Suspecting generally Tamils who belong to the younger age bracket as possible terrorists has a history of more than 30 years since the time Tamil youth took up arms to give effect to the Tamil Nationalist project of creating a separate state in Sri Lanka.
There are various ramifications of what this ‘feeling’ of suspicion can do to people. This post is a small note from my personal experiences. This is an issue, a theorem difficult to explain, but let me try. The central question that I pose in this post is whether one can separate his take on the ethnic politics of this country from affecting his friendship. My equation is this” politics has fuelled distrust and suspicion. Trust and confidence in each other are central ideals to any notion of friendship. Hence there has to be a connection.
Within an entrenched climate of distrust between the different ethnic communities in Sri Lanka it is my hunch that no amount of personal relationship and friendship can totally alleviate this feeling of suspicion. For a Sinhala speaking person I doubt whether it can be ever possible, how much ever long standing and close the friendship is, to be sure that his or her Tamil friend might not be a ‘LTTE type of Tamil’ ( I know its difficult to define this. I am not going to attempt to define it myself). Now this is not entirely problematic but what follows is: I will go a step further and say that it might not even possible for a Sinhala friend (when the suspicion is evoked externally) to easily dismiss the fact (in its entirety) that his Tamil friend might not be a member of the LTTE. Let me deal with two personal examples. One of my friends was once caught up in a mess where a member of an organisation that he used to head started spreading stories that he was either close or part of the LTTE. Now this sent ripples all round and some of his friends started to feel that they shouldn’t get ‘involved’ in ‘this’. They were ‘not sure’. Now I must quickly add that there were many friends of my friend’s – a whole host of them - whom he would flinch at the thought of even labelling them ‘Sinhala’ friends who stood by him. But my friend did feel that he was shocked by the response by quite a few (actually many) who were ‘not sure’.
The other situation was when this same friend of mine was arrested for all the wrong reasons or probably as some told him because he was stupid. Some of his friends worked very closely to get him out but they warned their other friends not to come to the police station to meet him. The reason: police would get suspicious, unnecessary questions would follow etc etc. Now this was very unfortunate. Being not to be with your friend during time of distress is as worse it can get.
These are difficult questions. Sometime back we organised a forum theatre looking at how the ethnic conflict has affected young peoples personal relationships with people in other communities. The plot revolved around two friends one Sinhalese and the other Tamil who were arrested for ‘loitering’ around (yes it is sort of a crime in this country). The parents of the Sinhala boy get him out without problem and the boy protests that he wont leave the police station unless his Tamil friend is also released. The parents drag the boy away from the police station. The police are shown in this theatre piece to advice the parents not to allow their son to have friendship with Tamils.
Last month I was in New York and I met up with my uncle who moved to the US after being forced to leave his country having been affected personally because of riots that took place in Colombo in 1983. Now both my aunt and uncle said that though a lot of their Sinhala friends had been helpful back in Colombo during those difficult times and continued to be good friends, it was impossible to shred away the thought which they believed was true that most of the ‘Sinhalese’ friends except for a handful of few friends were to use the popular term of their generation ‘communal minded’ when it came to politics and discussions that centred around how to resolve the conflict in Sri Lanka – that they never understood the problems of the Tamils. Now this is what academics who research on peace building and conflict resolution call a ‘protracted social conflict’- a type of conflict very very difficult to remedy.
The other side of the problem is this. For some Sinhalese there is no ethnic conflict because they all enjoy within their friendships many a Tamil. We all drink together have fun etc etc. For all those who think we don’t have an ethnic conflict because of your friendships my answer is: the test of friendships whether they are effected by politics or not is when the worst of your ‘suspicions’, unconsciously situated in you, are threatened. The foregoing paragraph where I narrate a conversation with my uncle and aunt is a dedication to them.
For me I wonder what would take to alleviate this distrust that has been built over centuries of reading history, passing down oral history and personal experiences. It will take a sea changing turn in our history (now what do these academics call it? ..hmmm..yes .. paradigm shift..!!) for us to push back our distrust of each other. There seems to be no indication of this happening in the near future.
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3 comments:
That must be awful,
I'm sorry that it's happening to you and your close family & friends.
But thank you for letting everyone else know this as our local news only shows what they want us to see (which is a perfect world, but it isn't). I take my hat off for you as it's very noble thing to stand up for you and your people and try to end disputes, for example I know many people who just are too scared to anything.
I just hope everything will turn out for the better and I hope God will take care over you and help stop conflict.
Aacharya, I was both intrigued and moved by your post. What you write resonates in conflict-ridden nations around our planet, where war and alienation become the defining characteristics of life. I am reminded, for example, of Colombia where guerrilla and government have fought inconclusively for over forty years, with the ideological call to battle that urged the FARC and others forward a distant and irrelevant theme. And yet the conflict rages on unabated, claiming lives and making living unbearable. The Democratic Republic of Congo as well is under constant siege, its citizens beleaguered by almost twenty years of ethnic conflict fuelled by the lucrative economic opportunities that can exist amid such chaos. People fight because it becomes more profitable than peace. People kill because of positions that have been senselessly ingrained in them, without ever really knowing why they fight at all. Children are born, grow up, and know nothing but the savagery of war. In countries like your own when the engine behind conflict is an ethnic and/or religious divide, the consequences are, as you so aptly note, absorbed into the very social fabric of the culture. A divide is always there, as people define themselves in terms of their differences instead of their commonalities. As positions become increasingly extreme, they also become more entrenched, making negotiation and sustainable peace that much more difficult to secure. I would argue, however, that much hope is to be found in the young and future generations. Such optimism is of course contingent on the development of serious negotiations that yield satisfactory results, providing the Tamil and other minorities equal rights under the law and repealing the problematic Sinhala Only legislation. If and when such progress is made, then perhaps the secessionist cause can be slowly abandoned. An implication of the point you make in terms of social distrust, however, would become increasingly relevant in such a scenario, for peace is not something that is brokered by authorities, but can only truly flourish when it is in the hearts of the people invested in it. This is something that, indeed, takes a paradigm shift, a reconstruction of the most basic perceptions of the “self” and the “other”. The fruits of multi-track diplomacy however, teach us, that bringing children together in something as obvious as a soccer team has very positive repercussions in the long-term peace process because you have a chance to build from the ground up and create, if not unity, at least friendship and understanding in the place of suspicion and fickle bonds. I would point you to a fantastic book called Peacemakers in Action that shares the stories of committed and ordinary people in conflict zones that approach this difficult subject in innovative and truly moving ways, bringing beauty and hope to lands so wrecked and hearts so ravaged and renewing that driver of human spirits: hope.
Aacharya, I must say that whilst agreeing with you to a great extent on what you've said in this post, I must add that friendship, at least to me, is pretty straight forward and simplistic even. There are best friends, close friends, friends and associates. Friends are classified thus for numerous reasons.
Friends, particularly those in the former 2 categories are those I accept and respect without question, even though I might not always agree with them and all their beliefs. If those differences were to include a difference in political affiliation or practice, so be it. That, to me is part and parcel of a solid friendship.
Call me naive and idealistic but, if a friendship falls short of expectation, based on ethnicity (suspicion stemming from one's ethnicity) or political affiliation, you might want to seriously consider questioning the very foundation of the friendship itself, and not the politics behind the thinking, which would seem to be undoubtedly flawed!
Cos' as far as I'm concerned, a friend who allows the seed of doubt, not only to be planted in their minds, but also to grow unchecked, is frankly no friend at all!
This is not to say I'm blind to the realities of mistrust and conflict between ethnicities, rampant in our lives today, but more so to drive home the other reality, that friendship and ethnic divides (irrespective of their basis,) don't necessarily have to be inter-connected, and that it is quite possible for a friendship to look beyond ethnic differences, whilst at the same time respecting that very difference.
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