Guyana and Sri Lanka are usually categorized as bi-communal societies, and recently the latter has been in the international news because some countries boycotted the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference which was being held there, and the British Prime Minister used his presence in the country to call for an international investigation into the recently concluded civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The unfolding of events in that country may have some lessons for us.
Unless appropriate methods are established to manage these kinds of societies, they remain politically unstable and associated with protracted violence and poverty. The table below indicates the latter trend.
GDP per capita (constant 2005 US$)
World Development Indicators
Barbados is not a bi-communal society but is in the table to deal with the numerous simplistic comparisons we are fed daily about the place of Guyana in the Caribbean scheme of things.
It is widely believed that the progress being made in Malaysia is due to the fact that in 1973 it began experimenting with the shared governance arrangement and introduced a medium term New Economic Policy and a longer term 20-year Outline Perspective Plan (1970-90). Among the objectives of these plans were the eradication of poverty irrespective of race and the restructuring of society to eliminate racial economic predominance. (Chee, Stephen – 1974 – “Malaysia and Singapore: The Political Economy of Multiracial Development;” Asian Survey)
Guyana and Sri Lanka have not been able to establish governments with national perspectives and the resultant political instability has contributed to their low economic standing. Indeed, our government never tires of alerting us to negative development consequences of political instability. But it seeks to have its cake and eat it, for in the very context of the persistent instability it recognises, it proceeds to tell us of the wonderful economic progress we have been making!
Of course, as the above figures indicate, nothing is further from the truth; based on the value of the US$ in 2005, our economy has not even doubled in the last 50 years. I have argued elsewhere, that instead of seeking a sensible national management arrangement as the Malaysians have done, the PPP/C, perhaps out of ignorance as to the nature and depth of our condition, has sought political dominance which is more in keeping with the Sri Lankan experience (.The Janet Jagan Effect, Future Notes, 27/03/2013)
Not unlike ours, the Tamils’ quarrel with the Sri Lanka government is complex and has its roots in ethnic suspicions which existed even before independence. Many of the policies adopted by the Sinhalese dominated national government could not but alienate the Tamils.
As examples, in about the mid-1950s the Sri Lanka government adopted a policy which recognised only the Sinhalese language, but in the face of persistent Tamil resistance it attempted to ameliorate this in 1978 by recognising the Tamil language but keeping Sinhalese as the “official language”.
In 1970, it introduced a kind of affirmative action policy in higher education which favoured Sinhalese students. At the time, given their proportion in the population, there were more Tamils with university education and the regime was attempting to adjust this situation. This, when added to a “chit” system, which gave politicians control over employment in the public service, disadvantaged young Tamils. But nothing gave rise to more resentment than the government’s decision in the mid-1980s to settle some 30,000 of its ethnic supporters in the Tamil north of the country.
These policies severely affected Tamil youth, who began to agitate for an independent Tamil state. The LTTE emerged in about 1972 as one among many guerrilla groups fighting for independence. “An incident of apparently unprovoked police brutality in 1974 started the LTTE on its career of insurgency. In January of that year, the World Tamil Research Conference, bringing delegates from many different countries, was held in Jaffna. Police seeing large crowds milling around the meeting hall attacked them ferociously. Nine persons were killed and many more injured” (Ross, Russell and Andrea Matles Savada (edts) – 1988 – “Sri Lanka: A Country Study,” Library of Congress).
But “Black July” in 1983 is usually regarded as the psychological turning point in the ethnic crisis. “The riots were touched off by the July 23 killing of 13 Sinhalese soldiers by LTTE guerrillas on the Jaffna Peninsula. … the mutilated corpses were brought to Colombo by their comrades and displayed at a cemetery as an example of the Tigers’ barbarism” (Ibid). Anti- Tamil riots began in the capital Colombo and spread to other towns, resulting (depending upon whose figures one chooses to believes) in substantial damage to Tamil property and the deaths of between 500 hundred and 2,000 persons.
Over the more than thirty years of fighting in which all sides have been accused of committing vicious human right abuses, many failed efforts at compromise were made and by the time the regime decided to make its final push against the LTTE, it was estimated that some 70,000 lives had been lost.
In 2009 the civil war ended with total defeat of the Tigers and although the regime has been reluctant to release casualty figures, it claimed that the LTTE lost over 20,000 fighters.
Again depending upon whom one believes, the loss of civilian life during the final phase of the conflict was between 6,500 and 40,000 and many people still cannot put closure to the disappearance of their loved ones.
It is in this context that the boycott of the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference and demand for an independent international investigation of what actually occurred in the final phase of the civil war must be viewed.
The tale about the lives, properties and developmental opportunities that are usually lost when the management problems inherent in our kind of society are allowed to fester is only a part and perhaps not the most interesting part, of the larger story.
In September this year, the government finally decided to hold elections for the Tamil Northern Provincial Council. The region remains highly militarised but the Tamil National Alliance, which claimed it would use victory to demand greater regional autonomy, won 30 of the 38 available seats in the face of what many independent observers believe was a massive military intimidation of its supporters during the electoral process.
Hopefully, the nature of the Tamil response will have changed but the electoral outcome clearly points to the tenacity of the ethnic problem and to the need to search and find political solutions if these societies are to really bloom.
