Poetic Politics

How Sri Lanka (Ceylon) was destroyed by Affirmative Action and an Indigenous Language Policy

Sri Lanka (Ceylon when the Afrikaner boers were there as prisoners of war during the Anglo Boer War) has had a thirty year war, sparked initially by an unjust Affirmative Action policy against the Tamil minority.

They also stopped education in English with predictable results. All the older generation can speak English, but the younger generation can’t.

I fail to understand why Thabo Mbeki, who told fellow students in Moscow when he was in his mid twenties that he would become South Africa’s first black president or prime minister, did not study these facts in the decades he was in exile.

To quote again from “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” by Paul Theroux:

“The Tamil Tiger secessionist war had had the effect of turning Columbo into a very quiet place, with few visitors and no tourists to speak of……A ‘speak only Sinhalese’ policy, which had been established in schools by the government in the 1970s, meant that so few Sri Lankans spoke English, they were unemployable by foreign companies looking for cheap labour in the IT industries. On one occasion in the 1990s, three thousand college - educated Sri Lankans showed up for call center jobs; fewer than one hundred spoke English.

Rebuffed by the high-tech employers, they were instead hired to make polo shirts and jeans and T-shirts and sneakers in Sri-Lankan sweat shops….The Tamils had been calling for their own state for the past thirty years…The Tigers fought with single-minded savagery….I had been told in Trichy by a boasting Tamil that the Tigers pioneered the suicide bomb…

……the Black Tiger Suicide Squad, its subgroup of zealots, wearers of the self-destructing vest – hold the world record for suicide bombings. The official figure is 1,680 in the twenty years between 1980 and 2000, far more than Hamas and Hezbollah combined. One of the better known Tiger victims was Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was blown up in Chennai in 1991 by a young Black Tiger woman…..

The Tamil convulsion, and all the deaths…and because the violence had retarded Sri Lanka…..Columbo was a forgotten city with little foreign investment and a failing economy…

Here is a description of where the Tamil problem started, from a different book, “a Passage to Africa” by George Alagiah:

“Africa …was to be, for my family, a place of deliverance, a promised land…I knew this in a way a child knows these things. I learned from half heard conversations between my parents that Ceylon was not somewhere that we Tamils would prosper. So Ceylon was bad, Africa was good….I remember our house in Colombo…..People in Sri-Lanka talk about ‘the disturbances’ of 1958 in much the same way as people in Britain blithely refer to the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. Both are euphemisms….After 1958 a large portion of educated Tamils…began to rethink their lives. My parents were typical of them…..

Years later, Rwandan Tsutsis, Kosovan Albanians….would tell me how they, too, were persecuted for how they looked. Tamils tend to be darker and shorter than the Sinhalese…..Tamils tended to be Hindus or…Christians, certainly not Buddhists….

the riots were to go on for two days and nights before the authorities took any action…..My parents realised it was time to get out….

The reason you will be given for the high number of Tamils at the top levels of the civil service depends on who you ask. The Tamils will tell you it is because they work hard and place more importance on the value of a good education…..the Sinhalese will tell you it is because the Tamils sucked up to the colonial masters and were rewarded with the plum jobs…..But there is- dare I say it- also a little something in the gene pool. There is a certain earnestness about Tamils, just as there is a certain breeziness about the Sinhalese. In a world of caricatures the Tamil would live in a shack and save all his money for a rainy day while the Sinhalese would live in a mansion he could not afford and not worry about the consequences……

Vast amounts of government money were pumped into projects to settle Sinhalese people on land bordering historically Tamil areas….Tamils saw it as a veiled attempt to tamper with the demogaphics of the country…..uncertainties in Africa seemed a better bet than what appeared to us to be at store for us in the country of our birth….

Bandaranaike boasted of how, within twenty-four hours of taking office, he would establish Sinhalese as the official language of the country. Till then, English had been the language of government and commerce…he appointed Buddhism…virtually…as the state religion….

It was an early, if gentle, hint of the process of radicalisation that would eventually lead otherwise peace-loving and sane Tamils to believe that the indiscriminate violence of Tamil terrorists was justifiable…..

There runs through Asian society a thick vein of racism, and Ceylon in the late fifties and early sixties was no exception. Colour, as I said earlier, was, and still is, an issue, and the caste system tended to reflect this…..

We were part of the beginning of the Tamil diaspora. And virtually every man who left was a professional…

So worried was the Ceylonese government when it realised what a haemorrhage of talent it unleashed that, just three weeks before we left the country, it had impounded our passports. We only got them back after the Ghanaian High Commissioner in Columbo lodged a formal complaint…

Over the next decade or so literally thousands of Tamil families left the island….

But now who would run the ministries? How would the roads be maintained? Where were the doctors who would ensure health for all? That is where the migrant professionals came in – Indians, Poles, Filipinos, Ceylonese and Czechs……

Ghana needed us. Tamil professionals could do the jobs left behind by the Brits…

Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president……..1965 was a watershed for the continent. Within twelve months of the OAU summit, Kwame Nkrumah would be deposed in a military coup…the champion of a greater Africa had been so out of touch he hadn’t realised his people were having to queue for milk…..the rejoicing of the Ghanaian people sent a shiver down the spines of presidents all over Africa. Not in my country, they said. They resolved to concentrate even more power in their own hands…….

My parents decided to send me to a boarding school in Britain…my parents eventually moved to Nigeria and then Zimbabwe.

Kilde: http://www.newstime.co.za