Rajpal's Column

13th May 2001

How civilians begin to look like low life

By Rajpal Abeynayake

Not that serial numbers matter. But if it's the fourth round of war, nobody quite remembers which round of peace it is.

"There is no meeting of minds, despite there being a memorandum of understanding," the Norwegian brokers of peace said, almost as soon as the LTTE had given their own thoughts on the matter.

The so-called memorandum of understanding is in itself a flawed document. That's so, because of the brittleness of the bedrock principles on which it is rested. For instance, the LTTE has given the scouts-honour that "there will be no military operations carried out in the South.''

That is a covert way of seeking to legitimize attacks on civilian and economic targets, which were the only "military operations'' carried out in the South.

No convention on war considers such attacks "military operations'', but, now there is a "memorandum of understanding'' to the effect that attacks in the South will be stopped, as a result of an "understanding'' , which probably means two things.

A) Interested parties tried to legitimize attacks on civilian targets by entering a moratorium on such attacks into the so called MOU.

B) The Sri Lankan side agreed, because politicians probably would say, 'as long as our lives in the South are safe, to hell with it.'

To all parties, including those who brokered the memorandum of understanding, either actively or by tacit participation ( 'they also serve who stand and wait' - ample legal dicta that indicate the culpability of tacit connivance), dead civilians are nothing but "collateral damage.''

It's probably why more noise has been made about the economic embargo than of dying civilians in attacks on the South. But, by contriving to enter a moratorium on "military operations in the South'', the architects of the memorandum of understanding have effectively compromised the credibility of the entire document.

In a relentless pursuit to engineer the course of a conflict from outside, war reporters and war analysts, have evolved their own value judgments on a conflict and its consequences.

One value judgment that has been emerging, especially with regard to "Third World wars'' or "forgotten or hidden wars,'' is that collateral damage or civilian damage is an inevitable price in these wretched wars.

But, flesh and blood civilians have always stood in the way of this casuistry in conflict analysis.

Bombs in trains and hotels continue to generate news. This news is never considered commonplace, even in the impersonal civilizations of the West. Timothy Mac Veigh has helped. ( It is reported that the execution of the Okalahoma city bomber has been stayed due to the FBI bungling; the FBI neglected to file some relevant documents. MacVeigh may enjoy a few more days in death row, but the largest single act of violence against a civilian community in the US caused the collective US psyche to convulse. Though it is true that an American life is still considered to be much more valuable than the life of a third world civilian, MacVeigh helped everyone realize that there is no such thing as a vicarious safety. If civilians are targets elsewhere, it's bound to strike home sometime. The chickens will some day come home to roost.)

The new crop of talks on talks, and all the apprehensions about negotiations have also awakened a new tribe of conflict analyst vultures. Flybynight war reporters and ephemeral conflict experts are pounding the world processors with a noisy elan. Hear the latest: a hidden war has been found in Sri Lanka! One of the new angles being peddled is that negotiations are being hampered "due to the escalation of conflict'.

'The savages are beating each other to death, because there is no will to stop the fighting so that negotiations could start.' So say the flak jacket pundits. And the lecture room conflict -wallahs.

But the situation is not new, as these carping commentators would have us believe. Writing about the Thimpu talks, Bernard Tillekeratne, ex-ambassador to India states, "There was no serious effort to reduce hostilities as a prerequisite (to talks) as this would have required the co-operation of both sides.'' To think that the Thimpu talks took place in that antediluvian age when Eelam War 1 was still being fought in the trenches.

The talks yielded arguably some of the most solid working principles, whose fundamentals some Tamil parties are yet quite in love with.

But each round of peace or war in this conflict is supposed to work within a structure that is determined by conflict analysts, war reporters and other assorted outsiders and hangers on, who of course collectively have a lot at stake in this war, even as they look at things from their exalted vista of monumental detachment.

Inside the glass house

Editorial/ Opinion Contents