Gloomy Gordon’s depressing reading of history

September 17, 2011, 6:19 pm

by Kumar David

Gordon Weiss was United Nations Spokesman in Sri Lanka for two years during the civil war and his recent book The Cage (The Bodley Head, London, 2011) was on the shelves in the bookshops for some weeks before the government had it taken off; so much for the eyewash called lifting Emergency Regulations! Certainly the book is scathing in its exposé of the Rajapaksa brothers and the military (So what, is criticism of the royal family prohibited?) but it is also merciless in denouncing the Tamil Tigers. Weiss is not pro-Eelam; "I went to Sri Lanka as a supporter of the state’s essential right to protect its sovereign territory, and I left with much the same view". He says the government had every right to fight the war to victory but "the tactical choices the Sri Lanka Army was directed to make, and which contributed to the deaths of so many civilians, warrant a credible judicial investigation of the kind that the Sri Lankan state . . . is no longer capable of mounting". (Emphasis added).

If I were asked to sum up the book in one sentence it would be: Horrendous crimes, including war crimes and crimes against humanity were perpetrated by the government and the Tigers over a long period and only an independent international investigation will ever get at the truth. Weiss backs it up with firsthand statements, documents and reports from victims, Catholic priests, medical teams, the ICRC and on the spot UN personnel. His narrative is plausible and his arguments cogent (there are minor errors such as dates). The Cage is a knockout blow that the Sri Lankan state, the military and rump-LTTE will not be able to stomach. No wonder the government had it taken off the shelves; it does not want you to read it. Its persuasive power invests the findings of the Darusman Report with great credibility.

However, my intention today is not to review the book in relation to its storyline, the civil war in Sri Lanka, but to take up a tangential matter that Weiss adverts to in his preface and emerges at other points in the text, particularly the closing chapter. In a word, it is a pessimistic reading of current world history, mainly in less developed countries, in respect of democracy and human rights. He senses a bleak future. It is not surprising that his sojourn in Colombo, at the height of the war, left him in a negative frame of mind. However I will argue that there are reasons to hypothesise that he could be wrong in the post-Gaddafi world.

Darkness at Noon

It would not be fair to attribute the origins of the thesis I am contesting to Weiss; it has been developed in various forms for over a decade; that is ever since the right of states to terrorise their citizens with impunity surfaced, again, as an accepted norm, after petering out at the end of the Second World War. The endnotes quote two sources, and there are other known articulations; Samuel Huntington’s controversial notions, inter alia point in the same direction. Larry Diamond, Weiss says, introduced the term ‘democratic recession’ to describe countries that became democracies after WW2 and the Cold War ended, but subsequently opted for a deficit and decline of democracy, liberal values, accountability and human rights.

The thesis holds that increasingly, repression, authoritarianism and gross brutality are becoming the norm. Weiss says: "This decay is well illustrated in Sri Lanka, where the pay-off for aspiring membership of the club led by Western liberal democracies is no longer quite as alluring as it was. With China as backstop, the Rajapaksa regime felt no compunction about thumbing its nose . . ."

At the heart of this thesis lies the rebalancing of global economic power contingent on the rise of China, and I add, more recently the global capitalist recession. Weiss fears that "countries such as Sri Lanka can achieve economic prosperity, underwritten by China, without the inconvenience of domestic political freedoms . . . (or) a shared moral order among nations".

General Rupert Smith of Bosnian peace keeping familiarity is also quoted: "(A) new kind of war . . . in which people in the streets, the houses, the fields – all the people everywhere – are the battlefield. Military engagements can take place anywhere, with civilians around, against civilians, in defence of civilians. Civilians are the targets, objectives to be won, as much as the opposing force". This could just as well be the Sinhala State and the Tamil Tigers throughout the civil war, or Sri Lanka’s police and military in 1971 and 1988-90.

While this is all true I need to make an aside. How do we contextualise this with the barbarity and brutality against civilians before and during WW2? I am not referring to Hitler’s gas chambers and Japanese genocide in China in the 1930s and brutalising prisoners during the war only. I also have in mind Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the firebombing of civilians en masse in Berlin, Dresden and other German cities to feed Churchill’s vengeful blood lust – for what, the destruction of Coventry? Later the world saw war crimes, bombing of civilians en mass and violence against the very earth in America’s devastation of Vietnam.

Nevertheless, I roundly reject the bigots and charlatans who exclaim some version of the following: ‘The Imperialists wantonly destroyed defenceless societies and civilisations, so don’t dispute our sovereignty when we kill-off a few thousand.’ My point is different; painting an end-of-civilisation hypothesis in the ‘democracy recessive’ third world is an oversimplification of a deeper, darker side of human nature. "Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn" and it has gone on for rather a long time, in rather too many places.

After Gaddafi

I am jubilant about Gaddafi’s overthrow, but like other supporters of the revolution I am also worried about the challenges of building a new united and democratic Libya. Yes, the project may suffer setbacks, even derail and there are reports of atrocities. But that this second stage is arduous is no reason to shrink from the first stage of eliminating the tyrant. Without this the democratic project could not even have got started. I am also a strong supporter of the decision of the revolutionaries to call for NATO air-strikes and limited military assistance without which they would not have succeeded in overthrowing the vicious regime. To my mind the Libyans satisfied the crucial condition for accepting assistance from European and American capitalism (oh yes, I have no illusions) and some Gulf States; viz. final decision making power remained firmly in Libyan hands.

The Libyan case is a new turn and an antidote to the pessimism of the Darkness at Noon thesis. The role of foreign military power in tipping the balance was crucial. Though China’s global economic role has grown dramatically, the cutting edge of Western power is military. China is focused on mega economic projects in infrastructure and raw materials extraction, but the Arab Spring has exposed both China and Russia as deficient in military capacity to intervene or to ship assistance to their buddies. Furthermore the international community was quick to deploy financial muscle and freeze Libyan assets. The message that comes across is that in matters military, or in flouting asset lock-downs, we are a far cry from the old days of the Soviet Union, or Vietnam and Cuba defying imperialism.

Especially important for Lanka is the Indian Ocean. Following on Indo-American strategic agreements it can be taken as given that Chinese involvement in the littoral states will remain economic not military. It would be dim-witted if anyone expects a flotilla of sampans to paddle in and sink the Seventh Fleet. While the odd submarine may dock or spy vessel snoop, China has no stomach for deep military adventures so far from home. Her military interests, for now, lie in the Taiwan Straits, the East China Sea, perhaps the near western Pacific, and in airpower of regional capability. The nigger in the woodpile of course is the oil rich South China Sea where an ugly conflict, China versus Vietnam and the Philippines, is on the boil.

Glimmer of a Brave New World

To return to my theme, the question that we need ponder is whether the ability of the West to influence the outcome in Libya, and more mutedly in Egypt, has sparked a strategic shift towards confronting authoritarianism and the abuse of power in ‘democratic deficit’ states. Good-cop intervention, in the eyes of the liberal world, may have started in Bosnia, Kosovo and driving out the odd ghastly African dictators, but what triggered a global perception shift was the Arab Spring. The criticism of Obama in the case of Egypt is why he prevaricated, why he didn’t push Mubarak sooner. The question now asked, albeit cynically, is when will the West close down its client monarchies and Gulf potentates? If it can preserve its oil interests and ease out inconvenient satraps, it is indeed likely to weigh the option.

In the aftermath of the fall of Gaddafi, the opposition, in every country groaning under a dictator, is salivating at the prospect of foreign intervention. In Lanka, for sure, the Tamil minority is convinced and explicit in pronouncing that unless India and the international community get in on the act, nothing will persuade the Rajapaksas to embark on a new constitutional dispensation.

Intervention in Libya has gone down well; world opinion has not labelled it dirty imperialist intrusion or greed for oil, though it would be naïve to imagine the incursion was altruistic. Liberals and radicals alike have applauded eliminating Gaddafi; even the Hell-No-Obama Tea Party clowns in the USA have climbed aboard the triumphal bandwagon. A very different mood is now catching on in the world. It says, since outside intervention may be a deciding factor, it’s ok to slip in the spanner if it’s for a good cause. The definition of a good cause invariably means jettisoning a grotesque dictator.

I have not noticed Western foreign policy boffins wake up to the import of this shift in public morals and mood, but I guess Cameron, Sarkosy and Hilary Clinton’s spooks are rubbing their eyes and awakening to a brave new world. So Gloomy Gordon can cheer up. Pity the last chapter of The Cage, called ‘Post Mortem’, rambling, wordy, pointless and directionless; it blotches the closure of an informative and unique read – actually there is no other comprehensive description of the war in the Vanni available.

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