What is so civil in a civil war?

In the second version of this blog that began in June 2008 after I deleted all the previous entries, I worried about a few global hotspots as I observed them from my corner of the world.  I listed in that August 2008 post the following countries/regions in addition to Iraq and Iran:

• Pakistan
• Afghanistan
• Georgia
• Zimbabwe
• Sudan/Darfur
• Israel/Palestine
• Lebanon
• Sri Lanka
• Burma
• Tibet

Only Georgia has really gotten off that list, right?

About Sri Lanka, this is what I wrote in that post in 2008:

This AFP report says it all: Strife-torn Sri Lanka is bracing for intense and bloody battles as security forces close in on the political capital of the Tamil Tiger rebels, according to military analysts.

That was in the summer of 2008.  The 25-year old civil war that began on "Black July" in 1983 was entering yet another bloody--yes, literally bloody--stretch. 

Here in the US, it was the summer of the presidential election season, with a young and untested but charismatic Barack Obama even going to Berlin and addressing the crowds that were all eager for a change from the Bush-Cheney era.  

The US couldn't care about the violence in Sri Lanka.

Later that December, I was in India, and observed people and the press expressing worries over the increased military assaults on Tamil areas in order to wipe out the Tamil Tigers.  So, I did what I could.  I wrote a newspaper commentary after returning home.

The Sri Lankan government didn't ease up.  It was a scorched earth approach to wiping out the Tamil terrorists, and civilian deaths and displacement didn't matter one bit to the government.  The leadership of the Tamil Tigers were killed.  An uneasy peace settled on the island.

All these in an island with which Arab merchants fell in love on first sight, which is why they called it serendip, which morphed into the English word "serendipity" to mean something absolutely awesome that just appeared or happened when least expected.

I was reminded of all that, of the roommates in my first year of graduate school, and more, when we watched Funny Boy.

The best #Tamil movie that I have watched in decades ... is a Canadian movie about #SriLanka ...#FunnyBoy involves two complex issues at once: #CivilWar and #Homosexuality https://t.co/Vfpi6unq65

— Am Dr Khe (@congoboy) February 2, 2021

If you read until here, well, you might be interested in a French/Sri Lankan movie we watched a couple of years ago.  Dheepan is a movie that is about three Sri Lankan Tamils who are in France after fleeing the civil war.

All I can do is read about peoples and countries, watch movies, and wish for peace.  That itself is a start, right?

There comes a point when you don't want to know

There comes a point when you don't want to know.

After reading that final sentence of the short story, "Roadkill," in the latest issue of the New Yorker, it felt most appropriate for me to put that magazine down, turn the lights out, and go to sleep.  There was a lot for the mind to process.

In so many different contexts, I have wondered about that same sentiment that perhaps I didn't want to know anymore about whatever it was that I was interested in.  Every bit of knowing something seems to take away that much more from the otherwise possible blissful state.

The short story experience was after I had read this essay, in that same issue, about the growing discontent in China over pollution.  It was a narrative that was simple and direct.  An accidental environmentalist, Wang Jun, says:

G.D.P. ... doesn't mean anything if you don't have life.

You can see why I noted that my mind had a lot to process before drifting off to sleep.

The older I get, the more I am bothered by challenges like pollution and war and, the big picture of the human condition.  What is it exactly that we are trying to do?  As one of my graduate school professors often asked us, "what are you trying to maximize?"

I wish I could simply say I don't want to know.

For a few years now, I have always tried to make students in my classes think about whether it is worth all that to have China as the world's factory and, thus, have all the inexpensive stuff, when there is widespread pollution of unheard of proportions, which then ultimately is about the human condition there.

We are, by now, familiar with the level of pollution in Beijing or Shanghai.  And slowly we are also getting to learn about how much "environmental damage is much worse in smaller industrial cities."  Like at Handan, "which is two hundred and fifty miles to the southwest of Beijing."

Handan's average PM2.5 for the first half of this year was 130.5.  By comparison, Beijing's was 101.3 and Manhattan's was 8.3.  The W.H.O.'s guidelines say that any particulate matter is harmful, but it sets a PM2.5 target of 10.  In other words, the concentration in Handan was thirteen times worse than W.H.O.'s target.

There comes a point when you don't want to know.

I am, of course, not the only one to make jokes about whatever awful situation that I am in.  As much as I make fun of my hassles such as the solitary state, the people in Handan have their own ways of trying to laugh through this misery:

There's a joke that a Handan person went to Switzerland and the air was so good that he began to feel sick from all the oxygen ... So they quickly hooked up a tube to a car's exhaust pipe and he sucked on that for a while until he felt better.

Can't laugh though, can you?

As I tell students, as if I have to do full disclosures even though I am not required to, I am not even an environmental nutcase and even I am deeply troubled by all these.  It is not any drive within me to retain everything in its pristine condition and I understand that there will have to be tradeoffs.  But, we certainly seem to be giving up way too much in order to make sure that we can have the cheapest possible iPhone.

Earlier this morning, before beginning to blog about these, I read the interview with Romesh Gunasekara, the author of "Roadkill."  He notes there:

Art is forever trying to capture the fleeting moment, but this moment—post-war Sri Lanka—has an urgency that will not wait much longer. The past, the future, and even the present are unclear, but soon there will be a dominant narrative of these times, which will make it more difficult to remember those uncertainties.

In my classes, too, I try to help students make sense of the fleeting moment.  I suspect that most do not pay any attention to me, which is the norm anyway.  Perhaps they are already practicing the idea that there comes a point when you don't want to know?  Maybe they are wiser than me.

Caption at the New Yorker:
A newly built residential development in Handan on a typical morning, shrouded in thick smog

Remembering "Black July": When Serendip meant hell!

I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Sri Lanka.  Not merely because it was a place that my grandfather almost got to, but did not. There were other family stories, too, of people from immediate and extended families having worked and lived in Ceylon.  A wonderful cousin, who is my brother's age, was even born in in that country and earned the nickname of "Ravanan."

BBC's newsfeed reminds me that it was exactly thirty years ago that the paradise became hell.  The island, which was referred to as "Serendip" by the Arab merchants for the enchanting beauty that it was, and which then gave the word "serendipity" to the English language, transformed into a hell on earth.

Thirty years ago, Tamil separatists stepping up militant attacks in northern Sri Lanka killed 13 soldiers who reported for duty only a day earlier. Over the next few days, mobs of the Sinhalese majority took revenge, killing between 400 and 3,000 Tamils around the country and triggering a civil war that lasted 26 years and sent hundreds of thousands of Tamils into exile. 

I was an undergraduate student in Coimbatore when newspapers carried reports and photos on the front pages.  Those were some chaotic undergraduate years, in my mind and in the world outside.  A year later, Indira Gandhi was shot dead, which then unleashed a killing frenzy in India too.  Conversations at tea-stalls near the college were all about Lanka.  India being a country of argumentative males with strong opinions, there were discussions in plenty over watery and sugary tea.

Within a matter of days, our college and most colleges throughout the state were closed down because of student protests.  The youth in Tamil Nadu wanted the Indian government to step in and help the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Black July was a recruiting agent for Tamil militants and catapulted the country into full-blown war, which would last 26 years and kill 100,000 or more people.
It had a drastic demographic effect as hundreds of thousands of Tamils fled abroad, said CV Wigneswaran, a retired Supreme Court judge who has just become a politician for the largest Tamil party.
"With that started the brain drain. A lot of intellectuals, lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers all went away from Sri Lanka. They thought there was no way out," he said.
"The diaspora today still cannot forget the death, damage, destruction that took place in 1983 because of which they had to leave Sri Lanka and go abroad."

I became familiar with this war-displaced Sri Lankan diaspora.  In 1987, when I came to Los Angeles for graduate schooling, my apartment-mates included two Sri Lankan Tamils.  Kugan was an emotional wreck, and even one criticism of the terror tactics that the LTTE employed would send him over the cliff and he would remind us of the horrors of that fateful July.  His sweetheart lived in Sri Lanka, and he could barely wait for her to join him in the US.  I think it was in 1989 that she finally was able to join him and their wedding was soon after at the temple in the canyons off Malibu.

Meanwhile, one of Kugan's close friends also came over for graduate school.  Ravi had more firsthand horror stories to narrate. One was absolutely cinematic.  It is one thing to watch a horror scene unfold on the screen.  But, when one realizes that this was no movie, it is bone-chilling and depressing, to say the least.  I remember his story of being chased by a Sinhalese mob, jumping over compound walls, hiding wherever he could, in order to save his life.  And, he exited the country when the opportunity came.

It was a tragic irony to study about Sri Lanka in the economic development literature in the graduate courses.  Sri Lanka and Costa Rica were some of the favorite textbook examples of how a society can have social indicators comparable to developed economies even without material prosperity.  Social indicators such as high literacy rates, long life expectancy, low infant mortality, relatively equal income distribution.  All these in an island with which Arab merchants fell in love on first sight.  Yet, it was a living hell. A hell from which a few escaped. A hell where sometimes men and women were burnt alive, or raped, or ...

An unfortunate reminder it is that not all that glitters is gold.  That an enchanting paradise is not always a paradise.  It is not the fault of the paradise though--it is all because we humans are no angels.

Happy Anniversary. And, Happy Birthday, America

Right from when I was a kid—a long time ago in India—I was familiar with the importance of the Fourth of July in the United States because of a family connection: the standing joke at home was that my parents lost their freedom when they got married on the very day that Americans celebrate their independence.

So, yes, anniversary greetings to my parents.

After gaining American citizenship, the Fourth of July is, of course, way too special for me. To quote from the musical, West Side Story, “I like to be in America, okay by me in America.”

Perhaps it is a typical immigrant emotion after all when I think that my love for this country is out of the ordinary because I consciously weighed the alternatives and worked to come to America. The American citizenship was not my "birthright."

Immigrating to America or any other country has never been as easy as it is now—unlike a few generations ago when most of the world’s population stayed at, or close to, the places where they were born and raised. Now, we move from state to state in this country, and with relatively little effort we migrate across international borders, and make ourselves new homes in strange places.

In our family, my grandfather was offered a job in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) because of his valued metallurgy qualifications from a reputed Indian university.

If grandfather had sailed on that ship, for sure my family’s history would have taken a different turn.

However, he was compelled to reject that offer and stay back in India.

It was not because the job did not pay enough--the offer was apparently a phenomenal one. But, his mother, who was deeply rooted in traditions, threatened to commit suicide if he went too far away from her!

Ah, mothers, without whom psychiatrists will be jobless :)

The distance between my grandfather's hometown and Ceylon’s capital city, Colombo, was nothing—a mere 250 miles. In contrast to that, a few decades later, I travelled half way around the world, in order to be here in the US.

In my case, my mother cheered me on.

In an interesting irony, I left India on its independence day--August 15th.  So, I now have an addition to the family joke: I gained my independence the very day in 1987 when Indians were celebrating the anniversary of self-rule and the end of the British Raj :)

And America has been home since the day I landed in Los Angeles.


Happy Birthday, America!

Proof that South Asians have made it in the US? Wall Street indictments!

Raj Raratnam, a Sri Lankan-born hedge fund tycoon, is found guilty of securities fraud, and faces up to almost twenty years in prison.  The only real question that the jury had was whether Raj was smart or stupid.

Stupid?

"He was very stupid. That was the sad part. He traded for less money than he already had. If you’re going to steal, steal big."

Or smart?

He was a “chameleon” who “could adapt to whatever personality to get whatever he wanted..."

"He knew how to pick his victims. He knew who was weak and who was crooked. It’s better to have weak and crooked people feeding you information."

But the jurors went meticulously though every detail to make sure they didn't send an innocent man to prison.

Tied to this Sri Lankan are a bunch of other characters as well, many with roots in the Subcontinent.  Including Rajat Gupta, who headed McKinsey to newer heights, before being termed out:

According to the SEC, it was on the evening of June 10, 2008, that Gupta, in "a flurry" of phone conversations with Raj Rajaratnam, the founder of the Galleon Group of hedge funds, allegedly divulged Goldman Sachs's still secret second-quarter earnings.
In early March, the SEC stunned global business circles when it filed a civil administrative proceeding against Gupta, accusing him of leaking information from confidential boardroom discussions held by Goldman and Procter & Gamble to Rajaratnam—accusations Gary P. Naftalis, Gupta's attorney, calls "baseless." Gupta has not been criminally charged, but for seven weeks this spring, during Rajaratnam's sensational insider-trading trial, hardly a day passed when Gupta's name was not mentioned. Although federal prosecutors called him an unindicted "co-conspirator," he never appeared at the trial. But jurors heard his voice, caught on an FBI wiretap, resonating through the courtroom, saw his face in a photograph beamed onto a large video screen, and listened as his professional and personal lives were dissected by federal witnesses. While Rajaratnam is alleged by the SEC to have made more than $17 million from Gupta's information, what Gupta himself might have earned is less clear.
Gupta has been removed from the prominent corporate and philanthropic boards on which he once served and is shunned by business leaders who were once his friends. His spectacular fall from grace has left the world's leading companies shocked and mystified. Rajaratnam's conviction on 14 counts of fraud and conspiracy on May 11 closes a central chapter in the story

There is more to this "illustrious" list mentioned in the same story, likeVictor Menezes: former Citigroup vice-chairman, and Anil Kumar: of McKinsey and Mindspirit, and Parag Saxena.

Why would Rajat Gupta go down this path?

his quest to amass great wealth led him to lapses in judgment, says Bala Balachandran, dean of the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai, India, and a friend for almost three decades.
“He wanted a billionaire’s life and the question for him was how could he become a billionaire in a short time,” Balachandran says.  ...
Gupta’s former Harvard dorm mate Carberry says he’s dumbfounded as to what went wrong with his friend.
“If the SEC charges are true, something happened to Rajat,” he says. “The Rajat I knew at business school was of the highest integrity. The Rajat I’ve heard on wiretapped conversations isn’t the person I knew.”

We have made it, baby!!!  Next stop: the White House, because we now know how to say "I am not a crook."

Is it news when 1,200 million people beat 20 million?

Apparently it is big-time news--in cricket, where India beat Sri Lanka in the World Cup final.

Cricket overwhelms India, and yet despite all the passion for the game and the sheer number of people there, well, the country has not been been a cricket-winning machine by any means.

I suppose the recent track record is better than when I was a kid.  But, still, when one compares Sri Lanka and India, the latter is a country that has a population that is 60 times the population of the former.  Arithmetically, even India's 50th best team ought to be better than Sri Lanka's first team!

Country	Population (in millions)
Sri Lanka	20
Pakistan	176
Australia	23
New Zealand	4
Zimbabwe	13
Canada	34
Kenya	38
India	1,200
South Africa	50
England	51
West Indies	4
Bangladesh	150
Ireland	4
Netherlands	17

So, it really does mean that demography is not destiny.  How about that negation, Monsieur Comte?
I explored some of these issues in the context of another world cup--when the soccer tournament was held in South Africa last summer.  As I wrote then, "a sport is, thus, more than merely about the game itself.  It presents yet another opportunity to begin to understand the peoples of the world, and their cultures and politics."

Maybe India ought to take the UK route in sports.  The UK doesn't field, say, a soccer teaming representing the UK, but has teams from its component political entities--teams from England, Wales, ... Maybe India, too, ought to field teams from its states!

There is a good chance, however, that this Indian victory might just about establish India's permanence in the sport.  As this NY Times story notes

Cricket may be, as the sociologist Ashis Nandy wrote in 1983, “an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English,” but India took a long time to take control of it. It played its first international matches in 1932, but its all-time record in five-day test matches remains well below .500, and its all-time one-day record is not far above that.
In spite of its massive population, for many years it suffered from a lack of effective pace bowling and a failure to develop talent outside the big cities. Tendulkar — the teenage prodigy who not only exceeds expectation but plays on into middle age and handles ridiculous celebrity with ego-free equanimity — has been the face of India’s transformation

Interestingly enough, Tendulkar's arrival on the international cricket scene almost exactly coincides with India's decision to get rid of its import-substituting industrialization, and to open itself to the global economy.  Tendulkar arrived in international cricket in 1989, and really established himself from 1990 on.  India, which was on the verge of going belly-up, opened up its economy in 1991, with Manmohan Singh as its finance minister--he is now the prime minister of the country, and has been at the helm since 2004.  

Thus, what is really interesting about this World Cup victory is that it comes at a time when India is asserting itself in global economics and politics. 

BTW, America, too, could have been a part of this cricketing world.

Cricket was among the more popular sports in America in the mid-19th century, but baseball's rapid postbellum expansion came at the expense of cricket. Some have argued that the shorter duration of a baseball game, its simpler rules (at least initially), and the fact that it didn't require dedicated fields helped kill cricket, but these claims are hard to evaluate. What's more clear is that marketing played a major role. When a sense of American national identity began to emerge in the decades following the Civil War, along with new communication and transportation technologies, baseball promoters recognized an opportunity. They stitched together some of the existing traveling clubs into the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players in 1871, and young athletes and fans flocked to the unified league. Cricket clubs, by contrast, stayed regional and let the historical moment slip. Many of the top players switched to baseball, and the fans went with them. 

Meanwhile, this sports/business news update:

ESPN is finally on board with the real biggest sport in the world — or the fastest growing at least — cricket.
ESPN announced last month they have bought the US broadcast rights to future ICC events, including the 2015 World Cup.

Rights of women, minorities, poor ... long way to go yet

Real life is often infinitely more troubling than the fictional ones, as evidenced recently in this case of the Sri Lankan maid in Saudi Arabia:

"A Saudi couple tortured their Sri Lankan maid after she complained of a too heavy workload by hammering 24 nails into her hands, legs and forehead" reports Reuters

BBC adds:
"LP Ariyawathie, 49, told staff at Kamburupitiya Hospital her employer inflicted the injuries as a punishment.
X-rays showed that there were 24 nails and needles in her body. Doctors said those remaining inside her body posed no immediate threat to her life.
The nails were up to 2in (5cm) long, a hospital official said."

Just awful :(

Even if you aren't willing to, force yourself to watch this video news report and remind yourself that it is not a movie clip!

Kerala: the "money order economy"

Right from my graduate school days, Kerala, Sri Lanka, and Costa Rica, were classic examples of how social indicators of "development" can be attained even without high levels of per capita incomes.

Sri Lanka then got messier and messier with its civil war.  Costa Rica continues to maintain that shine.

While social indicators in Kerala might make even a few developed countries blush, over the years its economy has started to lag ... a lot. 

It appears that many of the socio-political transformations that made the Kerala miracle possible are pretty much some of the reasons why the state lags behind in economic terms.

The BBC reports:

Many believe that the skewed nature of the economy - it has been called the "money order economy" - is to blame.
Kerala lives off remittances and it lacks a manufacturing base. Economists draw parallels with the Philippines and Sri Lanka, which face similar problems.

The urban-rural gap is the lowest in Kerala

And Kerala has not benefited directly from the rise of its biggest service industry, tourism. Service tax is a federal tax which first goes to Delhi, and is then distributed among different states.
Kerala's biggest advantage - high literacy - has become a strange liability: the vast majority of educated unemployed have to go elsewhere for work.
Economists like KK George, who have spent a lifetime studying the "Kerala conundrum", say the state is facing a "second generation problem" of growth.
"Having fulfilled all millennium development goals, the state has no money left for higher investments. The central government is busy tackling poverty and illiteracy in most states, so doesn't have time or money for Kerala. And successive governments in Kerala have not been able to take it forward," says Dr George.

Yes, they migrate.  The joke, even from my India days, was that when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he was surprised to see a Kerala tea stall there :) 

More from the BBC:

Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen says Kerala has to "learn from the world". Its famed model of development, which is still touted as the most inclusive one, appears to have hit the buffers.
"The Kerala model is grinding to a halt because the social and political groups having fulfilled their original agenda now have no new agendas. Society has lost its capacity to set collective goals. There are no more big dreams," says Dr George.
"The old change agents like the Christian church and their missionary organisations, social reform movements in various caste groups, trade unions and political parties are acting merely as pressure groups either to defend the status quo or to extract the maximum possible share of a cake that is not increasing in size."
Clearly, Kerala needs a new contract between the state and its people to move ahead and build upon its enviable gains.

Here, Oregon is kind of similar in one respect: up until the 1980s, Oregon seemed to be way ahead of the curve on many critical socioeconomic issues.  And since then, well, as a colleague described the situation yesterday at lunch, "we have it all ass backward now" :(

I now routinely tell my students: "you are screwed."  My hope is that they would wake up to the reality that there are lots of problems in Oregon, particularly for the young and the restless ....

I wonder if somewhere along the road, people and politicians in both these states kind of became a tad too  smug and started believing that the world revolves around them, only to later find out that it now revolves around China. And elsewhere ....

Anyway, if Kerala is the "money order economy," then what might be a catchy phrase to describe Oregon's economy? :)  What says you, ye faithful readers (editor: don't count imaginary chickens!)

Is Sri Lanka slipping back into anarchy?

What is with Sri Lanka?

26 years of civil war. 
Brought to an end through a brutal military assault.
Then civilians held in camps.
Presidential elections in which the former military guy, General Fonseka, is the "opposition" candidate.
He loses. 
Then this former military guy is arrested.
Now, the parliament is dissolved, for earlier than scheduled elections.

So, what next, Serendip?

83% of all the work outsourced to one man in Afghanistan

More American Workers Outsourcing Own Jobs Overseas

It is not cricket :-( Anarchy in Pakistan

When I was a kid, the phrase "it is not cricket" meant more than just the game--it was a phrase that described behaviors and actions that were not sportsmanlike.
How do I describe the act of shooting at cricketers, the violence and mayhem? "It is not cricket" is way too lame in this context.

It is sad to read about the attack on Sri Lankan cricket players while they were in Lahore. It is sad on so many grounds. Sri Lanka itself is not a happy place, with its own madness. Pakistan is rapidly spinning out of control. This was in Lahore--not even some small town in Pakistan's northwest.

I just don't understand how the US and the West did not see the coming anarchy in Pakistan, when even an idiot like me, sitting cozily in my home in the Pacific Northwest, have been warning about this for years :-(

Here are a few links to this story:
A video news report from the BBC
A BBC report that also includes a map of Lahore (note that the cricket stadium is named after one of the world's leading thugs--Gadaffi!)

F%&*ed up in Sri Lanka

I suppose it is a F%&*ed up Friday.

I blogged about the deteriorating situation in Sri Lanka, where neither side in the 26-year old civil war seemed to be concerned about civilians and, are instead, gladly bombing away. CNN reports that:

Both sides "appear to be engaged in a perverse competition to demonstrate the greatest disregard for the civilian population," according to the Human Rights Watch, in a 45-page report dated Thursday about warfare in the Vanni region of northern Sri Lanka.
"This 'war' against civilians must stop," said James Ross, legal and policy director at Human Rights Watch.
The group said that both sides are "responsible for the dramatic increase in civilian
casualties during the past month." Independent monitors say around 2,000 have been killed and another 5,000 have been wounded.
"In the last two months alone, both sides have committed numerous violations of international humanitarian law, the laws of war. While not all loss of civilian life is a
laws-of-war violation, the failure of the government forces and the LTTE to meet their international legal obligations has undoubtedly accounted for the high death tolls."

The Civil War in Sri Lanka

Out of sight, out of mind.  That seems to be the bottom line when it comes to the crisis in Sri Lanka.

 

A civil war has been raging in the former Ceylon since 1983, despite several attempts by outsiders to diffuse the tensions and to put an end to the conflict.  The rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and referred to as the Tamil Tigers, has adopted a violent approach to achieve an autonomous homeland for the ethnic Tamils who, it alleges, are discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese.  The Sri Lankan government, over the years, has attempted to squelch the rebellion without much success.  

Until recently.

 

For the first time after many years, the Tamil-dominated Jaffna Pensinsula, in northern Sri Lanka, is now under the control of the Sri Lankan army and government. The Tamil Tigers are now boxed into an area of just over 200 square miles—much smaller than the area that they controlled up until the latest military offensive.    

 

International groups watching the war rather helplessly from the sidelines are worried about the fate of civilians, which is my concern too.  The government, sensing that an ultimate military victory might be within reach—something that has been quite unimaginable over the 26 years—has apparently banned aid groups from entering the war area and assisting civilians.  

Reuters reports that “aid agencies say there are about 230,000 refugees in the war zone, where rights groups say the Tigers are keeping them as human shields.”  

Of course, the Tamil Tigers flatly deny that civilians are being used as shields. 

 

It is not only Tamils who are being caught in the crossfire.  A Sri Lankan newspaper editor, Lasantha Wickrematunge, a Sinhalese himself, was shot dead while he was on his way to work.  Ironically, it was not the Tamil Tigers who killed this journalist, even though he has described the rebels as “among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations to have infested the planet.”  

While the killers are yet to be identified, it is believed that Wickrematunge was a target because he was highly critical of the government’s handling of terrorism in his country.  Wickrematunge predicted his end in an editorial, where he wrote that "When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me."

 

Wickrematunge’s death and the ongoing war highlight how much the ferocious fanaticism of the rebels is being matched by the government's, and how civilians—Tamils and Sinhalese alike—are paying a huge price for this mano a mano behavior. 

 

Over the Christmas break, I was in Chennai—the capital of Tamil Nadu, and the largest city in the state.  “Tamil Nadu” means the “land of the Tamils” and, as one would surmise, there is, therefore, immense sympathy for the Tamils in Sri Lanka.  There were public demonstrations urging the government—at the state and federal levels—to act in order to help both the Tamils and the Sri Lankan rebels. 

 

Of course, while there is enormous sympathy for the Tamil civilian population in Sri Lanka, the same cannot be said for the Tamil Tigers—after all, this same rebel group was responsible for assassinating India’s former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, back in 1991, at an election campaign rally only a few miles south of Chennai. 

 

Yet, I find that there is very little coverage in the US of this serious development.  I do not think there has been a statement on this from our State Department and White House, either.  

Granted that this news item has to compete against updates on the global economic meltdown, the presidential transition, or the situation in Gaza. But, even the controversy over Russia turning off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine and other European countries gets more coverage, not to speak of the hours that were spent on the recently concluded Golden Globes. 

 

I would think that the Sri Lankan situation where hundreds of thousands of civilians are caught in the crossfire merits our attention.  However, and unfortunately, it turns out that the importance of destruction of life and property depends on the geographic area where that happens. 

 

William Shakespeare said it best, although in a different context: “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

update: this was published in the Register Guard on January 19, 2009, under the title "Sri Lanka flies under the radar"

Figting over land: Gaza, and Eelam

The conflict (war?) in Gaza is to the Israeli government the final push to silence Hamas and its acts of terrorism.  Meanwhile, in another part of the planet, the Sri Lankan government is in what might be the final stages of the push to silence the Tamil Tigers and put an end to the civil war that started in 1983.

Land, as we all know, is finite, and a good example of what economists describe as a private good--owning a piece of land means that the owner can exclude somebody else from owning it.  Of course, we could also peacefully co-exist ....

The Economist points out:

The Jews and Arabs of Palestine have been fighting off and on for 100 years. In 1909 the mostly Russian socialist idealists of the Zionist movement set up an armed group, Hashomer, to protect their new farms and villages in Palestine from Arab marauders. Since then has come the dismal march of wars—1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 and now 2009—each seared by blood and fire into the conflicting myths and memories of the two sides. The intervals between the wars have not been filled by peace but by bombs, raids, uprisings and atrocities. Israeli settlers in Hebron today still cite, as if it were yesterday, the massacre of Hebron’s Jews in 1929. The Arabs of Palestine still remember their desperate revolt in the 1930s against the British mandate and Jewish immigration from Europe, and the massacres of 1948.

The slaughter this week in Gaza, in which on one day alone some 40 civilians, many children, were killed in a single salvo of Israeli shells, will pour fresh poison into the brimming well of hate (see article). But a conflict that has lasted 100 years is not susceptible to easy solutions or glib judgments. Those who choose to reduce it to the “terrorism” of one side or the “colonialism” of the other are just stroking their own prejudices. At heart, this is a struggle of two peoples for the same patch of land. It is not the sort of dispute in which enemies push back and forth over a line until they grow tired. It is much less tractable than that, because it is also about the periodic claim of each side that the other is not a people at all—at least not a people deserving sovereign statehood in the Middle East.

That is one reason why this conflict grinds on remorselessly from decade to decade.

Beyond Iraq and Iran: global hotspots are even hotter

Tunnel vision can be worse than no vision at all. Yes, we ought to focus on our Iraq problem. But, here is a listing--not complete by any means--of other globally important and urgent issues:

• Pakistan: I have blogged a lot about this. The country is getting more and more unstable. Latest reports are that the coalition government, which forced Musharraf out, is on the brink of collapsing--not good news by any measure. Zardari, the candidate to replace Musharraf, says that the Taliban has the upper hand in the war, and that Pakistan and the world are losing the war on terror. Duh! Like this was not obvious all along?
• Afghanistan: Karzai is losing even the little bit of control he had over the country's security. Not only are American (101 this year alone) and foreign troops dying in large numbers because of the Taliban, the US is making things worse by accidentally killing civilians--the latest one involved 76 civilians according to one report. "The U.S. is now losing the war against the Taliban," Anthony Cordesman, of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in a report Thursday (AP)
• Georgia: Need I write about this? Really?
• Zimbabwe: The discussions to share power are at an impasse. Meanwhile, inflation is at a never-before-in-history 11.2 million percent. To give us a perspective, we in America are concerned that prices rose by 0.7 percent last month!
• Sudan/Darfur: I agree with comments that this is the only case of well-documented genocide, and yet the rest of the world cannot mobilize for any action. In fact, we continue to ask questions such as "Is Darfur Genocide? It's not yet clear"
• Israel/Palestine: Need I write about this? Really?
• Lebanon: Despite all the Israeli and American attempts to rid Hizbollah, and Iran's influence there, well, Lebanon is pretty much Hizbollah country now. According to AFP, "The moment the Lebanese government confers legitimacy on Hezbollah, it must understand that the entire Lebanese state will be a target in the same way that all of Israel is a target for Hezbollah," Environment Minister Gideon Ezra said on Wednesday. To which, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah vowed on Sunday to destroy Israel if it carries out threats to hit Lebanon should the government give greater legitimacy to the Shiite militant group.
• Sri Lanka: This AFP report says it all: Strife-torn Sri Lanka is bracing for intense and bloody battles as security forces close in on the political capital of the Tamil Tiger rebels, according to military analysts.
• Burma: George Packer's article on Burma is a must read to understand the horrible state the country and the people have been reduced to by the cold and heartless military junta.
• Tibet, and minorities in China: Need I write about this? Really?

More later