The linking of the authentic South of Sri Lanka with the North has rarely occurred in peace building initiatives carried out here. The term peace building should itself be re-examined. Linguistically it smacks of a Western coined word, it is taught theoretically in Western universities which have Masters and PhD programs on it and also taught in local universities along the lines of these foreign syllabuses.
Our country is rich with our inherent spiritual ideologies and traditional ways of living. Little or none of this is used in the local run peace building study courses or those courses such as Non Violent Communication.
If we look at the theories and references used we may find only foreign ones although we have many individuals in Sri Lanka including bhikkhus such as Ven. Walpola Rahula Thera who built peace by making philosophies such as Buddhism accessible to all within Sri Lanka and outside.
We will not find those such as this venerable bhikkhu and many others like him from this country that may be well known or not featured in these above mentioned courses of study. This is why the very mention of such courses those who are out of this INGO circuit immediately thinks of diverse agendas and thereby seriously affect the intended goal.
Vital word
Peace building should not be a fancy word isolated and associated with NGOs or used in particular academic circuits. It is a vital word and a practical need connected to the national policy construct.
We have had indigenous knowledge that guided the policy making of our ancient monarchs to create for ourselves a model where our nation would be a truly independent, peaceful and sovereign one.
When our country was termed as Siwhela or Sinhale we never had a history of discrimination against anyone who came here, as veteran historians and heritage specialists such as Prof. Nimal de Silva has explained.
Calling the country Sinhale did not mean that the Sinhalese had some strange superiority complex; it merely was a term that although associating with the race of the majority of the people of the land also meant that anyone else who came here was also part of Sinhale.
The ancient Tamils of Lanka were part of Sinhale. They are not to be equated with Chola invasions or invaders. Today the mere use of this word maybe interpreted internationally to mean racism or communalism by the Sinhalese. These are some of the things that should be rectified in peace building courses taught in Sri Lanka so that Sri Lankans working in international organisations will have some rational understanding of our history and also for opportunists who thrive on creating ethnic tension to not be able to use terms such as Sinhale and Siwhela to create communal tension.
Overall, a Sri Lankan peace building and reconciliation model would mean that we integrate everything needed in life; from economic policy to education to engineering; from water management to farming and health; to lifestyle, aesthetics and general values, to be modelled, through policy making that is truly in line with the natural resources and heritage of the nation.
Resources and talent
For this the ‘experts’ we follow should be are our own ancient rulers whose policy making was never disconnected from local resources and talent. Although the colonial narrative would have that it is colonisation that provided civilisations such as this nation an ‘education system’ there is immense scope for us to study our pre-colonial gurukula and pirivena systems.
It is these education systems that created for us world renowned marvels such as our hydraulic heritage and water engineering mysteries as found in Sigiriya.
Thus it is imperative that we use the lessons taught by our ancestors in creating current initiatives.
Our ancient rulers did not thrive on keeping communal fires burning. Apart from the one and only conflict with a foreign invader who was Elara, ancient Lanka never had a history of ethnic conflicts or riots. It is after colonisation that Sri Lanka saw the start of riots that were orchestrated to give an ethnic tinge. If today we are ‘marketed’ as a violent country this is a false label that each of us have to work to erase, and do so while reviving what is our heritage.
What is our heritage? Is it just monuments? Our heritage encompasses everything in life as mentioned above. All of these could be used for national unity and for saving and prospering of the national economy.
Heritage based traditional knowledge is not meant for mere theoretical researching; it is meant to be used. The use of it saves us money. Saves us dollars. Our hydraulic knowledge, our traditional farming knowledge and our traditional medical expertise all could have saved us dollars and used with proper vision paved the way for a global example of how an ancient civilisation uses in modern times its indigenous expertise in all sectors for national prosperity and unity.
Although we have thousands of Ola Leaf manuscripts with tonnes of spectacular knowledge related to the above, we are unable to interpret many of it because years of listless and direction-less modern education have distanced us from our fundamental core knowledge.
We today think of national unity mostly when it comes to the UN human rights discourse in Geneva every March. We ‘defend’ Sri Lanka on this platform.
Often, whatever the regime, what has been asked is for the space to create a ‘local ‘homegrown’ national reconciliation or peace building mechanism. Yet, the general reconciliation or peace building sphere is often run by the Western educated elite as with much of the local academia and those in the policy making arena and to date we do not have a sensible local mechanism of uniting people.
Foreign fund
For genuine peace building to emerge it has to have the core factors of the national economy and national consciousness in mind. Fragmented workshops or similar events held because there is a foreign fund for it is a useless waste of time and money. Events that are held just for outward show to please a set of persons are as equally useless.
The authentic Sinhala South represents ideologies not represented in mainstream academia or policy arena and certainly not represented in most NGOs or INGO agendas.
The Sinhala wedakam lobby, those who speak of the mythical ancient Sinhalese King Ravana, some practitioners in Sinhala theatre and the Sinhala language media are some of the those who fall to some of the groups of persons we may term as ultra-nationalistic.
What this term may mean to certain persons is of course subjective to interpretations. Yet the fact is that none of these segments are usually represented in any of the Western influenced peace building/national reconciliation or humanitarian based programs run in Sri Lanka or even in our post colonial mainstream policy making.
Peace building as we know it today is tied to international charities. These need a particular framework to source its funds globally and wields much influence in countries whose cultures are not Western.
This does not insinuate that they are insidious. Neither does it claim that these charities are not contributing to some global good. Many Western peace building oriented organisations have been founded in good faith, often by well- intentioned persons, who genuinely wanted to change the world for the better.
If the non Western countries in which these foreign agencies are operating are not influencing these global organisations to steer locally run humanitarian and peace programs akin to genuine local needs, resources and realities, the failure is in the part of these local countries and their elites and not the Western nations.
The reality is that many Western funded peace building programs in non Western countries are token workshops. The heart of the matter gets lost in donor seeking reports and donor show off reports.
The local activists often have to adjust the proposed local activity in a project to what the international donor agency has decreed. This holds true for other connected spheres such as development or health or micro finance or entrepreneurship.
Western countries
For example, in monitoring the many Covid time ‘call for proposals’ it could be seen (at least what this writer was exposed to) that not a single one referred to local knowledge systems in non Western countries and the connected pandemic handling.
There was certainly nothing that connected pandemic time traditional wellbeing models with peace building amongst different communities in multi-ethnic nations.
In this backdrop we can see a large formation of nationalist groups in Sri Lanka as evident in the hundreds of social media platforms that rabble rouse stating the Sinhalese are being destroyed along with their heritage by using vaccines as the only solution for the pandemic.
It is not uncommon to find in these platforms equating some of the religious and ethnic minorities of Sri Lanka as partners in this alleged ‘destruction.’ This is the vicious cycle of not mainstreaming our traditional knowledge in policy making and inculcating it as something to be owned by all of Sri Lanka.
The difficult part of national unity focused policy making and peace building is to actually connect people with opposing viewpoints. This does not happen because it is difficult. What is often seen in many of the workshops held in Sri Lanka is that one set of people holding one set of viewpoints speaking out against another set of people, holding another set of opinions, in their absence.
The above emerged at a discussion in December between this writer and the newly appointed Governor to the North, Jeevan Thiagarajah who is also from the local peace building and humanitarian sector and aware of its many dynamics.
AFollow up initiatives are looked at, in revisiting Sri Lanka’s local knowledge in different categories, which can be implemented especially at village level, for a better cohesive Sri Lanka.
The use of natural resources for village level home tourism is currently looked at with Mullaitivu being selected where rehabilitated persons will be among those who could be part of a pilot initiative to look at home adjacent structures to be constructed with natural elements such as Palmyrah (in the North) and clay and cadjan in the South.
These were used historically for shelter. Today clay structures are used for tourism while for Lankans it is looked as a symbol of poverty. How did we come to look at this natural resource, well suited as a construction material for a hot climate such as Sri Lanka, as a symbol of poverty?
Cadjan roof
In the North Palmyrah is a natural resource that is versatile in how it feeds, shelters and provides aesthetic charm. Cadjan in the South is the equivalent where the coconut tree equally feeds, shelters and provides aesthetic appreciation. Although touted as a symbol of poverty the cadjan roof is known to have had a robust existence even in the roughest of weather.
There is ample potential to steer a home tourism model using natural resources across Sri Lanka and to do so with a consultative process between practitioners in the North and the South who are adept at using these resources in a flexible manner.
To start this process a possible discussion is looked at between local Government representatives and ordinary civilian.This is currently being looked at as a sample project in the North under the direction of Governor Jeevan Thiagarajah and conceptualised by this writer.