CLASSIFIED | POLITICS | TERRORISM | OPINION | VIEWS

Professor Rajan Hoole’s human rights award

by C. Wijeyawickrema

27 Dum Americans
"27 Dum Americans" was a newspaper headline in Turkey. The 27 "dummies" were the congressmen from the House Foreign Affairs Committee who voted in favour of the Armenian genocide resolution on October 10, 2007. Some Tamils tell the western press that in Sri Lanka Tamils faced genocide. On September 18, 2007 U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy "stopped" U.S. military assistance to Sri Lanka citing human rights violations in the island (Leahy Law-P.L. 104-208; Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, Sec. 563 of P.L. 106-429).

The U.S. President and the Secretaries of State and Defense vehemently opposed the genocide resolution. But Leahy outburst had no opponents. What is important is that the two incidents made it clear that "Human Rights" has become a political football in the hands of former colonial masters.
White man’s (human rights) burden

The Martin Ennals Foundation (MEF) website has a quotation from Kumar Rupesinghe, who perhaps is the father of the human rights business in Sri Lanka. It is also possible that he spoke with MEF members about the work of UTHR (J). I have no issue with the work done by UTHR (J) or Prof. RH (the math professor or the one appointed as VC of Jaffna Univ.) in fighting to protect human rights.

My concern is that the HR bandwagon of some UNO agents and other INGOs in 2007 has become the new Hudson Bay Company (1670) or the new East India Company (1600) from the West. Instead of fur trade in North America or spices, gems and elephants from Sri Lanka, the White man now has a new burden—protection of HR. He says he is not coming to further fragment former colonies so that the exploitation of resources of these countries becomes easier for the global capitalist.

Yet, do we have even an iota of doubt that just like in the past when Columbus (1492) and Vasco da Gama (1498) came with the Bible and the sword, the likes of Gareth Evans come in 2007 with HR-R2P? HR has a dollar connection. For example, London newspapers waited to write about the plight of plantation workers in tea estates in Ceylon until they were nationalized from British ownership in the 1970s.

Buddhism: rights of animals and plants
I wonder how Mr. Martin Ennals (ME), who began with AI (Amnesty International) and ended up with IA (International Alert), would react from his grave if he heard that his disciple in Sri Lanka gets paid at the rate of over million rupees per month for HR services and pays a quarter million rupees a month to his assistant. I have however no doubt that ME (or Kofi Annan for that matter) did not know that for Buddhists HR is not a western-developed idea. West reacted to actions of Hitler, Stalin and the cruelties by the Japanese army. In Buddhism animals and even plants have rights. This is what the Native American Indians also believed.

Those who wrote HR charters for the UN were a collection of white or black-white people who grew up under the Judeo-Christian paradigm where life is uni-directional (one-way path- no rebirth) and killing others for self-defense is the accepted norm. For Buddhists, life is cyclical and killing even an ant is a sin.

With impermanence of life reminded on a daily basis a Buddhist cannot harm or hurt another human being. Women were allowed to become monks 2600 years ago compared to feminist movements in the West. This is why Louise Arbour should be given a copy of the Theri Gatha to introduce her to Buddhism. A Buddhist is also guided by the basic concept of "the Middle Path" which in the western jurisprudence is known as the Doctrine of Reasonableness.

Walk the talk
This is why Buddhists saw a clear difference between Rajan Kadiragamar versus Stanley Tambiah or between Col. Karuna versus Anandasangaree. This was why Buddhist monks came from all over the country for the funerals of Christians such as Kadiragamar’s or Jeyaraj Fernandopullai’s mother. This was why an Englishman became the elected representative from the Anuradhapura electorate in 1931 and again in 1936, uncontested. This was why a Catholic, R.S. Perera, represented the Kelaniya seat, and a Tamil Christian female defeated the professor of Buddhist Philosophy at the election for the Mirigama seat. This was why remote village temple monks provided lodging and meals to Christian priests from town when in the 1900s they went on circuit hunting for converts. This was why the Sinhala Buddhist King allowed the Catholics and Muslims to settle down in his kingdom when the Dutch and the Portuguese were killing them in the coastal areas.

Human right soup and cooks
In the face of organized propaganda against Sri Lanka, it is unfortunate that even its embassies abroad are failing to give "facts" to their host governments. Because of their Christian background it is possible that the late Rajani Thiranagama or Prof. Hoole did not know the Buddhist approach to human life.

The first thing a Buddhist is expected to do before preaching anybody is to feed him because an empty stomach is the source of all other problems. The Koran is all about "feeding the poor," more so than what Engels or Marx wanted to say. This is what Maslow identified as a "basic Need." When you come to think of it all the prominent NGO agents in Colombo are Christians. In the past SJV Chelva, GG Ponnambalam, Thrichelvam and Naganathan were all Colombo-based

Christians.
Buddhists believe that one’s salvation is in one’s own hands and that there is no God to do it for them or even "guide" them in it. A Buddhist can have salvation in this life. There are lesser gods and spirits in the world but it is the internal revolution (spiritual) that brings happiness and not the external revolution (material).

Maslow’s highest level, "Self-actualization," rests with this spiritual growth. This is why Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Karl Marx, Lenin, Mao, Nehru, Castro, Tony Blair or George Bush/Dick Chaney are different from the former Indian president Abdul Kalam, who said that the solution to world’s problems lies in Buddhism.

The "me-culture" of the west always asks "what is in it for me," because of its materialistic individualism, whereas Buddhist societies promotes "us and the community" thinking, always with an eye for personal spiritual growth. Without personal growth community development is not possible, and vice versa.

Western HR gurus armed with the magic word of democracy could perhaps understand this difference by looking at the Panchayathi concept in India. If there is an agreement among five people then god speaks through them. Why Abdul Kalam left the Raj Bhavan with two suit cases, why Lal Bahadur Shastri did not have a bank account or how Vinobha Bhave’s Bhoodan movement could be an exercise in individual spiritual growth for the donor could not be understood under a materialistic western individual way of life.

In this context, we have to ask the world HR network (or lobby) how they define human rights, how they find them or collect data on them, how they prioritize them and how they use R2P on them. Do they not find Maslow’s basic needs data in USA in the Katrina-damaged New Orleans or crime-infested inner-city slums in America, Brazil or Mexico or in the aborigine lands in Australia? One also needs to know who changed the UN HR Committee/Council setup to a one person bureaucratic show of UN HR Commissioner.

Is there any other organization more corrupt than the UNO? We know what AI agents did at the Sri Lanka-Australia cricket match. Yes, Sri Lanka has an IDP issue in the cleared areas. Yes, there can be rogue soldiers who should be punished for putting drops of dung to the pot of milk, as a local saying goes. But of all the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs how Global lobby of HR became so interested in the Sri Lankan case is a mystery.

In addition to indirectly working for global capitalism, can there be philosophical links of HR saints to Harvard Professor Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations or the last Pope’s 21st century goal of converting Asia into Christianity? With the Chinese ‘threat’ in South Asia may be the suspected designs by the West to balkanize India are buried, but Sri Lanka is the only place where the Theravada Buddhism is still surviving after 2600 years. In India Buddhism got wiped out, in South Korea it is decimated, and Koreans lead the evangelization movement in Asia.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2nd ed., Harper & Row, 1970
Gandhian satyagraha with "boys"

With the above introductory background, one can now ask whether Prof. RH did tell "the good, the bad and the ugly" in his acceptance speech of the Martin Ennals Award (Island, 6/10/2007). Prof. RH had to perform an impossible task. This was the tight rope that the late Neelan Thiruchelvam also had to struggle with then, and what Mr. Anandasangaree is now finding difficult to avoid. They cannot support a mad terrorist group but they cannot fully condemn it either.

Tamil separatist politicians from Colombo, even when they had the Leader of the Opposition position, felt that the "boys" provided them a "comfort zone," a raw power that Mao said was coming from the barrel of the gun. Sinhala politicians in Colombo who thrived on a beggar’s sore called the ‘ethnic war’, agreed to all kinds of ‘concessions’ (devolution packages, 10-year lease of NP as real estate, CFAs, P-Toms) when they found that their lives in Colombo were not safe from suicide bombs made in Jaffna (they never expected that what had happened to Alfred Duraiyappa and the CID Inspector Bastianpillai could one day happen to them in Colombo 07). It is this ‘bargaining chip’ that the ‘international community’ is desperately trying to save. They and the NGOs and the German Ambassador in Colombo vehemently demand an end to bombing the terrorist bunkers in the Wanni. So, HR agents go on comparing Sri Lanka with Nazi Germany and Rwanda or Darfur. The likes of Prof. RH are trapped in a prison of their own creation.

Dilemma of Tamil intellectuals
Tamils like Prof. RH are facing a dilemma because they want it both ways. Hence, despite such carefully placed words like ‘we suppressed nothing’, ‘we gave frank account of how both sides acted’, he cannot yet hide the singular fact oozing out of his speech that he is for the Tamil demand that began in 1919 (just one year after Tamilnadu made a demand for a separate country in India) for a separate Tamil country in Sri Lanka.

For the 16 million Sinhalese ‘Federated Lanka’ is a ‘two-state island fighting for borders and water rights in the north, east, central and even in Colombo. Col. Karuna who once saved Prabakaran’s life realized this and he framed the Tamil grievance in its correct perspective: ‘give us what Colombo gets’. This is not just a Tamil ‘aspiration’ but an ‘aspiration’ of the Sinhala and Muslim villagers in Sri Lanka.

The recent exit and re-entry of CWC as ministers also proves this point. Tamil problem (and the Sinhala and Muslim problem) is a basic needs problem of food, clothing and shelter (the base of Maslow’s pyramid), and not a dream of a Tamil state at the UNO. The late Kumar Ponnambalam’s sudden realization from his wealth and power in Colombo that Tamils have aspirations reminds one the saying, "only those with access to electricity romanticize the candle (light dinners)."

What then is the ‘dignity and justice (that Prof. RH says) that the Tamil community lost in Sri Lanka’? What kind of ‘ideologically directed violence was there against the minorities and especially Tamils’? Where is ‘Sinhalese hegemonic state’? Who are the ‘Sinhala chauvinists?’ By not telling ‘the truth, nothing but the whole truth’, in my view, Prof. RH had violated the spirit of Martin Ennals’ grave and joined the world-wide HR network which has become an instrument promoting global capitalism. The rest of this essay attempts to show the unreasonableness of the foundation that Prof. RH had used as his international HR platform.

1. Sinhala Buddhists never discriminated against minorities.
Mr. Anandasangaree said this publicly. Then who harmed Tamils? If there was specific harming of Tamils, it was done by the ruling elites in Colombo who are known as the ‘black-whites’ (coconuts in Mexico, brown outside-white inside). When the power of English of about 5% of people were to be replaced with swabhasha, Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim, elites and Marxists living in Colombo created a Sinhala-Tamil language conflict. If a Tamil doctor wants a job in the Sinhala areas, he cannot expect his Sinhala patient to learn Tamil (or English).

2. Sinhala Buddhist chauvinists
This idea was first promoted in the 1970s by Mrs. Vishaka Kumari Jayawardena (nee Soyza) who grew up in London with her English mother. For her, A. E. Gunasinghe’s objection to imported Malayali or Indian labour was un-socialist and nationalist. AEG had a 2500-old heritage to protect. Vishaka was thinking in terms of Irish labour living in slums in London in the late 1800s and the early 1900s of which Engels (1840s) and later the American Jack London provided first-hand accounts (The people of the Abyss (life in the East End of London in 1902), 1903.) According to Vishaka’s ‘Fourth Internationale-based theory’, the present debate in USA against Mexican labour is unscientific!

Not a single true Sinhala Buddhist leader preached discrimination against other religions or other minorities. The writings of Anagarika Dharmapala, Gunapala Malalasekara or Tennakoon Vimalananda did not ask Buddhists to discriminate against Tamils, Christians or Muslims.

3. Sinhala Buddhists faced humiliation for 500 years
Since the advent of the Portuguese in 1505, from their acts of destroying Buddhist temples and the use of stones from these temples to build fortresses and churches to the Section 29(2) in the Soulbury Constitution it was the Sinhala Buddhist who faced humiliation and discrimination. It was the Buddhist temple which protected Sri Lanka’s heritage from destruction as what had happened in Hispanic South America, Native American in North America, Maldives Islands or in Korea.
If independence does not mean that the suppressed majority could take steps to remedy this discrimination then who wants that independence? How can Prof. RH call this liberation from majority oppression? Doesn’t he know as William Blake once said, "One law for the lion and the ox is oppression’? Does he know that in India, USA and Brazil just to name three countries, this kind of remedial actions are implemented for decades? Does he know that in South Africa, the black majority and in Iraq, the Shia majority were the sufferers? It was the English-speaking, western-educated Colombo rulers who abused the reversal process and not the Sinhala Buddhist villagers.

4. Tamils enjoy more rights in Sri Lanka than in their homeland in Tamil Nadu
Can Prof. RH deny this?

5. Tamils in the South are richer than the Sinhala people in the South
Can Prof. RH deny this? In Colombo itself two-thirds of the people are Tamils and Muslims. In slums in Colombo one finds the Sinhala poor not Tamil poor.

6. Tamils prefer to live with the ‘Sinhala chauvinists’!
Can Prof. RH deny this?

7. World Tamil Federation wants a country for Tamils
Can Prof. RH deny that the best bet in this regard is the island of Sri Lanka, and not Malaya or the Fiji Islands or even Tamil Nadu?

8. Does Prof. R H. accept that there is a traditional Tamil homeland in the Eastern Province? This is the question I ask from the UTHR (J) also. If the answer is ‘yes’, then the difference between it and Prabakaran is only a matter of weapons used—cyanide capsule versus words.

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