|
|
 |
 |
| Sunday, 16 June 2002 |
 |
|
 |
Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
Sivasithamparam's return home : LTTE and 'Interim' Tamil politics Observations by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA When Appapillai Amirthalingam and Murugesu Sivasithamparam led yet another civil protest demonstration in Jaffna in 1984, a journalist colleague of this writer, who was then working in the Peninsula ,recalls that the young Eelamist militant cadres had confronted the TULF leaders at their site of 'satyakriya' near the Veera Maha Kali Amman Kovil, Nallur. LTTE activists Sathasivam Krishnakumar (Kittu) and Rahim had engaged Amirthalingam and 'Em Siva' in debate demanding that the politicians end their seemingly fruitless civil protest campaigns, step aside and, allow the militant movement give leadership to the Tamil freedom movement. Amirthalingam and colleagues, attempting to appease the young radicals and end the disturbance to their satyakriya, had spoken kindly to Kittu and Rahim and told them that "you are our sons". My journalist colleague, who had been covering the event for a Jaffna-based daily, remembers Kittu heatedly retorting "Then why don't you send us also to England?" in a sarcastic reference to the TULF leaders' own children who had been sent by their parents to Britain for their schooling. My colleague cannot remember what the TULF leaders said in response, presumably because they probably did not have a sufficiently memorable response to that classic social criticism of the advantage enjoyed by the elite of any society. One thing that may be said about both the late Amirthalingam, as well as Sivasithamparam, is that neither of them went the way most of their generation of the Tamil middle and upper classes did. Instead they identified themselves with the mass of Tamil people who did not have the advantage of class and caste in overcoming the difficulties of marginalisation by an ethno-centric State. And even if they did not pursue political action in the way the militants did, they nevertheless remained true to their people to the end of their lives; one life brutally cut short by the militants themselves while the other only narrowly escaped the same fate. It was astute political manoeuvre that kept M. Sivasithamparam and his civilian political colleagues alive in the subsequent decades of struggle, caught, as they were, between an unsympathetic Sinhala supremacist State that masqueraded as a 'democracy' on the one hand, and on the other, the desperately tough Eelamist insurgent movement which made no pretension of democracy. But survive they did. And, in many instances, despite the murderous depredations of the militant movement, their survival enabled them to perform an essential intermediary role between the armed movement and various institutions of State and Society - local and foreign, political, legal, social and economic. It is a role that has been and yet is useful for their community to survive both its oppression and struggle for freedom. The tragedy is that at this time Sivasithamparam's passing, the TULF, to which he had given a somewhat muted leadership this past decade, is on the threshold of a revival of its political role - a revival that may yet take it to the heights it originally envisioned: governmental leadership of an autonomous Tamil polity. Today, the Tamil National Alliance, in which the TULF is the principal active component, functions as the sole civilian-political representative of the LTTE (if Mr. Sampanthan and colleagues don't mind my reversal of their currently favourite slogan). This role places the TNA in position for a more vital future role: that of giving leadership to the Interim Council that must inevitably (and quickly) take up the task of administering the North-East if both that region as well as the Tamil community which largely (but not solely) populates it, is to proceed along the road to social, political and economic recovery. In fact many Tamil civilian political leaders (including those who have been killed or died natural deaths) have been aware that, ultimately, when the shooting and bombing ended, they were likely to be called on to take up their civilian political role. After all, in some sense, class will count. It possible to argue that it was the sheer epistemological condition (Korean Christian theologian Kim Yong Bock, more pro-actively, calls it the 'epistemological advantage') of the Tamil lower classes and castes that drove the youth of these impoverished, most marginalised and disadvantaged social groups to go beyond the frame of civilian and institutional politics employed by their upper class and upper caste forebears. Brutalised as they were, in actual social-physical terms, what more (or less) could they do than take up from where the bourgeois Tamil leaders left off? M. Sivasithamparam, ironically, began politics as a Communist Party cadre. But then, Sri Lankan communism, until the advent of the JVP, was epistemologically conditioned by the class-cultural-ideological formation of its own leadership, and, consequently, never went beyond the theoretical in terms of 'revolutionary' or extra-parliamentary struggle. And so with 'Em Siva' and, indeed, many others of his generation and class (and caste) whose political baptism as Leftists did not guide them towards extra-parliamentary or armed struggle even in their subsequent Tamil nationalist politics. The parallel between the Tamil militant movement and the JVP is precisely that of class and caste - their very social, economic and political-cultural condition. But while that condition does give them the epistemological advantage in conceiving their political strategy for changes in their circumstances, the complexity of society is such that those circumstances, once changed by them, must accommodate a whole range of exigencies that go far beyond their own original social circumstance. While the most oppressed Tamils (of the North-East, not the Hillcountry) have given the leadership to the Eelamist movement, the autonomous polity that is being established as a result of that movement's success must incorporate the entirety of Tamil society and also, a Muslim society, as well as some groups of Sinhalas. The establishment of the new polity, the defining of its institutional contours and, its negotiation through all the immense challenges of recovery from war, require political-cultural resources that the Eelamist militant movement, with the limitations of its socio-cultural origins, cannot solely provide. It is time for the sons of Amirthalingam and Sivasithamparam and Neelan Tiruchelvam to return from England. Ironically, while the most oppressed groups did eventually replace bourgeois-institutional Tamil politics with their brand of armed insurgency, substantial financial resources for this insurgency did come from the emigres Tamil elite (or, should I say elitist Tamil emigres?) that went to England (and elsewhere). Right now it is probable that the principal economic resource of the LTTE is emigre financing and financial management. Equally important is the intellectual and institutional support that these emigre groups have been providing - in terms of strategising for international legitimacy and institutional support, mobilising such support (from international organisations, legal institutions, foreign governments), financial strategy, institutional cover for legal political and financial activities (in addition to the hawala type activity), etcetera. Now that the new polity is on the verge of formation, various resources institutional, economic, intellectual - are needed to help in its birth. That the LTTE is aware of these immediate and future needs is evidenced by their adoption of the Tamil National Alliance (whose very leaders they once denigrated and even assassinated) as their civilian-political 'front' organisation. While the ultimate political decision-making, at least in the interim, remains with Prabhakaran and his associates inside the LTTE, it now seems logical that the civilian Tamil parties (and also, hopefully, the other non-LTTE militant groups) will function in the civilian institutional realm on behalf of the LTTE. It is also likely that the LTTE will ensure a secure interface between them and these civilian political parties by means of their own nominees being placed within these parties and as part of the groups of representatives put by these parties onto the regional council and various other administrative bodies in the North-East. The early signs of such LTTE 'placements' were to be seen in the recent elections held in the North and East and also in the LTTE nominations for the district-level cease-fire Monitoring Committees. The way in which the LTTE leadership is conducting its own bilateral negotiations with the other principal ethnic minority groups the Muslims and the Hillcountry Tamils is, again, an indication of the maturity of the Tiger leadership and its recognition that unilateralism is not feasible not just in the North-East but in relation to the whole of Sri Lanka. It is feasible that the LTTE will also negotiate a relationship with the Sinhala communities that may come within the realm of the future North-East polity. Indeed, it would be ideal if a combination of the LTTE-TNA and SLMC could, at the district or local level, open communications with local Sinhala communities in the North and the East in a manner that would pre-empt hostile groups from elsewhere (such as the Sinhala ultra-nationalists) intervening and mobilising antipathies on the basis of communal paranoia. Such multi-level bilateral and multi-lateral negotiations would greatly enhance the receptivity of the emerging autonomous Tamil political entity to the social forces in the rest of the island and will, in turn, serve to enhance the political-institutional legitimacy and strength of the North-East polity. The LTTE itself, in the long term, is likely to transform itself even form other political formations to adapt to the political requirements of representing or dealing with a much larger social formation (the entire Tamil society) than its original peasant/fisher caste social base. This adaptation will be necessary if the LTTE is to mobilise the full political-cultural (and economic etc.) resources of the larger Tamil society as the new North-East polity is built up. Hence, while the contours of Tamil politics in the semi-nation-state in the making will not meet the standards of Southern bourgeois-liberal "human rights" lobbies, they will certainly take on democratic and representational forms of a kind. If the LTTE has learned lessons that the JVP has, so far, failed to learn - and the indications are that it has then, it will ensure a measure of political inclusivity and tolerance that will dramatically belie the Tigers' current image of authoritarianism and intolerance. That emerging new inclusivity (yet largely covert) was symbolised by M. Sivasithamparam's return to his beloved Jaffna. The very organisation which sought to eliminate him was the one which received his cortege with high honours and escorted it to his homeland. |
|
News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
