From: Sandy Vadi <sandyvadi@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Dec 25, 2011 at 11:35 PM

Professor Henri Barkey
Department of International Relations

Lehigh University

Dear Professor Barkey,

I happened to read, by chance really, your recent interview with Rudaw titled ‘Expert: Tamil Solution for PKK Does Not Work’. In the interview, you have been quoted as saying ‘ You can always weaken an organization temporarily, but when its nationalist organization with a huge support base, anything you do is temporary. This unless you do a ‘Tamil Solution’".

What concerns me the most is your coining of a phrase ‘Tamil Solution’ which is totally a strange invention, unless it was inadvertently misprinted for the ‘Sri Lankan Solution’. I hope, you really meant to say that a military solution borne out by the experience of six decades of structural and protracted genocide where the Sri Lankan Tamils have suffered and sacrificed immensely and were brought under the yoke of majoritarian regimes ruling Sri Lanka. In other words, an identical solution attempted by the Libyan and Syrian leaders in killing their own people by calling terrorists and armed thugs, but failed or is failing due to the aggressive international attention focussed on the oil-rich nature of the region

32 months since the unwitnessed onslaught ended in Sri Lanka and LTTE was vanguished alongwith over 40,000 civilians and 146,000 are still unaccounted for according to Sri Lankan government statistics between 2008 and 2011. During the past 63 years, Tamils were killed solely on account of the fact that they are Tamils, like the way Jews were killed simply because they were Jews.

For the past 63 years, the successive Sri Lankan governments have been;

- depriving a section of Sri Lankan Tamils of their citizeship

- denying Tamils being party to the Republican Constitution of Sri Lanka

- declaring the Sinhala flag as the national flag

- imposing ‘Sinhala Only’ as the official language

- giving to themselves as authocthonous Constitution with foremost place for Buddhism

- discriminating against Tamil students seeking University admissions

- depriving Tamil language speakers of employment in public sectors

- dishonouring agreements entered with Tamil politicians and agitating the mass against agreements

- refusing to recognise constitutional safeguards against discrimination

and changing the name of the island to the Sinhala Buddhist name of Sri Lanka

From the inception, this form of democracy raised the problem of power sharing in a multi- ethnic society where one ethnic group, the Sinhala community, made up the overwhelming majority. These features of the constitution distorted the central principle guiding the operation of the democratic system the rule and exercise of power by the majority. The concept of non-ethnic nationhood in the Sri Lankan context encouraged a majoritarian form of democracy in which the majority ethnic community assumed that by virtue of it possessing an absolute numerical majority, democracy conferred on it the intrinsic right to impose its will on the whole of society regardless of the rights and aspirations of the minority. The social forces that were released by the democratic system reinforced the majoritarian trend and intensified the ethnic divisions. In the mid 1950s the majority community decided to make Sinhala the official language of the country. In 1972 the Sinhala leadership firmly rejected the federal idea or any form of power-sharing with the minorities and installed a unitary constitution. The mono-linguistic unitary state in a multi-lingual multi –ethnic society was soon confronted with strong resistance by the Tamil minority which grew into an armed struggle for a separate state and Sri Lanka has been unable to contain its ethnic pograms, as it escalated from mob violence, massive refugee exodus to an all-out military rule today with minorities being psycologically conditioned by the system.

Today, Sri Lanka is being herded in an authoritarian direction by a regime which has embraced majoritarian-supremacism as the path to absolute and long-term power. A democracy cannot be dismantled from within without discarding the principle of universal rights and re-embracing the belief that some people have greater rights than others.

The military of Sri Lanka is All-Sinhalese, motivated by genocidal perceptions, and it has acquired proportions pervading diplomacy to economy. The governors of North East provinces are ex-military chiefs alleged with war crime charges during the most unwitnessed war.

Barbara O’Brien, a Buddhist spiritual author wrote that Sri Lanka has been attempting to establish a Buddhist military kingdom for long time and quoted Sri Lankan leaders as "a demographic majority with a dangerous minority complex of persecution’.

As far as back in early ’80s, after one of the major ethnic riots occured in Sri Lanka, the International Commission of Jurists Review stated "The impact of the communal violence on the Tamils was shattering. More than 100,000 people sought after refuge in 27 temporary camps set up across the country. The evidence points clearly to the conclusion that the violence of the rioters from the majority population amounted to acts of genocide"

Leo Kuper, in his book "Prevention of Genocide (1985)", said in commenting on the failure of the UN Sub Commission on Human Rights to condemn the genocide attack on the Tamils, thus, "It is unfortunate that the UN did not take a firm stand at this stage". A book "New Directions in Genocide Research", edited by Adam Jones, a case study focused, seeking to place both canonical and littile-known cases of genocide include Sri Lankan genocide alongwith Nazi Holocaust and Armenian genocide.

The Kosovo armed struggle lasted only for ten years. KLA was one time a listed terrorist organization by the US and many other countries. The arrested Ratko Mladic preferred to describe his primary identity as "’Yugoslav" rather than "Serb", rejecting ethnic division and asserting "brotherhood and unity", the same way Rajapakse stated " We are all Sri Lankans, there are no majorities or minorities". Mladic said he fought Jihad for Christian Serbs whereas Rajapakse said it was a "Humanitarian Operation"

Sudanese leader Mr. Al-Bashir mobilized the entire Sudanese state apparatus against Fur, Masalit and zaghawa ethnic groups only for six years.

But, the Tamil struggle has been there for six decades ending up in the ‘military solution’ with the eyes of international community shut. As a member of Tamil community, it really hurts when you read ‘do a Tamil solution to the PKK problem’

Best,

Mrs. Sandy Vadi

Toronto, Canada

Reference:

http://www.rudaw.net/english/news/turkey/4254.html