Lampooning Jaques Chirac:

Was Banda, Prabha in this mould?

by Kumar David

Dans La Peau de Jacques Chirac (Being Jacques Chirac) just released in France depicts the life and times of the French President as he nears the end of his career. The crux of the film is that Chirac is a superb actor who would have excelled at any career, but unfortunately for France he chose politics.

Chirac never stood for anything except the political ambitions of Chirac; a seductive political operator who presided over a decade of wasted opportunities. A man who had an infallible nose for sniffing out what line and deals could win him the next elections, a man who ever followed the political fashion and the ephemeral moods of the people. Always followed never led; a machine for winning elections, always a politician never a statesman.

Does the cap fit?

As film-maker Karl Zero says: "He throws himself into the crowd, loves meeting old ladies and small children, likes touching people, he grabs them and embraces them - and people vote using their gut instincts, not their brains." Though Chirac believed in absolutely nothing and cynical though we are of our own politicians, the cap will not fit all of ours.

Nobody who calls JR or Premadasa a statesman will pass a lie detector test but neither is it proper to deny that they had their own commitments and agendas and sought to mould the state accordingly. JR, for example, is my b^te noire precisely because he had a political philosophy and agenda (authoritarian Bonapartism and specious open-market economics) both of which I find malevolent.

Nor can Mrs. Bandaranaike be written off as an empty vessel sniffing out what opportunist line would maximise her electoral prospects and crafting her policies accordingly. Though not a leader of great stature who led her people out of a political morass - actually the economy and ethnic tensions deteriorated during her regime - she cannot be mocked as the film does Chirac.

A more interesting counter example that tells us something about our own national mores and ethos is the farsightedness of NM and the left prior to and in 1956. Rejected by the Sinhalese voter, ignored by the Tamils, this twin rejection foreshadowed the vale of tears that has since engulfed this country.

A decade later the left capitulated in reluctant disillusion. Nevertheless NM remains this country's greatest, perhaps only statesman of stature, but also its fallen idol. Poor Philip went to the pits much earlier and unlike NM, ignominiously.

What about Mr Prabaharan?

Ruminating about politicians and statesman what are we to make of Prabaharan? He is neither a politician nor a statesman; he is of some other genre. Clearly a fine military strategist, I know little about military matters but I have heard from the usual assortment of military specialists that he is the island's number one in this domain.

But I do know something about politics and can say that the LTTE under Prabaharan has made clumsy and calamitous political blunders. The murder of Amirthalingam, elected Tamil leaders and the likes of school principals and the NSSP's Annamalai, is perfidy for an organisation that claims to stand for Tamil liberation; it also manifests the LTTE's harsh authoritarianism.

The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi laid Thamil Eelam to rest and thirdly the ethnic cleansing of the Muslims from the North has turned 40% of the East into an LTTE-hostile population. Three strikes and out? Not quite, thanks to Sinhala nationalism - rarely does a purported enemy enjoy such unintended favours! In recent months the LTTE has been pushed to the wall and outsmarted on the international diplomatic front by the Rajapakse government.

The Canadian and EU bans are not small setbacks, they cannot be easily reversed and the consequences will be significant. Still, we have to wait and see the long-term flips and flops of the so-called "International Community" - who invented this inane term anyway? In summary and if you pardon my conflating the superlative with the pedestrian, Napoleon was a military genius and the political mastermind who redrew the map of Europe.

The positive side of history's verdict on Prabaharan is likely to only recognise his military achievements and the political spaces and opportunities this created for the Tamils.

The physical elimination of Al-Zarqawi will make little difference to the unfolding drama of the Iraqi insurgency; in sharp contrast a similar event here will make a crucial difference because of the dissimilar organisations the two men lead, distinctions in their focal personal roles and the different power balances prevailing in the two entanglements.

Whose state?

The main critique of the Chirac Presidency is its record of "wasted opportunities", the most dismal being the failure to build an inclusive state in France. The all-embracing integration approach ('we are all exactly and equally French') to state building has failed to draw in the North African ,migr, population; the Muslim people have stood aside asking for recognition of their separate identity within France. Late in the day it is now recognised that a culturally plural, not an all-embracing Gallic mono-cultural approach is needed.

There is still time for France to get it right because of its libertarian traditions of tolerance and fraternity; the resonance of 1789 still survives in the national conscience.

Sri Lanka, when it rejected the left's accommodating approach to state building in 1956, started down a road that eventually modified the state itself. The state in Sri Lanka today is a Sinhala-state; I do not say it here pejoratively, but simply as a theoretically valid description.

The composition of government, the character of the administration and the military, the hegemonic ideology, the aroma of the Constitution and the historical events of the last several decades all underpin this categorisation.

At independence the state was a bourgeois-state (pardon the jargon but most readers are familiar with the term) - a class not an ethnic category. That is the capitalist and to a degree the landowner classes of Sinhalese, Tamils and other ethnic entities were the principal stakeholders in the state - meaning the government and the machinery of control and administration.

This has changed; the state is now more ethnically characterised. A little article like this is no place to retrace the historical process.

The reason why the Tamils are unlikely to accept the unitary state formula is because this 'presently existing' state is an ethno-state, not a national state. Recent statements from the President's office refer to "devolution within a united Sri Lanka" - if the omission of 'unitary' in favour of 'united' is intentional rather than a kite flying experiment, it is significant. However if the President is planning to reshuffle his cabinet and bring in JVP ministers he had better put a statesmanlike foot down and first make sure the concept change is irreversible.

Not much chance of doing it afterwards and no need for more "wasted opportunities" a la Chirac in Sri Lanka - too many already.