The South Brunswick Post has been dragged into the Sri Lankan civil war. Not that we want to be in the middle of this, but a couple of stories we’ve written in the past few weeks about an event at Crossroads North Middle School — an outside event not affiliated with the school district — that featured a speaker who has served as a legal adviser to a group designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization.
We were not at the event — sponsored by a group called the South Asian Community Association — and did not find out about it until about two weeks after it occurred when we received an e-mail about it.
The initial story was pretty straightforward, outlining what we knew of the event — that it was a celebration called Heroes Day and that the main speaker was Visuvanathan Rudrakumaran, who was identified on a number of reputable web sites as a legal adviser to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group designated by the U.S. Department of State as a terrorist organization.
We decided to do a follow on the story, hoping to give the South Asian Community Association a chance to explain what it is and what its goals are. The group, however, seemed less interested in saying what the did than in answering the terrorist charge and pushing its agenda on the Sri Lankan civil war — which is rather telling I think. The group’s spokesman offered some numbers that are difficult to verify, given that there are no reliable sources on the subject. That led to a slew of responses on the Web site, a call from the Sri Lankan embassy in Washington and this Web posting.
The British and American governments have condemned the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the so-called military wing of the Tamil independence movement, for their tactics, designating them as terrorists. The Tamil Rehabilitation Organization has not been designated, but appears to be a controversial group — Sinhalese Sri Lankans view it as an LTTE lite, if I read the Web posts correctly, while ethnic Tamils see it as a charitable group.
Everyone has an ox to gore in this, so to speak, as the history of the peace talks would seem to indicate, making all claims somewhat suspect.
The growth of a more assertive Sinhala nationalism after independence fanned the flames of ethnic division until civil war erupted in the 1980s between Tamils pressing for self-rule and the government.
Most of the fighting took place in the north. But the conflict also penetrated the heart of Sri Lankan society with Tamil Tiger rebels carrying out devastating suicide bombings in Colombo in the 1990s.
The violence killed more than 60,000 people, damaged the economy and harmed tourism in one of South Asia’s potentially prosperous societies.
A ceasefire and a political agreement reached between the government and rebels in late 2002 raised hopes for a lasting settlement. But Norwegian-brokered peace talks have stalled and monitors have reported open violations of the truce by the government and Tamil Tiger rebels.
Escalating violence between the two sides in 2006 killed hundreds of people and raised fears of a return to all-out war. There has been no meeting of minds over the rebels’ demand for an independent Tamil homeland in the north and east.
Sri Lanka suffered its worst disaster in late 2004 when giant waves generated by an undersea earthquake off Indonesia swept ashore, killing more than 30,000 people and devastating swathes of the coast.
This, like all civil wars, is a complicated clash of ethnic resentment and competing ideologies that features a central government with control of the military battling a rebel group that has resorted to violence and terror. The terror tactics, while morally indefensible, are not surprising — see the Irish Republican Army or the Palestinian Liberation Organization– given the history of these kinds of conflicts. (Mike Davis offers a useful history of car bomb — parts one and two — that can stand in as a history of asymmetrical warfare.)
propaganda, of course, is one of the war’s weapons, as is the passionate commitment of its partisans — and the Post finds itself smack in the middle.
I do not know enough about the Sri Lankan troubles (to borrow the designation the Irish have used to describe their own civil war in Northern Ireland) to know which side to believe, if any. My sense is that both bring legitimate grievances to the table and it is my belief that violence of the sort carried out by the LTTE — indiscriminate targeting of civilians — fails every moral test I know.
My heart goes out to the Sri Lankans affected by this disastrous civil war — Sinhalese and Tamil alike — and I sincerely hope that a ceasefire can be arranged and that the war can come to a close.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
Hank Kalet 