What Do We Do With Our Horrible Past

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What Do We Do With Our Horrible Past?

By Namini Wijedasa -June 29, 2013

Dear friends,

Thank you for having me here. It is truly an honour. I mustconfess at the outset that I dont have grandiose solutions tooffer you; only small hints.

I am a journalist. I have covered the conflict for the most part ofmy career. And now I cover the absence of war. I dont haveany book learning in conflict resolution or in reconciliation.

What I speak about today is what picked up on the field, from interacting for manyyears with fellow Sri Lankans. I have discovered one dominant truth. Reconciliation isnot rocket science.I want to start on a personal note. I spent part of my childhood in Bahrain in the MiddleEast. The Sri Lankan community there was large and diverse. We had Sinhalese,Tamils and Muslims but there was no animosity towards one another. Although the warwas in full swing at home, Sri Lankans in Bahrain organized events through the SriLanka Club and socialized without discrimination.

We didnt categorise ourselves asTamil diaspora orSinhala diaspora. We weresimply the Sri Lankan community in Bahrain, united against the world. Maybe Im

being nave. Maybe this is how the child in me remembers it. But I think its true.When I returned to Sri Lanka as a 14-year-old, I had no concept of race or ethnicity.For the longest time, I just called myself Sri Lankan. What are you? People would ask.Sri Lankan, I would reply. No, no, they would say, Sinhala or Tamil? Muslim?

Why was that even necessary?

Did you ever stop to think that today we ask each other what our race is even whenthat information is not necessary? Indeed, in day-to-day interactions, it really doesntmatter. But if someone joins an office for the first time, we wonder what his race is. Wecheck out surnames to decipher what a persons race is. We even assess someones

appearance to determine what his race is. And we often categorise shops andbusinesses by the ethnicity of the person who owns them. Muslim hotalayak, wesay. Demala kadayak. Sinhala mudalali kenek.

Think about it. The majority of us first define each other by ethnicity and only later byother attributes.

What is my point? Dont. Dont do it. It is not right. My daughter entered school for thefirst time this year. I filled three separate set of standard forms that asked me what herrace was. I couldnt understand why my six-year-olds race was relevant and in what

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context. This is not right.

Politics and history have destroyed the way we look at ourselves. As a journalist, I seeand analyse it repeatedly. And do you know what worries me the most? What worriesme most is that the more we do things the wrong way, the less we realize it is wrong.

Reconciliation is not rocket science. We Sri Lankans dont need banners or books or

flyers or academics to teach us about the benefits of reconciliation. In our hearts, wealready know how to reconcile. We were born with the natural ability to mingle and tolive in harmony. We know what to do.

We know to sit cordially with each other and to share a meal; we know to play sportswith each other and not treat defeat as humiliation; we know to laugh and to smilethrough tears; we know to feel happiness for one another and to grieve with oneanother. We all bleed red and we all feel pain and sorrow. So many things unite us.But the few people with the capacity to divide us are winning.

When LTTE leaderVelupillai Prabhakaran held a press conference in 2002 soon

after the A9 road was reopened, I was among the many, many journalists who went toWanni to cover it. We sat around a lot as the LTTE filmed us and spied on us. Theywere deeply suspicious of us.Under a tree, on a widescreen, their propaganda films played continuously. Therewere scenes of wailing Tamil mothers and unspeakable destruction. There wasfootage of dead Tamil men, women and children, of shelling and bombing. Evenwithout understanding Tamil, it was clear to me that the message was anti-Sinhaleseand anti-Government.

The LTTE was overwhelmed by the numbers. That night, they struggled to find placesfor us to sleep. A group of young female LTTE cadres was placed in charge of a group

of female journalists including myself.

This was the first time that I had met members of the LTTE. In the beginning, thewomen were cold and distant. But it didnt take long for the smiles to come out.Communicating without knowing each others language can be quite amusing.

We slept in what seemed like a small house. They gave me a bed. The place wasteeming with insects attracted to generator-powered light bulbs. I was tired and fellasleep quickly but the insects kept bothering me. I tossed and turned and flappedaway at the annoying little creatures.

Then, almost as if in a dream, I heard one LTTE cadre bend over me and tell another,Pavam. I dont know what happened but when I woke up the next morning I wasunder a mosquito net.

So you see, even in the most controlled of circumstances, humanity does triumph. Weare first and foremost humans. Only afterwards are we everything else that they tell uswe are. My earnest appeal to you, as young people, is to absorb and live thatmessage.

But the Tamils among you might ask me, what do we do with our history? What do we
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do with those horrible last months of the war when so many of our loved ones wereslaughtered by your people? What do we do with the last thirty years of war? What dowe do with the deprivation of our rights? What do we do with the continuingtriumphalism?

There is no easy answer. But I can tell you this. I have interviewed thousands of

people throughout my life. Everyone has suffered at different levels. Could you haveguessed that I lost an aunt in the Central Bank bomb blast? Could you have guessedthat my father was in the last bus that passed the Central Bank before that bombexploded? Just people dont talk about it, doesnt mean they were not affected.

I have been to Sinhala villages where families slept in the bushes at night for fear thatthe LTTE might kill them. One such family was later massacred by the Tigers in broaddaylight as they made sweetmeats for the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. During the laststages of the war, I visited an impoverished Sinhala village where every family had ason at the front. Many were dead or missing. I have witnessed intense, gut-wrenchinggrief and heard harrowing sobs. I know for a fact that anguish has no caste, creed or

colour.

The levels are different, I admit. Some people suffered infinitely more than others. Butpause a moment and consider this. It is conservatively estimated that between 40,000and 100,000 people were killed or disappeared during theJVP insurgency of the1980s. Many were tortured and died in agony.That was the JVPs second insurgency. The first one was in 1971 when, within aspace of five weeks, more than an estimated 20,000 were killed. This was Sinhalesekilling Sinhalese.

Listen to this extract from a book on the insurgency by Rohan Gunaratna, an

academic from the National University of Singapore: After April 5, a single day did notpass without a hundred youth being killed. Some were hung, or beaten to death anddisplayed, while others were lined up and shot. For days mothers searched for theirmissing sons. Many of them were shot for pasting posters or following lectures. Mostof the villagers had followed the lectures through mere curiosity. After all, the contentsof the lectures were about problems, which were very relevant to them. Some werepurposely disfigured or made permanently disabled and at times parents themselveswere detained and often beaten until their children surrendered.Here was State terror against the Sinhalese. I have come to believe through personalexperience that Sri Lankan Governments will brutally crush any person or group that

threatens their survival, regardless of ethnicity.But you and I are not the State. You and I are not politicians. So what do we do withthis horrible past? We deal with it together. We empathise and understand. We acceptthat wrongs were committed on all sides. We admit that some wrongs were moregrievous than others. We apologise. We make amends. We forge friendships and wemove forward. And we never, ever repeat the same mistakes.

No Government wants to see the people unite, certainly not this one. That is why yousee so much tolerance, even sponsorship, for hate speech. Governments can deal
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with pockets of people and divided communities. They are terrified of a strong,universal front. So that is what we must give them. We all have common dilemmas.Lets join hands on those. Then it will become easier to arrive at solutions to ourunique problems.

Toss the politicians and their divisive messages away. And watch how reconciliation

takes care of itself. It really isnt rocket science.*Speech delivered at the Fifth Sri Lanka Unites Future Leaders Conference in Galleon 29 June 2013 by Journalist Namini Wijedasa.

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What Do We Do With Our Horrible Past