I lived half of my adult life in Sri Lanka and other half away. During that time, I was able to see the both side of this war in Sri Lanka. Most people find it difficult to understand what this war is about. Is this an ethnic crisis, a terrorism problem, a freedom fight, fight against resistance? The list goes on.
If you look at the Tamil community, it has been a discriminating community for thousands of years due to Hindu caste system. That discrimination has kept certain underprivileged Tamils enjoying what the life has to offer. It is common to see Tami l millionaires and Tamil coolies who clean bathrooms in Sr Lanka side by side. Tamils are the most socially polarized minority in Sri Lanka. Caste system creates opportunities for human exploitation. The social oppression within Tamil community always existed even before alleged oppression claims against Sinhalese surfaced.
Let’s take LTTE Tiger leader Prabhakaran. He is known as the 7th grade dropout and a petty thief. He had no chance of emerging within the Tamil society as anyone. According to elite Tamil's standards, he won't even be hired as a domestic helper. In that sense, he would have had better chance in life among Sinhalese. Why Prabhakaran care about the freedom of Tamil people? He declared the war against elite Tamils first and killed all his rivals. Why Tamil Diaspora doesn’t care about his killing of Tamils? Well, that tells all the claims against Sinhalese are just political.
It is quite possible elite Tamils had a biggest ego in Sri Lanka. When their bottoms were whipped by certain Sinhalese leadership, they hired Prabhakaran who was a low caster himself to carry out dirty work against Sinhalese. Then they wrote the theme song for the struggle and pasted words like ‘discrimination’, ‘homeland’, ‘oppression’, and ‘chauvinism’ as justifications.
The bottom line is, there is no real motive for Tamils as an ethnic group for this war. They are so many different Tamil groups in Sri Lankan and they all have their own motives. The motives of Prabhakaran and Tamil Diaspora are different. They had to fake the reasons for this war to show the world about the homeland dream of Tamil elite. Since the reasons for this war is faked, there is no passion among most of Tamil people to support this war. That is why LTTE had to kidnap Tamil children for the war front and extort money from Tamils living around the world. If you motivate your people by fear for a cause your goal will never be successful.
Today Tamil Diaspora is doing what they do the best. Manipulating and wasting resources of the west to put an effort to stop the war. They are using Tamil civilian as reason for a cease-fire to keep Tigers alive. The truth is that Diaspora never cared about the plight innocent Tamil civilians. For them, the war is a game. They hate to see the game come to an end.
The war will end soon since the reasons they show why the war exist are so fake.
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ReallyCold,
ReplyDeleteNice post, well done.
It is true that the Tamils were extremely polarized due to their caste system prior to 1983. And I agree with all what you have said about VP.
But the idiotic deeds of several UNP politicians gave way for the LTTE to forcefully unify (by actually killing some with opposing views) the Tamil community under one banner.
Often Tamils say that VP got rid of the caste system. And I remember you mentioning, that this was done due to wrong reasons (your example in DW about a barber cutting the ear while giving a nice hair cut!).
But I don't think the caste system is done for as yet. As long as Tamils are Hindus, the caste system will prevail.
So all in all, Sinhalese became the scape-goats for the wrongs done by all Tamils (the Tamil caste system) and a few Sinhalese (morons like Cyril Mathew in 83).
I think the war we have today also has some invisible influence. We have provided the ingredients and there are other elements who keep the fire going.
ReplyDeleteI think most the reasons are economic and powerful nations run their economic cycles on a much more broader and deeper sense.