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| Sunday, 14 September 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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What in the world happened to Sri Lanka? (A Look-to-the-Future Appeal to the Peace Talk Delegates, Political Leaders and Religious Dignitaries) by Fr. Mervyn Fernando The prevalent mood of the average concerned Sri Lankan citizen vis a vis the ethnic crisis was very succinctly summarised by a friend of mine in his lament, Lankawata giya kala; apata kochchara lasanna ratak wenna thibunatha. The first part of the statement is literally untranslatable, a poor equivalent would be "what in the world happened to Sri Lanka?"; the second part would read, "we could have become such a beautiful country." I couldn't agree more. There is, however, no point in crying over split milk, if problems hide opportunities for a better "new", and there is always some good news in the bad news, it is well worth the effort to look at our plight afresh, from a new angle to discover whether it is offering us, or even beckoning us to a new, more desirable way of "being Sri Lanka". A hopeful start has been made with the Memorandum of Understanding between the Govt. and the LTTE and the subsequent commencement of the peace talks. We have paid dearly for failing to do what we should have done at the dawn of Independence, namely, figure out what shape and form the polity of Sri Lanka should take given her unique majority/minority mix of religions and races, in a serious and dispassionate political exercise involving all the stake-holders. The tragic experience of racial violence over the past twenty years or so has hopefully chastened us to the wisdom required for a more realistic new beginning to our national life. Though if may not be possible or very difficult, psychologically, to forget the hurts and pains of the past, it is possible and necessary to forgive "the enemy", who undoubtedly acted with the justifiable intention of righting perceived wrongs. I believe that this an essential pre-requisite for a genuine resolution of the problem - sort of cleaning the slate to write afresh. This would imply, firstly a cleansing of conscience through a genuine, preferably explicitly expressed, repentance of racial crimes committed by both parties to the conflict, (without finger-pointing about who started it all): and we may as well acknowledge with a contrite heart that our present woes are just retribution for our sins - the karma vipaka: we are reaping what we have sown over the past few decades. Secondly, a healing of painful memories, (as far as that is possible) of wrongs, injustices and bloodshed suffered in violent confrontations between the Sinhalese and the Tamils (and pari passu, the Muslims) during that period. Still lingering pains of the past seem to be at work in the collective unconscious of both the Sinhalese and the Tamils, provoking confrontational postures which will make a genuine, inner "coming together" very difficult. Perhaps a public acknowledgement of and saying "sorry" for, the racial sins of the past, at least in a symbolic way, by recognised leaders of the Sinhala and Tamil communities, might be an indispensable condition to put the past behind and start with a clean slate. Surely we have among our leaders at least a few who will have the greatness of mind and heart required for such an exercise. The resolution of our ethnic crisis has, therefore, a vitally important religious/spiritual dimension, which goes beyond politics (meta-political): it is surprising that we, avowedly given to religion as a people, have ignored this up to now. If the political leaders are reluctant to engage in such an exercise, the leaders of the religions, at the highest levels, should rise to the occasion, on behalf of the country and its people. The Context of the A-Borning Universal/Whole of Humankind Following the same line of thought, I am convinced that a lasting, soul-satisfying resolution of the ethnic conflict, which goes even beyond mere justice, towards the enrichment of both the minorities as well as the majority, can be achieved only by first going beyond immediate politics (again meta-political) of Constitution-making, electoral reforms etc., to the wider and larger, universalist enterprise of attuning ourselves to the vibrations of the a-borning future of humankind. In other words we have to expand the frame of reference of the problem, to cover the new consciousness of "being human" at all levels - person, community, nation and global humanity - and from that perspective come down, in a second movement, to our local political landscape and to the specific socio-political lineaments of "being Sri Lankan". The time is coming, in fact has already come, when the drama of each country/nation has to be played out against a wider, worldwide, ecological backdrop. No island can remain the island it was, any more. And this will demand, naturally, a paradigm shift in socio-political-constitutional structures nationally and internationally. And the pace of socio-cultural evolution across the globe is gathering momentum all the time with far-reaching consequences for every segment of the planet, touching the very roots of our consciousness with regard to human well-being and whole-being. In other words a new configuration of "being human" is in the making, in both personal and social spheres, and the new institutions - economic, social, legal, political educational etc. etc - we are going to set up, should bear the stamp of that configuration, if they are to be positively and vibrantly promotive of our aspirations as citizens of Sri Lanka and of the modern world. The New "Being Human" Scenario What is important, however, for our purposes is that the phenomenon outlined above is strongly impacting the human world and contemporary human consciousness too. We are not only acutely, conscious of the evolutionary, ever-changing character of our history, but also the accelerating pace of that evolution. We are becoming at an alarming rate what we were not earlier. And in the other spatial dimension, the spread of the human mass all over the surface of Earth, and the mesh of interactions generated by global travel, trade, instant communication (by telephone, e-mail, internet etc.) are pulling us in the direction of connections and inter-penetrations than separations and distinctions. Boundaries, both geographic and socio-cultural, are getting blurred, even disappearing. Time-wise, it is strange but true that the on-rushing future seems closer to us than the fast-receding past a scenario without precedent in human history. The link between the past and the future (flowing through the present) which never was that clear and simple (as some would have us believe), has become more tenuous and proportionately more problematic today. The upshot of this phenomenon is that history will be less and less helpful in understanding the present and making decisions for the future. The increasingly fast flow of the human tide demands that, rather than looking backwards, we take an imaginative leap forward into the future - for present decision-making - a difficult and unaccustomed exercise. The message is clear; it is imperative that we take our cue from the signs and lineaments of the future already present in our midst. The discernment of the future through the signs of the times, must take precedence over preoccupation with history; it is no longer possible to extrapolate from the past to a likely future, as we did earlier, simply because the future will bear little resemblance to the past, if at all. But the psychological anxiety generated in us by this unaccustomed situation pulls us in the opposite direction - to seek security in a throw-back to the familiar past, to the certainties of age-old traditions and practices. Hence the upsurge of fundamentalist movements, political and religious, the world over. Though this is understandable, it is definitely counter-productive, hindering and retarding the emergence of the new, and worse, making a mess of the present. Application to the Ethnic Conflict Looking at our ethnic conflict in the light of the above considerations, it is clear that the present deadlock is due to both parties operating with the paradigms of the old order, of rigid and distinct socio-cultural demarcations. This is obvious from the definitions they give to the realities of that order - tradition, race, caste, tribe, locality, nation/state etc. with hardly any thought of the new a-borning realities of free personal relationships (with scant regard for caste, race etc. specially among youth) complex socio-cultural interactions, vindication of rights and freedoms, gender equality and the like. Today in the emerging new economic order, to example, even nation-state boundaries are becoming dysfunctional. So our ethnic war is being fought on the battle ground of the old, rapidly disappearing world, and as such no victory is possible to either side simply because we are no longer there. We are trying to solve a "now" problem on "then" (past) premises, and predictably it has become an exercise in futility, churning out horrific and inane violence. The Gospels warned us long ago that new wine should not be put into old bottles; the bottles will break and the wine lost. Even spatially and geographically, it is impossible to draw racial and religious lines on the map of Sri Lanka. No race or religion is confined to one spatial area; the two main races, the Sinhalese and the Tamils are spread all over the country, (not to mention the goodly numbers abroad) in inter-mingled communities; nearly half the population of greater Colombo, for example, is Tamil. The Muslim people too are dispersed all over the island, with concentrations in some areas. Perhaps there are more Tamil people outside the confines of the North and East than within that territory. The same is true with regard to the religious denominations. Adherents of all the four major religions live cheek by jowl, with hardly any problem, all over the country. Drawing geographic lines by race or religion goes clearly contrary to the stream of consciousness in this day and age, and also flies in the face of the ground realities of population distribution; and therefore counter-productive for national well-being. This does not, however, mean that race, religion, language etc, are of no account, to be tossed into the dustbin of history. On the contrary, when they are looked at from the vantage point of the emerging future of the new humanity, in a universalist perspective they shine with a new effulgence. The future is challenging us to rise to a re-conceptualisation of all those elements, which are very much part and parcel of the human condition; a new understanding, which is far more liberating and therefore more deeply fulfilling - to move from, say an exclusive and defensive protection of racial identity dogged by fear, to an inclusive, "defence-less" one of brotherhood and mutual respect, in shared life-spaces of freedom and friendship. In an earlier evolutionary epoch of relative geographic isolation and other circumstances, human groupings (racial, linguistic, cultural) had to develop as separate entities with defensive mentalities; but in our epoch of population density, interpenetration, complex inter-actions and free "flow" of all kinds across the globe, identity can be assured and ensured, paradoxically, only through cooperation and union through open-mindedness and open-handedness. We have come to the stage when the: I-win-you-lose" (war) game has to give way to the "we-win" game in which both sides win. Youth got it right when they came up with the slogan, "make love not war". As Hazl Henderson put it: "The new game is unfamiliar (by definition) and it is very different from the old, competitive, zero-sum (I-win-you-lose) games that most of us were taught... the new game is co-operative, where no one wins unless everyone wins (emphasis added) and individuals make out better, if they consider the needs of others, and worse if they act selfishly... win-win games are always the rule when a system of resources is "common property," or a "commons" and can only be used indivisibly by all, such as the air we breathe (Paradigms in Progress)". So, if both the Sinhalese and the Tamils (and the Muslims) want to win, that's the game to play. To be continued |
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