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| Sunday, 05 March 2006 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Somebody was let down badly, latterly The Rajpal Abeynayake column Feeling that the Liberation Tigers have let you down, that's a feeling of being completely and radically hard done by. To be let down mothers brothers and others is a different thing. But, about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Colombo neo-oppositionist-chatterers have developed a sense of dependency and a sense of confidence. But the Tigers have made them want to stare into their drinks, contemplating the impermanence of confidence. This pang of sadness is very prevalent in many Colombo hangouts. The Tigers just didn't deliver by way of a war. How could they do it? The Tigers have a monopoly on it also - there is no way that an appeal can be made to the Jathika Hela Urumaya to deliver a war complete with the real sounds of it, the authentic echo of landmine blasts on the sand dunes in the Wanni. Those fellows only deliver war to the Colombo neo-chatterers in the form of special effects and sound bytes and the form of peaceful satyagrahas. Theirs is a peace-for-war a la JHU, an inversion of the famous Chandrika Kumaratunge war for peace. Nicholas Burns the US Under-Secretary of State made a statement that no Sri Lankan government ever did against the LTTE when he said prior to the Geneva peace talks that the Tigers are the only warmongers in this country. They alone wanted a return to the misery of war when no civilian wanted it, he said. For a fortnight it was good, thinking that Nicholas Burns was right, but the realisation that he was wrong crept up on me in a unusual way, which wouldn't have been so bad if it did not undermine the credence of Mr. Burns's very sincere statement that was meant for a very specific purpose of deterrence - of pre-empting a Tiger push for open hostilities. But even Nicholas Burns wouldn't mind, as he wouldn't have calculated that a wish for war sometimes has no relation whatever to the ability to actually make it happen. It is something like this: Just because Nicholas Burns would naturally hate - and censure - Al Quaeda, he would not hate or censure a bunch of six year olds who play a war game making believe that some of them are American soldiers and the rest of them are Osama bin Laden's turbaned terrorists?? Burns wouldn't swing by a Colombo watering hole and wag his finger leave alone his tongue at any generic membership of a Colombo club for wishing a war on the country?? There are those who have been saying for decades in angry nasal tones that the Liberation Tigers are on the ramp, with their boarding passes on the ready for the ride of their lives -- a war to end all wars, a mother of wars. This has been said in the form of an attack against the Tigers by those who may have overestimated the war-making capabilities of Prabhakaran who is a militarist even when he is not wearing fatigues. Predicting war in this way has been a warning signal by concerned and politically sensitised nationalists. As opposed to these predictions are those that come from the chattering-holes, the gin tonic and ginger ale arenas of opinion making and analysis. To these characters, its a case of clinical depression that there is no war because a whole swathe of the neo-UNP has been wising for one in the last few months, in the manner that they would wish a good education and a prosperous future on their daughters and sons. Subconsciously they dream about it, but the conscious manifestation is in the form of a gripe rather than an attack. Last week this writer was privy to this kind of publicly expressed collective sullenness, which however, always comes at you in the form of a patronising political analysis. Once you catch on, you can automatically translate it, in the manner a computer programme translates foreign language by the sentence. If one gin-tonic expert says to you "the government was forced to talk as the LTTE was going to war" what the fellow really means to say is that "it's a pity that the LTTE went to talks when they could have forced a war on the government for the simple reason that we were all cheering them on to go for it." One such General in a saree would have made Nicholas Burns blush at having thought Prabhakaran was the only General that found it hard to resist his romanticised war urge. A week after the election, this neo chatterer told me - without Tiger epaulette of course, but laughing and not attempting to hide her simple joy - that the LTTE is going to war..........which almost made me hear in echo the rest of her sentence.....'I love those guys, they are the only alpha males who gives us capitalists a chance against these rural simpletons who cannot understand the fact that any government without us supporting it is a mafia.' Such Generals half expect us dispassionate analysts to agree, because though they chortle and wish for war in the manner of wishing for a jolly Christmas party, they have bought into their own fantasy by the time they spit it out with their smiles. They are angry with the rest of the dispassionate analysts now, as they feel that a war would have been declared by the Tigers in Geneva if we the rest of the folks who talked and wrote about the conflict, (even for a living), had supported them in their time of patriotic national concern in which they wished for and demanded a war to save nation soul and pretty fanny, all in one go. We wildcatters are to blame now. We were not only unpatriotic not wishing war and not working towards it,
we had the temerity to be wrong in our prediction that there will be no war,
and yet at the last moment snatch vindication from the jaws of having to
live down a wrong prediction. When they were right all along, we had the
temerity to be wrong all along and be right only by accident. Now there is
no war - and we are in it with the Tigers, we the traitors. I see one angry
saree-clad General retreat with her patriotic wire service foreign analyst
friend who wants to settle down in retirement in a tea estate in Radella..... |
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