The meaning of the EU ban on the LTTE
 

H. L. D. Mahindapala

The long-awaited ban of the EU proves, among other things, that the internationalization of the separatist claim in Sri Lanka, which was first mooted by S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, has boomeranged on the Tamil separatists just at the time they need international support to get over their hurdles.

This is not what the Tamil agents expected when they lobbied assiduously, through their sob stories and underhand tactics, to influence Western lobbies.

They expected total support for their cause which they had for a while in the beginning. But after nearly fifty years of lobbying in Western corridors their efforts have reached a point where they can't even put their faces in the chambers of power abroad.

After the fall of Saddam Hussein the EU ban has placed the LTTE as the latest political pariahs of the international community.

Stunned by this deadly blow - and not knowing how to react to it - Anton Balasingham threatens to escalate the low-intensity fire-works of the LTTE into a full-scale war. This is typical of the mindless politics of LTTE violence that has run into a dead-end. Each time they are cornered their knee-jerk reaction is to escalate their violence without acknowledging that it is their violence that has brought them down to this degrading level.

Balasingham's reaction to the ban, presumably based on the LTTE theory of the balance of power, (i.e. their military capability to match that of the Sri Lankan government) is to challenge and take on the whole world, including the Sri Lankan government, Karuna's group, and a whole host of Tamil dissidents.

Where will this arrogant threat take them? Can the LTTE take on this combined force ranged against it single-handed?

Balasingham, of course, has a job assigned to him and he has to do it to the best of his ability. His job is to produce theoretical justifications for the only known strategy of the LTTE: violence. Some of it did help to hold the Tamil diaspora together and give a gloss to the sullied image of Velupillai Prabhakaran in the past. But all his arguments have now gone past the use-by-date.

His airy-fairy theories that are divorced from the ground realities and his selected facts and self-proclaimed labels (example: liberation movement) can no longer sustain the vindictive and authoritarian violence that has gone against the moral grain of the world shocked by the brutalities of the LTTE targeting children and Tamil dissidents.

The world is ganging up against the LTTE as never before. If you add to the latest 25 members of the EU to the other leading nations - i.e. India, USA, UK, Canada and Australia) - the total adds up to the 30 countries in all. And, according to reports, other nations are queuing up to kick the LTTE out of the boundary lines of human decency.

While the nations banning the LTTE are increasing, it is also visible that the Tamils supporting the LTTE in the diaspora are decreasing. In Canada, where there was popular support for Prabhakaran from the most formidable bloc of Tamils migrants (around 250,000, claims the Tiger loyalists), the LTTE could hardly gather 50 Tamils to join their Solidarity Week demonstration just last week.

Balasingham who tends to talk frequently in terms of objective realities could not have missed (unless his vindictive politics has blinded him) that no one is buying the overworked arguments and the fancy theories spun by him.

The next biggest blow after the EU ban is Balasingham, the sole English-speaking theoretician, losing his standing as a credible spokesperson. Bullets fired at the perceived enemy lose its power if there is no moral force behind it. This is the crisis facing Balasingham.

This is also the meaning delivered in the EU resolution banning the LTTE. Balasingham should know this by now. Though the LTTE, with its theory of balance of power, may boast about their armoury containing weapons of mass destruction the rest of the world considers them as weapons of moral destruction.

They are two different kinds of WMDs and there is no doubt that the mass appeal of the latter is winning over the obscenities of the former. In essence, Balasingham has lost moral crediblity which he claimed to possess with his worn-out theories of a liberation struggle.

Having lost the moral ground he is forced (as his satements indicate) to rely on the LTTE's capacity to kill indiscriminately - and Balasingham doesn't hesitate to boast about it. But does it have the necessary power to win? It is the erosion of the moral base that has undermined the validity of the exaggerated political claims of the LTTE.

And if Balasingham re-reads the EU resolution passed in Parliament it will dawn on him that his arguments have been shot to pieces, condemning the LTTE in the process.

The moral force of EU arguments targeting LTTE war crimes and crimes against humanity are unassailable.

For instance, the LTTE claims to have 2,000 suicide bombers in its armoury. But that has lost its initial heroic rating because there is a banality about such primitive human sacrifice.

Besides, international law now considers it as a crime against humanity because it targets innocent civilians indiscriminately. When on September 11, 2001 the World Centre Towers came down in flames and ashes the world witnessed partly the horrors of suicide bombing and, more importantly, the perversion of hate-infested minds that demand justice by violating the very principles of justice.

According to estimates, 3,500 non-combatant civilians died because they happened to be at the wrong time at the wrong place.

How valid is that as an instrument of seeking justice? Can injustice be fought with injustice? If that is accepted as the norm then there is no need for morality. Anybody can kill anybody without any restraints and neither side can claim moral superiority over the other.

Balasingham repeats his mantra of liberation struggle because he believes that there is some moral worth in it. The Sri Lankan government too could argue that it is fighting a cause to liberate the Tamils from the one-man regime of Vellupillai Prabhakaran.

And, mark you, the dissident Tamils too have thrown their lot with the Sri Lankan government because they have more faith in the liberalism of the government than in the oppression of their self-proclaimed liberator. Karuna of the east too is entitled to label his campaign against the LTTE as a liberation struggle because he claims he is fighting the oppressive hegemony of the northern Tamils.

So whose liberation struggle contains the higher degree of moral superiority? And whose liberation struggle has a better chance of winning? Bertrand Russell argued at the height of World War II that in battles between democracies and dictatorships democracies were destined to win because of its moral superiority over dictatorships.

The collapse of Nazism and Stalinism has confirmed his argument. In essence, the history of the Tamil separatist movement has come down to this issue of democracy vs. dictatorship now more than its divisive politics.

It has been a tragic story of betrayal of the trust placed by the idealists who initially went along with the boys to create a better world for them. The Broken Palmyra struck the first chord of disillusionment.

One of the authors, Mrs. Rajini Tiranagama, a lecturer in anatomy of the University of Jaffna, was gunned down by the boy for dissenting. The poignant film, No Tears for My Sister pays a posthumous tribute to this Tamil idealist who realized, rather late, that the movement they fostered had gone awry, devouring the fathers and the children who spawned it. The violence that was supposed to be turned against the other (namely the Sinhalese, the perceived enemy) turned venomously against the Tamils who selflessly and idealistically braved all odds to fight for their alternative world.

Velupillai Prabhakaran who began his political career by killing his first Tamil, Alfred Duraiyappah in 1974 has never stopped killing Tamils to this day. He began by promising security to the Tamils. Today he has turned out to be the most dreaded killer of the Tamils. Balasingham has no moral or political theory to defend this barbarity.

On what basis can he defend the abduction of Tamil children and the torturing of Tamil adults - both of which have been listed as war crimes in the latest Amnesty International report. (See AI report of February 3, 2006, titled Culture of Fear). The best he can do now is to hopelessly repeat his mantra of a liberation struggle.

The exaggerated notion of Tamil/LTTE superiority over others - including the other Tamil-speaking communities - has inflated their belief that only the LTTE is entitled to tag this label of liberation struggle.

It is somewhat like the untenable theory of the LTTE being the sole representative of Tamils" which has been rightly rejected by the EU demanding pluralism.

Balasingham's theory does not recognize that even Karuna, his erstwhile comrade-in-arms is entitled to use it. Karuna argues that the Jaffna-Tamil-dominated Vanni leadership has discriminated against the Tamils of the east and persecuted them, denying them their security.

This is the argument used by Balasingham's separatist group against the Sinhala-dominated government. So what is theoretically good for Balasingham should also be valid for Karuna. The fundamentals are the same in both arguments and, therefore, the theory of a liberation struggle should be applicable to both groups.

Clearly, Balasingham's claim to a monopoly of a liberation struggle doesn't hold water any more. He has no sole right to it. Besides, on his theory, anyone who feels aggrieved has a right to take a gun and slaughter any perceived oppressor just by pinning the label liberator. The EU resolution has put an end such nonsensical theories of liberation once and for all.

LTTE agents who invoke principles of human rights forfeit their credibility when they do not honour human rights in liquidating, torturing and abducting their own people.

The LTTE, therefore, is a failed liberation struggle that has betrayed the basic rights of their own people to live freely within its theatre.

Besides, despite its claim to run a separate and efficient administration, it does not provide the Tamil people with health, education from the kindergarten to the tertiary levels, food or some of the other basic amenities needed to maintain the people's quality of life.

Free health, free education, subsidized food and clothing, and books for school children are provided by the failed state dominated by the Sinhala community. On balance, which of the two towers over the other as a superior force? True, the LTTE finances and maintains a well-oiled killing machine. But that does not confer to it the status of a legitimate state.

The primary function of the state is, among other things, to look after the welfare of the people and that is done by the Sinhala-dominated government. The efficiency of the LTTE machinery is in destroying property and killing people. The EU resolution has now driven the last nail into that too.

It has denied any legitimacy for Balasingham's liberation struggle that violated the fundamental rights of the Tamils. Not even the threats issued by Balasingham to escalate violence to another level have succeeded in stopping the EU from banning it.

This places a huge question mark over its vast armoury. The irony is that the LTTE has more to lose than gain in using the weapons it has amassed.

Boosted by the funds collected from Western bases the LTTE attempts to claim political power from a theory of balance of power meaning that they can take on the military might of the Sri Lankan state. But the EU ban confirms (after isolating the LTTE from the international community) that any use of its WMDs will cease to produce the expected political gains internationally or credibility and the respectability it needs to be accepted as a civilized member of the human society.

The LTTE naval attack on May 11 proved, if proof is necessary at all, that their suicide boats can sink Dvoras but to what end? What political benefits have they gained from such rash and counter-productive exercises. Violence that fails to deliver political gains is a futile exercise.

LTTE, with its relentless violence, has painted itself into this irredeemable corner. The more it kills and destroys the more it stands to lose. It may inflate the ego of the killers without any corresponding gains to consolidate their political standing, either nationally or internationally. The objective realities (to use one of Balasingham's cliches) dictate that the LTTE has everything to gain by going to talks rather than using its WMDs All in all, it seems that events are militating against LTTE violence.

As it happens, the invisible hand that writes history seems to be running against the LTTE. Velupillai Prabhakaran's determination to unleash his next war was first stopped by the tsunami.

Now it is the unstoppable force of universally accepted morality that is on its way to paralyze him, one way or another. But in case he pursues violence as he has done in the past (it's a habit he can't drop in a hurry) he will be knocking the last remaining bits out of the rusty bottom of Balasingham's theories.

It will certainly make Balasingham's argument's sound like worthless piffle of a hollow man with his headpiece filled with.