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Peace process Vs parliamentary democracy

by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer thinks that (to quote him) "..... Africa was colonised by the Europeans. Africans, as time went on, grew to resent and despise that colonisation....". The Foreign Minister was sharing his thoughts on Australian TV reacting to the rejection by African member countries of efforts at the recently concluded Commonwealth Summit in Brisbane, to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe on issues of democracy.

So, according to Mr. Downer, those forcibly subjugated, exploited and culturally deformed ("Christianised", made "civilised") Africans only "grew" to resent and despise that colonisation "as time went on" and not immediately, when the colonising Europeans began that subjugation.

The Australian Foreign Minister, an educated and respected political leader, seems to imply that, at its inception, when the 'colonisation' (read military invasions, massacres, hoodwinking of native peoples with false treaties, spreading of diseases, etc.) began, the Africans may have liked it or, at least, quietly acquiesced to it!

We, colonised Sri Lankans, know better. Our own history tells us (presuming that we haven't forgotten" history, following the advice of one of our respected political scientists and newspaper columnists) that even if we warmly welcomed the first European victors, envoys and traders, we certainly did not lie down and take it when they began their colonisation.

The world has had more than a century of anti-colonial liberation movements, the 'decolonisation' process of the 1950s and '60s, an exhaustive critical analysis of, and cultural creativity (the Hollywood film 'Dances with wolves' is but a commercial example) about, the colonial experience and, even guilt-ridden breast-beating by sections of the White intelligentsia.

Yet the leader of a White neo-colonial nation like Australia, must, in a pronouncement in front of a global audience, express conclusions that deny the reality of that colonial experience.

Mr. Downer thinks (and confidently declares) that it was only "as time went on", that the subject peoples resented that subjugation. The bitter irony is that, historically, the reverse happened. If, at first, the colonised peoples hated that colonisation and fought it, after subjugation and, "as time went on", those sections of the colonised who became more 'Christianised' and civilised' grew to like their colonised status - and still do so.

Of course, for Mr. Downer it may have been a Freudian 'slip of the tongue', and, if it is pointed out, he may quickly retract or, in some way, modulate, his original proposition. But the point is that that slip of the tongue betrays the subconscious thinking: the persistent power of White imperial-colonial consciousness.

This is yet another example of the power of ideology of the subjective human experience and the way consciousness is shaped by that experience. Obviously, Mr. Downer has not (and cannot) live the experience of the colonised or the once-colonised, and so the actuality of the trauma of colonial conquest cannot shape his consciousness.

This is not to say that there are many White Australians (if not the majority, a sizeable minority) who are sensitive to this actuality and are even actively supportive of the efforts of once-colonised peoples to recover. What is significant is that a White colonial consciousness that is insensitive to it can yet exist.

It is this power of ideology that I wish to reflect on, as we, in Sri Lanka grapple with the deformities in our society, in our political culture, and in our psychological-spiritual being, that nearly 500 years of European colonialism has left behind. As I have noted before in these columns, the political structures left behind by the departing British, the Western-style democratic culture of politics super-imposed over the battered remnants of the pre-colonial indigenous culture, such as the aspiration to ethnic nationhood, are all factors that have led to the current crisis.

I have previously pointed out the inability of European-style parliamentary democracy, due to its competitive dynamic as well as the ethno-nationalism nurtured by the nation-state system and capitalist modernisation processes (including the mass media's contribution to linguistic nationalism), among other factors, to facilitate the resolution of the ethnic conflict.

Rather, we are compelled to go beyond the frame of parliamentary, democracy. Some groups of the liberal intelligentsia may want to maintain a 'parliamentary democratic' gloss over the extra-parliamentary politics that is already under way, but this will remain only a gloss and nothing more.

Right now, even if parliament has subsequently begun debating it, we must acknowledge that the ceasefire agreement was finalised entirely outside the Parliamentary process. Even if there has been any consultation among political forces, it has been done on the basis of direct political power, to some degree indicated by the electoral process, but nevertheless, done outside Parliament.

Furthermore, it seems as if the second most powerful political force, the People's Alliance, or, at least its dominant element, the SLFP, is unhappy with the lack of parliamentary consultation.

But its moves in response are, again, largely extra-Parliamentary: such as the failure of the President to help finalise the formation of the Constitutional Council, her delays in approving Government-initiated legislation and regulations, and her refusal to go to the Commonwealth Summit whose participants would have benefitted from a description by our Head of State of a most significant political development here.

The ideological crisis here, at this juncture, is betrayed by this conclusion that purely because it is extra-parliamentary, a process must be deemed 'un-democratic'. Of course, it does not help when the very people initiating this current extra-parliamentary process, the governing UNP, has a reputation of previous tenures in power in which it actually did the opposite: introduce anti-democratic measures through the parliamentary process (such as the infamous Referendum, among many other enactments, some still in force, like the Prevention of Terrorism Act). But then, equally paradoxically, those who are crying "Foul" today, the SLFP, led previous governments which initiated, in the name of democracy, major political re-structuring - made a new constitution, in fact - outside the parliamentary process.

Even if the UNP, and its apologists among 'civil society' groups are coy about the extra-parliamentary nature of the current peace process, the mainstream marxist parties, true to their anti-parliamentary origins (but in contrast to their current, purely parliamentary, existence) are quite happy to frankly acknowledge the process and support it. Both the LSSP as well as the Communist Party, for once consistent with their ideological heritage, are actively supporting the Ceasefire agreement and, significantly, have broken ranks with their senior coalition partner, the SLFP on this.

Here, a most welcome development has been the position adopted by the Ven. Baddegama Samitha Thera, MP, who is a member of the LSSP, in strong support of the Agreement. I am sure the Venerable Bhikku realises that his Marxist non-parliamentary political philosophy coincides every well with his other, presumably more fundamental, philosophical inspiration: the Dhamma. After all, the South Asian, Buddhist tradition of democracy is far superior to the ancient Greek model on which is based the 'democracy', imposed on us by the colonising Europeans.

These columns have noted, many times before, the profoundly democratic nature of the Buddha Sangha community, not only in its original, ancient, state, but even today, despite the awful encrustations of patriarchy, feudalism and, more recently, the profit motive.

It is possible to argue that the Sangha ecclesiastical community has retained its original democratic characteristics to a far greater degree that has done the Christian ecclesiastical community, which, except for a few marginal sects, can barely remember its original, non-Greek, forms of egalitarianism and collectivism.

Again, paradoxically, one of the most recent anti-parliamentary forces, the JVP, has become a champion of European-style parliamentary democracy and is agitating against the Agreement. In this they have strange bedfellows in the ultra-nationalist Sihala Urumaya, who, rather than reject our colonial political-structural heritage and work to recover our indigenous one, are striving to win a parliamentary seat such as the one over which they squabbled earlier.

Contrary to Mr. Downer's bizarre understanding, we, colonised Sri Lankans, rather than growing to resent our colonial-originated 'parliamentary democracy', have grown to love it. But unlike some other post-colonial societies, we seem to have remained subjugated by it - in awe, perhaps, of this gracious hand-me-down by our White haamuduruvo.

Some former colonies, however, have been quite happy to take this democracy' by the scruff of its neck and quite unabasedly re-fashion it to suit the needs of their post-colonial societies - or at least the needs of the elites clinging to power.

The Singaporean and Malaysian elites, for example, may not have built better democracies, but neither have they been coy about their deliberate re-fashioning (and dilution) of British-originated parliamentary democracy. Nor, it seems is Robert Mugabe coy about what he is upto in Zimbabwe. After all, when his Zanu-PF/Zanla movement overcame the White-supremacist 'Rhodesia' regime, Mr. Mugabe, a Marxist, quite deliberately set up a one-party political system. Today, his experiment with European-style multi-party democracy seems to be falling apart.

But then for Zimbabwe, yet recovering from that 'colonisation' Mr. Downer referred to, their current political experiment is, inevitably, only an experiment. Deprived of their indigenous political culture and structure and never ever able to recover that again in its original state, what more can they do than experiment, and continue to experiment - to fumble desperately, to blunder, to grasp at straws?

And who are the former White colonial masters (and mistresses), the ones who were responsible for destroying that indigenous political culture and preventing any organic evolution, such as that which the Europeans enjoyed in their development of 'parliamentary democracy', to criticise these experiments? Why should the former colonial rulers dictate norms and standards of democracy?

That seems to be the logic of the other African Commonwealth ('Commonwealth' itself being another classic colonial misnomer) member countries when they resisted British sanction proposals against the Mugabe regime.

Even in this 'one-party' system, practised in Zimbabwe as well as in many other post-colonial societies with socialist regimes, however, the European political cultural heritage of Marxism-Leninism left its mark and, took its toll. One of the ironies of Marxism-Leninism has been adoption of the 'political party', that fundamental pillar of bourgeois parliamentary democracy, as its principal tool of political mobilisation.

This, along with many other aspects, are part of the European ideological heritage of both Marxism as well as Liberalism (another, far more, vital aspect being the Enlightenment rationalism that underlies both Marxist and Liberal philosophy).

So it is, surely, not surprising that, in many societies where neither capitalism, nor liberal political philosophy, nor bourgeois liberal political culture, nor the political party system organically evolved, the 'parliamentary' system has either failed to solve the post-colonial political-economic problems of those societies or, has been manipulated beyond recognition by social elites in their bid to stay in power - usually in collaboration with, and supported by, their former colonial rulers.

The LSSP's Colvin R. de Silva may have wished to go beyond British 'dominion' status with his First Republican Constitution in 1972, but, revolutionary though he once strove to be, Colvin failed to engineer the radical changes necessary in our political-economy.

That was because his party was only second fiddle in a coalition that was only interested in minor reform of the post-colonial capitalist democracy the British left for us. Even today, that is all, our elite can think of.

The post-colonial processes of absorption into the European-dominated world system that originated with colonialism (in short 'globalisation') are so powerful that it requires almost inhuman leaps of imagination and creativity to seek socially just alternatives to the competitive ethno-nationalism nurtured by the nation-state system and modernity.

When I argue that one should seek inspiration from the non-ethnicised Vajji confederal system that the Buddha admired (and which would still exist among pockets of tribal communities if the modern Indian empire would just let them be), and also, from the medieval South Asian 'segmentary state' model, in building a new republic on this island, I am not surprised that I am laughed out of the halls of the intelligentsia.

That's because they suffer from that Downer's syndrome: they've grown to love their colonial subjectivity (Anti-colonial writers have noted this masochistic enjoyment of domination and debility/emasculation).

But how far can we go by mere pretence at parliamentary democracy - at duplicitous, covert politics for peace? 'Pragmatic' analysts point out that the UNP's covert introduction of the 1987 Indo-Lanka Agreement and its corollary provincial system, was more 'successful' than the PA more recent attempts at so-called 'transparent' methods and parliamentary process of constitutional reform.

No doubt the Provincial Council system is in place, and is a useful basis for future devolution, while the 'Package' merely got burnt in the streets and exploited to the hilt by a sensation-hungry, newly liberalised (thanks to the PA) mass media.

But even if the PC system is in place in the South (barely), it is not in the North; the LTTE's dictatorship is. The Indo-Lanka Peace Accord is non-existent and had to be replaced recently by the Norwegian-backed Cease-fire Agreement, again (interestingly) via that same non-Parliamentary covert politics of an UNP-led regime. Judging by the performance of the previous covert exercise, how far will this one go?

Do we not need to complement this coy duplicity with some, consciously creative initiative that deliberately and frankly goes beyond Western-style democracy if we are to ensure that the current peace process goes further than previous ones did? While there is no need to seek for complete 'models' from anywhere. What we need is a pragmatic creativity free of neo-colonial pretence of living up to our (neo-colonial) masters' standards - a step by step process.

The covertly won cease-fire must hold and be actively, overtly, upheld. And then we must be less than covert, but more than parliamentary, in going on from there towards a genuine peace.

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