various rambling thoughts

We are seeing the end of LTTE, one of the most notorious and well known militant organization in the world. And it is something that needs to be welcomed. LTTE had become the very problem that they had started out to solve in 1983 – securing a peaceful future for the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.

Like most guerrilla movements with a cause, LTTE had started off fighting a real oppression and found wide ranging support among the Tamil population, which is why its supporter base grew by leaps and bounds. But as with many revolutions that meanders for too long, LTTE became an organization that sought power as its means and ends. The ideal for the movement would have been to join the political process once they were in a position of strength and had successfully championed the cause of Tamil empowerment in the island.

Instead, even after repeated peace overtures, LTTE chose to keep fighting thus betraying to the world that it was hungry for power only and not for any kind of resolution. The result has been a thorough fascist organization under a megalomaniac leader.

LTTE also got corrupted in many other ways, almost right from the start – the practice of using child soldiers being the most heinous one, using civilians as pawns and human shields and torpedoing any development projects that came up in the ‘liberated’ zone, thus stymieing any hope of better conditions for the people under their control, the people they were ostensibly liberating.

However, if you read about the protests that are still taking place by the Tamil diaspora in the various cities around the world, to force the western governments to make the Sri Lankan government stop the military operation, you would wonder whether the much vaunted power of the internet to disseminate large amount of knowledge at the click of a button is really just a societal marketing phrase.

Because in these protests, we hear about the atrocities committed by the army only and not about the unnecessary casualties inflicted on the civilians by LTTE who are refusing to let the civilians escape and holding them by force. It would seem that the diaspora has shut its eyes and ears to any other information other than what chauvinistic Tamil websites are spewing which are still holding to the illusionary promise of a Tamil Eelam, their equivalent of land of milk and honey. The fact that LTTE has repeatedly violated human rights seems not to have made any dent in their opinions. The diaspora just wants to keep on believing that something that they have funded could not be committing atrocities against its own people.

It is also assumed that by the diaspora that they can speak for the Sri Lankan Tamils just because of a common ethnicity and in the process completely discounting the fact that what they believe and what actually happens on the ground are two very different things. There is a large trace of ethnic chauvinism in these protests. The question that they need to be asked is – what will happen if there is a ceasefire? There has not been a single instance that the Tigers have honoured a peace process. What will happen to the long suffering Tamil population in the island who have had to live in the crossfire for nearly three decades now? LTTE has been thoroughly discredited. Do they want the organization to keep scuttling the future of the Tamils in the region?

The problem is that solutions are absent but the anger is there and a completely irrational fundamentalist anger – truly the most fanatic fundamentalist is also the most ignorant one. Especially one whose whole contribution to the situation has been money sent to LTTE for the ‘Tamil cause’.

It just goes to prove a maxim that Julius Caesar reportedly spoke almost two millennia ago - “Men believe what they want to believe”..and no amount of information right under their noses can make a difference.