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Enemy Lines

University of California Press

Chapter One

Some Metaphors

It is not the aim of this book to explain or make sense of the war in Sri Lanka. Many millions of words have been written on this topic by people more knowledgeable than I. For me, this war is a context in which certain aspects of being human are illuminated in unique combinations of lights. Sri Lanka has been called a laboratory for the study of ethnic conflict, but it is not that for me. In a laboratory, conditions are controlled. In Sri Lanka, they are not. The violence in Sri Lanka, at the magnitude and intensity it has maintained for more than twenty years, is a severe affliction upon the people who make up Sri Lankan society, most of all the poor of all regions and all ethnicities. I would like to think this book may somehow ameliorate that affliction, but I know better than to expect such an outcome. I do not intend to make any prescriptions.

The aim of this book is to examine childhood, warfare, and play, as related and inters states of being, in the context of Batticaloa and Paduvankarai during the most intense phase of the Sri Lankan conflict so far. But the ramifications of the small, local events recounted in the ethnographic chapters of this book will not be evident to general readers in the absence of somedescription of how the overall war is configured.

Such a description cannot refer only to the actions of people in a closely circumscribed locality and period of time. In that sense, it cannot be purely ethnographic. It must be historical, shown as emerging from long social processes, patterns, and habits, to be understood in something like the way the parties to the conflict understand it. Chronologically ordered chains of cause and effect, however, are not what this chapter is about. History is not the same thing as what happened in the past. History includes only the events that get recorded and the records that receive later attention. And these records are not mirrors of events; they are interpretations. Records from a thousand years ago may receive more attention from people in the present, and be much more influential, than records from an intervening period. To the extent that it is read and heard by people in the present, a historical document is a thing existing in the present; and in this chapter I treat historical documents that way. The ones to which I devote the most attention are among the ones best known by the parties to the current conflict. On the foundation of such documents, both ancient and recent, they build their arguments for continuing the struggle.

My description in this chapter is a compilation and digest of information from multiple sources. None of the information or interpretation is original. I have put the description in my own words to give it coherence. Some of my own thoughts are added; I have dwelt at length on details that I believe are of special significance in the present moment, and I have only touched on certain historical eras to which whole books have been devoted. Rather than focusing on political economy and assuming this to be the foundation of all warfare, I focus on ideology, because I believe that the current war in Sri Lanka is principally a war of ideology. I do not like to label this conflict an "ethnic" war: that is too simple a concept, and very misleading. But it is also certainly not a class war; it is not a war between different ways of life (such as farming versus herding, or agriculture versus industry); and it is not primarily a war over resources, although the question of who controls what resources is obviously of great importance, as it always has been. Much as I would like to say that the war in Sri Lanka is strictly a modern phenomenon, having no deep roots, I am no longer persuaded that this is the case. There are deep roots. These roots have nothing to do with one "tribe" in conflict with another, still less with one "civilization" versus another. They have to do with a habit of intellectual, emotional, and physical struggle over issues profound and trivial, funny and deadly, that human beings engage in. They have to do with tortuous streams of thought, and long, multistranded threads of conversation and argument drifting over time from one topic to another, seemingly unrelated one, merging and diverging, with early participants wandering out and new participants wandering in. Sometimes these threads get caught together and snarled into knots.

One way to imagine the war in Sri Lanka, then, is as a giant knot made of many smaller knots, all tangled together and pulled tight. Efforts to untie the knot create new knots that get pulled into the whole. Simplified representations do not help, and cutting the knot is not an option, as the entire society has become inseparable from the knot that binds it. By "cutting the knot" I do not mean partitioning of the island into two or more sovereign states. This is in principle an option, but in practice it is not possible at present because of the powerful voices demanding that all the people of the island live under one strong central government. The resistance to devolution of power is a tightening force. Such a force is not good or evil in itself: it is merely an intrinsic and intractable part of the knot. Once someone has attained a level of power, such as control or the illusion of control over a whole country, they will be unwilling, and indeed unable, to relinquish it. It must be wrested from them. The need for control in frightening and unpredictable times adds ferocity to the insistence on nondevolution of power and maintenance of central control, or some facsimile of control, on the island. But even more powerful forces than the need for central control pull against the tightening, most importantly the human need to be free of subjugation, humiliation, impoverishment, separation from loved people and places, murder, torture, and predation. Last but not least is the vital importance to individuals and local communities of control over the circumstances of their own lives. The smaller knots that have been drawn into the larger one are petty personal quarrels and feuds, fights over resources, and the delusions of power, pride, and raw greed.

A more abstract way of imagining the conflict in Sri Lanka is to posit that it is historically overdetermined. An event is historically overdetermined if it has several contributing causes, any one of which could have led to the event or something much like it. Rather than causes, one might more accurately speak of historical vectors or forces, including intentional human movements with specific goals. A single vector may split into two or more vectors traveling in different directions, and two or more vectors may merge into one. If it is possible to speak of turbulence in the interaction of vectors, then the war may be considered a site of giant turbulence, a storm.

This storm broke in July 1983. A newcomer to the study of Sri Lanka must learn this first of all. The Tamil Tigers up to that moment were a small band of young men who used guns and explosives to register their views. They had few civilian supporters. Then one night they blew up a government military vehicle in Jaffna, killing nineteen soldiers. Word of the event reached Colombo. Cries, falsely proclaiming, "The Tigers are coming [here, to Colombo]," hit the streets. Crowds panicked. Every Tamil person was suddenly not just under suspicion of being a Tiger but convicted immediately of being a dangerous monster. Hundreds of ordinary Tamil civilians were massacred by gangs of Sinhalese men. The victims were cut down with knives and machetes, beaten to death with clubs or slabs of concrete, or doused in kerosene and burned alive. The violence spread to the hill country, where, as in Colombo, Tamils lived and worked among Sinhalese. Some of the killers carried voter lists indicating which houses were Tamil-thus some acts of anti-Tamil destruction were probably planned in advance. But the madness went beyond whatever may have been centrally planned. Individuals took advantage of the chaos to rob, batter or destroy their own real or perceived enemies. Mobs coalesced. "The rioters were the denizens of downtown: men in sarongs; youths in trousers; women in skirts, saris, or traditional wraps; bureaucrats in office clothes; some white-hair elders." Such mobs of people from all walks of life converged upon groups of Tamils and killed them. When the killers saw people on the road, they murdered anyone, rich or poor, man, woman, or child, whom they determined (by speech or identity cards) to be Tamil. Police assisted in the anti-Tamil violence, or stood idly by. In addition to the destruction of life, millions of dollars worth of property owned by Tamils-homes, stores, hotels, and industries-went up in flames.

The events of July 1983 were not the first manifestation of violence against Tamils in which the government was complicit, but they were the worst. The mobsters, looters, and killers were not representative of Sinhala society as a whole. But they prevailed, and there was no organized protection against them.

Before July 1983, both Tamils and Sinhalese thought of their country as a civilized place. Afterward, most Sinhalese went into denial about the enormity of what had happened. Some expressed the view that the Tamils had it coming. And Tamils who had previously been pacifists-from middle-class professionals and wealthy traders to landless laborers-decided that war against the Sri Lankan government was the only option left to them if they wanted to be free of Sinhala domination and its accompanying horrors. They mobilized their physical, material and intellectual resources toward this end. The conflict between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government has been raging ever since.

To understand how and why this storm broke and how and why it has followed this particular course, one must consider myriad factors. Here I describe just a few of the features that constitute Sinhala and Tamil cultures and try to indicate the roles they have played in the current war.

Ancient History

The first human beings set foot on the land now called Sri Lanka perhaps as early as fifty thousand years ago. Recent evidence suggests that India may have been settled first from the south, instead of from the north, as was previously assumed. Thus the island of Lanka may have been settled many millennia before Homo sapiens sapiens ventured into central and northern India. Even if the first human settlers came from the north, it is certain that the people of Lanka and southern India raised their children, became familiar with the landscape, the flora and fauna, and developed their cultures, their technologies, their languages, their arts, and their spirits and minds long before anyone spoke of Siva or Buddha or Tamil or Sinhala or Sanskrit.

The earliest written inscriptions known from that area were created only about two and a half thousand years ago. But before written history, there would have been many waves of migration into and through the island, which is accessible by coastal sea routes from the Arabian peninsula and Southeast Asia and from the Indian mainland. Since its first settlement so long ago, the island has always been awash in the currents of the wide world.

Language, Religion, and Myth

LANGUAGE

The main difference between Sinhala and Tamil people is that they speak different languages. This difference is not trivial. The language you know structures the world you see and feel as real. If you know more than one language, you know more than one world. If you do not, you may have difficulty accepting that your way of understanding the world is not the only valid way. More Sinhalese and Tamils know English than know each other's languages. Few Sinhalese are motivated to learn Tamil. Some urban Tamils take the trouble to learn at least spoken Sinhalese, in large part to facilitate their getting along in a country where Sinhalese-speaking people constitute a majority.

The majority of Tamil-speaking people live not in Sri Lanka but in southern India. There are also old Tamil communities in Malaysia, Fiji, Mauritius, and other places. More recent Tamil communities, collectively called the Tamil diaspora, have developed in Western countries. There are presently about seventy million Tamil speakers in the world. There are only about ten million Sinhalese, of whom the great majority live in Sri Lanka.

The origins of the Sinhala language are enshrined in legend. The word Sinhala (sihala in Pali) means "people of the lion." The first written use of this word as a name for the island or the people on it came in the chronicles Dipavamsa and Mahavamsa of the fourth to fifth centuries A.D. The Mahavamsa traces the descent of the Sinhala people to a lion, hence their name.

Linguistic evidence suggests that the Sinhala language is related to the languages of central India. Hence the Sinhala language, together with north and central Indian languages generally, may be ultimately derived from Sanskrit, in combination with other, more local languages. It is said that the Sinhala language is remarkably homogeneous throughout the island-that is, relatively free of dialect variation-perhaps partly because the Sinhala nationalist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entailed the promotion of "pure" Sinhala. (There was a pure-Tamil movement among Tamils also). The pure-Sinhala movement, like the pure-Tamil movement, never caught on among the masses, but it did result in a standardized orthography and grammar for written Sinhalese. Because a large proportion of Sinhalese people are literate and educated, the standardization of the written language would have conduced to reduction in dialect variation throughout the island. Literacy and standardization of forms in turn allowed the development of what Benedict Anderson calls print nationalism. "From 1860 to 1900, there were hundreds of Sinhala newspapers and periodicals. After that, it became thousands."

The Tamil language and the people who speak it have no mythological origin. Tamil is one of a group of languages spoken in southern India known as Dravidian languages. These are grammatically and phonetically distinct from languages spoken in the north but very similar to one another. Analysis of inscriptions from the Indus Valley civilization of 2500 B.C. indicates that the people there spoke some kind of proto-Dravidian language. This evidence does not necessarily contradict the theory that the first South Asian settlers came from the south, or that Dravidian languages originated there. To the best of modern historical knowledge, Tamil-speaking people have lived in southern India for as long as there have been Tamil-speaking people. It is not unlikely that they settled in Lanka, together with any other peoples already there, before writing was introduced to the area. Inscriptional evidence puts Tamil Buddhist monks on the island of Lanka from the early centuries A.D.

The earliest extant Tamil literature is called Sangam literature because it is believed to have arisen from academies or gatherings (sangam) of scholars and poets. Extant Sangam literature is dated from about the first through about the fifth century A.D. Most Sangam literature consists of collections of short poems about either love or war. This poetry is naturalistic and humanistic in tone and usually bears no overt religious agenda. Features of the natural landscape, together with small but telling details of daily human, animal, and plant life, are woven into the poetry to indicate different emotional moods.

RELIGION

Religious differences among Tamils and Sinhalese are more complicated than linguistic differences: in popular practice there is no sharp line between Sinhala religion and Tamil religion. Most Sinhalese subscribe to a variant of Theravada Buddhism currently called Sinhala Buddhism. Theravada Buddhism is based on early Buddhist texts written in Pali. It includes the idea that only a monk following the path of the Buddha can achieve spiritual liberation. Laypeople can improve their karma in various ways, including by feeding monks; but without joining the sangha (the community of monks), they cannot attain enlightenment. Theravada keeps itself separate from Mahayana Buddhism, which developed about eight hundred years after the life and death of the Buddha. According to Mahayana teachings, you do not have to be a monk to achieve spiritual liberation. They also raise the bar of spiritual achievement: the highest level of enlightenment is not arhat (someone who has achieved personal liberation) but bodhisattva (someone who refuses to be free until all other creatures are free and who works for the liberation of others from suffering). Mahayana supplanted Theravada in India and thence spread north to Tibet, Mongolia, China, Korea, and Japan. Theravada persists in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Buddhism was supplanted in India by Islam, in conjunction with other religious forces: Saivism (the worship of Siva), Vaishnavism (the worship of Vishnu), and Christianity. Sri Lanka is therefore now geographically isolated from other predominantly Buddhist countries.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Enemy Lines by Margaret Trawick Copyright © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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