May 17, 2013, 8:10 pm
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by Rohana R. Wasala
The real war in which we are now engaged is one within ourselves; within mankind as a complex whole. Our right hand holds high the tools man has developed for his security and survival. Our left hand clasps to our hearts our most valuable, innate tool: the sense of identity and the contextual logic of our survival.
- Gregory R. Copley, historian and global strategist, in his The Art of Victory (New York, 2006), p. 139.
(The title of this essay by a non-specialist reader of Dr Jayatilleka’s book is an adaptation of a chapter heading in The Art of Victory. Copley’s work is mainly addressed to society leaders.)
Dr Dayan Jayatilleka’s "Long War, Cold Peace – Conflict and Crisis in Sri Lanka" (Vijitha Yapa Publications, March 2013) I found to be of absorbing interest from the beginning to the end without a single dull paragraph in between. It consists of five fairly long chapters. My impression on trekking through its 500 pages with my own essential ideological baggage (‘essential’ in the sense of essence as well as necessity) was that most average readers like me may find it not only eminently readable, but also intellectually stimulating, and that they will cherish the experience, or rather the adventure, as something to savour for some time afterwards; they will also find on this journey a number of interesting points to hitch a tent for environmental exploration and solitary contemplation whose ultimate value, I think, will lie in its potential contribution to the monumental task, that all of us responsible Sri Lankans cannot avoid, of bringing about a social transformation, in both mental and material terms, in our shared homeland in order that we, at present involuntarily and tacitly withdrawn into a state of communal/ethnic cold war, quickly emerge out of it and do everything possible, in the name of our common humanity, to forge a stable and peaceful future for our children by availing ourselves of this present moment of historic opportunity on the one hand, and, on the other, by courageously defying its threatened negative potential in the context of an increasingly volatile regional power equilibrium for causing a relapse into conflict and violence.
However upbeat, though, the foregoing reflection on what I see as an interesting, even exciting engagement with the Tamil separatist problem that Dr Jayatilleka’s book contains may sound, I personally think that many people will find it difficult to share his anxious enthusiasm in urging the implementation of the 13th amendment (with suitable tradeoffs to be worked out between the parties to preclude secession) as the weapon of last resort for Sri Lanka to wield in defence of her unitary status in the current perilous situation.
The book has an important message for all stakeholders caught up in the crisis, and others similarly concerned about the future of Sri Lanka. But a message is more than the mere words in a book. Who is speaking there and in what context both defines the import of, and makes for the effectiveness of, the communication that is being attempted. Therefore it is necessary to first take a look at the author. For this we need not go outside of the book, because there is sufficient information available in the body of the text itself for us to form an idea of the writer. He is, as I perceive it, the kind of Lankan political thinker and strategist who would command an international readership as an author. This is a fact which could prove helpful for us, on the diplomatic front, though his views may not exactly correspond to those of the majority of Sri Lankans including me. His diagnoses and pronouncements could help drive the attitudinal transformation that we all wish there were in our society. The book enunciates what, in the opinion of the author, should be done to preserve the sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of the island, while achieving or ensuring equal citizenship for all (the last being the crucial point). He also emphasizes the importance of maintaining the high moral ground in our approach to the issues.
The occasion of his producing this volume needs no special elaboration. As stated in the Introduction, both the publisher (Vijitha Yapa Publications) and the author wanted to print the book in time for the March 2013 sessions of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and the discussion concerning it in Sri Lanka. The military defeat of terrorism was imminent in 1987. That was at a fairly early stage of the conflict. But the high-handed intervention by foreign vested interests led to two decades more of murder and mayhem. Now we have almost completely put terrorism behind us, and are making steady headway in economic recovery schemes across the country. We are under pressure again; we find ourselves besieged by neo-colonialist global powers which seem to believe that an independent, stable Sri Lanka will not be in their interest, but that a divided island will serve them better. They are throwing at us every missile in their diplomatic arsenal in a barefaced destabilization or regime change project against our resurgent country. A resolution of our present crisis will involve strategies to circumvent roadblocks erected by foreign interventionists on our way to reconstruction and reconciliation.
Dr Jayatilleka presents himself as a ‘public intellectual’ in addition to or in alliance with a variety of other roles that he has played to date: political scientist, academic, diplomat, analyst/commentator, and internationalist (inspired by the late Argentinean revolutionary Che Guevara), in the context of his engagement with issues during the war and its aftermath. To my mind, he is an important language professional as well, like any philosopher, academic, politician, lawyer or journalist who has to work with language. It is well known that he was an active politician, too, for some time at least: he was the only Sinhalese minister from December 1988 to June 1989 (a position from which he resigned) in the North-East Provincial Council under the EPRLF led by Vardaraja Perumal. Before that, at the beginning of ‘the Tamil armed struggle’ in the late 1970s, he himself being ‘a rather dogmatic Leninist’ still in his early twenties as he recalls in Chapter 5, which is subtitled ‘Reflections’, he supported that struggle, because, in the belief of the rebel activists, they were engaged in a struggle against the ‘capitalist’ (Sri Lankan) state as they described it, for what they called national liberation. At a later stage, as he recounts on p. 493, he was severely beaten up, stripped down to his torn underpants, and nearly done to death by a murderous ‘lynch mob’ ("aptly enough at the cemetery", he wryly adds) in August 1992 for having publicly defended a besieged President Premadasa who had, in his opinion, been unjustly accused of the assassination of ‘his own general, a war hero’.
The book is both evidence and an offshoot of the multifaceted ‘intervention’ aspect of his career as Dr Jayatilleka himself claims (not exactly in those words, however). Though he compiled it out of his articles on the suggestion of his friends, it is not a mere anthology. To use his own words, "….. my interventions as analyst, commentator and academic over the years of turmoil and torment have been transformed into a book of greater cohesion and coherence than a collage. I hope that it symbolises and serves my abiding purpose as a student and teacher of political science" (Preface, p. viii). It should be left to the reader to experience the cohesion and coherence of the volume.
His passionate commitment as an academic to the speciality of his choice (political science) is something he has indicated before. That, personally more central, purpose is never sidelined in favour of his desire for ‘intervention’ about which he has always been not less enthusiastic. The book, he says, "is not what is finally needed, but hopes to provoke what is needed: conversation, argumentation, debate and discussion, leading eventually to the synthesis of a realistic and enlightened alternative". It was in fact my appreciation of this attitude of his that encouraged me to thus express my reaction to his book as an ordinary Sri Lankan. Dr Jayatilleka tells us in the Preface that work on the book began during his stint as Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies of the National University of Singapore. As an academic treatise on "politics and its extension, war, and its aftermath in Sri Lanka" (words quoted from the Introduction, p. xi) the book makes a significant contribution to the discipline of political science: "It teases out some implications for political theory and practice".
It appears to me that the book can also be partly seen as the result of a sort of personal odyssey for the author in social engagement in the form of ‘intervention’. As he claims in an interview with Lakbima News in August 2009, referred to and extensively quoted from in the book, he started as a revolutionary, but later became what he calls a reformist; he changed from a communist to a social democrat, and supported President Premadasa’s reform politics. The fascist nature of "the barbaric violence…. unleashed by totalitarian movements such as the LTTE and the JVP" led him to choose the state – even the capitalist state – in preference to their fascism. (The deeply fascistic character of both the JVP and the LTTE, particularly that of the latter, is a theme that is repeatedly emphasized and decried in the book partly in defence of his stand against them.) In that interview he says he was on the verge of a third shift – one away from the state to a greater emphasis on society and the public space. "However," he declares in the same interview, "the underlying consistency of my life is that I have been a rebel with a sense of right and wrong as indicated by my consciousness and conscience, my intellect and spirit. I have also been an internationalist throughout" (p. 375). Thus, though the book does not expressly or centrally indicate any element of personal growth or discovery through educative adventure, it is not devoid of that quality either; he asserts with hindsight (at the opening of Chapter 5 – Reflections) that for him "Life was dominated, distorted, and to some extent determined by the conflicts and their cumulative gravitational pull"; his times "were shaped by armed conflict: wars, insurrections and counter-insurgency; successive wars in the North and East of the island, two insurrections in the South, against a backdrop of Vietnam, the Middle East, Angola and Central America. History was driven by the dialectic of states vs. armed movements" (p. 372). Drawn into the vortex of tumultuous events that erupted in the country, he was personally touched by the tragic loss of friends and acquaintances (presumably, to violence) too many "to bear enumeration". "The greater the number of deaths of those one felt something for, the more difficult to walk away from it all. One then applies what one has to bring it to an end: the analytical intellect to discern, the power of expression to expose and exhort and the will to play one’s part in the collective effort to overcome and prevail. From this I draw some grim satisfaction" (ibid).
The paragraphs under the subheading "But then there was Che…" occupy the last few pages of the book, pp. 487-98, and form its most explicitly autobiographical section. It is a brief retrospective account of the author’s life and career from a precocious initiation into the world of revolutionary Left politics to his present as a distinguished senior diplomat just returned from a number of successful diplomatic assignments at the UN representing Sri Lanka. Che Guevara (1929-67) has been his most abiding and most influential source of inspiration. Dr Jayatilleka quotes the following words from Che: "some may call me an adventurer. I am, but with a difference – one who risks his skin to prove his platitudes". Dr Jayatilleka seems to have copied the legendary guerrilla leader’s quixotic adventures: following are his words about himself: "…. leaving my parents for full time activism not knowing when I would see them (or they, me) again, and having survived one experience, engage again and again in risk taking political projects and take stances, tilting at windmills" (p. 490). He was introduced to Che by his father, the late veteran journalist Mervin de Silva in 1968, when Che was already dead and when he himself was hardly eleven. Mervin had been brought up in a Buddhist background, he tells us; but his mother was of the Catholic faith, which the son also adopted (but I think he evinces a very relaxed attitude towards traditional religion). His enthusiasm for Che Guevara seems to be something almost like religious devotion: "Eighty five years after his birth they are making movies and music about the Argentinean. Two thousand years after his, they are making movies and music about the Nazarene".
to be continued