It was a tableau of inhumanity, a symbolic forewarning of a country losing its sense of balance and inclining towards indefensible extremes.
Two burly men armed with stout poles beating an unarmed man, even as he brings his hands together in a gesture of supplication begging for mercy. More than 100 people watching this outbreak of savagery without uttering a word of protest. The attackers were policemen in civilian clothes. The spectators included both policemen and civilians. The victim was a mental patient. The crime for which he paid with his life was throwing stones at passing vehicles.
When an adult person throws stones indiscriminately, the common sense assumption is that he is bereft of his senses; i.e. that he is insane. In such a case, the sensible thing to do would be either to move apart from the madman or to chase him away with the most minimum use of violence. In civilised societies the mentally insane are not hounded and beaten up, just for throwing stones. If a society treats its mentally insane in such a manner, then it forfeits the right to be considered civilised.
When 26 year old B Sivakumar, a psychiatric patient who had taken treatment from Angoda, threw stones at passing vehicles in Bambalapitiya, he encountered a group of fellow men who lacked whatever modicum of balance and proportion he possessed. They chased him and beat him; and they watched impassively as he waded ever deeper into the sea in a vain effort to escape their savagery, and, drowned. Having caused a man’s death and watched him die, they went their separate ways and resumed their momentarily interrupted lives
. Had not for the fact that a cameraman from a private TV station was televising the entire incident, the truth may never have emerged. Initially the police claimed that Mr. Sivakumar drowned. It was only when the footage and the pictures were made public that the police were forced to admit to wrongdoing and commence an investigation (how thorough it would be and how impartial the results remain to be seen).
Murders, even savage murders, are not uncommon in Sri Lanka; incidents of police/armed forces brutality are not rare either, especially in the context of the long Eelam War. What places the Sivakumar incident outside this norm (including the abduction of Nipuna Ramanayake and the Angulana murders) is that it was a case of mob violence, with the mob consisting of both civilians and the police. Mr. Sivakumar was chased by a herd of humans, intent on revenge; that same herd of humans, overwhelmed by bloodlust, watched while he was being beaten and as he drowned. Both participants and spectators of that savage spectacle displayed a degree of moral depravity that is hard to reconcile with our much vaunted claims about Sri Lanka being a ‘Dhammadeepa’.
A Plague of Amorality
The Sivakumar incident is an omen, a warning, of dangerous psychological undercurrents present in our society, which, if left unattended, can result in a generalised outbreak of mindless violence. This is no stray incident, an anomaly without any broader significance; it is both symbolic and symptomatic of the place post-war Sri Lanka is turning out to be. It is a sign of a malaise that seems to be eating away at the moral health of Lankan society.
How did that mob come about? What created that particular confluence between the police and members of the general public?
How come so many people acted as of one mind, without any sense of decency, kindness, pity or proportionality?
There was nothing pre-planned about the Sivakumar incident (unlike other notorious causes célébres in the recent past). Most of the men who played active or passive roles in it were strangers to each other who were brought together by nothing more than an accident. These men probably had nothing in common except for their willingness to debase their own humanity and to be indifferent to or enjoy the pain and suffering of a fellow man. The randomness that underlies the entire incident (plus its non-political nature) means that such incidents can happen anywhere in Sri Lanka.
It would be fascinating to meet the people who chased Mr. Sivakumar and became silent, approving spectators of his tragedy. What those civilians did and did not do is far more remarkable, far more ominous and perhaps far more representative than the actions and the inactions of the police.
What were their backgrounds, in terms of race, religion, class and education?
What were their political beliefs and affiliations, if any?
Why did they not take a moment to think, since a moment’s reflection could have reminded them that sane men do not throw stones at passing vehicles?
What made them so angry that they chased this obviously insane man relentlessly and watched him being beaten and watched him drowning?
Did they not feel even an ounce of pity?
What kept them silent, if they did?
How do they explain what they did do and what they failed to do?
If they have any religious faith how do they reconcile their actions and inactions with that faith?
Do they have any regrets, post-facto, or do they think it is all a storm in a teacup, blown out of proportion by the media?
The Sivakumara incident points to a reality which we can ignore only at our own peril. Post-war Sri Lanka is on a downward slide, morally and ethically.
Sri Lanka today, perhaps more than at any other time, is prodigious with signs of moral depravity. It is manifest in our collective lack of interest about civilian casualties that could not but have happened in the last, ferocious, stage of the war. It is indicated by our collective silence about the Northern internment camps. It is present in our willingness to countenance deaths in police custody, so long as the victims are ‘criminals’ or ‘terrorists’. It is related to the fact that the monks, who protested against the death of two participants at a Christian faith healing ceremony, are maintaining a stony silence about the Sivakumar incident. We, as a society, are becoming more and more predisposed towards tolerating and explaining away what is manifestly unjust, wrong and downright brutal, by dehumanising the victims.
In the Sivakumar incident, the moral guilt does not stop with the policemen who did the actual beating. It extends to the civilians and policemen who watched this act of barbarism and even to those of us who remain silent about it for a variety of reasons, from callousness to apathy, from a sense of helplessness to indifference. As Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz said, “And there is another, vaster shame, the shame of the world. It was memorably pronounced by John Donne, and quoted innumerable times, pertinently or not, that ‘no man is an island’, and that every bell tolls for everyone. And yet there are those who faced by the crime of others, or their own, turn their backs so as not to see it and not feel touched by it” (The Drowned and the Saved). That shame and that guilt of passive bystander belong to all of us.
Wars and Crimes
“William L Calley Jr., 26 years old, is a mild-mannered, boyish-looking Vietnam combat veteran with the nickname “Rusty:’ The Army is completing an investigation of charges that he deliberately murdered at least 109 Vietnamese civilians in a search-and- destroy mission in March 1968 in a Viet Gong stronghold known as ‘Pinkville’.” Thus began the groundbreaking expose by legendary reporter Seymour Hersh about one of the most heinous war crimes in the 20th Century, the Mai Lai Massacre. A comment made by one of the participants of the massacre in a subsequent interview with Mr. Hersh indicates why war crimes can be committed by any fighting force, irrespective of the real or perceived justice of their cause: “We were all under orders. We all thought we were doing the right thing. At that time it didn’t bother me” (Ex-GI Tells of Killing Civilians at Pinkville – St. Louis Post Dispatch – 25.11.1969). Unless this possibility is accepted, and due vigilance is kept, even the most disciplined army can commit war crimes in even the most just war.
A war, irrespective how just and unavoidable it is, contains within itself, the possibility of war crimes. This possibility is enhanced when a party to a war believes that the justice of its cause precludes the possibility of it committing an unjust act, ever. This mindset was explained by columnist Bradely Burston, in his exposition of hardline elements within the Israeli government, polity and society: “We are moral, our enemies are out to exterminate us along with our state, that’s all you need to know. No modifications necessary. Stay the course. Concede nothing. Ease no siege. Give no ground. Ever” (Haaretz – 21.10.2009). This hermitic, self justifying mindset enables acts of crime and inhumanity even by those who are neither criminals nor monsters.
Wars are not made in a vacuum; armies are made up of citizens who have homes and families away from the war zone. Therefore wars brutalise societies. The risk of such brutalisation is greater when wars are seen as just/holy and killing is seen as justifiable, either for reasons of state or for religious reasons (or both). Papal and monarchical infallibility may have gone out of fashion; but they have been replaced by notions of national infallibility, the belief that one’s own country/nation can do no wrong. This erroneous belief is a fundament of the more extreme version of patriotism, which tolerates no criticism of one’s own nation and regards such criticism as treachery. The LTTE’s brand of Tamil nationalism belonged in this category as does the Sinhala supremacist nationalism that is dominant in Lankan state and society today.
According to the Mahavamsa morality killing is not religiously wrong, if the cause is religiously correct and the victims are unbelievers. This Mahawamsa mentality is exactly akin to the moral basis of the crusade and the jihad – that there is no wrong, no sin in using violence against the infidels for the protection of the true faith. Such a distorted, warped worldview has no place in the Buddhism of Gautama Buddha but it forms the basic building block of Sinhala Buddhism, which is a religion of the Book, the Mahawamsa. When a popular tele-drama claims that soldiers who fought the Tigers accumulated sufficient merit to attain Nibbana because the enemy they waged war against was the enemy of the nation and the faith, it gives the Fourth Eelam War the character of a holy war.
The war is at an end. But the government tries to continue the war through other, political, means. Wars need enemies. Therefore the public is warned about omnipresent conspiracies and told to be on the lookout for ubiquitous enemies. In such a climate of heightened fear and suspicion, mobs can come into being very easily. When such a mindset becomes predominant, even a mad man throwing stones can be seen as an enemy who deserves the ultimate punishment. When countries become accustomed to violence, when ordinary decent men and women become numbed by violence, crimes and abuses will become the norm, even post war.
As Auden warned,
“That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept”
(The Shield of Achilles).
- Asian Tribune -
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