What War is Worth

Neelan Tiruchelvam was killed last week. He was a prominent Tamil member of the Sri Lankan Parliament, and was scheduled to arrive at Harvard as a visiting professor this fall. He never made it.

About a week ago, a suicide bomber hurled himself onto Neelan's car and blew them both up.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group of ethnic Tamil guerrilla fighters, are widely supposed to be responsible for his death. They are battling to restore a separate Tamil homeland in the northern region of Sri Lanka. Neelan was known for his politics of reconciliation, especially his recent efforts to work with the Sinhalese-dominated government to change parts of the country's constitution to give the Tamils more autonomy.

I doubt that many people had heard of Neelan or the LTTE before the suicide-bombing. I'm the American-born daughter of two Sri Lankan Tamils. I seek out Sri Lankan news. And although my parents have told me about the LTTE my whole life, I had never, until his death, heard of Neelan Tiruchelvam. How is this possible?

I had not heard of him because every day, the media chooses to ignore a bloody ethnic war between the Sri Lankan Tamil minority and Sinhalese majority--a war that has taken and continues to take thousands of lives since 1983.

Only a few American papers choose to carry the news of Neelan's death, and when they did, it was well hidden. Last week, the Washington Post ran the story on page A-24 in its World in Brief section, devoting exactly 91 words to it. A quick database search for his name in major newspapers over the past month turned up only 16 items--six of which were articles by The Hindu and one of which was a correction

The lack of media coverage of the Sri Lankan conflict is both inhumane and journalistically unsound. When the war isn't entirely ignored, the very occasional coverage fails to represent the history behind the conflict. The ethnic conflict in Kosovo receives plenty of well-deserved coverage. Where is the coverage of Sri Lanka?

Maybe the whole problem is the information everybody else isn't supposed to know. Maybe that's why erratic international media coverage of the conflict cannot or does not tell you the story my parents told me.

Many years ago, Tamils and Sinhalese lived separately--and peacefully--in separate kingdoms on the island, the Tamils in the north and the Sinhalese in the south. Eventually the British came and colonized the island, and for administrative purposes, they united the island and called it Ceylon. When they left in 1948, they did not undo what they had done.

According to my father, three things started the conflict.

The first was language. The Sinhalese instituted Sinhalese as the national language, requiring all official documents, such as employment applications, to be in Sinhalese. The career aspirations of an entire generation of young Tamils, who had been and were being educated in Tamil, were destroyed.

The second was colonization. The government sponsored groups of Sinhalese to settle in traditionally Tamil territories so that all regions of the country would have a Sinhalese majority. This left the Tamils little to no representation in parliament.

The third was quotas. Tamil students applying to universities found themselves faced with quotas. If 20 percent of the population was Tamil, no more than 20 percent of the university students could be Tamil. This meant that Tamils had to score significantly higher than Sinhalese on university entrance exams.

The Tamils spent the 1950s and 1960s protesting peacefully, following the satyagraha method of peace pioneered by Mahatma Gandhi. The police spent the 1950s and 1960s beating them up. During the 1970s, the LTTE formed. In 1983, open fighting began. My parents grew up in a perpetual state of emergency--random police checkpoints, people disappearing, arrests and imprisonment without cause, questioning without reasonable suspicion.

Not only has this Tamil history been conveniently erased, but media coverage of Sri Lanka, where journalists are severely restricted by the government, consistently fails to represent a diversity of views. For example, after Neelan's death, I made it a point to ask members of the Tamil community what they thought of his death and the war in general.

Some say that Neelan was a great leader, a great pacifist, a brilliant mind, and that his death shows that the LTTE is ruthless, responsible for the loss of countless lives and cannot compromise--that they will kill anyone, Sinhalese, civilian or Tamil, who stands in their way.

Some say the media, so quick to lay the blame at the LTTE's feet, are unfair. It cannot be denied they disagreed with Neelan's reconciliatory politics, just as it cannot be denied that the violent methods they employ have contributed to the country's chaos. But the LTTE, who are generally blamed for the murder, usually claim responsibility for those they have killed. In this case, they have not.

And there are some who say Neelan got caught up in the power of politics and forgot the common man. When Neelan's original constitutional changes--which the LTTE would have found less objectionable--were drastically rewritten, Neelan said nothing. There are those who told me that the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan government and the media made Neelan--who was appointed, not elected--a mouthpiece for the Tamil people. There are those who told me Neelan was a convenient, moderate leader for the West and those international leaders who ignore the Tamil cause.

The members of the Tamil community who voiced their opinions so strongly in this matter were informed by ethnic newspapers, underground publications and word-of-mouth. What about those of us who don't have access to all those sources on a regular basis? How do we sort out our opinions? Now, in Sri Lanka, the air seethes with rumors of hidden horrors--torture, rape, looting, murder. Thankfully, in our family, the worst thing that has happened is the burning of my aunt's house 15 years ago. I could tell you stories much worse and much bloodier than that. But it's not my job to tell you.

Why is this story so regularly ignored? Why are human rights abuses--a large number at the government's hands--occurring daily and ignored daily? Is it because Sri Lankans are people of color? Is it because the country's economy isn't worth enough? For the ethnic conflict in Kosovo, media attention meant international outrage--and international intervention and aid. If no one brings attention to what is happening in Sri Lanka, when will it stop? How can the journalists who can and don't cover Sri Lanka look at themselves in the mirror every morning?

What is the war worth? I have been waiting a long time for the answer to that question. So have a country of people--both the living and the dead.

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan '02, a Crimson editor, is an English concentrator in Lowell House. This summer she is working at the Harrisburg Patriot-News in Pennsylvania.