Sri Lanka

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TM, ®, Copyright © 2021 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.

TM, ®, Copyright © 2005 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.

Articles on Sri Lanka after 2009
One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter

  • (may 2009) One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. The 25-years old civil war in Sri Lanka appears to have ended with the government killing the leader of the Tamil Tigers and restoring its control over the north. The northern coast of Sri Lanka is inhabited by ethnic Tamil people, many of whom never accepted the rule of Colombo. Sri Lanka is one of the oldest Buddhist countries. The Tamil are Hindus. The Tamil are "immigrants" in the sense that they were "imported" from India by the British to provide for cheap labor. Centuries later they claim that northern Sri Lanka is their land. The Buddhists of Sri Lanka still think of them as immigrants. Racism runs deep between the two sides. I heard Buddhists routinely insult Hindus and their "stupid gods", while in India i heard Tamils accuse Sri Lanka of genocide.
    The truth is that we still don't have a uniform rule on how to deal with these issues. We granted independence to Kosovo (ethnic Albanians and Muslims who were left in the homeland of the Christian Serbs after the Ottoman Empire collapsed), but we de facto recognized Russia's rights on Chechnya (another Muslim nation that does not want to be ruled by a Christian nation) and are moving towards recognizing China's rights on Tibet. We always sided with Spain against ETA and with Britain against the IRA. We support a Palestinian state. Recently, the USA sided with Georgia when two of its provinces declared independence, while Russia sided with the provinces the same way the USA had sided with Kosovo in Serbia. If Texas or California decided to secede from the USA, nobody really knows what the USA would do.
    During the Cold War, one power would choose between government and rebels simply based on which was the communist side. These days there is a general desire for stability and therefore the great powers tend to support the existing borders. The only country that had supported the rebels in Sri Lanka (or at least allowed a flow of arms) was India. Once India withdrew its support, the days of the Tamil Tigers were counted: they had no friends anywhere. The only other "terrorists" who specialize in suicide bombing are Muslims who hate everything Hindu. Pakistan and China gladly provided Sri Lanka with weapons to fight the Tamil Tigers (both Pakistan and China are engaged in a subtle geopolitical game with their rival India, see India vs China: a story of waking-up giants).
    So we don't really know who is right and who is wrong in these civil wars. We just know that the USA bombed Serbia when it tried to do to Kosovo what Sri Lanka is doing today to the Tamils. The Russian public opinion will, of course, view this contradiction as one more proof that Kosovo was an excuse to reduce Russia's sphere of influence. Since there is no Russian influence in Sri Lanka, the USA closed both eyes. China, on the other hand, might be pleased to see another revolt quelled: a lesson for Tibet.
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