Going with the wind » Colombo

Walking around Colombo’s “slums”

GoingwitheWind — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:39:39 +0000

To kill time between two stories in April 2010, I walked around what one could call Colombo’s slums (I much prefer the French term, bidonville, which sounds less offensive to me). Tamil inhabitants of the extremely poor quarter I visited, were living next to a railway and would spend a lot of time hanging out on the tracks, to escape the claustrophobia of their confined houses. My limited photographic skills did not allow me to take pictures inside their houses; dark, narrow rooms with hardly enough space for one person, but often accommodating families of 5 or 6 children. I could see the wall shaking each time a train would pass.

Instead I focused on life in the street, where inhabitants of the bidonville spend most of the day.

Filed under: SRI LANKA

Colombo’s Fishmarket

GoingwitheWind — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 12:42:49 +0000

To stay in the spirit of my previous post, here are some pictures from Colombo fish market taken a Sunday afternoon walking around the city with my sister. The smell was so strong that our clothes and shoes were impregnated for several hours after we left, but the place is quite something to see. Busy, noisy, smelly, lively and colored in halftone. In a different life I would be a fisherman.

Filed under: SRI LANKA

World Cup Cricket and Football: Nationalism in France and Sri Lanka

GoingwitheWind — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 08:57:25 +0000

As Published on Groundviews

I know absolutely nothing about cricket and honestly would not have paid attention to the Cricket World Cup, had I not been in Sri Lanka the week its team made it to the final. Although the Sri Lankan team lost in the end, it was an electrifying moment to live, even as a foreigner. World Cup fever is universal, whatever the game, whatever the continent. The tension was so palpable, emotion and excitement at its highest on Galle Face Green where I went to watch the game amid a crowd of 8000 cricket fans. People seemed proud to be Sri Lankan, waving the flag, faces painted and broad smiles. An entire country behind its team.

This was particularly interesting as Sri Lanka will be soon celebrating two years since the end of the war and mostly reconciliation between the different ethnicities remains a theory. Being Sri Lankan still largely means belonging to the dominant Sinhala/Buddhist culture. However supporting a national team implies that one feels part of a nation and the fervor following the semi-final that Sri Lanka won against New Zealand prompted many to wonder if a victory could help foster reconciliation.

I could not help but think about 1998 and the football world cup that France won against Brazil and our own delirious state of French nationalism. I was 12 at the time, on a holiday with my family in Rochefort for a cousin’s wedding. Because we were all staying in a hotel, some twenty of us decided to watch the match in one of the room, in front of a ridiculously small TV screen. My cousins and I had painted our faces blue, white and red, the colours of the French flag, matched our outfits and even tinted our hair with blue, white and red hair spray. I barely knew the rules of the game, but men, I was into it. We were all. The whole of France was stuck behind its TV screen, in the streets, all over Paris, the suburbs, the province. We were all « black, blanc, beurre ».

This formula coined by the media was derived from the flag’s colours (bleu, blanc, rouge) and replaced them with skin colours representing the different ethnicities in the French team and France as a whole. « Black » for people of sub-Saharan origins, « blanc/white » for boring people like me and « beurre /butter» for people of Maghreb origins whose skin is the color of melted golden butter.

I remember the euphoria, singing «Et 1, et 2, et 3 – 0 !!!!» as Zinedine Zidane head-butted the ball in the Brazilian goal, twice, on two corner kicks, taking the French team to a total and triumphal victory. What a sublime game it was. I remember going in the street with my cousins, overwhelmed by the number of people out partying together, carrying flags and dancing on the pavement, on walls, in fountains. We felt like one people.

Fast forward 7 years later, I am 19 studying in London and once again I find myself glued to a tiny screen -a computer this time- watching the news coming out from France with my good friend Pierre. Cars burning, riots, the suburbs of Paris, Lyon, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Nantes on fire because a disenchanted youth has decided to voice its anger for being relegated to second class citizens. From afar it looks like France has gone to war with itself. The young people in the streets are sons and daughters of 2^nd, sometime 3^rd generation immigrants, parked in the ghettos that are the state housing estates located in the suburbs around big cities – la cité, immortalised in Mathieu Kassowitz’s film La Haine. That France « black, blanc, beurre » that we so eagerly celebrated in 1998 seems to have never existed and I watch in disbelief. What did I miss?

What I missed is simple. When we watch a football game or a cricket game, we watch it with our friends, with people similar to us. The feeling of unity, comradeship is real, but what we celebrate is different from one group to another. Zidane the Algerian, like Murali the Tamil, are idolized by entire countries yet what the majority and the minority project on them is fundamentally different. While for the minority they are a source of pride and the proof that they deserve the respect of the majority, for the majority they are the proof that integration is possible without compromise, that those in the minority who complain really are just nuisance. Unfortunately for the racist and scared majority, “National identity is not only a football team winning when it is blue, white, red. It is a multicoloured society; and that you have to deal with it in difficult times as well as in success”, as Tariq Ramadan, an European academic, pointed out.

Leaders like to do just that, hijack sport events like the cricket world cup, ride the wave of nationalist enthusiasm and proclaim heroes the players of minority origins, heroes they will be able to shake like scarecrows against the trouble makers who ask for equal rights. They appropriate to themselves the symbol of national victory, something as trivial as a football game, to create an easy discourse of unity. Perhaps I should stop here before I put Foucault and football in one sentence, but you get the idea.

France never really recovered from the riots in 2005. Since then the « identity » issue has grown, engulfing immigration, the « banlieues », “Islamism”, extreme right, populism and political opportunism. For sometime the Sarkozy administration has even tried to create a controversial debate on national identity, i.e. what it means to be French.

What does it mean to be French ? I have absolutely no clue.

My point is flags, national anthems and national sport teams are all nice symbols meant to consolidate the Nation-State, an old 19^th century concept that we struggle with in the global age. But the truth is nation-building is a bloody and insensitive process that wipes out minorities, forcing them to adapt to the majority’s culture and values to survive. It is a process at odd with increasingly universal values of human rights and democracy, but we cling to it because it reassure us. Football world cups and other international competitions are rituals in which we can reassert our belonging to the nation. Games are ersatz of battles and the mirror offered to us by multi-ethnic sport teams, champions duelling for their country’s honour, is infinitely more pleasant than the one where we kill, oppress and exclude to ensure that only our idea of what our country is prevails. But of course, it’s just a game.

Filed under: SRI LANKA

Sri Lanka’s war chiefs fight for the spoils of peace

GoingwitheWind — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:46:17 +0000

By Melanie Gouby
As published in The Samosa

He may seem the most unlikely candidate of all, but former army chief General Sarath Fonseka has shaken off the Sri Lankan establishment and engaged in a fierce campaign to beat his former ally to the presidential throne.General Fonseka, the very man who led the army to victory, and once part of current president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s inner circle, dramatically turned against the power in place and declared he would run against his old friend in the election.

President Rajapaksa had called for early elections, hoping to strengthen his rule thanks to the nationalist sentiments prevailing in Sri Lanka following his government’s victory over the Tamil Tigers rebels last spring, ending a 26-year civil war.

Rajapaksa was expected to win the January 26th election hands down – but he didn’t reckon on Fonseka entering the fray.

As a military man who took tough decisions in the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) guerilla movement, Fonseka was not exactly the designated candidate for the opposition, and certainly not for the Tamil minority.

Nevertheless, last Wednesday the Tamil National Alliance, a party representing the Tamil population, declared it would “request from all Sri Lankans … to vote for General Sarath Fonseka”.

The campaign revolves around ethnic issues, but little is being said by either candidate about actual policies or how they will realise their lofty promises of good governance and economical revival.

Fonseka has committed himself to abolishing the executive presidency – which currently gives the president over-arching power – as well as fighting corruption and making concessions to the Tamil minority.

He promises to grant an amnesty to former militants and says that government troops will return occupied private lands to their Tamils owners.

But Fonseka is also an ardent Sinhalese nationalist and has yet to declare he will make concrete political concessions to the Tamils and recognise their right to self-determination. Some think his courtship of the Tamil population is simply a calculated electoral move.

“Personally I don’t believe him because he made literal statements as the leader of the army, saying that the minorities don’t have a place here,” said Sheila Richards, the head of a Colombo-based peace and reconciliation NGO. “The military is also behind the violation of media rights and the lack of freedom of expression.”

Fonseka promised he would pass a freedom of information law, and recently claimed that Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the Minister of Defence and brother of Mahinda, should take responsibility for the killing of journalists in recent years.

At the heart of the feud between Fonseka and the Rajapaksa brothers lies a dispute over both who should take credit for the victory against the LTTE, and who is to blame for the high civilian death toll.

It was army chief General Fonseka who commanded the troops that finally defeated the LTTE after 26 years of bloody civil war, but President Rajapaksa credited the victory mainly to himself and his brother.

And when Fonseka was asked by US officials to testify in an investigation into possible war crimes in November, palpable tensions began to emerge within the power triumvirate.

Fonseka later declared that he would welcome such investigations once he was elected, and accused Gotabaya Rajapaksa of being responsible for the alleged crimes.

Since then, the election has been little more than a media circus, with each side hurling accusations at the other.

This blame game does not fool many Sri Lankans. To many, Fonseka is just the lesser of two evils, an anti-establishment candidate who will keep the establishment running.

“We are left with the choice of an extremely corrupt, centralised government which has disregarded the written constitution and runs the country like it’s a family business, or we’ve got an ex-General who was hired for the job purely due to his ruthless past and is just a mouthpiece for the opposing parties at the moment,” complains Sammath Gammampila, a 22-year-old Sinhalese student.

“What can you expect of someone like him, who led the war and denies his implication in the violation of human rights during the war? He was leading the army. But the presidency will be more ruthless if Rajapaksa is elected,” adds Sheila Richards.

Even if he is genuine about his fight against corruption, General Fonseka will be confronted by the realities of Sri Lanka’s establishment.

“The way things are now, it will be difficult to change it rapidly. Because Fonseka comes from a background that is close to this corrupted power, he was at the top of the army, it seems unlikely that those promises will be kept,” explains an opposition MP who wishes to remain anonymous.

On top of this, Sri Lankans wonder whether Fonseka will have what it takes to turn around the economy and bring them the comfort they are longing for.

“Full stomachs, a home and a job, that’s what most people want. They have forgotten long ago about their rights and about democracy. The war brainwashed them into thinking that this near state of dictatorship is normal,” adds the opposition MP.

But the rival candidates have barely touched on the economy during the campaign, and Fonseka’s manifesto does not make promises beyond easing the cost of living and providing employment for the country’s youth.

The reality is that economic issues may well be left in the hands of foreign powers, with India and China struggling to impose their respective spheres of influence over Sri Lanka.

New Delhi has a history of meddling in the island’s politics, and it was thanks to an Indian intelligence tip-off that Fonseka was ousted from his position in the army, according to Seema Sengupta, a freelance journalist based in Kolkata, India.

This is likely to push Fonseka closer to China, who largely funded last year’s decisive attack on the LTTE.

Whoever is elected will have to choose his allies carefully, but a stable Sri Lanka will also require foreign powers to act responsibly.

“India, as the largest South Asian neighbour, will be required to play a constructive role in ensuring that Sri Lanka can prosper”, says Sengupta. However, international pressure has had little effect in bending the will of the Sri Lankan elite either during or since the war last year.

Tamils voters, the “kingmakers” in the election according to observers, will have difficulty forgetting recent events and the ruthlessness with which they were repressed.

On the 26th, they will have to make a tough call on Fonseka – is the enemy of their enemy their friend?

Last Updated on Thursday, 14 January 2010 03:36

Posted in SRI LANKA

Sri Lanka’s winner takes it all

GoingwitheWind — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:10:48 +0000

My article on Sri Lanka’s government in The Samosa

Sri Lanka’s winner takes it all

By Melanie Gouby

Following his decisive victory over Tamil separatists, Sri Lanka’s victorious president Mahinda Rajapaksa is accumulating unprecedented power in what his critics fear is a new war – only this time, on democracy.
Talking about his job with the Sri Lankan government makes Samath uncomfortable. Many times he looks around to check that no-one is listening. His restlessness seems out of place on this peaceful beach on the east coast, not far from Pottuvil. He nervously drinks his arrack, a local liquor, while explaining that he will quit his job soon because he feels threatened.

Samath is a stage speaker who visits Tamil and Muslim villages to promote government policies.

“Propaganda, that is. I don’t like what I am doing, it is a constant lie. I don’t believe in the government,” he says. “One of my friends, a pharmacist, disappeared because he was suspected of giving medicine to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The government denies they kidnapped him, but I know it is them. And I’m scared because I am suspected of dissent. Leaving the country may be my only option.”

Samath, like many other educated Sri Lankans, fears that the government has become autocratic in recent years. The government’s defeat of the LTTE separatist movement has been welcomed by most Sri Lankans, but the blitz that secured its rapid victory has also restricted freedom of speech and freedom of movement and diminished other civil liberties. In such circumstances, many question whether peace has been gained at the cost of democracy and human rights.

“The president should work with the opposition but I don’t think it will happen,” says Chandra, a member of Sri Lanka’s political opposition. “The mentality is petty-minded, they want to suppress the dissent, they are too authoritarian. I don’t think they really act in people’s interests.”

While most international attention is focused on the refugee camps of Vavuniya, the rest of the country suffers from an insidious, and less visible, terror. Critics of the government, such as the former editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper who was murdered earlier this year, regularly disappear, and although nothing has been proved, it is muttered behind closed doors that disbanded soldiers can be hired for less than 3000 rupees by anyone, for any job. So, why not the government?

“Last year, before the elections, there were many abductions and killings. It went down since, but who did this remains uninvestigated,” says Maria, an international NGO worker. “In fact the subject of the rule of law is a sensitive topic here.”

But the vast majority of Sri Lankans seem unconcerned. Alienated by thirty years of civil war, they see the new government as their saviour despite all they may have to sacrifice for relative peace. “The whole way the war was led, the increased military presence everywhere, it brainwashed people,” explains Jonathan, a local NGO worker. “If you watch the local TV now, it is a lot of propaganda, there is no other alternative voice anymore. You would never see pictures of Gordon Brown everywhere in the UK, but here our president’s portrait is on every wall.”

Wearing his usual white tunic and red scarf accompanied by a moustache awkwardly reminiscent of Stalin, President Mahinda Rajapaksa is indeed everywhere, embracing children, talking to soldiers, walking victoriously with his generals. “People here seem to want a dictatorship, a lot of people say they had a democracy for fifty years and it hasn’t got us anywhere. But what people do not understand is that they never gave democracy a chance, because immediately after independence there was the Sinhala Only Act in 1956,” says Jonathan.

After centuries of British rules, the Sinhala Only Act decreed that Sinhalese would become the official language. A root cause of the conflict, it discriminated against Tamils, who faced disadvantage in the education system and were unable to apply for many administrative jobs. With time and terrorism, the people’s need for security has become stronger than the need for democracy.

The government has therefore been able to enact harsh policies in the name of the war. The number of troops has increased by more than 100 per cent in the past two years, from 100,000 to more than 200,000 soldiers, an incredible number for such a small island. Despite the end of the war, more soldiers are still being recruited.

The rising cost also raises questions. “We pay very high taxes and the government justified it with the cost of the war. But now it has been criticised because it has not come down. They say that we have to wait, that it is too early”, complains Rithu, a businesswoman.

Samath, the stage speaker, is convinced the government is using that money illegally for campaign fundraising. “There is no reason for the prices to go up. I know that for sure,” he says with a sigh.

Illegal fundraising or not, the presidential elections are due in November and current president Mahinda Rajapaksa is almost certain to win. Elected last time thanks to his promise to crush the LTTE, now he says he “wants a mandate to settle the [conflict] forever, [find] a political solution.”

Many think he genuinely wants to put an end to the conflict and give Tamils more rights, starting with the refugee camps. “It would look so bad on them to leave the refugees in camps interminably,” says Chandra, the political opponent.

But the danger is for democracy in Sri Lanka. Chandra fears that the country will be “governed with an iron hand by a mafia-like elite. To be honest, I think this government is more about corruption than minorities. Everyone will be treated the same from now on, whether Tamil or Sinhalese, and everyone who is outspoken will be equally told to shut up.”

The build-up of a strong military-backed power has never been a good omen for democracy. Whether Rajapaksa’s ambition for the future is to resolve the ethnic conflict or accumulate more power remains to be seen. It will be for Sri Lankans to decide at the next election if they think his government can be as successful at democracy as it has been at war.

All names have been changed for the purpose of this article

Posted in SRI LANKA