At least one Oslo peace accord is on the brink of bringing about a real peace. Negotiators from the Sri Lankan government and Tamil separatists are preparing to launch a federation, which will embrace the separate political and cultural aspirations of their two communities.
Sri Lanka’s peace is not quite a done deal. There are already pessimists who believe that the planned federated Sri Lanka simply will not work in the long term. Such people point to the hard-liners on both sides. There has always been a hard core in the majority Sinhalese population that believed that the separatist Tamil Tiger fighters could be defeated eventually, if only the Sri Lankan authorities pressed on with the struggle. On the Tamil side, there are extremists who will see the award of autonomy within their northern and eastern parts of the island as simply a step on the road to ultimate independence.
Now, however, is the time for men of good will on both sides to be strong in the face of such siren voices. Since 1983, the fighting in this beautiful island has cost the lives of more than 60,000 people and has wrecked the economy, including the extremely important tourism industry.
One of the key points that the patient Norwegian negotiators have always pushed home, even in the dark days three years ago, when the civil war re-erupted and it seemed that all their efforts had been in vain, was that a lasting settlement would constitute a victory for neither side. At the heart of Sri Lanka’s Oslo accord is the common sense of compromise. Neither side can have all that it wants. The federal political structure that has at last been agreed gives the Tamils the right to run much of their own lives within a new federated Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, the Sinhalese majority has not seen their island split in two, creating animosities on either side of the divide, which would surely have led to future terrible blood letting. One negotiator in Oslo has spoken of the way that negotiators on both sides came to respect their former bitter enemies.
Incidentally, that quality of respect is what is missing so grievously from another conflict that Oslo sought to end: the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation. Israeli Zionists consider the Palestinians to be nothing better than interlopers, who should be deported en masse from the last of the lands that have been their home for centuries. It is hard to feel respect for someone when you have a gun barrel over them and your boot on their neck. Palestinians, for their part, are too full of anger at the way in which they have been so long humiliated, to feel any respect for many, if any, Israelis.
Truth is always the first casualty of any conflict and one of the lies that quickly grows up, involves the dehumanization of the enemy. They are called “Gooks” or “Boche” or “Chinks”, terms of insult and mockery which help to portray the other side as worthy of nothing except destruction.
The Sinhalese and the Tamils have, however, finally reached beyond such destructive characterization. They have rediscovered the fact that both sides are human beings with shared needs and aspirations. That they have finally come to recognize this has brought them to the point where they can begin to respect each other again.
