Moral failures

Moral failures

Tom Plate writes that Sri Lanka risks becoming another human tragedy unless the world takes action

By Tom Plate
Pacific Perspectives Columnist

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Los Angeles --- There is something about humanitarian catastrophes of the political kind to which the world is often slow to respond.

Torpidity is not always the case with every threat. A few dozen people die of what is officially termed swine flu, and the world is instantly all a-jitter. Disease control ayatollahs are everywhere on the media declaiming the peril; health alliances swing into action as if NATO forces against an invading Soviet Union.

But when tens of thousands of people face death in some tragic land and, though almost everyone knows about what is going on, we act as if divided as to whether something must be done now -- or perhaps nothing should be done ever.

Remember the historic human carnage in Rwanda? It was some years later that the world’s leaders were asking themselves, with all evident anguish, why they had been so slow to respond. President Bill Clinton rued Rwanda as one of his greatest moral failures.

Then there is the Darfur case in Sudan... years in the making but only relatively recently the object of international anguish and partial ministration.

Submitted now, for your consideration, is the tragic situation in Sri Lanka.

Here is what we know:

We know that many Hindu and Christian Tamils -- the country's ethnic minority -- have died or are dying as a result of a surge in the civil-war effort by majority Buddhist Sinhalese government forces. The remainder of this minority is caught in the vice between the government and the Tamil Tigers, classified internationally as a terrorist group.

Every hour, Sir Lanka looks more and more like a Sudan or a Rwanda. So what is being done?

The United Nations, having met over the humanitarian disaster, has begun pressuring, at this late hour, the Buddhist ethnic-majority government in Colombo. There may, or may not, be a cease-fire in the country that may, or may not, hold and save lives.

India, the regional power (the island nation of Sri Lanka lies off its shore), deliberately dawdles. The federal government in New Delhi is in the middle of re-election and may not harvest a whole lot of votes by risking a humanitarian intervention. But at least 60 million ethnic Tamils make their home at the very southern end of gargantuan India. How many more Tamils, across the strait in Sri Lanka, must be systematically snuffed out before India's government has a serious Tamil problem on its hands?

The so-called international community has perhaps had plausible reason to pause because the Tamil cause has been wrapped in the odious booby-trap of the Tamil Tigers. These terrorist champions of suicide bombing and other hideous and offensive techniques would seem to complicate this otherwise simple morality play. They are as easy to loathe as the masses of Tamils are in general easy to love.

The majority government wins sympathy by claiming their goal is to crush the Tigers, not eradicate the Tamils. It is anti-terrorist, not pro-ethnic cleansing.

The distinction would work if the net impact of their anti-terrorism weren't essentially genocidal. The reasoning in Colombo is fallacious precisely because the government has selected a tool that cannot, over the long-run, work: force of arms. Instead of selecting severe repression now, Colombo should have undermined the extremist Tigers long ago by offering the Tamils a measure of self-governance in the north and northeast through referenda and local elections.

Even if the Tigers can be destroyed, Tamil aspirations cannot. Recall that in the early nineties the central Sri Lankan government had launched a military crackdown against the Tamils -- and they survived. My guess is that they will continue to survive -- if driven deeply underground while the current immense heat stays blowtorch level -- as long as the on-the-ground conditions of Tamil oppression endure.

The extreme brutality of the techniques used by the Tigers is matched (and indeed fueled) by the tragic self-delusion of the central government that a people's hopes can be vaporized through military force.

Recently a friend reminded me that this otherwise immensely gorgeous country -- once called Ceylon -- in ancient times was known as "Serendip." This morphed over the decades into the English word "Serendipity." But what a misnomer this word is now for this trouble-plagued land, where the evil appears to be happening not by pleasant accident but by malicious design. In years to come, the world (and India especially) will rue the day that basically it looked the other way and acted as if it couldn't decide what, if anything, to do.

The views expressed above are those of the author and are not necessarily those of AsiaMedia or the UCLA Asia Institute.

Date Posted: 4/29/2009