The Sri Lanka Option

As legend has it, in the 520s BCE, in the city of Singur in what is now the Indian state of West Bengal, near the Bangladesh border, one Prince Vijaya was exiled. He traveled quite a distance by water craft to the island of Sri Lanka, and with him brought seven-hundred people. Over time, the initial intermarriages of those original colonizers with the locals gave rise to what today we call the Sinhalese ("lion people"). (In an aside, Singur, the home of Vijaya, has sometimes been written as Singappur, which means "Lion City", and, not coincidentally, sounds very much like one modern city-state of today, Singapore, which unsurprisingly, means "Lion City", even though there were never any lions there, and what they saw were most likely tigers...)

The Sinhalese are what you call people from Sri Lanka. They make up 74% of the population of the island, have a language close to other Indo-Aryan family members from north-western India, and are intensely Buddhist.

There had been a long and violent insurgency being waged in Sri Lanka by the Tamil, an ethnic minority from the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the state on the side of the Indian peninsula that faces Sri Lanka. The Tamil are Hindu and Dravidian.

A few things have to be said, just to make some sense of a complicated few millennia of human migration, history, and an abundance of ethnic and religious tension: Siddhartha, the "founder" of Buddhism, was originally a Hindu. The Dravidian were the original inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent, and physically tend to be relatively short and relatively dark-skinned. In one of human history's major human migrations, the Indo-Aryans pushed into the Indian subcontinent and waged many wars, settled many lands, and inter-married with many Dravidians, shaping overtime what we in America, with our short attention spans, consider the "Indian ethnicity". Aryans tend physically to be taller and lighter-skinned. Think Kumar and his father in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle as examples of one of each.

So, the Sinhalese, the folks of Sri Lanka, are originally from an area far away, while their insurgents, the Tamil Tigers, as they were known, were most likely closer genetically to the Veddac people who intermarried with the exiled prince in the first place. The southern Indian states tend to be more Dravidian than Aryan, and vice-versa in the north, with Pakistan having little Dravidian presence.

Okay...the point up until now, besides a bit of background, was to notice that I used the past-tense for the insurgency ("...had been a long and violent..." and "...as they were known...").

Sri Lanka is the first modern nation to successfully stamp out a violent and suicide-bomber fueled insurgency. They accomplished that with what has come to be called, almost admiringly in military circles, "the Sri Lanka option."

What their army did was to corral the remnants of the main fighting force and push them off into the forrest. There were about three-hundred-thousand civilians with the fifteen-thousand strong rebel army. Now comes the clever part: they picked large clearings and declared them fire-free zones, and that the civilians should go there for safety. Once those areas were full the next day, they bombed the hell out of them, killing as many people as possible.

This worked rather well, but there was still a stubborn group sending suicide bombers as surrenderers, still killing Sinhalese soldiers, so they came up with another clever plan. They used a British journalist to broker cease-fire deals, with the remaining fighters to show themselves waving white flags, the international symbol of surrender.

At every meeting spot where the fighters emerged flying white flags, the result was the same: the Sinhalese soldiers blasted as many as they could see.

I imagine the running sentiment in the brains of those Sinhalese soldiers was either: Your white flag is no match for my machine gun; or: Surrender? Well, fuck you very much.

Now, the army did take in plenty of civilians, "rescued hostages" they were labeled, and the Tigers were killing the civilians as they fled. The final killing grounds--a stretch of beach-- kept shrinking with each offensive from the military. Defender's of the Tamil Tigers call the entire operation genocide, while the Sri Lankan president thumped his chest triumphantly. You have a problem with us, his statement being paraphrased by me went, we dealt with terrorism in our home land while you (the UN) did nothing, just like you do nothing about Columbia and their constant flow of cocaine or Somalia and their exporting of piracy...

So, the Sri Lanka option is, apparently, to kill as many of them as you can, as fast as you can; collateral damage is just a calculated cost; and keep the damn journalists and human-rights watchdogs the hell away.

Can you argue with the results?

Is that any way to view this situation?

Can Rodney King ever be right, with his famous line, "Can't we all just get along?"