A motley collection of ineffectual blokes

Dredged into the army by war’s hunger for bodies.

Clerks and light labourers, intellectuals and incapables.

Too short or too tall. Weak in the head, too modest,

Or bright to be an officer. Unfit to fight. Fit to clean stables.

Cleaning up after the proper soldiers. Tidying the war.

The above extract from a poem I wrote in memory of my father illustrates the view of the Pioneer Corps propagated by comedians and ‘proper’ soldiers. Like thousands of others, my father gave thanks to the country that gave him a home and employment and family by enlisting in the armed forces in Britain’s hour of need.

Michael Young, in his influential book The Rise of the Meritocracy, took an unflattering view of the Pioneer Corps.  He claimed that the morale of these ‘hewers and drawers  … these dull-witted men’ was spectacularly increased ‘when the stupid were kept together… and they were no longer daunted by having superior people to compete with.’  In fairness to Young, it should be noted that his intent was a satirical critique of how the cult of IQ measurement was creating a smug ruling class and a demoralized lower class.

Nevertheless, one must challenge the view that the Pioneer Corps was merely a dumping ground for mentally-challenged labourers. My father had little formal education but was witty, astute and well-read. Among the ranks of the Pioneer Corps were the artist Sir Edward Paolozzi, the dramatist Christopher Fry, the writer Alfred Perles, Professor Jack Cowan, founder of the Architectural Science Review, Hans Coper, the sculptor and potter and the Olympic athlete Sidney Wooderson.

The word ‘pioneer’ derives from the 11^th century French word paionier, which has links with the Spanish peon and the word ‘pawn’ for a chess piece. Skeat’s Etymological Dictionary links it with ‘pedal’ and ‘pedestrian’. From the 15^th century ‘pioneer’ has meant a foot soldier who prepared the way for the army. From around 1605 it acquired the added meaning of a person who goes first or does something first. It was first used as a verb in 1780.

The pioneers would go in advance of an army preparing roads and trenches for the oncoming warriors. The idea of using a group of soldiers whose main function was to provide the army with labour rather than to fight goes back many thousands of years. In the Old Testament, Nehemiah, chapter 4, verse 17  contains the words ‘Of them that built on the wall and that carried burdens, and that laded: with one of his hands he did the work, and with the other he held a sword.’

There were pioneers in the English garrison at Calais in 1346 and pioneer contingents under their own officers attached to the Artillery in 1600. Pioneers would go in advance preparing roads and trenches for the combatants. The Labour Corps, formed in February 1917 was the precursor of the Pioneer Corps. Before that the army relied on French civilian labour. As the need for labour grew, the British government sent labourers to France in1915 in a force that included 38,000 Chinese, 10,000 Africans. By 1918 there were also 300,000 prisoners of war and contingents from Fiji and Egypt.

In 1918, the Labour Corps acquired its badge which became the emblem of the Pioneer Corps – the piled pick, rifle and shovel.

They often had to carry out their tasks under heavy fire and in the spring of 1918 took up arms and fought the German army when the need arose. 2,300 men of the Labour Corps were killed between May 1917 and the end of the war.

In September 1939, groups of reservists were formed into Works Labour Companies. The next month they became the Auxiliary Military Pioneer Corps and in November 1940 the name was changed to the Pioneer Corps.

Pioneers were enlisted from Ceylon, Mauritius, Seychelles, Basutoland, Bechuanaland, Swaziland, East and West Africa, Cyprus, Malta, India, Syria and Palestine. In North West Europe, Free French, Belgian and Dutch companies were formed.  Over 10,000 Germans, Austrians and Italians were recruited, earning the Pioneer corps the nickname ‘The King’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens’.

Among these ‘aliens’ were many uprooted by the rise of the Nazis. In 1916, Kurt Lewin volunteered for the Kaiser’s army. In 1939, he fled anti-Semitism, made his home in Britain and, in 1940, enlisted in the 74th company of the Pioneer Corps.

Ignaz Schwarz arrived in Britain in 1938 from Vienna and became Sidney Graham. He joined the Pioneer Corps and volunteered for hazardous duty.

Emeritus Professor HJ (Jack) Cowan, the world’s first Professor of Architectural Science and founding editor of the Architectural Science Review came to Britain from  Glogau in  Silesia, was interned and deported to Canada. He was given a choice of staying in Canada or returning to England. He chose the latter and joined the Pioneer Corps. He spent the war dismantling mines and was seriously injured on 1st January 1945,

Helmut Rosettenstein was born in Koenigsberg and came to Britain in March 1939. He became Harry Rossney, and joined the Pioneer Corps before serving with the Graves Restoration Unit hand-writing names on the temporary crosses in post D-Day Normandy that eventually became Commonwealth War Graves.

Geoffrey Perry was born Horst Pinschewer and grew up in Berlin, before coming to Britain and joining the Pioneer Corps. In May 1945, he and a British officer called Bertie Lickorish encountered an odd-looking figure in a forest near the German border with Denmark. It was William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. ‘I shot him in the bum,’ said Perry.

The Italian father of Sir Edward Paolozzi, the distinguished painter and sculptor, creator of murals on London Underground, was interned and then sent to a camp in Canada. The ship was torpedoed and Paolozzi lost his father, his grandfather and an uncle. Paolozzi himself was briefly held in an Edinburgh jail and after his release returned to the family’s Leith ice cream parlour to help his mother. He advanced to Edinburgh College of Art, but was conscripted into the Pioneer Corps in 1943.

Christopher Fry, the verse dramatist and screenwriter, was a profoundly religious man, whose opposition to war led to him being advised to join the fire service by TS Eliot. Fry said that he had no head for heights. The poet told him to concentrate on basements. Fry joined the Pioneer Corps, working on the Liverpool docks during the Blitzes, as well as in London.

In Soldiers and Civilians, the writer and friend of Henry Miller, Alfred Perles, born in Vienna in 1897, to Czech Jewish parents, described working in the Pioneer Corps in London and  testified to the liberation of losing all that he owned when a bomb destroyed his London house. He felt newborn in his khaki battledress in Oxford Street, an unknown soldier. He was protected from all curiosity, malevolent and benevolent. ‘Only I knew that I had just lost all my terrestrial goods. It did not matter. After all, I had lost nothing essential. As a matter of fact, all I had lost was essentially inessential. All of a sudden, I realized that all one possibly can lose must needs be inessential.’

The Corps handled all kinds of stores and ammunition, built camps, airfields and fortifications, cleared rubble and demolished roadblocks, built roads, railways and bridges, loaded and unloaded ships, trains and planes and constructed aircraft pens against enemy bombing.

On 6 June 1944, 13 Pioneer companies landed with the first allied wave and a further ten companies with the second, making a total of about 6,700 men ashore by the end of the day. The first Pioneer party landed 20 minutes after Operation Overlord had started. By D-day + 79, the complete Pioneer Order of Battle, consisting of over 68,000 officers and men, had been brought to France. The Pioneers who arrived with the assault troops landed ‘wetshod’, which meant a long wade ashore in full equipment. Some had to swim ashore from grounded craft. This would have been traumatic for my father who was born and brought up by the sea but never learnt to swim.

Some, including my father were recruited for burial parties. My father escaped without serious injury but for the rest of his life suffered from anosmia – he lost his sense of smell. The last smell he remembered was of the rotting corpses of young men at Caen in Normandy. The pioneers bivouacked in fields, in severe weather, working long hours with little rest. Conditions were hazardous because of minefields. Over 2,000 British personnel, serving with the Corps, and nearly 6,000 of other nationalities lost their lives.

By May 1945 The Pioneer Corps was probably the largest Corps in the Army with 12,000 Officers, 166,000 British and 400,000 Commonwealth Personnel, as well as being responsible for a civilian labour force of 1,074,000 and a Prisoner of War force of 173,000.

A grateful nation recognised the Pioneers’ contribution to victory and in November 1946, King George VI renamed it the Royal Pioneer Corps.  Pioneers later served in many conflicts around the world. In 1993, the Corps lost its separate identity when it was merged with several other units to become part of the Royal Logistics Corps, although there are still currently two specialist pioneer units within that corps.

Many commentators, including some on the left, have concluded that there is something rotten in the state of Britain today, particularly with elements of the nation’s youth, and have suggested radical remedies. Deborah Orr, in The Independent, believes that respectful attention should be given to the suggestion by actress Brooke Kinsella that one way of tackling the extreme anti-social behaviour that devastated her family when her young brother Ben was stabbed to death, might be to bring back national service

In a report published by the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, Tom Burkard, who was a corporal in the Royal Pioneer Corps, and is now  director of a children’s charity, proposed that ex-military personnel could be excellent teachers and improve discipline and learning in schools. His proposal was backed by the former chief of the defence staff, Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, who said that it could offer an antidote to problems of youth knife crime, drugs and violence.

Perhaps there is room for a new Pioneer Corps dedicated to moulding troubled British youth into responsible citizens through community service. As long ago as 1945, John Rawling Rees noted that the health and crime records of the Pioneer Corps compared very favourably with the best units in the field and that service in the corps had a therapeutic effect on soldiers who had displayed delinquent behaviour. About 18% of the National Service men in the Pioneer corps in 1952 were illiterate but the Corps had a good record of teaching them to read.

Perhaps the Pioneer Corps could, even today, help young people cast off their old selves and don a uniform of public service.

The Corps motto translates from the Latin as ‘Work conquers all’. Would a new Pioneer Corps benefit British society today?

For some reason my article has not made it to the LMD website this month so I am reproducing it here on my Word Press blog.

Under intellectual property law, owners are granted certain exclusive rights to a variety of intangible assets such as musical, literary, and artistic works; discoveries and inventions. According to Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author”. The natural rights argument is based on Locke’s idea that a person has a natural right over the fruits of his or her labour. Utilitarians argue that a society that protects private, including intellectual,  property is more effective and prosperous than societies that do not.

The earliest recorded historical case-law on copyright comes from ancient Ireland. The Cathach is the oldest extant Irish manuscript and the earliest example of Irish writing. It is traditionally ascribed to Saint Columba as the copy of a Psalter lent to Columba by St. Finnian. A dispute arose about the ownership of the copy and King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill gave the judgement “To every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy”.

The Berne Convention was first established in 1886 and  relates to literary and artistic works, which includes films. The convention, to which Sri Lanka is a signatory,  requires its member states to provide protection for every production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain. A core principle is that each signatory would give citizens of other member states the same rights of copyright that it gave to its own citizens. The stated purpose of the convention is protection  of authors rather than the protection of publishers and others.

Sitting down to watch a DVD one is  assailed by a noisy prologue asserting: “You wouldn’t steal a handbag, you wouldn’t steal a TV etc”. There is an irony in this strident propaganda against pirate DVDs because the disc on which it was included was purchased in Colombo’s Majestic City for 230 rupees. These pirate emporia are openly advertised in reputable publications like LMD. In some establishments the very latest movies are available for as little as 60 rupees. On one occasion, I stood next to a policeman while making my illicit purchases.

The protection of a creator’s creation  might at first seem to be an unalloyed good. However, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, believes the term “operates as a catch-all to lump together disparate laws [which] originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues”.

In 1980, Ananda Chakrabarty won a US Supreme Court case allowing him to patent a bacterium to digest oil that he had genetically engineered. Five years later, the US Patent and Trademark Office allowed genetically modified (GM) plants, seeds and plant tissue to be patented. By 1987 animal patenting was permitted. Today human gene sequences, cell lines and stem cells are patented. Since the mid-1990s, Monsanto has sued 145 individual US farmers for patent infringement in connection with its genetically engineered seed. One farmer received an eight-month prison sentence for violating a court order to destroy seeds. In India, thousands of farmers have committed suicide because of Monsanto’s policies.

Eben Moglen ,  professor of  law  and legal history at Columbia University writes in his dotCommunist Manifesto: “Society confronts the simple fact that when everyone can possess every intellectual work of beauty and utility–reaping all the human value of every increase of knowledge–at the same cost that any one person can possess them, it is no longer moral to exclude. … the bourgeois system of ownership demands that knowledge and culture be rationed by the ability to pay.”

“Anything that is worth copying is worth sharing.” His other quotes: “The more we give away, the richer we become.”

Eben Moglen  says , “‘When everybody owns the press, then freedom of the press belongs to everybody’”. This is the world of citizen journalism. It is great for we journeymen writers  to have access to Wikipedia , Google, Word Press and Questia so that we can easily research the drivel we inflict on the world. A lot of this is free to us , so we are grateful.

It came as a shock to me when I saw my  own immortal words in print without payment. It was actually a pleasant surprise to see my work in the New York Times. Quite a few of the articles I wrote for the Le Monde diplomatique blog appeared in publications and websites all over the world. The New York Times was perhaps the most prestigious, but it was also good to see my name in the International Herald Tribune and the Scotsman. It seems that, without my knowledge Agence Globale was syndicating my unpaid work on behalf of Le Monde diplomatique. I have never been able to establish whether the New York times etc  paid Le Monde diplomatique for my work.

It was  worse   when my articles were published without even a mention of my name, let alone payment being made. This happened with an article in the Sri Lankan Sunday Times about the Environmental Foundation Ltd (EFL). I made a complaint to the Press complaints Authority but it seems the fault lay with EFL who allowed the paper to accept my article as a press release.

It came as a worse shock when I saw some more of my words in print with someone else’s name at the top. This happened when the Sunday Leader, which had never responded when I submitted articles, published word for word an article by me on animal welfare with the name of one of their staffers on it.

People willingly write for free for Huffington Post. The divine Arianna became a very rich woman when she announced  “a merger of visions” with AOL which netted $315 million. “And, of course, thank you to our HuffPost community, whose engagement, enthusiasm, loyalty, and support have been the foundation of HuffPost’s growth. We can’t wait to begin the ride.”

http://www.athirady.info/?p=161485

I made a comment on the site but it was deleted.

I will be rewriting the article to bring it up to date in the light of recent developments i Sri Lanka and Ireland.

Terrorism, Business, Politics and Ordinary Decent Criminals

There are fuzzy boundaries between war, terrorism, crime, politics and business. Politicians use terms like “war on terrorism”, “war on crime”. “war on drugs”. Some might believe that this is part of a plan to militarise civil society. “Freedom fighters” easily morph into criminals as they resort to bank robberies and drug dealing to raise funds for the cause. Many once considered as terrorists later take their place in government.

Northern Ireland

On the right of the picture, a young Martin McGuinness at an IRA funeral
While they were purportedly striving to reunite the six counties of Northern Ireland with the 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland, the Provisional IRA were also building up a criminal empire. While this might have begun as a means of financing the republican struggle,  crime seemed to become an end in itself. The profits of crime might have been a reason for prolonging the conflict.

IRA leadership 1972 – Martin McGuinness on the left of the picture.
Raids on illegal distilleries in Ireland uncovered bottling and capping machinery and high- quality copies of brand labels. Many of the products were designed for use in pub optics. The IRA took  the production of counterfeit spirits so seriously that it even had a quality control unit.

Ordinary Decent Irish Criminals

Martin Cahill with a truly criminal wrap-over hair style
The Irish gangster Martin Cahill was the subject of two feature films. In The General he was played by Brendan Gleeson. In Ordinary Decent Criminals he was played by Kevin Spacey. Cahill was involved in petty crime from an early age and turned to armed robbery after stealing arms from a police station. O’Connor’s jewellers was forced to close, with the loss of more than one hundred jobs after Cahill stole €2.55 million worth of gold and diamonds from the store at Harold’s Cross.

In 1994, a gunman, who was armed with a .357 Magnum , shot Cahill in the face and torso, jumped on a motorbike and disappeared from the scene. The IRA said that it was Cahill’s “involvement with and assistance to pro-British death squads which forced us to act”. One theory is that John Gilligan, who was convicted of the murder of journalist Veronica Guerin (also shot by a motorcyclist in a hit similar to the murder of Sri Lankan editor Lasantha Wickrematunge), had Cahill killed because he was trying to get a slice of Gilligan’s drug profits.

John Gilligan
Gilligan effectively had the complicit support of the Dublin IRA and had members of the INLA (Irish National Liberation Army) in his pay. He was importing enough cannabis to make everybody rich. He was even importing small arms which he passed on to republicans as sweeteners.

The rate of murders in the Irish Republic that can be attributed to organized criminals, all involved in drugs, has trebled since the period before the murder of Veronica Guerin.

Veronica Guerin
The Murphia on the Costa del Crime

The IRA established links with organized crime in the same areas of the Costa del Sol where many of Dublin’s top “ordinary” criminals, the “Murphia”,  lived. The Murphia became the wholesale middlemen and women who supplied parts of the UK drugs markets after developing  links with their British counterparts.

The dissident republican group, the Real IRA, has been responsible for murders, attempted murders and pipe bomb attacks in the Republic. The group is believed to be extorting millions of Euros from targeting drug dealers — as well as business people — in Dublin and Cork. The Real IRA have taken over many of the security and protection rackets once run by the Provos. The dissidents are also believed to be selling some of these bombs to gangs including criminal elements within the Travelling community. In 2009, the Army Ordnance Corps dealt with 61 live bombs and 140 hoax bombs. In 2010, they dealt with 40 live bombs, mostly in Dublin.

Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein

Not Laurel and Hardy – McGuinness and Paisley
The Provisional IRA funded its activities with bank robberies and protection rackets. Martin McGuinness was the IRA Commandant for Derry. He and Gerry Adams were prominent in the labyrinthine negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement and the IRA laying down its arms. McGuinness  was  a minister in the government of the statelet of Northern Ireland until he resigned to run of the presidency of the Irish Republic. He visited  Sri Lanka to advise us on peace and reconciliation. In the Republic’s last general election, Gerry Adams for Sinn Fein topped the poll in Louth, in the north-east, with more than 15,000 votes. Sinn Fein, which used to be seen by voters in the Republic as the proxy of the Provisional IRA, has scored its best-ever election result in the Republic with 14 seats and will be a major Opposition force in the new Dáil. Fiachra Gibbons, in the New Statesman, described Sinn Fein as “a kind of cross between Fianna Fáil and the Catholic Church, but with extra guns, paedophiles and front businesses.”

The Tamil Tiger Mafia

Prabhakaran
In Sri Lanka, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) was mainly dependent for funding in the early days on robberies and extortion.  Trading in gold, laundering money and dealing in narcotics brought the LTTE substantial revenue to buy sophisticated weaponry. They also played a role in providing passports, other papers, and also engaged in human trafficking.

KP – the Tamil Tigers’   leading arms procurer, now working with the government he sought to topple.

Crime Pays and so Does War

There were those on “the other side” who profited from the conflict continuing for so long. As in Ireland, Sri Lankan politicians and businessmen are accused of taking commissions to do favors. War is a profitable business.

Former Army Commander, Sarath Fonseka, fought the presidential election in January 2010 on a platform of rooting out corruption and nepotism. An Asian Tribune article, published on November 22, 2009,  was entitled “Every bullet fired at innocent Tamil civilians fetched kickbacks to Gen Fonseka family”.  One of the charges against Fonseka  was that he was involved in corrupt arms deals with his son-in-law, Danuna Thilakaratne. Thilakeratne’s company Hicorp, was involved in the purchase of MIGs from Ukraine, uniform and telecommunication equipment from China, food rations from Malaysia and tank transporters from Russia. Hicorp also supplied ration packs, which were past their shelf life and bought cheaply from a Malaysia. Thilakaratne started many new businesses in Sri Lanka, such as a beauty salon at the Galle Face Hotel,  as well as   a salon in Las Vegas, and a communication company in London. He invested millions of dollars in the American and Sri Lankan stock markets. Where did he get this money? After police investigated his bank accounts, Thilakaratne fled the country. Fonseka is in Welikada prison.

The Asian Tribune has also accused Fonseka of selling off army land rovers for his own profit. When Fonseka was Army  Commander, he forced the Army Board to condemn many serviceable army vehicles which found their way to Dhanuna’s friend , who bought them cheap. The Asian Tribune published this man’s name and address. I will not repeat it here as he knows where I live and, indeed, has been an uninvited guest in my home.

Police and Crime, Criminal Police

One incident (among many) in 2009  highlighted the danger of people’s frustration at police impunity turning into mob outrage and vigilante “justice”. Two young men were killed by police at Angulana. Local people described the Angulana police post as more like a brothel-cum-tavern than a police station. Nine police officers from Angulana police station were arrested and a court heard that they had been drunk on the night of the murders. Eyewitnesses testified that armed police officers blindfolded the young men and took them away in a jeep on the night of 12 August. The two victims, handcuffed and with blue polythene bags over their heads, were bundled into the jeep by the police, one of whom was armed with a T-56. One of the accused policemen admitted to his uncle (another policeman) that he had shot and killed the two victims.

Clint Eastwood was LTTE leader Prabakharan’s hero and seems to have many fans in the Sri Lanka police, at least in his Dirty Harry persona.

Impunity International

The Sri Lankan government’s “war” on the underworld led to key underworld figures  being “taken out’”. Summary executions by shadowy death squads during the JVP uprising in 1989, evoked memories of the British government’s “shoot-to-kill policy” in Northern Ireland. The phrase “culture of impunity” is frequently heard in Sri Lanka. No one wants to live in a country where the police can kill anyone they want, including private-grudge enemies, and get away with it. There is a danger of police impunity being mirrored by vigilante justice by sections of the public.

The Angulana incident garnered a lot of publicity, and some have taken comfort from the fact that police were arrested and brought before a court. They were found guilty and sentenced to death (the death penalty is still on the books but never used). Yet hundreds of other incidents around the country may go unreported. The lawyer and human rights campaigner Basil Fernando had high hopes in 2003 of the 17th Amendment of the Constitution, which included the setting up of a National Police Commission (NPC). He described the NPC as “one of the most extraordinary mechanisms created in Sri Lanka to check human rights violations.” Unfortunately the NPC has been allowed to wither and die, with its powers delegated to officials of various ministries, including defense.

Banalisation of Violence

Eric Meyer wrote in his book Sri Lanka: Biography of an Island about a “society confronted by the  banalisation of violence. Meyer does not attribute this only to the deadening effect of thirty years of terrorism, brutal conflict and emergency legislation. He traces a deeper malaise. He sees the frustration felt by a large part of Sri Lankan society: “arrogance and indifference of the capital’s bourgeois microcosm, the corruption found in the administration, the Macchiavellism of the country’s leaders, and the frustrations of  the younger generation faced with a competitive society that only parsimoniously concedes them a place”.

These tensions are exacerbated by the contradictions imposed by Buddhism being the dominant philosophy. Buddhism’s emphasis on harmony and non-violence “does not permit the verbalisation and exteriorsation of impulses that brutally and suddenly erupt into frenzy, condoned by the silence of the authorities”.

Meyer also sees in Hinduism and Catholicism ambivalent strains that contribute to a proclivity to violence: “The diverse religious traditions provide the people with the means to confront and combat violence, yet they tend to diabolise the adversary, stripping him of his human qualities”.

Nevertheless, whatever ambivalence may have been generated by Buddhism, Hinduism and Catholicism, they have been in Sri Lanka for a long time and violence does seem to have got measurably worse in recent times. According to John Richardson, communal violence ranked low among categories of violence in the immediate post-independence years. Two events reported in 1948 and 1952, were Sinhalese-Muslim and Tamil-Muslim clashes. From 1953, incidents of communal violence began to be associated with rising Sinhalese Buddhist political movements. Initially, clashes between Sinhalese and Tamils were similar to   Northern Ireland turf wars over tribal marching.

The real descent into political instability came in three phases: the first from 1955 to 1961 over affirmative action measures for the majority Sinhalese; there was a second phase of confrontation, often leading to violence, in the 1970s, culminating in the riots of 1977; the most violent period of ethnic conflict began in 1983, when the killing of soldiers by Tamil terrorists led to horrific anti-Tamil riots involving the hacking to death and mass rape of innocent bystanders.

Broadcaster and journalist Vincent Browne wrote of the Irish situation: “Just think of the thousands of lawyers, accountants, bankers, stockbrokers and others who must have colluded in criminality over the last decade or so, in fraudulent accounting, in fraudulent trading, in fraudulent preference, in insider dealing. And such is our public culture that not one of them has been charged with a crime and, very probably, not one of them will go to jail.”
Irish people have expressed their despair at the ballot box at the crime wave and the corrupt complicity of politicians, bankers and business men.

Have thirty years of conflict desensitised Sri Lankans  to violence and criminality?

This has created some controversy in Sri Lanka because MIA is of Sri Lankan Tamil origin.

http://colombotelegraph.com/2012/02/06/did-mia-really-shock-the-super-bowl/

Way back in May 2010, Alaska Progressive  wrote a post  on on Open Salon about  the banning of a violent MIA video which showed children being blown up.

http://open.salon.com/blog/alaska_progressive/2010/05/02/new_mia_video_banned_on_youtube

I am against censorship and wouldn’t support the banning of  MIA’s video. Nobody has the right to be immune from being  annoyed or offended. However, nobody seems to object to child pornography being banned. A lot of complex issues are involved if one thinks seriously about  censorship.

AP said:  “We are subjected to gratuitous violence every day, whether it is first-person shooter video games or stylized slaughter in movies and TV”. Does that mean we need more of it and that we should not worry about it?

AP:  “People claim to want art to be provocative, but when it hits a little too close to home or touches a nerve as it approaches an unspoken truth, then it is ‘offensive’ and ‘distasteful.’”

I am myself happy to be  provoked but let us  examine the reality behind the provocation and not succumb to the fantasy. Let us look at the “unspoken truth” behind  MIA’s position.

It seems to be OK to blow someone up in a film because the movies are just fantasy.

I have a problem with that. Fantasies have proved toxic in Sri Lanka. As a result of fantasies about national myths, a  lot of people in Sri Lanka have seen people blown up in real life. As one goes about from day to day in Sri Lanka, one sees a lot of people with missing limbs. The north and east, the areas once dominated by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) , are still littered with mines left by MIA’s friends. MIA supports the LTTE. The LTTE blew people, including babies and schoolchildren, up.. The LTTE, to most Sri Lankan’s joy were  comprehensively defeated in May 2009 and there have been no terrorist incidents since then.

Large sections of the Tamil diaspora seem to want to continue the fight. MIA seems to be continuing to support them. Let her have her video but let us examine the “unspoken truth”.

I am sure that there is a lot of research showing that images of pornography do not lead to rape and that movie fantasies about violence do not engender violence. Does rap music cause men to imitate misogynistic attitudes and bad behaviour towards women that extends to physical violence? My gut feeling  leads me to believe that Hollywood violence de-sensitises viewers and leads to atrocities in Iraq and allows politicians to sanction torture. Which came first, Jack Bauer or John Yoo and Abu Ghraib?

The US likes to fight “wars” like video games or TV programs.

AP makes the very good point: “this is the violence we take part in and promote throughout the world on a daily basis.” AP says:  “It is disingenuous of Americans to be so outraged when we are the ones perpetrating this violence against so many others.”

There is an assumption that the US has a moral justification and obligation to intervene in other nations’ affairs. There is also the fantasy that it has the capability to address terrorism and, simultaneously, support ill-defined humanitarian objectives. The US is not as tough and powerful or as humane as it deludes itself to be. It is unlikely that it can defeat the Taliban forever. In trying to make its fantasies real it causes havoc and suffering.

Ian Birrell wrote about elections in Afghanistan in the London Independent:  “Once again, we are chasing a chimera, falling for the myth of democracy rather than the reality. Buttressed by our own history, we see the ballot box as the ultimate expression of democracy… The dream is back on. Meanwhile, warlords wash the blood from their hands and dress up as democrats, doing deals to carve up the country… At the end of the process, there will still be some tribal tensions, gangsterism and poppy fields. Even to get to this point will cost billions. It will take many years. And sadly, there will be scores more teenage soldiers slaughtered and maimed. ”

The birth of the American nation depended on the genocide of the indigenous races and its development depended on slavery. In his book, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of  Modern America, 1877-1920, Jackson Lears describes how many Americans embraced militaristic fantasies of national rebirth through war and empire. US soldiers were awarded medals in 1890 for firing Hotchkiss cannons at unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee. When Filipinos resisted US imperial claims, the US Army ‘civilized’ them with indiscriminate slaughter – as Mark Twain put it ‘Maxim Guns and Hymn Books’.

And still it goes on.

America is today an imperial power with military bases instead of colonies. George Orwell commented in 1943, “It is difficult to go anywhere in London without having the feeling that Britain is now Occupied Territory.” Citizens of many nations today get that same feeling. Those populations hosting US bases, in say Okinawa,  are expected to be grateful that the bases are contributing to democracy and freedom, but instead feel exploited because the bases are used to control trade, resources, local supplies of cheap labor, and the political, economic, and social life of host countries. They also force the host countries to support American imperialism, including foreign wars, despite harmful fallout, like the rape of local women and children, to the indigenous populations.

As Sri Lanka’s President Rajapaksa said, why is the US criticising Sri Lanka for defeating its own home-grown terrorists? Sri Lanka is a small nation (about the same size as West Virginia).  It is not sending its planes to bomb other countries. It is not setting up bases all over the world.

Americans’ attitudes are  fuelled by Hollywood fantasies. MIA’s fantasies are accepted as entertainment with the added bonus  of another fantasy about giving the “oppressed “a voice. This is just another aspect of American imperialism. Even leftish US “liberals” seem to want to police the rest of the world through cultural dominance.

Just about everybody in Sri Lanka resents the USA’s attitude towards it. Robert Kaplan acknowledged that tiny, cash-strapped Sri Lanka has successfully defeated its terrorists but asserted that the US had nothing to learn because the US was too virtuous to use such methods.

See: http://agonist.org/padraig_colman/20090728/fantasies_of_virtue

Dayan Jayatilleke, (he would not be very popular in the states as he is an admirer of Fidel Castro), former Sri Lankan ambassador to the UN said:  “Sri Lanka is not the case of an army of occupation invading and occupying another country. Sri Lanka’s is a military that serves a constitutional democracy, a military that fought a war strictly within its recognised borders against a separatist, terrorist militia, with whom the State had tried to arrive at a peaceful settlement on numerous occasions. Therefore, we will not have forced upon us formulae and paradigms derived from entirely different contexts.”

Moving on to the specific case of MIA and her video. MIA supported (and still supports) an organisation, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), which invented suicide bombing and held the population of the north and east of Sri Lanka hostage for thirty years in a de facto totalitarian fascist state. The population was mainly Tamil because the Tigers carried out brutal ethnic cleansing to get rid of all the Muslims and Sinhalese who had lived there for generations. The Tigers were certainly not “poorly equipped”, thanks to the funds provided by the diaspora. They had an effective navy and a rudimentary air force bombed the international airport, petrol stores and government buildings. On one occasion, the airport had to be closed and frightened foreign tourists hid under desks while the Tigers went on a killing rampage and destroyed most of the Sri Lanka Airlines fleet.

Because of “fantasy”, many in the west came to see the LTTE as romantic freedom fighters, the good guys, the white hats against the Sinhalese majority, the government, the bad guys, the black hats.

The LTTE oppressed Tamils and killed off any Tamil politicians or civilians who stood in their way. Their activities were funded by drug smuggling and people trafficking and by the Tamil diaspora of which MIA is a member.

Tamil journalist, DBS Jeyaraj,  wrote a year ago, just before the LTTE was defeated, in the Indian newspaper The Hindu: “the conflict has gone beyond its original causes. If the Tamils opted for a separate state owing to certain discrimination and unaddressed grievances, the brutal war has brought in a whole set of new problems dwarfing the original ones. Many of the ills afflicting Tamils now are due mainly to the war. It is logical therefore to assume that many of these war-related issues would gradually cease or lose their potency in a non-war situation.”

This is not to say that I buy the fantasy on the Sinhalese nationalist side. While trying to adopt an unbiased approach, I have been berated by Sinhalese for “regurgitating terrorist propaganda” by merely trying to explain why people were fighting for a separate state of Tamil Eelam. One charmingly told me that I was a “a crazed Irish monkey, an IRA fugitive  who should be in a zoo or an asylum”. From the other side, I am accused of being a government lackey and a bigot if I criticise the LTTE.

Clearly, we wouldn’t have  had a thirty-year war in Sri Lanka with over 100,000 dead if there were no genuine grievances. Tamil separatism gained traction because of the acts of commission or omission of successive Sinhalese-dominated governments. Tamil people did suffer but the situation is far more complex than western fantasists would believe.

Prime minister, SWRD Bandaranaike alienated Sri Lankan Tamils by introducing a Sinhala only policy in 1956. In Being a Tamil and a Sri Lankan,  Professor Karthigesu Sivathamby wrote: “If I may not be misunderstood by my non-Tamil friends, what happened in post-1956 Sri Lankan politics was not so much the implementation of Sinhala as the sole official language,  but Sinhalisation of the entire administration and political machinery. The Tamils were prepared  to learn Sinhala and there were in Jaffna, Buddhist monks teaching that language in the better-known schools. The Muslims also learnt Sinhala. It was, however, not the use of the Sinhala language, but the insistence on Sinhalising the staff and the geographical areas which made Tamils and Muslims hold on steadfastly to their north eastern areas and identities. When they were threatened in the areas where they were working and had established themselves as its people the slogan of the Traditional Homeland began gradually to emerge”.

After 1956 there were anti-Tamil riots culminating in the horrific events of July 1983 which led many Tamils to leave the country. There were many incidents where ill-disciplined police took reprisals against innocent Tamil civilians. Many Tamils who remained in Sri Lanka gave  up all hope of justice from the government and therefore fought for a separate homeland.

I have covered this in some detail at

http://agonist.org/padraig_colman/20100414/democracy_in_sri_lanka

Whatever Sri Lankans think about President Mahinda Rajapaksa, most are grateful that there have been no terrorist problems since he defeated the LTTE nearly three years  ago. No-one in Sri Lanka, even Tamils, would want the LTTE back. Apparently many Tamils abroad, like MIA, do want the LTTE back.

Many of the militant Tamil separatist groups  - PLOTE, EPDP, TULF and TNA – have stated categorically that a separate homeland for Tamils in Sri Lanka is no longer on the agenda. However, some elements of the diaspora still fantasise about it and have held “elections” for a “transnational government”

Douglas Devananda used to carry arms for the EDPD (Eelam People’s Democratic Party)  but is now a government minister. Many innocent people have been killed in botched attempts by the LTTE to assassinate him. He said: “when the whole country is looking towards a bright future, extraneous forces which cannot digest the healthy political developments in the country have now embarked on an idiotic move called `Transnational Government’. I am confident that the selfish action of a handful of LTTE proxies is not going to take them anywhere. Hence the Tamils abroad and in Sri Lanka should be cautious of these sinister moves to destabilise peace that prevails in the country”.

Devananda himself is part of the problem.

The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) leader V. Anandasangaree said, “The intended ‘Transnational Government’ by the LTTE proxies is sheer stupidity. The elements opposed to the people’s co-existence in the country are all out to create another racial calamity for their existence abroad. People such as V. Rudrakumar in the USA and his allies in other parts of the world are trying to continue with their ulterior motives to destabilise the peace created in the country after three decades”.

Leader of the People’s Liberation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) D. Sitharthan said, “Even after people gave their verdict in the North and the East at the parliamentary polls sidelining the TNA, the LTTE proxies are trying to deceive the people abroad and in the country by coming out with gimmicks such as forming a ‘Transnational’ government abroad. When the LTTE was active there were people who were thriving by showing themselves as supporters of the outfit. However, with the annihilation of the LTTE those who supported it are finding it difficult to survive. Therefore, they are resorting to all sorts of stunts to revamp their activities. Foreign Governments should be cautious of those elements and ensure that their sinister moves are curtailed”.

What Sri Lanka needs now is a genuine attempt to address current grievances rather than endlessly stirring the pot about what happened in the past. What of the present day? What grievances do Tamils in Sri Lanka have today and how might they be addressed in order to prevent further outbreaks of violence?

In the north and east many people are still suffering the after-effects of thirty years of domination by the LTTE which left the infrastructure of the north and east undeveloped or destroyed. The defeat of the LTTE left further damage by government forces which will not be easy to put right.  I have written elsewhere about conditions in the IDP camps. People who went “home” from the camps faced a bleak outlook. Restoring livelihoods and alleviating poverty will be a huge undertaking.

The government has taken positive steps to rebuild homes and provide jobs even for former LTTE fighters (see http://mondediplo.com/blogs/rehabilitating-the-tigers) . A spokesman for the garment industry said: “It does not matter whether they come from the IDP camps or rehabilitation camps for former LTTE cadres. What is important is that everybody is given a chance to grow in the new Sri Lanka.”

A grievance in the past was “colonisation”.  Some argued that the central government, under cover of developing “bare land”,  was engaged in a process of Sinhalese settlement similar to the Israelis in Palestine. Such settlements by Sinhalese assisted by the government allegedly worked under a sinister agenda of infiltrating the Tamil “homeland” and diluting Tamil representation. Economic regeneration and re-integration needs to be handled sensitively. Reconstruction should not just be for the profit of carpet-bagging southern business. This danger is epitomised by reports that the people of the north are not unanimously overjoyed by being gawked at by tourists from the south.

So far, a separate Tamil state no longer seems to be on the agenda of anyone in Sri Lanka, although elements of the diaspora might still entertain such fantasies. As Jeyaraj wrote: “The future and well- being of the Tamil people are inextricably intertwined with that of Sri Lanka and its people. All future efforts to secure rights and share power have to be within the unity, territorial integrity, and sovereignty of Sri Lanka.” The position taken by Dayan Jayatilleke, ambassador to France, and others is that devolution under the 13^th Amendment of the constitution is essential to prevent future unrest. Columnist Malinda Seneviratne believes that any form of federalism or devolution risks continuing fragmentation and that economic development is the best way of reintegrating the north and east into the rest of the nation. “If minority grievances going unheeded leads to political unrest and violence then it is in the interests  of those who voted for Rajapaksa and the UPFA to have such grievances addressed. My only demand  was that grievance must be undressed of the frills called myths, legends and fantasies”.

In Northern Ireland, peace was achieved through negotiation when both sides became exhausted and accepted that neither could win. The IRA gave up its goal of a united Ireland. The LTTE went into every negotiation with an uncompromising demand for nothing short of a separate homeland, comprising two-thirds of the territory of Sri Lanka, of Tamil Eelam.

Whatever notion the western media might convey, the entire Tamil population has not been imprisoned in concentration camps prior to extermination. Tamils are spread throughout the country and generally live normal lives in harmony with Sinhalese and Muslims and the myriad ethnic and religious groups that inhabit this island. Many Tamils are prosperous and influential. Some held senior positions in government until the Tigers killed them.

Reconciliation will be difficult but it is possible. Sri Lanka needs help in this process not sanctimonious lectures.

If MIA is using her music and videos to further the agenda of the vestigial elements of a vicious terrorist group to undermine from abroad sincere efforts towards reconstruction and reconciliation in Sri Lanka, it is distasteful . If it’s all only for the sake of entertainment and marketing and consumerism is that OK?

My compatriot, Paul Murphy MEP, an Irish member of the EU Parliament,  wants to visit Sri Lanka to lecture the government about democracy.

He is  a prematurely balding twitchy 28 years old, (There are many videos on You Tube showing Murphy ranting to an empty hall  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjToY8jULCY and demonstrating that he cannot pronounce “Sinhala”).

He has never had a proper job and has been an MEP for around eight months. No-one ever voted for him to be an MEP.

He  has been complaining about Sri Lanka in several media outlets.

“The idea to travel to Sri Lanka came from the meeting I hosted in the Parliament a few months ago about the massacre of Tamils in Sri Lanka. My wish to go was strengthened by the many meetings I have had with the Tamil Diaspora, and others active on the issue of Tamil rights, in the recent period.”

“I will continue to highlight and speak out against what I consider to be war crimes of the Rajapaksa regime and to defend the right to self determination by the Tamil people in Sri Lanka. I will also continue to speak out against the ongoing militarisation of Sri Lankan society and against the repression used against any opposition to the Sri Lankan regime. The whole of the working class, poor farmers and poor people, Sinhala and Tamil, are victims of this repressive government in my opinion.”

As well as complaining that he was refused a visa to visit Sri Lanka, he is raising the issue of an Irish citizen, Gunasundaram Jeyasundaram,  whom he says has been held prisoner by the Sri Lankan authorities without charge for four years.

Other than the assertions of Murphy himself. I have been unable to find much  information about Gunasundaram Jeyasundaram. All I know is that the man studied polymers at Queen Mary College in the 1970s.

I asked the Irish Ambassador in New Delhi, Kenneth Thompson, if any representations  had been made to him about this case.  I was  fobbed off by one of His Excellency’s minions. The press office of the Foreign Ministry in Dublin told me: “The Department is aware of this case and all possible consular assistance is being provided to Mr. Gunasundaram Jayasunderam’s wife and family through the Consular Assistance section in Dublin, the Embassy of Ireland in New Delhi and the Honorary Consul of Ireland in Sri Lanka.”

I have asked Paul Murphy himself for more information. He has not responded.

I would greatly appreciate it if  any readers  point me in the direction of some information about Gunasundaram Jeyasundaram. (I can be contacted at spikeyriter@gmail.com.)  Is he in custody in Sri Lanka? If so what has he done?

I was sorry to hear that Paul Murphy was  unable to get a visa to visit Sri Lanka. I understand that he  wished to visit the north of the country. It will be  a pity if he does  not get an opportunity to do so. I do not think he has  visited Sri Lanka before. If he  had, he should  be impressed by the changes that have occurred all over the country since the Tamil Tigers were defeated.

Paul Murphy wants to teach Sri Lanka about democracy. How many people voted for Paul Murphy? President Rajapaksa, despite a strong  animosity expressed in some papers, notably the Sunday Leader, and despite anxieties about the economy and worker unrest,  has  generally won the confidence of voters and he currently seems unassailable. A recent Gallup found that more than nine out of ten Sri Lankans approved of the president. Mainly, Sri Lankans of all ethnicities are grateful to President Rajapaksa that their children can go to school without fear of being blown to giblets.

Joe Higgins of the Irish Socialist Party won the Dublin EP seat in 2009 but gave it up when he was elected to the Irish national parliament on the wave of voter disgust with mainstream Irish parties.

There was criticism that Higgins was being less than transparent: “He deliberately kept people in the dark about the fact that if he got elected to Europe he would throw in the towel at the first smell of a general election and that in truth people were not electing him but some unknown entity”. There was a great deal of high-minded debate about how the Socialist Party would choose a successor to Higgins but none of this seemed to involve consulting  the electorate.

Paul Murphy worked for Higgins and took over Higgins’s EP seat. The above comment is from the website politics.ie. Here are some more:  “He [Murphy] is known to nobody outside of his small party and has never sought election…This appointment of Higgins’s assistant is complete cronyism despite the tripe being written by the hard-line socialists.” “The people voted for a list that named Ruth Coppinger as the replacement for Joe Higgins, in the present circumstances. For the Socialist Party to instead appoint a crony of Joe Higgins is a sign of contempt for democracy.”

How many votes did Paul Murphy get? None! How many votes did President Rajapaksa get?

Paul Murphy, in his infinite compassion,  wants to get involved in everyone’s problems and spreads himself thin. The British satirical magazine Private Eye has been bursting bubbles of pomposity since the early 60s. One of the Eye’s great comic creations is the all-purpose lefty agitator Dave Spart. Spartism has entered the English language. The Urban Dictionary defines a Spartist as: “An individual who observes Marxist theory to the exclusion of all else. Often condemns most things in society and the world with meaningless far left-wing dogma, and often ends up in logical cycles and jumping to conclusions in the process. Such people claim to be progressive, but are as backward thinking, unimaginative, hare-brained and colourless as the leaders of the former Soviet Union and Communist Eastern Europe.”

There is a lot of Spartism on Paul Murphy’s website: http://www.paulmurphymep.eu/

Paul is a feisty little fellow. His tireless ecumenical activism tempts me to rename him  Daibhéid Ó Speartáin. Murphy is supporting striking Kazakh oil workers, unionists in Columbia, Syrian revolutionaries, Bahraini and Chinese dissidents, oppressed Palestinians (he took part in the flotilla to Gaza), he protested against a high speed rail link in Italy, he feels for the homeless all over the world. The Chinese government must be trembling to know that Daibhéid Ó Speartáin has them sussed.

There are many problems to be solved in Ireland.

Ireland has a reasonable international image when it comes to human rights and global charitable works. However, it has to be noted that the Irish government (not the current one) allowed Shannon Airport to be used by the CIA for extraordinary rendition flights. That means anonymous people held without charge were being flown all over the world to be tortured with the complicity of the Irish government.

This was not Paul Murphy’s fault, of course. He was not a member of the Irish government. He has never been elected by anyone. He has no power or influence. Murphy certainly has no mandate from the Irish people to take on the entire world’s problems.

Lest we accuse Paul of neglecting problems back home in dear old Ireland, it should be noted that he is suing the Irish police for assaulting him when he was protesting at the Shell gas plant at Corrib. He protested  against cutbacks at Tallaght Hospital. He is active in Free Education for Everyone. In 2009, he was working on a PhD thesis titled “Does socialist law exist?” In Ireland,  he has been prominent in campaigning for young workers rights, holding a series of public meetings throughout Dublin as part of the “Jobs not Dole” campaign. Paul Murphy has also been vocal in opposition to the EU/IMF bailout of Ireland and austerity measures being carried out by the government including the proposed “Household Tax”.

Mind you,  he has not got a mandate from the Irish people to address those issues either. He has no electoral mandate at all.

Writing in the October 2011 issue of Lanka Monthly Digest, Amantha Perera reminisces about his grim visits to Vavuniya during the war. He finds the North as a whole transformed for the better, with Vavuniya a particular revelation. The Tampa hotel is providing better facilities for journalists than five-stars in Bangkok and a boisterous crowd gets drunk around the pool. The next morning Perera chats to some students one of whom says he is sleepy because he studies late into the night. “I am not scared to study alone at night, there are no more loud noises”.

This reminded me of something my friend the Reverend Harold Good said in 2008 when receiving his  award from the Ghandi Foundation for his role in the Northern Ireland peace process. A child wrote: “I want to grow up in a Northern Ireland where you can look at a sunset without wondering what they are bombing tonight.” Harold commented: “Today our children see sunsets instead of bombs. As a community we have faced and accepted realities; engaged in dialogue; achieved consensus; accepted compromise and witnessed the signs and symbols of peace.”

Is amnesia more conducive to reconciliation than truth? Do we need a young Dublin jackeen who has never set foot on Sri Lankan soil  and has very little experience of life in general to remind us that horrors have occurred in this land?

Don’t be a begrudger,  Paul. Let Sri Lanka continue to enjoy the peace we have had for over two years.

This article was published in the Sri Lankan newspaper The Nation on December 11 2011 but has disappeared from their website.

War is hell and the suffering goes on after war’s end.

Over the past few years, there have been many books describing what happened at the end of the Second World War. The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War by Ben Shephard was published in April 2010. After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation by Giles McDonogh was published in July 2007. The Struggle for Europe by William Hitchcock was published in January 2003. Walter Laqueur’s books on post-war Europe came out in 1992. John Roberts, Norman Davies, Mark Mazower and Richard Vinen, David Calleo, and last but not least, the late, great Tony Judt,  have produced  strong analytical work examining Europe’s future in the light of what its 20th-century past reveals.

Scholars have had 67 years to assess the six years of World War 2. Sri Lanka has only had just over two years to come to terms with nearly 30 years of internal war.

In 1945, the Allies had to deal with  10 to 15 million DPs (displaced persons) -  concentration camp victims, foreign workers and slave laborers and  destitute Germans. The UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) was set up to deal with DPs. Shephard is sympathetic but also describes incompetence and political manipulation. Some UNRRA functionaries made mistresses of Polish DPs. Others engaged in crime.

One thing for DPs to do after years of deprivation was to get blind drunk. Two thousand people died from alcohol poisoning  in two months after war’s end. Many DPs reacted to freedom with sexual abandon. At Wildflecken DP Camp in Bavaria, the Virgin Mary in the “Holy Manger” Christmas show had gonorrhoea. The birth rate in DP camps rocketed.

Not everyone was ready to debauch. Richard Wollheim, later a distinguished philosopher, was tasked with organising  a dance party for British soldiers and female survivors in Bergen-Belsen. The party ended in mayhem, with panicking women expecting nothing but more torment from uniformed men

“Resettlement” was not an easy task. Shephard describes American soldiers dragging terrified Russians and Ukrainians to assembly points. They were often being sent in open cattle trucks to their deaths in Russia or Yugoslavia. British soldiers, sometimes with tears in their eyes, had to force about 70,000 people who had, in many cases already suffered terribly under the Germans, to go back to a more horrendous  fate.

McDonogh describes the rape and pillage that went with Red Army “liberation” of  Eastern Europe. Native populations turned on ethnic Germans with frightening ferocity. Whole  communities of Germans, up to 16 million, who had lived outside the Reich for generations, were violently uprooted. Old men, women, and children were forced to march westward, or crammed into cattle cars in which they sometimes froze to death. The most conservative estimate that  600,000 German civilians were killed at this time is still high. The savagery was comparable to what the Nazis had inflicted. Schools and public buildings became torture centres. Up to 15,000 Germans were held at Strahov soccer stadium in Prague, where  the guards amused themselves by forcing thousands to run for their lives and then machine-gunning them.

The Americans set up PWTEs (Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures) which make Menik Farm seem like Club Med.  In the spring of 1945, some 40,000 prisoners died of hunger and exposure in the twelve open camps containing a million men. The Americans had burned their kit, so they had nothing to protect them from the elements.

The British and Americans also set up Direct Interrogation Centres to find major war criminals or  subversive activity. Their function soon changed to gathering intelligence against the Russians. Prisoners were tortured by guards with scores to settle. Methods are familiar today from their use in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan and CIA centres all over the world: savage beatings, starvation, deprivation of sleep, and removal of clothing. Men were kept standing for hours. Many never came out alive.

At Schwäbish Hall, near Stuttgart, Americans used methods similar to  those employed by the SS in Dachau. Prisoners endured  long periods in solitary confinement. Men were led off in hoods and  lifted off the ground to convince them they were about to hang.  When the Americans set up a commission of inquiry, they found that, of the 139 cases they examined, 137 had “had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation team.”

NGOs such as Human Rights Watch were strongly critical of GOSL’s  decision to keep civilians in IDP camps. More extreme sections of the Tamil Diaspora accused the government of having a genocidal agenda and referred to extermination camps. David Begg, leader of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, took time off from watching his members lose jobs and welfare benefits as the Irish economy went  rapidly downhill, to take  an interest in far-away Sri Lanka. He claimed that 1,000 people were dying every week in concentration camps.

The UN Refugee Agency reported that there were around 16 million refugees and 26 million IDPs in the world at the end of 2008. In recent years it has been increasingly tasked under the UN’s humanitarian reform process with assisting IDPs.

War is hell and the suffering goes on after war’s end. Some wars just do not end.

Today, 63 years after the foundation of the state of Israel, five million Palestine refugees are eligible for UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency) services.

One reads a lot about the democratic deficit in Sri Lanka.  Sri Lankan, as well as western commentators,  bemoan the weakness of the Sri Lankan opposition and the gathering of power to the executive through the 18^th amendment and the use of urgent bills. We read about the inspiring hunger for democracy in nations like Libya, Egypt and Syria, where people are prepared to die (and kill) for democracy.

I thought it might be instructive to see how that democracy thing is working out in some of those countries that have had it for a long time.

First let us attempt an analysis of the concept itself. According to Raymond Williams in Keywords, democracy is an old word, but its meanings  have always been complex. The word first entered the English language in the 16^th century, as a translation from the Greek demos – people, and kratos – rule. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by “people” and what you mean by “rule”.

Aristotle wrote that “a democracy is a state where the freemen and the poor, being in the majority, are invested with the power of the state”. What does “power of the state” actually mean? Socrates, according to Plato, said, ”democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents , slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power”.

Aristotle’s disciple, St Thomas Aquinas, did not see democracy as a good thing. He defined democracy as popular power, where the ordinary people, by force of numbers oppressed the rich. Democracy was a form of tyranny. In my schoolboy study of American history, I noted the fear in the early days of independence of the canaille (pack of dogs),  the mob.

According to Raymond Williams, the most striking historical fact about the word democracy is that it was, until the 19^th century, generally a highly derogatory term and it has only been since the early 20^th century that most western political parties have felt the need to pay lip service to it.

The first constitution to use the word democracy was that of Rhode Island in 1641. What democracy meant in that document was that the people,  in “orderly assembly” made the laws and ministers “faithfully executed” them. Alexander Hamilton, in 1777, saw this as recipe for anarchy. He favoured representative democracy “where the right of election is well secured and regulated, and the exercise of the legislative executive and judicial authorities is vested in select persons”.

Today, Hamilton’s concept is all we are left with. Anyone who argues for the original idea of direct democracy might be seen as a dangerous radical. So the voter opts for a particular candidate and in doing so leaves  that candidate to make his or her own decisions. A majority of voters might be in favour of capital punishment but that counts as nothing against the opinion of the elected representative. A majority might be against the invasion of Iraq, but in a representative democracy their views have no standing. In a further twist, the views of the elected representatives do not count when balanced against the views of the Cabinet. The views of the Cabinet do not count against the views of the prime minister. In guarding against the tyranny of the mob, representative democracy gives tyrannical powers to one man who gets his way by lying.

Representative democracy, in effect, gives little power to the voter. The voter makes a choice on the basis of the party manifesto, the personality and record of a particular candidate. The only control over the candidate’s performance is to vote for someone else at the next election , which may be five years away. The candidate/representative may break every promise in the manifesto and may even change party but still stay in parliament without consulting the voters.

John Stuart Mill ran for the British parliament in 1865. His campaign was very unlike a modern one. He refused to spend any money. When he was asked by a raucous working class crowd if he had written that the working class were habitually liars, he had no hesitation in saying “yes”. The audience  cheered and one of their number stood up to announce that the workers needed friends not flatterers

One definition of democracy is “government of the people by the people”. What do we mean by “people”? Throughout history suffrage has been limited to certain groups – freemen, whites, property-owners, the educated, the mature in years. It may not be generally realised that Switzerland, often thought of as an ancient democracy (more of that in a later article) did not grant the vote to women in all elections until 1991.Women got the vote in Ceylon  in 1931.

“Democracy” is often seen as synonymous with liberal democracy, which is expected to  include elements such as political pluralism and equality before the law. Majority rule is often listed as a characteristic of democracy, but it is possible for a party or candidate to rule with a numerical minority of votes. See Bush v Gore.

Economists have found fault with democracy in general on the grounds that voters are uninformed about many issues, especially relating to economics. Democracy is criticised for not offering enough political stability or continuity. Pareto argued that democracy masked the reality that elite oligarchy is the unbendable law of human society, and that democratic institutions would do no more than shift the exercise of power from oppression to manipulation.

Pareto’s view is borne out by what we see in the world today. JS Mill would get nowhere. In the USA, no candidate can get elected without huge funding. This  allows corporate interests to call the shots. The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations have the human rights of “persons” when it comes to campaign contributions.

Classical liberal theory sees capitalism and democracy as independent systems with disparate goals. Democracy restricts economic processes only to protect basic rights and does not limit wealth. Capitalism creates a large, wage-dependent class lacking the political power of the wealthy. Unrestricted global capitalism has created multi-national, non-democratic bodies with the impunity to override the environmental or labour laws passed by sovereign legislatures.

The EU has accrued many powers which allow it to override the wishes of voters in previously sovereign  nations. The crisis of global capitalism has not brought punishment on the perpetrators, who have been bailed out and given new power. Austerity measures and failed neo-liberal policies of privatisation, reduction in public services  and deregulation are being forced on individual governments by the troika of the EU, the ECB and the IMF. Look at Greece, often thought of as the birthplace of democracy. George Papandreou sought the views of his demos with a referendum and brought on his head the fury of Merkel and Sarkozy who had exacerbated the crisis. Papandreou was replaced by Lucas Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank, who promptly installed in the government a far-right group banned since the military government lost power in 1974. In Italy, the ludicrous (but elected) Berlusconi was replaced by ex-Goldman Sachs executive Mario Monti. The decision was made by the Italian president without consulting the voters. The next election is in 2013. In Ireland,  the voters did get the chance to throw out the corrupt scoundrels who got the nation in a mess, but now the Irish economy is being supervised by 15 unelected officials from Brussels, and even the (elected) cabinet is kept in the dark.

Is this version of democracy any better than the Sri Lankan one?

Commentators assert that the Sri Lankan parliament is populated by drug barons, rapists and murderers. It seems that European democracies are now ruled by the very banksters who toppled the economies.

In his treatise Petroleo y Dependencia, Dr. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, principle architect of OPEC, wrote: “Oil will bring us ruin. It’s the devil’s excrement. We are drowning in the devil’s excrement.”

Sri Lankan hopes of oil finds

Once again,  fantasies of Sri Lanka becoming oil-rich are bubbling to the greasy surface.

Sri Lanka imports nearly 30 million barrels of oil, which is used to generate electricity as well as for transport, every year. This used to cost around $800 million a year. In 2005 it cost $1.64 billion. In 2006 higher international prices took the bill to $2.2 billion. Add to this, $19 million per month in subsidies, the knock-on effect of transport costs on prices and the never-ending cost of war and reconstruction and one can see why the government would like to have its own oil.

India started exploring the Cauvery Basin in the Palk Strait as long ago as 1954, drilling 100 test wells. From 2000, India started production from fields close to Sri Lanka at the rate of 1,000 barrels per day. In the late 1970s, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, assisted by US and Russian companies, drilled seven test wells on and offshore in the Gulf of Mannar Basin without success. India’s success encouraged Sri Lanka to try again. The Cauvery and Gulf of Mannar basins are said to be associated with rift complexes of the Late-Jurassic-Cretaceous Age and have the potential to yield 100 million barrels.

Gamble

An oil bonanza cannot be confidently predicted without drilling. Offshore wells require more than $10 million each and the investor loses it all if the well is dry. It will be at least five years before there is any return on the investment.

The Director General of Petroleum Resources, Dr Neil R de Silva said in January 2007 that the picture was still ‘fuzzy’ about how viable the fields were. “One of the requirements oil companies would be expected to meet in getting a licence for oil exploration would be a benefits plan – this would ensure employment for Sri Lankans and enable Sri Lankan manufacturers and service providers to take part on a competitive basis to supply goods and services.” He added that they must be competitive, efficient and trained. How can that work? He conceded that there was a serious shortage of  professionals to work in the field and that the industry needs to train  a certified labour force. There are no petroleum professionals coming through the education system.

The number of local people employed after the construction phase of the Chad-Cameroon pipeline was negligible in Cameroon and around 350 in Chad. In Ecuador, 50,000 new jobs a month were promised; there have been only 9,000 new jobs so far, mostly unskilled and temporary.

De Silva gave the Sunday Observer an update in March 2011. He did not sound very positive to me: “with the available data it is not possible to estimate the amount of oil in the Mannar Basin confidently… At the beginning of the oil production process the Sri Lankan Government’s share would be 15% and Cairn Lanka’s 85% … As the years go by, Sri Lanka’s share will increase to … 85% while Cairn Lanka’s share will come down to …15%”.

Oil and Corruption

As long ago as 2004, Transparency International estimated that billions of dollars were lost to bribery in public purchasing and oil seemed to guarantee corruption. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Angola, Azerbaijan, Chad, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Libya, Nigeria, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela and Yemen were highly corrupt. Public contracting in the oil sector is plagued by vanishing revenues.

Inequality

Even if Sri Lanka’s oil exploration is successful, it is unlikely that many citizens  will benefit. Venezuela is to some extent an exception in that government policy has been to  use oil to improve the lot of the people as a whole. Even with Chavez’s reforms, problems persist and Caracas is one of the three most violent cities in the world.

Prof. Michael Ross of UCLA  produced a chart mapping  oil sales against literacy and malnutrition. Every  5% rise in oil exports was matched by a three-month fall in life-expectancy and a one-point rise in childhood malnutrition. Sri Lanka currently enjoys good WHO indicators, but child malnutrition figures are causing concern. This could get worse with the “benefits” of oil.

Terrorism and Environment

Spillages from sabotage sometimes occur. In Colombia  and Nigeria guerrillas persistently targeted pipelines. In 1995 the LTTE attacked CPC refinery and oil storage installations in Colombo causing several deaths and massive fires in the storage areas. Security fears undermine human rights. In more recent times the LTTE air force targeted oil installations.

The seismic vibrations generated by drilling can adversely affect buildings and the chemicals used can also deplete aquatic life in rivers and streams. Pollution can occur because of human error, sudden rupture of pipelines, or instrument failures.

Conclusion

So, does Sri Lanka want to be a nation where foreigners call the shots – a polluted nation, plagued by poverty and  inequality; where corruption, dynastic elites and nepotism compromise good governance and erode human rights?

Does Sri Lanka deserve the blessing of oil?

Sophocles: “An enemy’s gift is ruinous and no gift”.

At its annual Berlin Humanitarian Congress, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) discussed  some of the ethical dilemmas it has faced over the past 40 years. The report, published this month,  is entitled  Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience.

Dutch journalist Linda Polman argued in her book War Games that humanitarianism has become a massive industry that, along with the global media, forms an unholy alliance with warmongers. She cites a damning catalogue of examples in which humanitarian aid has helped prolong wars, or rewarded the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide rather than the victims. Polman believes aid enabled the interhamwe, Rwandan  Hutu extremists, from the security of the UNHCR camps in Goma,  to continue their attempt to exterminate  Tutsis.

A number of people from the NGO world rushed to attack Polman but they failed to address substantively her central thesis. The May 2010 issue of Opinion, the journal of the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute, carried a long article by Matthew Foley intended to be a rebuttal of Polman’s book. Foley  complains: “We tell donors that they’re not giving enough, while simultaneously telling ourselves that giving too much creates aid dependency… A lack of contextual knowledge, plus cultural insensitivity, often lead to inappropriate, unwanted or unsustainable projects. Displaced people are still herded into massive camps because delivering aid is easier and cheaper when they are in one place, despite evidence that camps are often incubators of disease and crime, and often develop into more-or-less permanent communities. At higher policy levels, we worry that humanitarian aid may become a substitute for the state, freeing governments of their responsibility to their own people.”

Fabrice Weissman, one of the co-authors of the MSF book was quoted as saying:

“In Sri Lanka in 2009, the government rounded up some 270,000 people it suspected of supporting Tamil rebels and then gave aid groups the job of providing the basic services. We did not want to be supporting a vast prison for an innocent civilian population which the state was unjustly labelling criminals, but we were also concerned about what would happen to the civilians if we didn’t assist them.”

Where did that crazy idea come from?! MSF adopted a more reasonable attitude on their website on September 24, 2009:

“The Sri Lankan Ministry of Health have mobilized significant resources from all over the country to provide health care in the camps; deploying doctors and nurses in 24 health structures, and therefore considers MSF medical assistance in the camps unnecessary. Some primary health care facilities have been set up in camp zones and a referral system has been implemented gradually since February. MSF teams are currently working in three hospitals outside the camps… Two of the Ministry of Health hospitals, Vavuniya General Hospital and Pompaimadu Hospital, are supported by MSF with extra human resources and some equipment. .. However, despite significant effort, the needs of a population trapped in conflict for so many years remain substantial and concerning. MSF is ready to scale up its activities to assist the Ministry of Health in their efforts to provide quality health care in the camps and during the resettlement process.”

When Henri Dunant set up the Red Cross, he was keen to stay neutral in any conflict. He wished to ease the suffering of all victims of war, which at that time were mostly soldiers. These days civilians are usually caught up, and even used as human shields, in conflicts. Dunant was opposed by Florence Nightingale who argued that Dunant’s compassionate vision was a charter for prolonging war. Linda Polman agrees with Nightingale that neutrality is as much of a problem as taking sides.

Humanitarianism is a multi-billion-dollar business – at least $18 billion in 2008. NGOs  are huge corporate businesses and they offer a career structure. NGO workers can build up an image of saintliness as well as developing a lucrative CV.

During the Sri Lankan conflict  there were many accusations of NGOs supporting the LTTE rebels beyond a reasonable boundary of humanitarian neutrality. Two employees of Care International were arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate defence minister Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. It  is interesting to note that Care is based in Atlanta, Georgia but in its mission statement specifically excludes itself from doing any poverty alleviation work in the USA. Is there no poverty in the USA? Athens-Clarke County in Georgia, home of REM, has 28.6% of its population living below the poverty line.

Giving humanitarian assistance directly to armed groups is another topic tackled in the MSF book. “Combatants are also human beings and sometimes they need humanitarian assistance more than civilians,” Weissman said. “When combatants are wounded we no longer consider them combatants.”

Considering the comments about the IDP camps, one wonders whether MSF were neutral when it came to those combatants known as the Tamil Tigers. Is Weissman expressing personal views or has the MSF, since September 2009, altered its stance and added to  the chorus of western lies about Sri Lanka?

I intend to write more later on the topic of aid.

It has just been announced that Michael D Higgins, a beaming little leprechaun, endorsed by  Martin Sheen is the new President of the Republic of Ireland. Higgins is a poet who has been minister of culture.

The Áras an Uachtaráin is not an executive presidency. Although it is mainly a ceremonial office strong personalities have been able to use it cannily. Eamon de Valera used his freedom fighter status (and his newspaper empire) to maintain the  totalitarian rule of the Catholic church. Mary Robinson used her international reputation, mighty intellect and even mightier charm to nudge Ireland into the modern world.

Contenders have come and gone and come back again. At one time there was speculation that Bob Geldof would put himself forward. In one of his more printable comments the ex-Boomtown Rat spoke of boom and bust. “The overwhelming feeling I have is one of sadness for the country – and of anger for the incompetence beyond measure, the sheer stupidity and the clear venality which has Ireland where it is now”. Saint Bob early decided it was not worth running.

There was pressure on Martin Sheen to use his experience of pretending to be a president on The West Wing to have a go at running a real country. He has Irish citizenship as well as a Master’s in philosophy from the University of Galway.

Fianna Fáil,  the party that has dominate Irish politics for decades. did not run an official candidate. but Sean Gallagher, although rejecting accusations that he  embraced his Fianna Fail past but denied the  Fianna Fail present, said on his own website: “Seán has been a sporadic member of Fianna Fáil over many years”.  Gallagher was front-runner at the end of the campaign. Businessman Hugh Morgan, alleged Mr Gallagher personally collected a €5,000 cheque from him on behalf of Fianna Fáil.

Rosemary Scallon (born Rosemary Brown in 1951 in Derry) achieved international fame as Dana, when she won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1970 with the song All Kinds of Everything. Squabbles over money from her US earnings peddling religious music have escalated into nastier accusations. Dana’s brother, John Brown, was a member of her election team. Dana’s sister, Susan, has accused Brown of sexually molesting her, Susan’s, daughter and is repeating the allegations now. She concealed the fact that she was a US citizen and therefore constitutionally barred from contesting for the presidency of Ireland.

The contest is open to natives of Northern Ireland even though they are UK citizens. Like Dana, Martin McGuinness is a native of Derry. (I once had dinner with Chris Patten and he told me he had got into hot water with the Reverend Ian Paisley for saying “Derry” instead of “Londonderry”). McGuinness, who has given up his job  in the Stormont government in Belfast to run in the Republic’s presidential election. He is having to field a lot of criticism about his terrorist past as Commandant of the Derry brigade of the Provisional IRA. He claims that he left the IRA in 1974 but others dispute this. Government Chief Whip Paul Kehoe snarked at McGuinness’s  commitment to draw the average industrial wage if elected. “Why would you need your salary when you have the proceeds of the Northern Bank at your disposal,” Mr Kehoe said. The IRA stole £26.5 million from the Northern Bank in 2004.

My friend, the Reverend Harold Good is not naive about the horrors of terrorism, but counts McGuinness as a friend following their partnership in the Northern Ireland peace process. Harold told me: “If elected he would be a circumspect, respectful and statesmanlike President… he would leave a gap in our Stormont administration where he is doing a very good job. The media and his opponents are indeed focussing on his past rather than his present. However, as I understand it … he and Sinn Fein see this as an opportunity to ask the Irish electorate to give a strong endorsement to the road they have taken … as distinct from the ‘dissidents’ . They feel a strong vote , whatever the outcome, will send this message.”

McGuinness made a less than helpful intervention in Sri Lankan affairs when he came here in 2006 and talked with LTTE leaders. He may have meant well  but was over-optimistic in seeing parallels with the Irish situation. In Ireland,  most parties were exhausted enough to give up conflict and to talk. “The reality is that, just as in Ireland, there can be no military victory and that the only alternative to endless conflict is dialogue, negotiations and accommodation”.

He was clearly mistaken.

McGuiness criticized the European Union for banning the Tamil Tigers as a Terrorist Organization. He said that “it was a huge mistake for EU leaders to demonize the LTTE and the political leaders of the Tamil people.”

We knew well enough that some were demons.

Although it is possible to learn lessons from history, the road to hell is paved with false analogies.