Paradigm shift is the need of Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 21 October 2008, 15:41 GMT]
The International Community and especially India, should not burden any further the peoples of Sri Lanka by insisting on a united Sri Lanka. The first step to diffuse tension is to recognize the right to self-determination of Tamils, not necessarily to mean partition, but to achieve parity and to provide a conducive platform needed for meaningful negotiations of the concerned parties to decide the future of the island of Sri Lanka, peacefully. The way sentiments have been built up, initially it may stir emotions among the Sinhalese, but it may not take long for them to realize that it was for their good as well, writes opinion columnist Chivanadi, quoting paradigm changing global thinking on ethnonationalism.



In a recent issue of the US based journal, Foreign Affairs, Jerry Z. Muller writes, quoting from Chaim Kaufmann that once ethnic antagonism has crossed a certain threshold of violence, maintaining the rival groups within a single polity becomes far more difficult.

"Partition may thus be the most humane lasting solution to such intense communal conflicts. It inevitably creates new flows of refugees, but at least it deals with the problem at issue. The challenge for the international community in such cases is to separate communities in the most humane manner possible: by aiding in transport, assuring citizenship rights in the new homeland, and providing financial aid for resettlement and economic absorption", says Muller.

"The legacy of the colonial era, moreover, is hardly finished. When the European overseas empires dissolved, they left behind a patchwork of states whose boundaries often cut across ethnic patterns of settlement and whose internal populations were ethnically mixed. It is wishful thinking to suppose that these boundaries will be permanent", is the opinion of Muller in the article.

"Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer", is the summary of the article 'Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnonationalism', appeared in the March/April 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, an influential American journal published from New York.

The author, Jerry Z. Muller is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. The full text of the article is given at the end of this column.

The Sri Lankan ethnic crisis, as it is being projected by all parties concerned and especially by the majority identity, has inherited more than two millennia old historical legacies of contention between the Sinhalese and Tamils, going back to the times of the beginnings of urbanization and civilization in the island called Sri Lanka today. No one can deny that this is the basic psychological framework constructed for the kind of nationalism emerged during colonial times and nurtured in the post colonial era in Sri Lanka.

Eezham Tamil nationalists highlight a fact that at the beginning of the colonial era 500 years ago, the political sovereignty of the island was already divided in ethnic lines between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, the Tamils having a sovereign kingdom of theirs.

Neither the colonial administrative arrangement of placing the authority at Colombo by the Portuguese and the Dutch while maintaining the units separately, nor the statutory and later constitutional unity of Ceylon effected by the British towards the end of the colonial era, failed to shape multicultural nationalism in the context of Sri Lanka, either in colonial or in post colonial times.

The ethnic crisis in Sri Lanka in modern times is hundred years old, starting after some decades of the British unification of the island. The successive constitutional arrangements of the British only helped to further the divide.

Constitutional alienation, infringement into the contiguity of the homeland, ethnic pogroms, denial of language rights, and denial of economic and educational opportunities - all against Tamils, marked the post colonial scenario of Sri Lanka.

More than three decades old Tamil armed struggle for an independent country and the civil war are consequences of the post-colonial structural failures of Sri Lanka.

The civil war has reached the stage of genocide today.

America has never witnessed the intricacies of the old world ethnonationalism. Its problems are different and as a new nation it has addressed them through multicultural theories and models. Europe has already sorted out its ethnonational boundaries to culminate into European Union. India has evolved an ethnolinguistic federal model through its colonial and post-colonial legacies.

There are no signs in Sri Lanka at present for the multicultural model advocated by the above to have any impact.

The President, Chief Justice and the Army Chief of Sri Lanka reflect a tendency insensitive to ethnic accommodation. The last one has openly come out with a statement that Sri Lanka is a Sinhala country. Perhaps it is the reality and is reasonable. The majority Sinhalese wish to have a country exclusively for them, without being bothered by others.

The International Community and especially India, should not burden any further the peoples of Sri Lanka by insisting on a united Sri Lanka. The first step to diffuse tension is to recognize the right to self-determination of Tamils, not necessarily to mean partition, but to achieve parity and to provide a conducive platform needed for meaningful negotiations of the concerned parties to decide the future of the island of Sri Lanka, peacefully.

The way sentiments have been built up, initially it may stir emotions among the Sinhalese, but it may not take long for them to realize that it was for their good as well.

External Links:

Foreign Affairs:

Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism