This diary is about a war between two factions struggling for control of the same small country. Two factions separated by race, language, and religion. Two factions with stunningly different views of the world. One side willing to use brutal terrorism in pursuit of its nationalist goals. Another side willing to use brutal military force to put down the "rebels".
But this diary is not about Israel and Palestine.
This diary is about Sri Lanka. And who cares?
As I write, the decades-long "civil war" in Sri Lanka appears to be drawing to a close. The Sri Lanka Army has, by their own account, drawn to 12 miles from Mullaittivu, last remaining stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Unless there is some dramatic military reversal, we can expect a complete conquest of LTTE territory sometime in the ensuing weeks and months. 2009 will be marked as the end of the military confrontation.
It won't mean the end of the confrontation as a whole, however. Deprived of military means of fighting, political groups often retreat into terrorism: kidnappings, assassinations, bombing -- the last resort of the weak. And long before the current offensive by the SLA, when the LTTE had held about a quarter of Sri Lanka, they had already shown a willingness to engage in terrorism. So 2009 only marks the end of one kind of war. The other will continue. And even if it is successfully repressed, the question still remains about the basic causes which enabled the LTTE rebellion.
How did we get here? Who are these people, and what is Sri Lanka anyway?
Sri Lanka (shree LUNG-kah) -- an old-new name borrowed from Sanskrit epic -- is the current name for the country occupying the entirety of the isle of Ceylon, an island in the Indian Ocean shaped like a tear, just off the southern point of India. It's had many names -- Taprobane, Sarandib, Ceylon -- and its history is no less tortured.
Sri Lanka's original inhabitants, the Veddas, play no significant role in the politics of the country -- they are a tiny minority, who have even lost all but a few words of their original language. The main players on this stage are two groups who arrived later, and who between them assimilated the greatest part of the island's inhabitants.
The dominant group of the two are the Sinhalese. They speak an "Indo-Aryan" language, distantly related to the languages of northern India, indicating that at some point a north Indian group must have migrated to Ceylon and become culturally dominant. Details of this movement are only attested in dubious legends, however. The Sinhalese have been in the island for about 2500 years.
About 300 years after their arrival, the Sinhalese began to adopt a form of Buddhism which ultimately developed into the sect called Theravada, "the doctrine of the elders"; this sect then spread from Ceylon to the neighboring countries of Southeast Asia which are now Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. This sect shares many doctrines with the more numerous Mahayana Buddhists of east and central Asia, but is distinguished by its dependence upon a closed canon of early Buddhist texts written in Pali, an archaic descendant of Sanskrit.
When Buddhism disappeared from mainland India in the Middle Ages, it was retained in Ceylon, and subsequently became a distinguishing characteristic of the Sinhalese, who blended linguistic, religious, and racial identity into a precocious form of nationalism -- rooted in works of propaganda like the 4th century Mahavamsa, which skilfully blended legend and history to create a shared national mythology. This mythology helped the Sinhalese retain their national identity in spite of the hammer-blows of foreign occupation.
Due to its insular position, Ceylon escaped the land-based invasions, from Persia and Afghanistan, that devastated most of continental India. But the encircling sea also made Ceylon uniquely attractive and vulnerable to foreign traders -- in the heart of the Indian Ocean, halfway between the Cape of Good Hope and the Spice Islands, it was a perfect staging post from which to dominate the entire Indian Ocean trade. It was, accordingly, conquered three times -- first by the Portuguese, who annexed the Ceylonese coast over the course of the 1500s, and attempted to impose their version of Catholicism on the Sinhalese; second by the Dutch, who ousted the Portuguese in the 1600s, and who exploited the islanders economically; and at the end of the 1700s, by the British, who made Ceylon part of their larger Indian Empire, and whose sense of duty required both religious and economic exploitation. (A famous 19th century mission hymn acclaims Ceylon as the land "where only man is vile"; it was an accurate statement of the attitude of the missionaries.)
During this time, the second major ethnic group on Ceylon was acquiring its own unique history and national consciousness. The part of India closest to Ceylon has been occupied for many millennia by a Dravidian people -- speakers of a group of languages entirely unrelated to Sanskrit or any other language now spoken outside of India. The most sophisticated and civilized of these peoples, with a literature going back to the 1st century BCE, were the Tamils. Tamils had probably had a presence in Ceylon from an early date, as communication between the south Indian Tamil homeland and Ceylon was easy; but there's no evidence of large-scale colonization until the 10th century, when the Chola kingdom of the Tamils conquered much of north Ceylon. Thereafter the Tamils became rooted in the island, particularly in the northern point of the "tear", and along the eastern coast. Their religion is primarily a form of Hinduism, though there are also Tamils whose ancestors converted to other religions -- though rarely to Sinhalese Buddhism.
Under British rule, yet more Tamils entered Ceylon as workers. These Tamils had no long history in the island, and came from south India. Their position was to become a major political problem following independence.
Ceylonese independence was a less stressful affair than its Indian counterpart, and Ceylon achieved self-rule in 1948, a year after India. The political agitation leading up to independence did, however, produce political parties of a nationalist bent, reflecting Sinhalese and Tamil identities. There was an effort early on to balance Sinhalese and Tamil interests in the new national government; but its price was the sacrifice of the political interests of the Tamil immigrants from India, who were left effectively stateless.
In the 1950s the situation deteriorated. The chauvinistic Sri Lanka Freedom Party gained power and pushed through a law in 1958 making Sinhalese the sole official language of the state. This had the effect, intended or not, of excluding large numbers of Tamils from state employment. (Amended in 1987, the laws of Sri Lanka currently state that Sinhalese is the official language of Sri Lanka, while Tamil is an official language.) In the ensuing fighting between Sinhalese and Tamils, hundreds, mostly Tamil, were murdered. Sinhalese-Tamil relations entered a descending spiral from which they have never recovered.
Through the 1960s the Sinhalese were dominant, and the history of the island is a competition between Sinhalese political parties. In 1970 the SFLP regained power on a socialist/nationalist platform, and instigated a new phase in Sinhala chauvinism. Ties with the UK were broken; the country's name was changed from Ceylon to Sri Lanka; a 1971 act controlling admission to universities openly discriminated against Tamils. Paralleling increasingly radical acts by the Sinhalese government, Tamil parties became more radical themselves, recommending violent measures and calling for the separation of a large part of Ceylon as an independent country, "Tamil Eelam".
In 1981, the Sinhalese government, now under the control of the conservative United National Party, allowed Sinhalese paramilitaries to engage in massive destruction in the Tamil city of Jaffna, where two Sinhalese policemen had been killed. Among other things, the Jaffna Public Library, including an irreplaceable archive of ancient literature, was burned down. The Tamil extremists stepped up their activity. One of them, founded by hardline Tamil nationalist Velupillai Prabhakaran, was the "Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam". Initially only one of a number of competing Tamil extremist groups, over the course of the 1980s the Tigers either destroyed the others in internecine warfare, or forced them to merge with the Tigers.
In 1983, the Tigers attacked and killed a squadron of Sri Lanka Army soldiers in Jaffna. Sinhalese nationalists elsewhere in the country responded with a vicious attack on Tamil civilians, killing hundreds. The Tigers responded with massacres of Sinhalese civilians. Fighting continued through the mid-1980s, with the Tigers controlling a strong position around Jaffna in the north of the island, and the SLA generally having the military edge. Serious campaigning to dislodge the Tigers occurred in 1987, but was halted by threats of intervention from India. India, seen as somewhat sympathetic to the Tamils, took on a peacekeeping role in north Ceylon. The Tigers resisted disarmament, and clashes between the Indian Peacekeeping Force and the Tigers grew. With a change in the Indian government in 1989, the peacekeeping force was withdrawn the following year. In 1991, a Tamil Tiger assassin killed former Indian Prime Minister Gandhi in a suicide bombing. This marked a final breach between India and the Tamil separatist movement.
During the 1987-1990 lull in fighting, steps were taken to address some of the Tamils' political concerns, e.g. allowing Tamil to be used as an official language. These moves were unacceptable to the Tigers, who wanted nothing less than complete independence. In 1990 a newer and more brutal phase of the war began, with the Tigers initially targeting the local Muslim minority in the Jaffna area, whom they believed to be sympathetic to the Sinhalese. In 1993 the Tigers assassinated the President of Sri Lanka. Despite the deaths of thousands in conflicts between the LTTE and SLA, little changed on the ground. After a brief ceasefire in 1995, a new government stepped up military action. Jaffna was taken in 1995, but the Tigers responded with suicide bombings and other terrorist actions throughout Ceylon.
In 1999 an SLA offensive stalled, and the Tigers counterattacked. By 2001 they had regained considerable territory, and had carried out several successful terrorist actions, and some failed ones (e.g. another assassination attempt against Sri Lanka's new President). After the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City, the LTTE -- heavily dependent for its survival on foreign donations -- began to step back its terrorism campaign. With Norwegian mediation, a peace process led to a ceasefire formalized in 2002. The ceasefire lasted until 2005, and was a period when the LTTE broadened and deepened its hold over the northern and eastern portions of the island.
In August 2005, the Tigers assassinated the Sri Lankan foreign minister -- a Tamil. With the victory of the hardline United People's Freedom Alliance, a political alignment including the SLFP, in elections in 2004 and 2005, tensions between the Sri Lankan government and the Tigers increased. Low-intensity violence on both sides resumed in 2005, and steadily escalated. By summer 2006 scores were being killed in bombings and reprisal massacres. Full-scale war resumed on July 26, 2006. By mid 2007, the eastern regions controlled by the LTTE -- most of the east coast of Ceylon -- had been captured by the SLA. At the beginning of 2008, the government officially renounced its ceasefire agreement. Through 2008 the SLA attacked and steadily reduced the LTTE-held areas in the north. On January 2, 2009, the SLA captured Kilinochchi, previously the headquarters of the LTTE. On Wednesday, the SLA completed its reconquest of the Jaffna peninsula at the north of the island. The LTTE is now boxed into a small corner in the northwest.
This long war, or series of wars, has been marked by a remarkable degree of brutality and the use of unorthodox modes of warfare. Human rights watchers have broadly criticized both sides; governments have tended to denounce the LTTE, and it is now proscribed (since 2006) as a terrorist group by most governments, due to its use of mass bombings of civilians, suicide bombings, and assassination of government leaders. On the other side, the government can be blamed for creating the conditions for the conflict by policies that are at best described as insensitive and at worst, racist; while the SLA has been accused of human rights violations, mass killings, and ethnic cleansing. Over 20,000 military, police, or paramilitary have been killed on either side, in addition to the numerous civilian casualties.
In short, there are all the materials here for hefty doses of righteous indignation, as long as one picks a side. But -- although this war is an ongoing one, with deaths occurring by the day, I have yet to see a "S/T" (Sinhalese/Tamil or Sri Lanka/Tamil Eelam) diary.
We have, in this conflict, cold-blooded murders of innocents. We have bombs. We have assassinations. We have suicide boats. We have bad-faith compromises and broken truces. We have huge death tolls. We have corrupt politicians and dictatorial leaders. We have wild fanaticism and studied contempt for minority rights. Above all, we have religion and ethnicity mingled in the usual toxic brew.
So I don't get it. Why does I/P get all the attention and recommendations? Why no diaries on the S/T conflict? Why no denunciations of Sri Lanka as a Buddhist theocracy that doesn't deserve to exist, or, conversely, condemnations of the LTTE as a gang of murderous cut-throats with a bankrupt ideology? What makes Israel and Palestine sexier than Ceylon?
I'd love to know.