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| Sunday, 19 March 2006 |
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The Rajpal Abeynayake column: Disturbing psychology for NGO's in this time of terror What's the difference, somebody asked, between Al Quaeda and George Washington? I would have expected a substantially anti American person such as John Pilger to make that query or even that pocket size volcano Arundathy Roy to do so.
Camp replied gamely that George Washington did not go around attacking buildings that were full of civilians. That's final then. Sherman did not ask the Assistant Secretary to retract, when Camp added ''the LTTE is famous for its terrorist bombings.'' That statement by Camp should make Velupillai Prabhakaran want to squirm a little on his chair inside that bunker in Mullathivu. He said in Killinochchi during that 2002 press conference that there is a case to make out a substantial difference between terrorist organizations and liberation movements. That bit of thinking was delivered as if he was imparting divinely received wisdom, with the man rolling his eyes, pondering the question hard, and delivering the answer in measured cadence. But the world has spectacularly refused to buy his theory. Donald Camp has taken issue with the LTTE over the Human Rights Watch report, which states that the LTTE has been fund raising by extortion within the diaspora even though the organisation has been ''forbidden by law in terms of the proscription of the organisation (LTTE) as a foreign terrorist organisation." That does not give the thumbs up for the LTTE. It shows Prabhakaran can get a digit raised on his behalf by a local media man, but certainly not a thumb rinsed on his behalf by the international community. That's the kind of isolation that the LTTE and the LTTE enamoured media in this country have asked for and been delivered. Poetic it is, the kind of repudiation of the Liberation Tigers. That's so particularly as this snub wouldn't have come if there were no war on terror. No US congressman would have wanted to clarify whether George Washington was any different from the LTTE or Al Quaeda as the assumption those days was that Prabhakaran was like Geroge Washington. Al Quaeda spoiled that pancake for the LTTE which means that a US congressman now has to get it clarified (even to salve his conscience), whether there is any difference between Al Quaeda and the Washington. The congressman was but going through the motions, as it can be safely assumed that he didn't expect the man who gave him the answer to deadpan 'yes, Washington and Bin Laden are like two peas in a pod, so there.'' Quaeda-wise and otherwise, the world has changed, and there is the general acceptance that the LTTE has a problem laundering its image, which makes it a problem of Rubic's Cube proportions why the Western liberal Sri Lankan lobby and their satraps in NGOdom find it so difficult to internalise these international negative perceptions of the LTTE. Add to that the media, or parts of it, find that even though they imbibe the Western ethos from Coke to Nike and Reebok, they cannot internalise the fact that the same purveyors of international commercial-chic have repudiated their favourite organisation of repute for the emancipation of the Tamil people, the Liberation Tigers. So, it means that their sense of 'disconnect' is monumentally large that it makes their existence surreal. Dealing with that condition is difficult. But there are ways, one of which is to internalise the international repudiation of the LTTE and call that repudiation their own. But, they just cannot do that, it goes against their grain. The other is to externalise their love for the current peace processes.. They have, in the NGO lobbies, begun to kiss President Rajapakse's hand which would normally want me to reach for the nearest detergent if I was the President. Looking at newspaper articles in the last two week would make even a reader with the shortest attention span realise one fact. There is a ferment in the NGO lobby that makes the chief apparatchiks of Sri Lankan NGOism want to cleanse themselves of being too associated with the LTTE by using the President as their dry cleaning agent. The rationale goes roughly in this way: 'We can embrace Rajapakse, so we will do that in order to survive the current peace process but we cannot repudiate the LTTE, even though hell might freeze over us while we are imbibing that cafe latte that smells as if it was from the Starbucks, Washington DC branch.' No psychology can decipher for us laymen the NGO logic that will kiss their favourite 'chauvinist', but not ditch their favourite globally labelled terrorist, whom they consider freedom-fighter ( .......even though now we know George Washington did not go around bombing buildings with civilians in them.) This then is the modern day dilemma that Deriida could not have explained in his famous treatise ''Philosophy in the time of terror.'' Philosophy and psychology in the time off terror is simple, yet complex. Its as curious as seeing the NGO industry captains kissing Rajapakse, to see media men who were harrumphing their anti Tiger positions from editorials just the year before, now writing columns for newspapers that do the raised-digit thing for Balasingham. But that's a longer story, to be spoken about in an episode yet to come in this discussion on psychology (ha shrink shrink!) in the time of terror. |
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But, it was US congressman George Sherman asking a US Assistant Secretary
of State, Donald Camp that question. It was at a U.S congressional hearing
on Asia and the Pacific. 
