I Protest

When I was young I watched my mother struggle away organizing various campaigns, trying to mobilize more and more people towards a cause and I used to ask her why go through all this effort, the issue isn’t that big after all and you needn’t put so much effort into it. But she would always be patient with me and explain that she was teaching people to- protest. She told me it’s with the smaller issues that you can learn how to withstand the bigger fists in the belief of a cause. But I was at that age where I couldn’t differentiate from feeling strongly about something to acting upon it and I don’t think I understood all what she said then.

When I was in my teens she challenged me to get people to rally towards a cause that I though most people I knew would identify with: garbage disposal, collection and cleaning up our neighbourhood. That’s when I realized that sometimes people weren’t disturbed about some things (even if it affected them directly) and even if was a simple act of coming together and voicing their protest it was too much to ask of them, in their busy set ways of lives. So I learned that people had to be taught to use the tools of a functioning democracy. Only by making yourself heard can you ensure a democratic rule through mutual understanding. This talent is definitely not something we are born with.

When I watched the war on Iraq take place and the whole world go on the streets in protest on the ruthlessness of the American oil conquest, I saw democracy die another death. We were shown with great clarity that those in power laid down the rules for us and that we had little choice and the only time they were going to listen to global opinion was when things backfired on them.

Today , right at this moment, there are so many injustices taking place out there in the world, in your own country, in your very neighbourhood. And somehow whether knowingly or by choosing not to know we let them take place, for history to record them in its many narratives. Right now Palestine makes the news, but let me point out that simply because it didn’t make the headlines during other times it wasn’t to say that their hardships and human rights violations were any different. When you think of the amount of news that never reaches your daily paper headlines due to the tacit agreement between media and the corporate and pressures of governments upon free media practices that act as impediments to the exploration of the truth, it might amaze you. And then again it may not. Maybe I am telling you of something you already know about. The fact that these practices still continue with our knowledge makes them even more frightening.

Right now in Sri Lanka there is genocide underway. The Sinhala army is carrying out a genocidal strategy, where they place embargos on food, medicine and other essentials to the North, especially to Tamil settlements and towns in the name of war on terrorism. They have removed various other non-governmental agencies that were providing aid in these areas. They carry out intense aerial bombing and cluster bombs over areas that were residential, citing schools and hospitals and homes as potential terrorist locations. The government has media regulations by which they control the reporting on the war, this includes brutal murder of anyone who reports contrary to the report issued by the military spokesperson or against the current president Mahinda Rajapakse( like the recent killing of Sunday Leader editor Lasantha) or simply just throwing grenades and destroying a whole television station like they did to MTV, a main private broadcaster. They practice kidnapping and killing of Tamil people in what that has come to be known as the menacing “White van terrors”, where they would come in a white van and simply take away someone, and you will never hear of them again. There is no where that the families of these Tamil people can go and file a report, as even the police is in on this scheme. This also gave the military enough room to carry out extortions and ransoms, where the bigger payments were deposited into the bank account o of no other but the president himself.

A friend of mine tells me that one should be weary of writing about an issue until they know all the facts about it. And I agree with that. But I also think that even to know one has to fight. To be honest the proof to all which I claimed above is everywhere in Sri Lanka. Everyone speak of it and yet they speak of it in hushed voices. There is no knowing who the next target is. Now it is no longer only the Tamil journalists and activists and politicians who are being killed, it could be anyone. So yes it’s not like anyone will produce the proof to you on a silver platter when you asked for it.

It’s sad that when the Sinhala and Tamil people had a chance to protest against the killings of Tamils they did not. And now they cannot protest against the mass murder that the government has unleashed upon its subjects. These are the times when I truly understand what my mother had tried to teach me so long ago about learning to protest. With each choice not to protest we further estrange ourselves from the ability to protest and fight. That is what the people of Sri Lanka did. They gave away their rights each time they let Justice die. The people in power were simply given more power. And now when the people of Sri Lanka have to raise their voices in protest and alarm as never before at seeing the atrocities the Sinhala Government has resorted to they cannot, they remain voiceless and exposed.

You might wonder as to why I lay emphasis on the ethnicity. Whether we like it or not, Sri Lankan politics and loyalties are along ethnic lines(one of those colonial legacies shall we say). Most people when the civil war started used to argue about whether Prabhakaran was the sole leader of the Tamil struggle or not, rarely did they talk about discrimination of the Tamils, or about how the menacing war against the rebel group turned to one against the Tamil population as it became impossible to determine the difference on the surface between the two. Even now the questions that seems to be in the air is “where is Prabhakaran?”, similar to the question where is Osama, while the American military kept bombarding Afghan people, the Sinhala army keeps deflecting the attention away from the real ground issues: the terror tactics of their warfare, the displacement of Tamil people into concentration camps and the resettlement of Sinhala people in those territories which were previously Tamil areas in order to change the balance in the Nothern populations.

We saw Nazi Germany operate like this and that’s when we built global bodies, after the Second World War, so that we can stop these very atrocities from taking place. Many global organizations have already recognized the seriousness of the issues being covered up in Sri Lanka. The Genocide Prevention Project has indicated Sri Lanka as one of the top eight “red alert” countries where Genocide is taking place. Peter Campbell of the world Food Programme has commented how conditions of Northern Sri Lanka are similar to Somalia. Diplomats from other countries have written to the President of Sri Lanka voicing their “disappointment”. Global opinion is that which it claims itself to be, simply an opinion. As long as Sri Lanka has no important resources that is of any interest to the global powers or poses a potential threat there will be no need to put pressure on the government to rethink its practices.

It’s almost fashionable now to talk about ‘issues’. We constantly “condemn” an action. We are never constant in our opposition. In college I witnessed how easy it was to jump from one issue to another without connecting to a greater picture. Being passionate about incidents is hardly productive as being actively opposed to the ways in which incidents operate under certain ideologies of power. And it’s easy to forget the importance of always being aware that you cannot simply theorize and systematize the lives of people. For a long time I have debated over bias, over criticism and presenting a balanced picture and I have learnt from life that it is not simply a journalism classroom. Wars are never about equality and fairness, and even truth is not about balanced perspectives. An armed guerilla movement and a national military force are never equal opponents. When a government of a country wages war on its own people in the name of democracy you can be sure that justice has been killed. For many Tamils who have left Sri Lanka as asylum seekers to other countries they have lost the right to live in their homeland, for those who still live there it has become their living hell.