A response to the critiques of

the victory celebrations

Photography by AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena, via South China Morning Post
I would ask them to stop a moment, to take the time to listen to our time (we had no
other one) Jacques Derrida: text delivered at Althussers funeral
by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka
- on 05/20/2014
Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post
coitum historicum ideologies, after the orgy ideologies for an easy going generation
which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a
generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered
altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional
outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values
harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age A new generation, that
of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed
children of history. Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, London, Verso, 1990, pp 223-
24.

The central contention of the anti-victory celebration civil society intelligentsia seems
to be that violent civil conflicts should not be celebrated and never are. This is ironic
because most of them would be familiar with Bastille Day and I expect to see some of
them on the occasion. They would know that July 4th, Bastille Day is Frances National
Day. That is of course the day that the prison, the Bastille was stormed. In other
words, France marks as its National Day, the day that the Revolution triumphed.
Though the storming of the Bastille was itself relatively bloodless, the Revolution was
a very violent civil conflict which had an even bloodier aftermath. Bastille Day July 4th
is celebrated and not only by receptions. As I have been privileged to witness during
my tenure as Sri Lankas Ambassador to France, it is marked by a most impressive
display of military might, culminating in parachute drops and a spectacular fly past by
advanced military aircraft of all categories.

Those who argue that civil wars are not commemorated are ignorant of the historical
fact that when there is a liberating aspect to a civil war and when a civil war has ended
in victory, it almost always is commemorated. The Russian Revolution was
commemorated by military parades in the Red Square for decades, while as I have
just noted, the French Revolution still isand every victorious revolution was
preceded, accompanied or followed by bitter civil war. The defeat of the Tigers and the
felling of Prabhakaran the Monster-King, were felt to be an emancipation; an authentic
liberation from decades-old terror.

Doesnt any anti-war, anti-victory celebration Sri Lankan intellectual or aspirant

intellectual remember or know what the Vietnam War was? It was originally and finally
a civil war, in which the US intervened. The Vietnam War commenced as a war for
reunification of North and South Vietnam which had been divided at the Geneva peace
conference of 1954 on the proviso that elections would be held. The war resumed
because Geneva Peace accords were violated by the South and its western backer,
the USA, who feared that Ho Chi Minh would win an election throughout the country
massively, not because he was a Communist which he indubitably was but
precisely because he was also or primarily perceived as, a nationalist. Therefore the
struggle for reunification took the form of guerrilla war and after the US intervened in
that civil war on the side of its ideological protgs, it became a full scale conventional
war. After the Paris Peace talks led to the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement, the
US no longer had a combat role. The last years of the Vietnam War were once again a
civil war for reunification of North and South. Following the victory of April 30th 1975,
the capital of the South, long known as Saigon, was re-named Ho Chi Minh City. That
victory is celebrated with military parades every year.

If Germany can celebrate its Reunification Day, when the Berlin Wall fell and the two
halves of Germany were reunited, why should Sri Lanka not celebrate the day when
the LTTEs Iron Curtain was destroyed, a radical evil defeated, a monster (a South
Asian Hitler) slain and the island reunified after decades?
Not every reunification is peaceful. In most cases the unification or reunification of the
national territory and state required civil wars, as we know from Bismarks Prussian
unification of Germany through blood and iron, Italys Risorgimento and the history of
most of Europe, not to mention the military campaigns of Sun Yat Sen and the
Kuomintang which reunified China.

Which collective political formation/entity, be it state, nation, community, or peoples,

would not celebrate a mere half a decade later, the reunification of its territory; the
return and repair of its borders so that its sovereign territory is coextensive with its
natural boundaries?

As for the liberal-pacifist argument in Colombo that the unification of peoples is far
more important than the mere unification of territorial borders, it demonstrates a
complete ignorance of the history of the modern era. The magnificent democratic
revolutionary awakening of 1848 dubbed The Springtime of Nations saw the
unification of territories and creation of nation-states by the shattering of the separate
kingdoms or principalities (as Tamil Eelam was), and the unification under the
language and often the religion of the group that constituted the majority. 1848 was a
majoritarian phenomenon which left behind or kindled many a Nationalities or Minority
Question throughout Europe.

I am glad we won the war. I am proud of it. If as Nietzsche says, there is a pattern of
eternal recurrence in existence, if the only choices available were (a) the victory of the
Tigers (b) their evacuation (c) a return to negotiations with them on the basis of the
CFA, ISGA or PTOMS, i.e. anything other than outright surrender or (d) the outcome
that we had with all the horrors that are coming to light, I would support that final
offensive all over again. In Geneva in April-May 2009, we cleared the decks for the
final decisive military endgame by staving off the Wests attempts to obtain a UN
mandate for a cessation of hostilities. Having prevented the Special Session until
Prabhakaran was dead we then defeated the West diplomatically when the special
session was finally held ten days later. If I were put on a time machine and taken back
to that time, I would unhesitating do it all over again.

As Regis Debray, philosopher Louis Althussers student, Fidel Castros acolyte, Che
Guevaras comrade, Francois Mitterrands advisor and one of Europes most
renowned thinkers says:

In the beginning was War. The demand for security (of people, property,
and ideas) constitutes political need, for the state of war is the horizon of
the social and societies can never see beyond it except in terms of juridical
mirages of humanitarian pacifismWar is a universal and recurrent fact of
history of societies becauseit is inherent in the existence of social groups
and actually conditions their constitution and dissolutionEveryone knows
that war is waged so that we can have peace, but that we cannot have
peace without making war. (Regis Debray: Critique of Political Reason
1981: 276)

The LTTE was a racist and fascistic force which had dismembered sleeping women
and children and child monks, exploded bombs against wholly civilian targets in the
South and serially murdered many leaders of the Sinhalese and Tamils. It is hardly
surprising that in the last stage of the war, the motivating spirit of the Sri Lankan
soldiers, some of whom would have come from villages which experienced atrocities,
would have been a blood lust to exterminate the leadership and hard core of such an
enemy which had engaged in a decades-long orgy of unbridled Nazi-like exterminism
against the Sinhalese nation. When one fights radical evil, one is tempted to eliminate
any chance of its revival. It is human, all too human to borrow Nietzsches phrase. It
happens to the most rational and literate of us: who after all, has not heard of the
Jacobin Terror after the French revolution and the elimination of the Tzars family
which Regi Siriwardhana termed the Original Sin of the Bolshevik Revolution?

It is a testament to the humanity of our armed forces that specialised units lost men
and limbs in penetrating the bunker-bund complexes, engaging in bitter trench
warfare, to rescue two hundred thousand Tamil civilians who were with the Tigers. It is
evidence of their humanity that 11,000 Tiger fighters were taken into captivity
unharmed.

As Nietzsche cautioned, when one looks for too long into the abyss, the abyss looks
into you. We, my generation, the accursed children of history which preceded the
spoilt children of the crisis to use Baudrillards phrases, had to look into the abyss for
three decades (four if you date it from the April 71 insurrection) and the abyss has
looked into us. Our lives were directly impacted by the war. We knew many who were
slain, and not in combat, by the Tigers. We had an emotional stake in the war and its
outcome. We lived the crisis; the long extreme situation. We are the products of that
two-way gaze, into the abyss with the abyss looking back into us. Someday, we as a
society, Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims, shall settle accounts with our traumatic, terror
filled past. We shall decide when that is. That choice and timing will not be imposed
upon us by Western governments driven, among other things by the same elements of
the Tamil Diaspora who supported the Tigers and materially contributed to the carnage
they inflicted.

To open an inquiry prematurely would cause a psychological eruption among three

hundred thousand armed men, veterans of a bitter and victorious war. Who are we to
judge them? That is the task of another generation or other generations. Certainly
Western states and societies have no right to judge them, or us, who experienced
these harsh and bloody decades. This is why I remain as unalterably opposed to an
international inquiry into the war as I was in Geneva in 2009 and before. We shall not
permit it; we must and shall resist.

It is ludicrous of soi disant liberals and radicals to advocate or excuse an intrusive,

lacerating external inquiry into the war while at the same time lamenting the closure,
as I do, of the Sri Lankan state, society and mentality. These academics,
commentators and critics lament the consequence while supporting the cause! As
Regis Debray points out: the besieger creates the rampartsThere would be no
circumscription if there were no encirclement. (Debray 1981: 276)

Thus only among those who oppose the external siege are consistent opponents of
closure, paranoia and the siege mentality, to be found.

To leave the last philosophical word to Regis Debray: The political world is a world in
which there are always two of us; the enemy and meWar itself is a principle of
delineation. There can be no really open society, no society whose essence or identity
(or both) is not to some extent threatened by a neighbouring or more distant society.
Enclosure is the basic category of the political world, since the opposition between
inside and outside establishes both its identity and its necessity.(Debray, 1981: 277)
Let no one repeat the mistake of underestimating the resolve of a people-nation which
did not surrender to decades of terrorism but decided instead to fight and win.

Dayan Jayatilleka, PhD, was Sri Lankas Ambassador/Permanent Representative to

the UN in Geneva (2007-2009) and Sri Lankas Ambassador Extraordinary and
Plenipotentiary to France and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO (2011-2013).