By Rathindra Kuruwita
“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the State is to detect it in embryo.”
– Isaac Asimov
The issue of establishing new settlements on forest areas adjoining Wilpattu National Park has moved beyond from being an environmental issue to a tribal shoving match, by tribes I meant the Sinhalese and Muslims. While it could come to this was never a surprise to me, in fact I expected as much when I started reporting on the new settlements around 2010 and tried my best to prevent that from happening, which was the attitude of almost all environmental journalists from that period, I must admit that this is indicative of a dangerous trend we must try to overcome if we really want to make multiculturalism work.
Tribal shoving match
Essentially the issue of clearing of 3,200 acres in Kalaru forest reserve under the control of the Forest Conservation Department and establishing new settlements, is an environmental issue. This was how it was covered between 2010 and 2013. But unfortunately when the issue once again ‘resurfaced,’ although environmentalists like Sajeewa Chamikara and Jagath Gunawardane had been fighting the continuous environmental degradation since day one, the journalists who began to cover the issue had changed.
Those who covered the issue previously, from an environmental perspective, for some reason didn’t turn up and a new set of journalists, who had for most part not covered any environmental issue, reported on the matter in a partisan manner. One set of journalists toed the line peddled by Rishad Bathiudeen and Basil Rajapaksa, making it an issue of Muslim rights while the others toed the line peddled by the Sinhala extremists. And now the settlements of forest areas around Wilpattu are no longer an environmental issue, it is an ethnic issue.
For those who don’t know, the settlement of forest reserves around Wilpattu National Park began in 2009 when the Rajapaksa administration started converting the Old Mannar Road, which was nothing but a cart track which was used a long time ago, into a proper road connecting Mannar and Puttalam. From 2010 to 2012 a number of attempts were made to create settlements in these forests reserves, unsuccessfully, because no one wanted to live in an area without infrastructure surrounded by elephants and serpents.
But Bathiudeen and Basil Rajapaksa are not the kind of people to give up a project and since 2012/13 steps were taken to clear up forest lands and provide infrastructure to the new settlements. When I visited the area in 2010 while there were only wattle and daub houses, by 2012 there were concrete buildings, hundreds of trees were cut to provide electricity, and the sight of heavy vehicles, transporting material, thundering past in the road through the park raising dust clouds were a common sight. I remember thinking these people are hell bent on destroying this unique environment.
Credit for this must be given to Bathiudeen and the private media institutions. Bathiudeen of course stole this from the playbook of the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), who has done an excellent job in converting everything into a racial issue and the private media, whose main objective is maximization of profit couldn’t help but cover the issue from a racial angle. Almost two years down the line, things have deteriorated to such an extent that no Muslim environmentalist can come out and speak against the settlements in Kalaru forest reserve.
An environmentalist from the Muslim community, which is tightly knit and very much identitarian, might feel like letting down the entire community if she speaks against these settlements. But blaming this on the ‘characteristics’ of the Muslim community alone is stupid. Most of the blame should be put on media as the narrative propagated by these institutions divided those who are for and against the settlements on racial lines.
The problem is that if we can’t come together on an environmental issue to find ways to minimize the damage caused by creating new settlements, we will never be able to tackle more sensitive issues. And if we are not able to deal with sensitive issues without making it an ethnic shoving match, most of the people will feel that segregation and separation is the only answer. This division and its fallout, while being a major bummer for the ordinary people, will be awesome for people like Bathiudeen, the TNA and extremist elements in the Sinhala community because this will ensure that their hold on power will not be challenged.
The great game
And of course Bathiudeen, the TNA and what passes as Sinhala nationalists, aka the sad bunch of people who can’t even find a leader apart from the Rajapaksas (a member of the same clan Tweeted recently ‘we will always stand up for the minority communities in this country’) are all playing a game. And they know it. The premise of this game rests on the knowledge/idea that the Sinhalese will always claw and bite and scamper to maintain the ‘territorial integrity’ of the country.
But what if the Sinhalese decide that separation is the only viable option? What happens to the game then? Considering that almost 60% of Tamils and Muslims live outside the North and East how messy do you think the repartition process will be? Has no one read ‘Train To Pakistan’?
In the United States and Europe, the policies of successive administrations and demographic changes made everything a shoving match between the ethnicities by the second decade of this century; the majority Whites had become increasingly sceptical of the idea that different people can live in a country in harmony. At this point a new wave of right wing thinkers stepped out and said things that struck a chord with the Whites. The ideas of people like Markus Willinger and Richard B. Spencer, made the Whites think in a different way. And Brexit happened, Trump happened and Le Pen is likely to happen this year.
And on a very minuscule scale things are shifting in Sri Lanka as well and, no, it won’t bring Mahinda into power. Recently I met a few young Sinhala nationalists who thought dividing the country, so that each three ethnicities can have a separate ethnostate, was the only viable option for the Sinhala people. They were already convinced that multiculturalism was not working but unlike the easily dismissible maniacs in the Bodu Bala Sena or Joint Opposition they had no intention of lording over the other two main ethnic groups. They were just convinced that we (the three main ethnic groups) were not making each other happy and maybe giving up a part of the country was a price worth paying. These youngsters were intelligent and come across as sane rational people and I believe are likely to replace hooligans like Dan Priyasad who currently are a regular presence at ‘nationalist marches’.
And in 10 years when they put these ideas out into the Sinhalese people, right about the time when the population is ready to be convinced that segregation and separation is the answer, Bathiudeen, the TNA, dinosaurs of Sinhala nationalism and social justice warriors will be in for a rude awakening, just like the Republican and Democratic establishments in the US. But I presume the only thing to be done at that time is to figure out repartition.
Courtesy:Ceylon Today