Choking Fertile Ground

Despite all its contradictions, controversies and corporate control, it was the American Liberal Arts College that first got me thinking. For the first time in my life I was taught to look beyond textbooks; for the first time in my life I didn’t hear the phrase, “don’t be too smart” when I challenged a teacher or questioned their authority over me, and for the first time in my life I was actively critiquing educational oppression that I had struggled against for years as a student in Sri Lanka. Once, during a class called the Intimacy of Terror, students were asked to recount experiences in which the pervasive nature of state control affected us on a personal level.

Instantly, I was reminded of myself as a thirteen year old, sitting in my English Language classroom in an international school in Colombo. We had been assigned an essay about “An Unforgettable Day.” I wrote about a Tamil family from Colombo who took a vacation to their ancient family burial ground in Jaffna. After a full day’s travel, the family reaches the graveyard to find that the bodies have all been dug up by Sinhala mobs. Corpses are everywhere. The family attempts to digest this kind of violence, the kind that is hell-bent on claiming ownership over the land, over the right to be there. One of the other girls in my class wrote about a date rape. Another friend of mine wrote her essay on an unforgettable day with a physically abusive father. The teacher failed us all on the assignment. She claimed we had not ‘followed instructions.’ “Unforgettable doesn’t mean these things,” she shouted, flourishing our essays in her fist. “Unforgettable means going to the park, or having a party.” We were forced to re-write our essays. This is not a particularly exceptional anecdote; rather, it represents the limits of what, in my opinion, is publicly, socially and politically sayable on a national level in Sri Lanka. The class carried on, other students chiming in with their own personal stories of state control. But the lesson lingered in my mind long after I’d left the lecture hall.

During moments of national crisis, certain groups bear the brunt of state repression. These groups are: the minorities (oppressed races, sexes or language groups); the labor unions (representing disenfranchised workers); the independent media (harbingers of truth) and the students (visionaries) It stands to reason, then, that these are also the groups that can be counted on to pull a nation out of crisis – by championing democracy, equality and change in the face of stagnant dictatorships. The faster a government clamps down on these groups’ freedom of speech and expression, the easier it becomes to ascertain the magnitude of their threat to the established regime.

Consider the Rajapakse regime’s response to all the above groups, post-war; with a wave of his scepter, King Rajapaksa banished the minority “threat” the day after the war: “There are no more minorities in Sri Lanka,” he proclaimed to the masses, “only those are behind the government, and those who are against it.” The 19th amendment to the constitution, which would essentially destroy the little autonomy still left in the hands of Tamil and Muslim constituencies, is a blatant attack on all who had hoped for racial equality post-war. In essence, the proposed 19th amendment would ensure a Rajapakse majority in provinces that have historically voted solidly against the majority Sinhala parties.

The labor unions required even less effort; possessing neither a clear vision for collective action nor a united front against the evils of capitalism, they have been collapsing in on themselves since their glory days in the 1960s. Wealth and land are today more tightly concentrated in the hands of a few powerful families than ever before in Sri Lankan history; yet former Marxist revolutionaries such as Vasudeva Nanayakkara (Democratic Left Front) and Wimal Weerawamsa (People’s Liberation Movement) continue to endorse the rampant capitalist aspirations of the Rajapakse regime. Prices of flour, rice and sugar rise beyond the hands of daily wage workers who are constantly denied fair compensation for their labor and, meanwhile, the Rajapaksa family fattens off the bounty that Sri Lanka still has to offer.

As for the independent media, a continuation of Sri Lanka’s intolerant policy towards differing opinions and dissenting voices was all that was needed to put the journalists in their place. As of April 2010 Sri Lanka ranks the fourth worst nation in the world on the Impunity Index released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). Since 2008 nine extraordinary journalists have been killed, while twelve others have been forced into exile. Silence reigns, and we must ask ourselves: If the Rajapakse regime recognizes the strength of its opposition enough to work relentlessly to dismantle it, why don’t we recognize the potential for change in our midst and work as tirelessly to protect it?

Perhaps what disturbs me most is the methodic strangulation of students’ freedom in the post-war society. Every great liberation struggle has relied, at some point or another, on the ranks of young, inspired students to fuel the movement towards radical change and from these ranks the world has drawn its greatest revolutionary leaders. Everyone from Mohandas Gandhi and Franz Fanon to Leon Trotsky and Nelson Mandela have come to politics from the University where, in a simulated environment of promise, students are taught that another world really is possible. The libraries, student centers and organizing spaces of universities are vital components of a transitioning society.

But the university students in Sri Lanka are being preached a different sermon. In late September, the Sunday Leader published an expose on the draconian measures being adopted by the Vice Chancellor of Sri Lanka’s second largest university. In addition to security cameras and unwritten rules prohibiting opposite-sex interaction in a coeducational facility, no less than sixty senior students have been suspended within two months for communicating with juniors. Any gathering of five or more students is strictly prohibited, as are posters and flyers bearing announcements. The entire campus shuts down by six p.m. This is nothing less than an outright suffocation of higher education. 

When the shame of Menik Farm first oozed over the country in 2009, it became a matter of incredible political import who was left to languish in the camps and who was granted permission to leave. Teachers and government officials were the first to go, naturally, as their detainment was harder to justify than that of impoverished Tamil women and children. What came as a shock, though, was the speed with which Tamil university students were hastened out of the camps. One might be tempted to believe that such a move was in keeping with a country’s pride for exceptionally high literacy rates, except for the fact that younger students were treated less magnanimously. In fact, according to a special report on the situation in the Vanni by the UN Office for Coordinating Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) dated May 13th, 2009, every effort was made to establish semi-permanent education structures within the camps for younger students.

In light of recent attacks against university students – including severe limitations on the freedom of speech, political expression and affiliation – the decision to move university students out of the camps as quickly as possible isn’t so strange after all. It is fully in keeping with a brilliant strategy of preventing potential resistance to the state at every turn.

In an interview with Lanka Solidarity, Sivamohan Sumathy sums up my feelings on the issue very succinctly (you can read the full text of her interview here): “Education [is] been bent toward utilitarianism...While individuals might have genuinely embraced this position in an idealistic vision, and also genuinely served society...the goals of mass education has been to produce individuals who maintain the status quo and help perpetuate the system.”

If the procedures being carried out within universities on a national level are not stopped soon, there is little hope for the university as a space of radical political resistance in post-war Sri Lanka.