Vesak

Next weekend, the nation celebrates Vesak, the premier sacred festival of our numerically largest religious community, the Buddhists. Whatever their ethnicity, Sri Lankan Buddhists will spend the two days of the Vesak Poya holiday in meditative calm, in symbolic commemoration of the founder of the Dhamma and in festive communal celebration of the beginning of the Path to Moksha.

Oil lamps of ritual piety will be lit as will be festive, colourful lanterns, all casting a bright glow across this island. Sri Lankans will join Buddhists the world over in the celebration of Vaishaka.

In a celebratory preamble, our President, Maithripala Sirisena, was in Sanchi, central India, yesterday to unveil a statue of the Anagarika Dharmapala..

As we celebrate Vesak, our nation is yet in the throes of a massive societal recovery from decades of war and huge social dislocation, of mis-governance, unintelligent political management and plunder.

What better moment for reflection by the majority of our people than this great religious festival - for a rejuvenation of political thought and an enlightened vision of a future inclusive and caring nationhood Of a republic unified in cohesive and collective endeavour towards a prosperous, civilised society

The flower of Lanka’s youth . . .

‘The flower of England’s youth’ was a phrase much used in the press in the United Kingdom during and after the First World War to describe the sheer carnage on the battlefields that resulted in the death, injury and disappearance of over a million British youth, preponderantly young men. Indeed, for a generation to come after that first ‘Great War’, as it was called at the time, women were in a noticeable majority in the British population.

Within a generation, however, the world suffered an even greater war in which scores of millions died: in battles on land, sea and in the air and, as civilians in the cities and, worse, in the Nazi ‘death factories’. No single moment or episode – whether it is the ‘strategic bombing’ of Hiroshima or Dresden or the gas chambers of Dachau - could be described as deadlier than others in the seven long years of World War 2. So extensive was the human devastation across the globe.

If these ‘world wars’ saw bloodshed as nations pitted their mobilised youth against the mobilised youth of other nations, this country’s post-colonial national experience saw the nation’s own citizens killing each other – in uniform and without - in internal ‘civil wars’ almost on a similar scale, proportionately. Our nation since ‘independence’ has, for the most part, been in the grip of internal war of various kinds or, of ethnically hostile actions that led up to internal war.

The ‘flower of Mother Lanka’s youth’ perished on the earth of the Dharma Dveepa, an earth reddened by blood shed in previous internal wars too, over millennia, between kingdoms and chiefdoms. In eras past, Sri Lankans died battling invaders from across the sea and also, in neighbouring lands as part of invading armies at the bidding of ambitious Sri Lankan royalty. Yudaganaava, near Buttala in the East and Yudaangana Pitiya in the Wasgamuva Forest Reserve, are both legendary sites of battles over two thousand years ago between kingdoms.

In our post-colonial period, Sri Lankan youth died as rural youth rebels in two successive southern insurgencies and, as soldiers defending the State against these rebellions. In the thirty-year-long Eelamist insurgency, again thousands of youth died either as secessionist rebels or as soldiers of the State defence forces. On the sidelines of the armed combat or, sometimes right in the centre of battle, civilians too died in their tens of thousands – citizens of all ethnicities and religions, young and old, urban and rural. If memorials were to be built to bear all their names, those edifices would be mighty indeed – a different form of ‘high rise’, encapsulating far greater meaning.

On May 19, 2009, the then Government announced the defeat of the LTTE in battle. This week, the State, as it does every year, will officially commemorate those personnel who defended the State in the Eelamist wars. At the same time, much of civil society, especially the civil society of the most affected ethnic minority communities, will commemorate the civilian dead. For thousands of Sri Lankan families, the first two weeks of May have become a time of death anniversaries: of religious services and rituals in loving memory.

What about the soldiers who died defending the State in two successive southern insurgencies What about the tens of thousands of southern rebels and political dissidents – rights activists, lawyers, journalists – who also died in those two violent social upheavals

Some of the Western powers have formally converted this ‘war commemoration’ into a Remembrance of not just the military sacrifice but of all the people of their respectful national societies who died during the great wars. Sri Lanka has yet to do this.

A common and collective remembrance of all citizens who died in our internal wars in our modern nationhood is not immediately crucial to our national effort for reconciliation and inter-ethnic equality and harmony. But, the very plurality of these commemorations is a powerful emotive pointer to the richness of our diversity and the commonality of our shared national predicament.

United in sorrow and fond remembrance, we, Sri Lankans, feel spurred on to support the on-going national enterprise for inter-ethnic settlement so that ‘never again’ is as meaningful to us as it became meaningful to the warring nations in the aftermath of two world wars.

“Not yet will those measureless fields be green again

Where only yesterday the wild sweet blood of wonderful youth was shed . . .”

(The Cenotaph, by Charlotte Mew)