- Email: [email protected]
Dissent: Sri Lanka's new minority?
Political Geography 28 (2009) 385–387
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Guest Editorial
Dissent: Sri Lanka’s new minority?
On May 19, 2009, two days after declaring military victory against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapakse, spoke to the nation via Parliament. He started in Tamil, only then switching to Sinhala, the preferred language of Sri Lanka’s eponymous ethnic majority. Given Sri Lanka’s post-independent history of linguistic nationalism, Rajapakse’s gesture was both a radical departure from protocol and a conciliatory offering to the besieged Sri Lankan Tamil community. Jumping scales from ethno-linguistics to the plural politics of the national, he went on to claim there no longer to be any minorities, only those who love Sri Lanka and those who don’t. His pacifying signal and conciliatory linguistic gesture qualified, this statement seemed to carry within it a veiled threat against a politics of dissent – irrespective of which civil society quarters waged it. Political geographers have much to contribute to, and learn from, recent events in Sri Lanka. The brutal 26-year civil war has been fundamentally about the relationships between territory, politics and power, resulting in what Hennayake (1992) refers to as ‘interactive ethnonationalism’. But in this editorial we argue that a more equitable ‘post-war Sri Lanka’ depends not just on territorial securitization of the island’s geography, but also on forging dissident and dynamic space for debate and dialog around the composition of the contemporary Sri Lankan national. This readership needs no reminder that the ‘end of war’ is not the same as just and equitable peace. Whilst the war waged on Sri Lanka’s battle grounds is now over, a pervasive ‘war culture’ – meaning the drive to colonize and militarize the cultural and political field, imposing a dominant vision of the war effort and its aims (Deer, 2009) – means Sri Lanka is a long way from a peace signaling the equal political and social representation of all its communities. The right to critically engage the Sri Lankan national remains a precarious privilege. In this respect, President Rajapakse’s ‘victory’ speech and its circulation are worthy of more reflection. His signal toward forging a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation-state is certainly an opportunity to uphold as a starting point in the formation of a new and inclusive political thinking; and by extension a political system which recognizes and seeks to redress the grievances of Burghers, Hill-country Tamils, Muslims, Sinhalese, and Tamils. Yet, early signs leave little hope that this moment will be seized upon to explore the possibilities for a radically and creatively pluralistic political entity. Exuberant and triumphalist flag-waving in Colombo, boisterous street parties and noisy papara bands all betray a deep-seated elision between the Sinhala-Buddhist nation and Sri Lankan nation-state. Whilst celebrating the end of war and its immiseration is one thing, the President has quickly been hailed and self-styled as a warrior0962-6298/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.08.002
king who has saved the Sinhala-nation from an endogenous Tamil threat; a narrative familiar from consecrated Sri Lankan historiography going back 2500 years, whose origins can in fact be traced through nineteenth century Orientalist translations of sacred texts (Jeganathan, 1995). Historical parallels drawn, heroic and kingly qualities conferred by the Buddhist clergy on a democratically elected President, three-day national victory parades held, national holidays declared: restoration of sovereignty over the whole island’s territory are being narrativized on terms writ by Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-Buddhist majority. The President also made much of his own duty to protect Sri Lanka’s Tamil people. Necessary and commendable as this mandate is, the paternalistic singling out of a community requiring protection by a Sinhala President also betrays a continued social, cultural and economic minoritization of the Tamil community (amongst others) in Sri Lanka. Akin to Hennayake’s (1992) ‘interactive ethnonationalism’, this very process reconfirms Tamil presence in Sri Lanka as always hospitably granted by a sovereign Sinhala host. The ‘we’ empowered to fashion Sri Lanka’s polity remains the Sinhala-Buddhist majority legitimated each election term by the self-fulfilling prophecy of ethno-majoritarian democracy in an ethnically striated society. Ethnic minorities then do exist in Sri Lanka, and are reified through the very process of governance (Hennayake, 1992). Another dimension of the continued minoritization of nonSinhala communities, is that amidst the clamor of nationalist triumphalism following the government’s military victory, what has been more difficult to discern are the minority voices of the Tamil IDPs (not to mention the war dead) whose plight has been directly linked to the war’s endgame. Contested news reports from the last weeks of the war suggested how Tamil civilians in the last remaining LTTE occupied coastal stretch, were cynically used by the warring factions to further their aims (Rajasingham, 2009). The government claiming that theirs was a humanitarian operation to free civilians used as human shields by the LTTE, whereas the LTTE pointed to constant shelling by the Sri Lankan armed forces into the No-Fire Zone where civilians ‘resided’. One fact remains beyond doubt: those who survived this ordeal have suffered immensely. As we write, one month from the war’s end, the UN’s best estimate is that some 277,000 Tamils are now crammed into overcrowded and under-resourced refugee camps, surrounded by barbed wire, awaiting resettlement by the government. As the state continues to detain and ‘process’ these people, they meld together as one infrahuman statistic, denied voice, spoken for. But each has a dismal story to tell, if only they could bring their narratives – of
386
Guest Editorial / Political Geography 28 (2009) 385–387
Fig. 1. Map of Sri Lanka, with disputed territorial borders.
suffering, of loss and pain, of survival, of a politics deeply personal – into representation. We are less sure what reality ‘war’s end’ signifies for these people, we await their testimonies, aware only that their silence right now surely constitutes one, many, of those erasures that political geographers have argued we must recuperate (Grundy-Warr & Sidaway, 2006) for the just constitution of the national. This is not to obscure the loss and pain suffered by government troops or innocent victims of the LTTE’s programme of slaughter. But at present, Tamil IDPs remain utterly subaltern, unable to be heard (Spivak, 1988). One of the central challenges confronting Sri Lanka at this juncture is how to forge a political process going forward that is ethnically and geographically plural, and explores sensitively, seriously and democratically the concerns all Sri Lankans have regarding the governance and post-conflict development of the north and east, and its political, cultural and spatial orientation to the south. It is easy to see how this challenge is both political and geographical in the most demanding of ways. Now, more than ever, the voices, testimonies and aspirations of each ethnic community must be brought into
a process of negotiation and creative repluralization of the national, not spoken for under the sham authority of ethnic majoritianism. Forging such a process will be difficult, but may lead to new intersections born through the trauma of war that themselves cut across Sri Lanka’s postcolonial certainties of ethnic communitarianism. It is worth remembering that those who have been caught up in the violence, whether it be the shelling by the armed forces and the LTTE in the North and East, loved ones caught in bomb blasts while using public transport, or the dreaded arrival of sons and daughters in body bags from the war front, have preponderantly belonged to the rural and low-income classes of each ethnic community. The forceful schism of ethnic identity has kept away class solidarities that can, and should, be built upon – as it is likely to be a basis from which to agitate for not just multi-ethnic political pluralism but also for an economic democracy which Sri Lanka’s low-income classes, irrespective of ethnicity, so desperately need. And here the demise of the uncompromising LTTE particularly, represents a real opportunity to create an open and un-coerced space for such non-assimilatory, cross-cutting, political process.
Guest Editorial / Political Geography 28 (2009) 385–387
For over two and a half decades, the LTTE’s economic, intellectual and emotional support from the global Tamil Diaspora has been central to its capacity to keep the dream of Eelam – an independent Tamil homeland – alive (see Fig. 1). But for too long those uncompromising contours of Eelam have also fueled the LTTE’s authoritarian brutality; a fact not lost on a Diaspora no longer characterized by uncontested support for the organization (Rajasingham, 2009). The LTTE has, over the years, exterminated democratically leaning Tamil politicians, dissidents, and public figures, it has controlled voting in national elections, and in the 1990s driven non-Tamil, Muslim families from the Jaffna peninsula in an ethnic cleansing aimed at securing the absolutist ideological and geographical parameters of a Tamil nation (Fuglerud, 2009). With the uncompromising specter of the LTTE now diminished, we return then to the importance of dissent. A just, sustainable and peaceful post-war national cannot be the mere imposition of Sinhala hegemony over militarily securitized Sri Lankan territory. It must retain within itself space for critical, dissident but compromising interrogations that might help fashion a productive political process. During the war’s endgame, the media focus honed in on the ‘war against terror’. But this has been to neglect another, more stealthy, just as crippling war waged in the recent past: a war against dissent. The high-profile assassination of Lasantha Wickrematunga – editor of a critically inclined Sunday newspaper – and his ‘letter from the grave’ effectively pointing the finger at the government for his death, may have been a point of culmination earlier this year, but the assaults and threats against the free media, civil society, public intellectual community, and non-governmental organizations, continue unabated. Threatening letters, emails, denial of entry visas to foreign and diasporic figures, kidnap, assault or worse have unfortunately become the price of criticism as an increasingly authoritarian dimension, and interpretation, of the current regime seeks to secure the island-state’s borders from any kind of dissident and relational geography. This battle is the silent war the rest of the world does not hear about so much; a hushed war producing Sri Lanka’s rigidly territorialized geography, where an elected government are insulated from critics both within and without. As President Rajapakse stresses, dissenters belong to Sri Lanka’s new minority: those who do not love Sri Lanka. Putting aside his demand that all must love their country as is, the military defeat of the LTTE represents Sri Lanka’s best opportunity in recent history for critical, creative, democratic and peaceful reconstellations of the national. Dissenting voices must be part of that process.
387
Even as the past three decades have witnessed incessant war and ethnic polarization, the Sri Lankan political field has also seen the growth of a vibrant peace, activist and intellectual community that has struggled to build bridges across regions and ethnic groups. Their work will become more daunting against the clamor of nationalist triumphalism by one community and defeat, fear and paralysis by another. Yet they are a beacon of hope in Sri Lanka. To hold the government responsible and accountable to all its citizenry irrespective of whether we choose to politically differ or not: to recreate, reclaim and expand democratic space for peaceful dissidence, and to forge an open political sphere and process where the contestation of ideas, geographical imagination, and history can themselves overcome Sri Lanka’s creeping politics of ideological polarization and territorialization. References Deer, P. (2009). Culture in camouflage: War, empire and modern British literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuglerud, O. (2009). Fractured sovereignty: the LTTE’s state-building in an interconnected world. In C. Brun, & T. Jazeel (Eds.), Spatialising politics: Culture and geography in postcolonial Sri Lanka (pp. 194–215). Delhi: Sage. Grundy-Warr, C., & Sidaway, J. (2006). Political geographies of silence and erasure. Political Geography, 25, 479–481. Hennayake, S. (1992). Interactive ethnonationalism: an alternative explanation of minority ethnonationalism. Political Geography, 11, 526–549. Jeganathan, P. (1995). Authorizing history, ordering land: the conquest of Anuradhapura. In JeganathanP.., & IsmailQ.. (Eds.), Unmaking the nation: The politics of identity and history in modern Sri Lanka (pp. 106–136). Colombo: Social Scientist’s Association. Rajasingham, N. (2009). The Tamil Diaspora: solidarities and realities April 17th, 2009. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-tamil-diaspora-solidaritiesand-realities (Accessed 20.04.09). Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson, & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313) Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Tariq Jazeel1 Department of Geography, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom E-mail address: T.Jazeel@Sheffield.ac.uk (T. Jazeel) Kanchana N. Ruwanpura*,1 School of Geography, University of Southampton, Shackleton Building 2065, Southmapton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 238 059 7436. E-mail address: [email protected] (K.N. Ruwanpura) Authors are listed in alphabetical order
1
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Guest Editorial
Dissent: Sri Lanka’s new minority?
On May 19, 2009, two days after declaring military victory against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapakse, spoke to the nation via Parliament. He started in Tamil, only then switching to Sinhala, the preferred language of Sri Lanka’s eponymous ethnic majority. Given Sri Lanka’s post-independent history of linguistic nationalism, Rajapakse’s gesture was both a radical departure from protocol and a conciliatory offering to the besieged Sri Lankan Tamil community. Jumping scales from ethno-linguistics to the plural politics of the national, he went on to claim there no longer to be any minorities, only those who love Sri Lanka and those who don’t. His pacifying signal and conciliatory linguistic gesture qualified, this statement seemed to carry within it a veiled threat against a politics of dissent – irrespective of which civil society quarters waged it. Political geographers have much to contribute to, and learn from, recent events in Sri Lanka. The brutal 26-year civil war has been fundamentally about the relationships between territory, politics and power, resulting in what Hennayake (1992) refers to as ‘interactive ethnonationalism’. But in this editorial we argue that a more equitable ‘post-war Sri Lanka’ depends not just on territorial securitization of the island’s geography, but also on forging dissident and dynamic space for debate and dialog around the composition of the contemporary Sri Lankan national. This readership needs no reminder that the ‘end of war’ is not the same as just and equitable peace. Whilst the war waged on Sri Lanka’s battle grounds is now over, a pervasive ‘war culture’ – meaning the drive to colonize and militarize the cultural and political field, imposing a dominant vision of the war effort and its aims (Deer, 2009) – means Sri Lanka is a long way from a peace signaling the equal political and social representation of all its communities. The right to critically engage the Sri Lankan national remains a precarious privilege. In this respect, President Rajapakse’s ‘victory’ speech and its circulation are worthy of more reflection. His signal toward forging a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation-state is certainly an opportunity to uphold as a starting point in the formation of a new and inclusive political thinking; and by extension a political system which recognizes and seeks to redress the grievances of Burghers, Hill-country Tamils, Muslims, Sinhalese, and Tamils. Yet, early signs leave little hope that this moment will be seized upon to explore the possibilities for a radically and creatively pluralistic political entity. Exuberant and triumphalist flag-waving in Colombo, boisterous street parties and noisy papara bands all betray a deep-seated elision between the Sinhala-Buddhist nation and Sri Lankan nation-state. Whilst celebrating the end of war and its immiseration is one thing, the President has quickly been hailed and self-styled as a warrior0962-6298/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2009.08.002
king who has saved the Sinhala-nation from an endogenous Tamil threat; a narrative familiar from consecrated Sri Lankan historiography going back 2500 years, whose origins can in fact be traced through nineteenth century Orientalist translations of sacred texts (Jeganathan, 1995). Historical parallels drawn, heroic and kingly qualities conferred by the Buddhist clergy on a democratically elected President, three-day national victory parades held, national holidays declared: restoration of sovereignty over the whole island’s territory are being narrativized on terms writ by Sri Lanka’s Sinhala-Buddhist majority. The President also made much of his own duty to protect Sri Lanka’s Tamil people. Necessary and commendable as this mandate is, the paternalistic singling out of a community requiring protection by a Sinhala President also betrays a continued social, cultural and economic minoritization of the Tamil community (amongst others) in Sri Lanka. Akin to Hennayake’s (1992) ‘interactive ethnonationalism’, this very process reconfirms Tamil presence in Sri Lanka as always hospitably granted by a sovereign Sinhala host. The ‘we’ empowered to fashion Sri Lanka’s polity remains the Sinhala-Buddhist majority legitimated each election term by the self-fulfilling prophecy of ethno-majoritarian democracy in an ethnically striated society. Ethnic minorities then do exist in Sri Lanka, and are reified through the very process of governance (Hennayake, 1992). Another dimension of the continued minoritization of nonSinhala communities, is that amidst the clamor of nationalist triumphalism following the government’s military victory, what has been more difficult to discern are the minority voices of the Tamil IDPs (not to mention the war dead) whose plight has been directly linked to the war’s endgame. Contested news reports from the last weeks of the war suggested how Tamil civilians in the last remaining LTTE occupied coastal stretch, were cynically used by the warring factions to further their aims (Rajasingham, 2009). The government claiming that theirs was a humanitarian operation to free civilians used as human shields by the LTTE, whereas the LTTE pointed to constant shelling by the Sri Lankan armed forces into the No-Fire Zone where civilians ‘resided’. One fact remains beyond doubt: those who survived this ordeal have suffered immensely. As we write, one month from the war’s end, the UN’s best estimate is that some 277,000 Tamils are now crammed into overcrowded and under-resourced refugee camps, surrounded by barbed wire, awaiting resettlement by the government. As the state continues to detain and ‘process’ these people, they meld together as one infrahuman statistic, denied voice, spoken for. But each has a dismal story to tell, if only they could bring their narratives – of
386
Guest Editorial / Political Geography 28 (2009) 385–387
Fig. 1. Map of Sri Lanka, with disputed territorial borders.
suffering, of loss and pain, of survival, of a politics deeply personal – into representation. We are less sure what reality ‘war’s end’ signifies for these people, we await their testimonies, aware only that their silence right now surely constitutes one, many, of those erasures that political geographers have argued we must recuperate (Grundy-Warr & Sidaway, 2006) for the just constitution of the national. This is not to obscure the loss and pain suffered by government troops or innocent victims of the LTTE’s programme of slaughter. But at present, Tamil IDPs remain utterly subaltern, unable to be heard (Spivak, 1988). One of the central challenges confronting Sri Lanka at this juncture is how to forge a political process going forward that is ethnically and geographically plural, and explores sensitively, seriously and democratically the concerns all Sri Lankans have regarding the governance and post-conflict development of the north and east, and its political, cultural and spatial orientation to the south. It is easy to see how this challenge is both political and geographical in the most demanding of ways. Now, more than ever, the voices, testimonies and aspirations of each ethnic community must be brought into
a process of negotiation and creative repluralization of the national, not spoken for under the sham authority of ethnic majoritianism. Forging such a process will be difficult, but may lead to new intersections born through the trauma of war that themselves cut across Sri Lanka’s postcolonial certainties of ethnic communitarianism. It is worth remembering that those who have been caught up in the violence, whether it be the shelling by the armed forces and the LTTE in the North and East, loved ones caught in bomb blasts while using public transport, or the dreaded arrival of sons and daughters in body bags from the war front, have preponderantly belonged to the rural and low-income classes of each ethnic community. The forceful schism of ethnic identity has kept away class solidarities that can, and should, be built upon – as it is likely to be a basis from which to agitate for not just multi-ethnic political pluralism but also for an economic democracy which Sri Lanka’s low-income classes, irrespective of ethnicity, so desperately need. And here the demise of the uncompromising LTTE particularly, represents a real opportunity to create an open and un-coerced space for such non-assimilatory, cross-cutting, political process.
Guest Editorial / Political Geography 28 (2009) 385–387
For over two and a half decades, the LTTE’s economic, intellectual and emotional support from the global Tamil Diaspora has been central to its capacity to keep the dream of Eelam – an independent Tamil homeland – alive (see Fig. 1). But for too long those uncompromising contours of Eelam have also fueled the LTTE’s authoritarian brutality; a fact not lost on a Diaspora no longer characterized by uncontested support for the organization (Rajasingham, 2009). The LTTE has, over the years, exterminated democratically leaning Tamil politicians, dissidents, and public figures, it has controlled voting in national elections, and in the 1990s driven non-Tamil, Muslim families from the Jaffna peninsula in an ethnic cleansing aimed at securing the absolutist ideological and geographical parameters of a Tamil nation (Fuglerud, 2009). With the uncompromising specter of the LTTE now diminished, we return then to the importance of dissent. A just, sustainable and peaceful post-war national cannot be the mere imposition of Sinhala hegemony over militarily securitized Sri Lankan territory. It must retain within itself space for critical, dissident but compromising interrogations that might help fashion a productive political process. During the war’s endgame, the media focus honed in on the ‘war against terror’. But this has been to neglect another, more stealthy, just as crippling war waged in the recent past: a war against dissent. The high-profile assassination of Lasantha Wickrematunga – editor of a critically inclined Sunday newspaper – and his ‘letter from the grave’ effectively pointing the finger at the government for his death, may have been a point of culmination earlier this year, but the assaults and threats against the free media, civil society, public intellectual community, and non-governmental organizations, continue unabated. Threatening letters, emails, denial of entry visas to foreign and diasporic figures, kidnap, assault or worse have unfortunately become the price of criticism as an increasingly authoritarian dimension, and interpretation, of the current regime seeks to secure the island-state’s borders from any kind of dissident and relational geography. This battle is the silent war the rest of the world does not hear about so much; a hushed war producing Sri Lanka’s rigidly territorialized geography, where an elected government are insulated from critics both within and without. As President Rajapakse stresses, dissenters belong to Sri Lanka’s new minority: those who do not love Sri Lanka. Putting aside his demand that all must love their country as is, the military defeat of the LTTE represents Sri Lanka’s best opportunity in recent history for critical, creative, democratic and peaceful reconstellations of the national. Dissenting voices must be part of that process.
387
Even as the past three decades have witnessed incessant war and ethnic polarization, the Sri Lankan political field has also seen the growth of a vibrant peace, activist and intellectual community that has struggled to build bridges across regions and ethnic groups. Their work will become more daunting against the clamor of nationalist triumphalism by one community and defeat, fear and paralysis by another. Yet they are a beacon of hope in Sri Lanka. To hold the government responsible and accountable to all its citizenry irrespective of whether we choose to politically differ or not: to recreate, reclaim and expand democratic space for peaceful dissidence, and to forge an open political sphere and process where the contestation of ideas, geographical imagination, and history can themselves overcome Sri Lanka’s creeping politics of ideological polarization and territorialization. References Deer, P. (2009). Culture in camouflage: War, empire and modern British literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuglerud, O. (2009). Fractured sovereignty: the LTTE’s state-building in an interconnected world. In C. Brun, & T. Jazeel (Eds.), Spatialising politics: Culture and geography in postcolonial Sri Lanka (pp. 194–215). Delhi: Sage. Grundy-Warr, C., & Sidaway, J. (2006). Political geographies of silence and erasure. Political Geography, 25, 479–481. Hennayake, S. (1992). Interactive ethnonationalism: an alternative explanation of minority ethnonationalism. Political Geography, 11, 526–549. Jeganathan, P. (1995). Authorizing history, ordering land: the conquest of Anuradhapura. In JeganathanP.., & IsmailQ.. (Eds.), Unmaking the nation: The politics of identity and history in modern Sri Lanka (pp. 106–136). Colombo: Social Scientist’s Association. Rajasingham, N. (2009). The Tamil Diaspora: solidarities and realities April 17th, 2009. http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-tamil-diaspora-solidaritiesand-realities (Accessed 20.04.09). Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson, & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313) Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Tariq Jazeel1 Department of Geography, The University of Sheffield, United Kingdom E-mail address: T.Jazeel@Sheffield.ac.uk (T. Jazeel) Kanchana N. Ruwanpura*,1 School of Geography, University of Southampton, Shackleton Building 2065, Southmapton SO17 1BJ, United Kingdom Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 238 059 7436. E-mail address: [email protected] (K.N. Ruwanpura) Authors are listed in alphabetical order
1