The Lessons, They Are Blowing In The Wind

Prabhakaran and Wijeweera

“I speak severely to my boy, I beat him when he sneezes; For he can thoroughly enjoy, The pepper when he pleases.” Chorus – “Wow! Wow! Wow!” — Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland – Lewis Carrol.

By Ravi Perera

The other word that recurs is mediocre. Argentines detest the mediocre and fear to be thought of as mediocre. It was one of Eva Peron’s words of abuse. For her, the Argentine aristocracy was always mediocre. And she was right. In a few years she shattered the myth of Argentina as an aristocratic colonial land. And no other myth, no other idea of the land has been found to take its place….” Argentina And The Ghost Of Eva Peron — VS Naipaul

The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission has not yet been reduced to an easy to handle acronym, which would be most useful if its proceedings were to ever interest history.  But finding a short name for the Commission is going to be the easy part. If one of the lessons to be learnt is that everything in this country is looked at from the point of view of political if not personal interest, the task of the Commission is well nigh unachievable.
A tourist landing for the first time at the Katunayake International Airport (hope it is the correct name, it seems to change with every election) is bound to notice the welcoming smiles of the ground hostesses. In fact our tourism industry makes the smiling faces of the locals their advertising theme. But if the jet-lagged tourist is not overly dazed by the tropical heat he will also observe that the smile on the face of the lissome maids  can easily turn into  an unfriendly  scowl  when dealing with their own, particularly the loud variety disgorged from the planes arriving regularly  from the Middle-East.
As he traverses the island, nature’s tropical bounty so generously bestowed on the land, cannot but impress him. Palm gardens, terraced paddies, rolling tea estates and the beckoning beaches that he has read about in tourist brochures are now laid out in front of the dollar rich tourist in all their splendor. It will strike him as odd when told that this paradise land ranks as one of the highest in the rate of suicides (including attempts) and perhaps the highest in the case of female suicides.
The background to the issues concerning the Lessons Learnt Commission is hugely complex. If the barbarism of the LTTE must be explained we cannot ignore the events that preceded, which surely were ample warning of what was to follow. Periodic race riots had become almost a regular pattern until the catharsis of July 1983, the mother of all riots. No lessons seem to have been learnt from the earlier events, and even if they were, political expediency made such lessons unpalatable. When 1983 occurred, our complacent political establishment was taken by surprise. The fury of that July divided the nation almost irreparably.
The LTTE was by no means the first violent challenge to the post independence State. That dubious honour goes to the JVP which on April 5, 1971 launched a wide-spread armed attack on the State structure with the intention of seizing power. Given the relative strengths of the antagonists, the JVP adventure was fore-doomed to fail. After overcoming the initial shock, the State forces put down the rebels brutally. In just two months the country was back to near normalcy.
But typically Mrs. Srimavo Bandaranaike, who was then Prime Minister, continued with the Emergency Regulations, which she had brought into effect to deal with the JVP in early 1971, until 1977 when she was voted out by the people. In that period she also brought in a new constitution which made us a republic while also changing the country’s name.  Changing of   names of public places and institutions like roads, schools and even irrigational tanks to those associated with politics became standard practice. Apparently everything was done according to times suggested by astrology. That was also when the era of bodyguards began. Prior to that, perhaps only the prime minister and that too as a mere protocol, had one. Today a politician to be taken seriously needs at least two escort vehicles bursting with bodyguards driven frantically behind him.
Why did so many youngsters join the cause of the JVP knowing very well that many of them were bound to lose more than their puberty in the coming battle?  One does not challenge Mike Tyson in a pub unless one is very drunk or very foolish. All that was needed to persuade the child brigades of the then JVP to take on their suicidal mission were five “lectures” delivered by equally youthful party cadre. The palpable poverty and injustices here perhaps blinded them to the reality. But there are many countries in the world which are even more disadvantaged than us. Their youth do not self-destruct the way a sizable number did on our dusty streets in 1971. Later it was found that many of the participants in that insurrection were not really as badly off as originally thought. Is there something deeper, darker and sinister at work in the labyrinths of this society?
Amazingly the JVP was able to repeat their violent feat in the period 1983-89 which ended with the decimation of its leadership. This was largely a development from the harrowing events of 1983 when a government looking for a scapegoat for the breakdown of civil order, put the blame on the JVP which had by then come a long way in the democratic process.
The JVP went underground and later caused so much mayhem that in the years 1987-89 the country virtually hemorrhaged. Military units in civilian dress scourged the land dealing death to JVP operatives who were themselves conducting a massive terror campaign in order to topple the elected government. Again when it came to the crunch the JVP was no match and its followers came to horrible ends.
If Wijeweera, the leader of the then JVP was the pied-piper of Hamelin   for the Sinhala youth, Prabakaran was even a worse harbinger of death and destruction for the Tamil youth. His dream and promise was a separate State, which it was assumed would be better and superior to what was south of the border. Thousands of youngsters from that hitherto conservative society  rallied to his call only to eventually meet a brutal end. In the course of that doomed struggle they fought desperate battles against   large armies, including that of India. Hundreds of his followers, barely out of their teens, sacrificed their lives in suicide attacks, causing unbelievable misery and destruction. Their worst anger was directed against fellow Tamils daring to take up a position against Prabakaran, who was well in the way to being deified   by his hardcore followers.
On the other side of the barricades stand the armed forces, again a segment of our youth, guarding the State against the enemy. Many of them have had to turn their guns on fellow citizens in the process.
These are all recent events which are fresh in our memories. It is difficult to think of another country where its youth have repeatedly rebelled against their State as well as turned on their own as bitterly   as in this little island. The mystery we confront becomes even more complex when we consider the fact that Sri Lanka is  a functioning democracy with a stable, if mediocre economy.  Both factors generally reduce social frustrations. But here they have apparently not. It may be that only a few are convinced   that we are a true  democracy. Often the way it is practiced here, the vote  is used merely as a justification by the winner for every kind of abuse. Surely democratic forms alone will not answer if the spirit thereof is absent.
Here perhaps  lies the problem.
To become something better, the collective must have the genius to overcome themselves.
If our tourist were to approach that smiling ground hostess, for some information slightly outside of her immediate work, say the cost of a taxi ride to Colombo, the chances are she would be flummoxed, snapping  “it is not my job to get you a taxi!” Everybody can hide their mediocrity in meaningless cultural practices, endless incantations, symbolic gestures and hollow poses. Such things then become the end itself.
Sure, there are lessons to be learnt from every experience. But is comprehension possible for the  mediocre?