1) while Tamil shall also be an official language (Art
18.2). That is, Sinhala is the sole official language of the whole country
while Tamil an official language for specified purposes only. The Article
essentially combines and restates the 1956 Official Language Act (in Art
18.1) and the 1958 Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act (in Art 18.2).
This odious fact is skilfully obscured by the Sinhala chauvinists
propaganda that both are official languages of the whole country; and
collaborating Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) politicians colluded
with them to deceive Tamils by not exposing Article 18 as a cruel
deception and by mouthing vacuous assertions about proper implementation
of the provision. Can Rajapakse amend Article 18 to make Sinhala and Tamil
the official languages of the whole country in the face of opposition from
his Sinhala-extremist coalition partner, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
(JVP)?

Tamils have long emphasised the need to return to a secular constitution
to ensure equality for all religious groups under the constitution. The
next requirement, then, would be to repeal Article 9 of the constitution
that makes Sri Lanka a de facto Buddhist State. What would be the reaction
of Rajapakses coalition partner, the Buddhist-fundamentalist Jathika Hela
Urumaya (JHU)? These fundamental changes would help to re-link political
citizenship with the individual and so transform the current
Sinhala-Buddhist ethno-religious State into a secular, plural democracy.
That transformation is the necessary pre-condition for a negotiated
settlement.  Rajapakse, being a realist, must surely know that the
LTTE-led Tamil National Movement has no democratic space within the
suffocating confines of the ethno-religious unitary State to negotiate a
political solution.  Does Rajapakse hope to reach a consensus with his
coalition partners, Sinhala political parties and other southern
organisations to mobilise the Sinhala politys support to secure this
pre-condition?

If the president proposes to hold direct talks with the LTTE without at
the very least preparing the Sinhala people to accept the transformation,
then he will have great difficulty convincing the LTTE, the Tamil people
and the international community that he is negotiating in good faith on
behalf of the Sinhala people. The unavoidable conclusion would be that,
like previous Sinhala presidents, he too is buying time to attempt a
military solution to the Tamil National Question.

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