Report from a War Zone (Sharif Abdullah)
Howdy—
Life here in Sri Lanka continues to slide downhill. People seem to have forgotten the relative peace and prosperity they experienced just a few short years ago during the ceasefire.
My Mission…
I’m here to help strategize peace activities with Sarvodaya’s senior leaders, as well as conduct two days of training for 50 of Sarvodaya’s senior district workers. Our vision: creating an alternative political/economic structure – one that has nonviolence and true democracy at its heart. The antidote to a bloated, insensitive, corrupt national government is a bottom-up, village-based governance structure. The antidote to a government that wants people to stay in a trance is a society that is spiritually awake.
The War…
Both sides are going after each other full blast – with innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. The Tamil Tigers continue to use their unique position as the only insurgency in the world with its own air force. The government forces claim to be winning on the ground, and promise to “defeat” the Tigers by the end of this year. When the government presses its military campaign in the North, the Tigers counter by increasing the civilian death toll by suicide bombings in the South. The strategy of seizing Tiger-held lands can only spread death and misery throughout the country.
With all of the competing military claims, it is hard to know exactly what is going on. The one thing for sure -- the civilians in the war zone continue to suffer.
A Local Bombing…
A pretty powerful bomb went off at the Piliyandala bus station (about 5 minutes from my house and Sarvodaya headquarters). Bombing took place Friday evening, around rush hour. The suicide bomber killed 25 and wounded another 100 or so. (We didn’t notice the explosion at the office because there was lightning and thunder off and on all day.)
There were no Sarvodaya people caught in the blast. This is extremely fortuitous, since that route is heavily traveled by Sarvodaya workers from HQ on their way home.
It’s ironic that I didn’t go up into the War Zone this weekend because it was considered too dangerous…
On the War Front:
I don’t know what it is that causes normally sane and rational people to believe in absurdities. The word among the majority population of Sinhalese is that the Government is going to “win” the war by late this year or early next year. They have been promised this by the President and military leaders.
This means that the Sri Lankan government is promising to do that which NO OTHER GOVERNMENT on this planet has ever done – win a military victory over an entrenched insurgency. The Israelis can’t do it. The British couldn’t do it in Northern Ireland. The Soviet Union’s attempt to win a military victory in Afghanistan And the United States, the largest and best equipped fighting force in history, cannot do it in Iraq, against insurgents who aren’t even particularly entrenched.
Yet the Sri Lankan army is claiming they can rout the Tigers in a few months.
The deadly effect of this absurdity is that people who should be looking for a diplomatic, negotiated, nonviolent solution are putting their faith in military hardware. The general population seems to be waiting… in this case, waiting for what can never happen. Waiting to be disappointed.
The United States was gripped by this madness, directly after 9/11 and again in the run-up to the Iraq Normally sane people fell under the spell of the military and political leaders – that Americans were under an imminent threat from a 4th World country like Iraq, that threat justified an invasion of that country and that the invasion and occupation would be quick, easy and cheap. None of this was true.
The problem isn’t the “leaders” (although they bear their fair share of responsibility for whipping the flames of war). The problem... lies far deeper.
“Mass Psychopathology”
I just received an article from Richard Koenigsberg that discusses war and violence from the point of view of pathology – a sickness. But, this is not the sickness of one individual, but the sickness of an entire society. (You can read his article online at http://ideologiesofwar.com/docs/rk_collective.htm.)
Koenigsberg says that political movements are a form of mass psychopathology. We are reluctant to use these terms when they are applied to an entire society, or an entire religious or ethnic group. He looks at “recurring, massive episodes of political self-destruction”. He says there is abundant evidence that something in us causes us to look at these psychotic episodes as “normal”.
From time to time, we enter periods where we glory in killing, death and destruction. Mass psychopathology makes it seem that wanton manslaughter is mandated from Heaven and that “God (or the Buddha) is on our side”. I recently heard someone say, “God does not take sides in interspecies conflicts”. The Divine gives us the capacity to rise above our own mass psychosis. Our spiritual teachers (Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and others) teach us the essential truth: we are all One. Whether or not we actually use that capacity and follow those teachings is up to us. If we’re not smart enough to transcend our violent natures on our own, we don’t deserve to inhabit this planet.
Video Available Soon:
I recently completed a talk at the Seattle Green Festival, outlining the work we’re doing over here in Sri Lanka. That video is in post production right now and should be finished and posted on the Commonway website in a couple of weeks.
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