Book review, Governance Now, July 1-15, 2011
A gripping account of the slide of a liberal parliamentary democracy with lively and independent institutions towards a ‘failed state’
Last week, the prestigious Washington-based Foreign Policy magazine released its annual index of the most ‘failed states’ which featured several of our neighbours – Pakistan (at number 12), Bangladesh (at 25), Nepal (at 27) and Sri Lanka (at 29) – in the list of 60 which is topped by the African nations. For many, Sri Lanka seemed an unlikely member.
This is what the magazine said to justify Sri Lanka’s inclusion: “This May, Sri Lanka celebrated its second year of peace after 26 years of civil war with a separatist army in the north and east, the so-called Tamil Tigers. It was a conflict marked by brutality from start to end. The Tigers fought the central government with assassinations and terrorist attacks. The government’s final push against the rebels relied on the shelling of civilians and other atrocities, according to a 2010 report by the International Crisis Group. The most recent statistics from last year indicate that some 327,000 are still displaced from the conflict.”
In his book, “The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers”, Gordon Weiss, a journalist-turned-UN spokesman in Sri Lanka who witnessed it first hand, captures the finale of that bloody civil war in great detail. Apart from the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil rebels, even the international community, including the UN, emerges with a taint difficult to ignore in a hurry; the last one because of its failure to prevent or reduce civilian killings and take appropriate remedial action, thanks largely to China’s interventions on behalf of Sri Lanka.
But the book’s canvass is much bigger and helps explaining Sri Lanka’s listing as a failed state. Weiss traces the island nation’s history, particularly of the recent decades, to find a series of state-sponsored pogroms despite being dominated by followers of peace-loving Buddhist philosophy. Beginning with the massacre of “tens of thousands” of young Marxist Sinhalese who revolted against the state in 1971 and the late 1980s to the killing of between 1,000 to 3,000 Tamil youths in riots of 1983’s Black July, the unbridled power of the state, near permanent “state of emergency” laws, degradation of police and judicial institutions, ethnic cleansing and a subjugated media set the stage for the horrifying tale of 2009 anti-LTTE operation which again claimed “tens of thousands” of civilians trapped in a corner of country’s northeast coast (‘the cage’ of the book) with the Tamil rebels. That is a big come down for a country which was born a liberal democratic state in 1948, minus birth pangs of India and with the potential to become economic powerhouse in Asia.
Post conquest of the Tigers, the economy of Sri Lanka has recovered and is, in fact, booming; but Weiss has other worries. He sees a ‘decay’ in Sri Lanka’s democratic values (a phenomenon he describes as “democratic recession”) and emergence of a ‘Sri Lankan model’ which he describes thus: “A society sliding into tyranny where myth-making, identity whitewashing and political opportunism have defeated justice and individual dignity.”
A good pick for those keen to find out why democracy is finding it difficult to flourish in our part of the world. n
prasanna@governancenow.com
No comments:
Post a Comment