Let Our People Go
This was originally published in the Sunday Leader
I’m writing this on the way back from Menik Farm. The roads are good. They’re digging new drains. There seems to be enough medicine. People are growing vegetables and sewing clothes. Behind that, however, there is a weariness in people’s eyes and a constant refrain on their lips. These people don’t want charity anymore. They want to be free.
Freedom. You and I take it for granted everyday. I took some kids to the park, bought them ice cream and let them run around. I was hanging around Haputale, climbing rocks, taking photographs and eating lunch in the clouds. The same day a young IDP I know celebrated his birthday in the camps. He’s five years old. What does that kid have to do with anything?
Foundations
You can’t build your happiness on other people’s misery. Someone told me that and I can’t get the words out of my head. I have dreams of some global zombification that I’m somehow complicit in. I see people I know ashen and hemorrhaging, I look down and there’s blood on my hands. I wake up afraid.
I live in a country where it seems OK to detain men, women and children by the thousands. Where suspects are regularly killed in police custody. I watched a Channel 4 video of soldiers executing naked, bound men in cold blood. I don’t know if the tape is real, but I fear that is reality.
Perceptions
Of course, I can’t really know. The local media can’t see through blackened eyes and rose-tinted glasses. The international media is driven more by an audience that isn’t here and has already made up their minds. Reading the news feels more like picking sides than making up my mind.
However, walking through Menik Farm, I know what I see. This is not emergency relief anymore. People no longer look relieved to get medical treatment and a meal. Everyone just wants to go home, or at least to stay with relatives. They don’t need charity anymore, they need the freedom to rebuild their lives with dignity.
Complicity
I think the time has come to let our people go. To the government’s credit, they have begun releasing people to Jaffna, Trincomallee, Batticaloa, etc. This needs to be made systematic and it needs to happen fast. It may not be possible for them to return to their homes, but people should be able to choose to stay with relatives or stay in the camps.
I think this is now a moral concern. Many of the arguments have been practical (demining, terrorism, etc), but at some point you have to look this thing in the eye. We are keeping children as prisoners. We are keeping families apart. We are ‘clearing’ camps by ‘removing’ people without trial or appeal. This may seem effective at securing the country, but there is a weight of injustice we cannot understand or predict.
What’s Changed
I always felt bad when I visited the camps, but I could at least see that things were getting better. That things were getting to a point where people were healthy and safe. Now that has been achieved, and the armed forces, government and doctors should be thanked for that. Now when I go, however, things are pretty much the same and resentments are hardening.
People are not cattle and they cannot be fed and medicated indefinitely. At some point they need freedom. Sadly, these people cannot speak for themselves, so I feel obliged to tell you what I’ve seen. It may not be the best for my security in Colombo, it may go wrong, but I can no longer look these people in the eye and tell them to wait. It makes me sick to my stomach.
The Future
Most of all, I cannot bear to see the children. When I see children anywhere it now reminds me. I know how hard it is to get a kid to eat and go to the bathroom and stay out of trouble and I don’t know how you do it in a camp. I don’t know how you do it without the support of family and the ability to make a living.
While this five year old in the camp was celebrating his birthday, I was in Haputale having unrelated cake. I was driving through the clouds, seeing the world and feeling as free as I could be. Some things are wrong and some things are right. This just feels wrong. We need to let our people go.
[...] Samarajiva at Indi.ca visits a Sri Lankan IDP camp and shares his observations: “Everyone just wants to go home, or at least to stay with [...]
A good post Indi, and some important and sensitive observations.
If weeks delayed.
What is wrong with the rest of the country that they have lost all sense of perspective, compassion, humanity and any sense of what is morally wrong and can’t see what’s going on right in front of their noses? It is brave of you to put your name to such thoughts – as, pathetic as it may seem, they are the kind of observations that can get you in a lot of trouble in sri lanka today, such is the ridiculous and scary reality of this immensely morally diseased country. as pants says, it’s taken you a while to realise that the manner in which this has been carried out from day one was not for the benefit of anyone – inside the camps or out.
“You can’t build your happiness on other people’s misery.”
Neither can you build them on landmines. Neither can you build it when your neighbour is a terrorist.
Why is that these simple truths are so difficult to wrap our heads around? Fact is that the dearly departed LTTE has strewn much of the IDP’s homes with landmines. Also a fact: there are still LTTE cadres skulking around amongst the IDPs.
And you want to release the whole lot right back out, so we can have a repeat of the 30-year war?
As tragic as the lives of these IDPs are, this is a fate that at least some of them created for themselves, along with their diaspora cousins. Perhaps if they turned in the LTTErs hiding amongst them, ‘going home’ would be happening sooner than later.
Is it so difficult for this blog to present all sides of the story?
Nadia, the repeat of the 30 year will only happen if you continue to build these kinds of walls where you don’t see the humanity of your neighbors and the suffering of human beings… but instead label them “terrorists” and advocate for them all to be kept like prisoners for the crime of few. If you clump all Tamil people into one category (a category that you seem to fear and despise), than you are creating that reality for yourself as well as the Island. Are you the same as everyone else who has same label as you – whether its male/female or Sinhala/Muslim or whatever identities you are part of? Do you enjoy being blamed for things any person(s) who look like you or speak the same language as you have done? This way of talking where you advocate punishing all Tamils for the behavior of few will only create resentment and animosity and hurts/wounds that are more likely to create people who are going to want to hurt others (including you perhaps). Think a bit before you speak or write. And consider how you would feel if you were the one caught in the situation described by Indi. Try and practice that compassion that the Buddha so beautifully talked of and showed humanity how to achieve and yet so many who dare to call themselves “Buddhists” can’t even seem to distinguish between hatred and compassion… wake up please before its too late for all of us. Or not… its really up to you. We only reap what we sow. Imagine what irony it would be if you were to die tomorrow by a tragic accident and be born as a child of one of the women living in the camp? Perhpas younger sibling to the one shown in the picture above? Try to create a world (in thoughts as well as actions) where you will feel happy to reborn anywhere and to anyone so you can sleep in peace in this life.
Why don’t you Tamils practice Hinduism first before telling others to practice their religion. Does Hinduism teach you guys to blow yourself up into smithereens and kill and butcher innocent people? Does it teach you to use little children as child soldiers? Do you realise that the 3 million odd Sri Lankan Tamil Hindus have provided more suicide bombers to the world than the more than 1 billion Muslims? People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
Whimsical, I am not Hindu. I do my best to practice the teaching of the Buddha and any others who teach how to free myself from hate and to have compassion. I am disturbed to see others who claim also to be followers of the Buddha but don’t seem to be able to free themselves from hate. Do you ever wonder what might happen in the life or circumstances of a human being to make that human being so desperate as to be willing to blow him or herself up as a suicide bomber?
Have you ever felt how when you feel hate for someone or something, how the energy you put into hate is inside you and destroys you? I sometimes think that when we die, those people whom we hate or fear and therefore give most of our psychic energy to must be the ones whom our spirts are drawn to be born to or among. And if this is so, its all right. There is no hurry. If we don’t learn to transform that hate for others now, we will probably get a chance to do it from the inside next time…for I think there is a good chance that we will become what we hate. So, I hope I find a way to forgive and have compassion for those who claim to be Buddhists but can’t seem to find the first step towards compassion. I will work on that. Because I don’t want to be born as one next time. And I hope you find a way to forgive and have compassion for those who are willing to blow themselves up into “smithereens and kill and butcher “innocent” people. Because if you don’t, you might be one of those people in next lifetime and than you will be able to understand why they do such things. You can wait for that time or do it now. Its all the same in the end. I do believe we will all get there sooner or later.
Oh yes, and before I forget, there was also a ‘weight of injustice’ when we didn’t know which bus stand or train station would be exploding into smithereens.
I think we need to have some ‘moral concern’ about such incidents repeating themselves. While people may not be cattle (though I have my doubts, going by some), the government is not Mother Theresa. It needs to do what is best for the country, security-wise, long term.
BTW, how come none of you were complaining about the condition of these people’s lives when they lived under the jackboot of the LTTE, sacrificing their children (by force) to serve the whims and fancies of that now-deceased megalomaniac? Do you think it was so much better than what it is now?
Typical Colombo hypocrisy.
Why do you hate the IDPs? Typical convenient–when-the results–don’t–hit–my–family–hard utilititarian hypocrisy.
Why do the sri lankans in the south hate and have no empathy towards civilian IDPs? Someone could write a thesis on that. some kind of tribal group instinct? are the IDPs seen as not “of the group” and therefore not human? Perhaps we could do an cross analysis with the germans of the 1940s and how they sat idly by, justifying everything in their own heads when some of them knew exactly what was going on.
most people I know who are calling into question the morality of the camps also abhor the LTTE, and numerous people have written criticising them throughout this conflict and throughout this war, tamil and sinhala alike. This is a tired and stupid argument – we need to look at what is happening NOW, not harp on about what happened before. one injustice doesn’t cancel out another. The LTTE are all but gone now which is why we are focusing on the issue at hand: the IDPs. The fact that the LTTE once committed acts that any morally sane person wouldn’t condone, doesn’t mean that we now have license to take revenge on a ravaged civilian population as some kind of twisted retribution. this is the sick kind of nonsense coming out of the propaganda addled country today.
Fact: a large proportion of those people don’t have to build their homes on landmines, they have homes to go to and can stay with relatives. This is a pathetic false argument that people are still dutifully parroting.
Fact: you can’t just hold a quarter of a million civilians hostage illegally because you think there may be some criminals amongst them – at least open up and tell us how you are weeding them out and what process you are using to do this – be transparent if you have nothing to hide. And let the people you have screened out. It is morally wrong and fundamentally illegal to do this.
The situation is an abomination – pure and simple, and the fact that people still continue to excuse it is one of the most frightening things I have ever witnessed. More frightening than the bombs we’ve had to suffer, the threats we have faced, is that the majority of Sri Lankans are happy to allow one section of this country to bear such suffering in the name of their own alleged safety and don’t even try to hold the government accountable by demanding transparency and the observance of due process. There is never one shred of concern expressed by people like Nadia about the innocent people in the camps. They are lumped together as one monolithic monster in the minds of most sri lankans, these people that none of them have spoken to or spent time with, unlike Indi.
You are the hypocrite here I fear, Nadia. Hypocrite enough to demand that these people be put through such suffering that you yourself would not want to be subjected to. Why don’t you go and stay with them in the same conditions until they get let out and put your money where your mouth is? Why don’t you go up there and meet these people and ask them what they think and want and feel, at the very least, these people you are happy to sit there condemning as judge and jury from your computer.
Indi, I concur with your words and I think you have stated your thoughts elegantly. These people need to be relocated in haste and whatever it takes to achieve this must be expedited. I understand the governments position regarding LTTE members having to be weaned out and all hidden LTTE resources needing to be discovered before allowing anyone to return but this must also be done as quickly as possible. The key to racial reconciliation is to win the hearts and minds of these people and not to alienate them even further by incarcerating them in camps.
well, well… enlightenment took a while didn’t it, Indi?
Anywayz, good to see you’re no longer stretching the cling wrap over the lavatory pit.
So Indi, now that you’ve reached enlightenment, and want the 300,000 detainees released, do you or do you not support the media and political campaigns of NGO’s, foreign politicians and media organisations from overseas? Do you still think they should be requesting politely, and not demand. Do you have a right to demand? And if you do, why can’t they echo your demand? I’m confused. Have you really done a right about turn? Let’s hope you have.
Thank you Indi for this post. It seems to me that you are genuinely grappling with tough issues and trying to be open minded to take in new information and be willing to change your opinions. It takes courage to say, perhaps I was inaccurate in my thinking before and now that I see whats happening to people, I have changed my mind… and I would like to honor that courage. Its easy to see things from our own perspective (as individuals or community) but much harder to open to seeing how it might be for others and to try to understand their perspective. Thank you for showing that its possible. And for having the courage to do it in such a public way.