I was sent recently an essay entitled ‘Pax Americana, the EU, and the Tamil Resistance Movement (TRM), written by Peter Schalk of Uppsala University. Prof Schalk has been concerned with Sri Lankan affairs for many years now, and this shows, in his rather dogged adherence to the battles of the seventies. His view is that the EU ban on the LTTE is ‘part of a falling in line with a worldwide pax americana’ which the man explains as analogous to the pax romana, which he also then has to explain.

His explanations are simplistic, but they suggest a splendid cunning that he doubtless thinks justified, since he clearly believes in a world without morality, provided the cause is good enough. This does not however preclude him from snide asides about similar views in others. Thus, his very first paragraph describes ‘water torture sanctioned by the President of the United States’ as part of the ‘martial pax Americana’which he claims ‘is presented with a Christian-evangelical signature also as jus ad bellum, ‘just war’, and as jus in bello, ‘just (method) in war’, fighting Communism in the 1950s and now terrorism.

A little learning is indeed a dangerous thing. The man then brings in Cornelius Nepos and conflates the theory of just war with ‘the formulation paritur pax bello, ‘peace is won by war’, and then talks of India and China also having ‘ideologues of just war’. George Orwell would have had a delightful time taking this essay apart. You do not need ideologues to justify what common sense dictates, that self-defence is ample justification in itself for war, and that extrapolations as to what constitutes self-defence have always been acceptable as justifying war. Unfortunately that does not solve the problem since there will generally be questions about the acceptability of such extrapolations. Most people for instance accept that the wars against Iraq in 1991 and Afghanistan in 2001 were acceptable in terms of self-defence (and were authorized as such by the UN), but the war against Iraq in 2003 was not (and was not so authorized).

Then again there will be questions as to the legitimacy of the means employed. Schalk’s confounding of confusion becomes understandable at this point because, having chided the American president, he then claims that, in its own concept of just war, revived as he claims ‘by the Buddhist monk Walpola Rahula in 1992 and by President Chandrika Kumaranatunga Bandaranayake (sic) in 1995’, Sri Lanka included ‘counter terrorism methods like terrorizing civilians by making them homeless, raping, torturing and killing them’.

And then the man declares that ‘Being confronted with a ‘just war’ of the Lankan Government, the Tamil Resistance Movement (TRM) responded by its own version of a just war known in Tamil as punita por, ‘holy war’, in the terminology of Veluppillai Pirapakaran, to resist an attempted genocide of the Tamil speakers. Significantly, at no point in his 14 page article does Prof Schalk note that the Tigers, or the TRM as he terms it, uses terror as a tool.

Now there can be no question as to the fact that, in the course of war, illegitimate methods are used. The question is, are they sanctioned and justified by government. Using his sleight of hand, Prof Schalk insinuates that, just as the American President sanctioned water torture, so the Sri Lankan government sanctioned rape and torture and killing of civilians.

This is nonsense. Prof Schalk may complain that the Sri Lankan government is slow or inefficient in punishing such activities – a trait it shares with all governments – but it has never sanctioned them. With regard to the Tigers the case is different. Though often they deny obvious atrocities, the rulings of the Scandin-avian Monitoring Mission alone show how they were systemic. The claim that they have reformed with regard to child soldiers may or may not be credited, but it makes clear the fact that they did engage in forced recruitment in the past. And the ethnic cleansing of Muslims they engaged in in 1990 was not only patent, it still finds apologists in the form of Mr Vaiko, their apologist in Tamilnadu. Even though both Mr Pirapakaran, as Prof Schalk calls him, and Anton Balasingham came as close as Tigers can to an apology for the action, even though Sri Lankan Tamils to a man seem to regret it now, Vaiko’s recent justification recently in Oslo, on the grounds that the expelled Muslims included collaborators with the Sinhala government, suggests that at least some elements in the LTTE believe that tactics such as ‘terrorizing civilians by making them homeless’ are acceptable, in the context of what is justified as a ‘holy war’.

In short, what Prof Schalk’s collection of conflations is designed to do is to belittle the European Union ban on the Tigers as being not a conscious decision based on recognition of their terrorist nature but rather simply obeisance to self-righteous American impositions that include immoral methods; to claim that the Sri Lankan government asserted the righteousness of not only war but also similar immorality in the form of terrorizing techniques; to suggest that the Tigers are fighting only because they were confronted by such tactics; and finally to characterize the EU ban on the Tigers as ‘biased and evil, because it insinuates motives’. The theologian in Prof Schalk comes out here, as benefits a denizen of Uppsala, but whilst the attribution of motives may be a terrible sin, equally nasty is the assertion as well as the insinuation of falsehoods designed to denigrate. When he then claims that the EU action ‘is immoral and counteracts scientific principles of interpretation’ and complains about ‘the sloppy way historical facts are handled by the EU’ one wonders whether his biblical studies ever extended to the man with the beam in his eye who pointed out the mote in another’s.

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The archaic nature of Schalk’s mindset becomes even clearer in the next section of his essay, when he privileges the Tigers, whom he continues to call the TRM, on the grounds that it ‘is the only party that sticks to the election program from 1977 that demanded a separate state for the Tamils’. The fact that in successive elections since then that program has not figured matters not a whit to Schalk’s sense of history. Indeed the program of the TNA in 2004 was different, but their victory is simply seen as ‘democratic proof that the Tigers are considered the bulwark and guarantee of the Sri Lankan Tamils’ existential interests’.

Further slight of hand is apparent here in that he asserts that the TNA ‘obtained 22 out of 23 seats in the Tamil dominated electoral districts of the Northeast. First, the fraudulent nature of that election in the Northeast has been amply documented, including by European Union election observers. Second, while the TNA won all but one of the seats in the three districts of the Northern Province, it won only about a third of the seats in the three districts of the Eastern Province, thus providing democratic proof that the LTTE cannot be taken as the authority for the East. Third, since by then the Eastern Tamils were trying to break free of LTTE domination, the latter killed one candidate at the time of the election, and then forced another who topped the poll to resign, and subsequently killed him as well. This was their way of eliminating Tamils who supported the Eastern breakaway group. Doubtless for Schalk such murders of Tamils are quite acceptable, as part of a strategy ‘to resist an attempted genocide of the Tamil speakers’.

Another example of Schalk’s scientific principles of interpretation is apparent in his dismissal of the EU’s characterization of the Karuna group, the Eastern Tamils who broke away from the LTTE, as ‘effectively a third party to be considered in the conflict’. He asserts that this is ‘disingenuous’ because the then UNP government ‘boasted having secretly helped (sic) the Karuna group to split off from the LTTE’, because ‘the LTTE revealed what had been an open secret that the paramilitaries work hand in hand with the army’ and because ‘according to the CFA of February 2002 it is the responsibility of the GOSL to disarm the paramilitaries, a stipulation which, however, has at no time been implemented’.

If Schalk cannot see that all this is nonsense, he has no claims to being a serious academic. The validity of the determination of the Karuna group to split from the LTTE cannot depend on whether anyone helped them, let alone boasted of having secretly helped them. Characterization by the LTTE of the Karuna group as paramilitaries does not make them paramilitaries unless the LTTE too are seen as paramilitaries, on the grounds that that is the right term to describe any unofficial armed group – in any case, since the LTTE has no mechanism for allowing different perspectives to be weighed democratically, a group that broke away from the LTTE is still in essence of the same genus as the parent group. Finally, the GOSL did disarm the former militant groups in terms of the CFA, only to find the LTTE picking them off ruthlessly, with no mechanism for them to point out that this violated the CFA since complaints were only entertained by the Monitoring Mission from the government or the LTTE.

In this section of his essay Schalk also suggests that the LTTE is willing to negotiate whereas ‘no concession has been offered by the Singhalese parties and governments’. This again is nonsense. The agreement in Oslo to explore a solution based on a federal solution within a united Sri Lanka was questioned initially by the LTTE leader Mr Pirapakaran, who seemed indeed to have lost confidence in his chief negotiator, Anton Balasingham, because of that agreement. It was the LTTE that subsequently withdrew from negotiations, and stayed away for three long years.

Schalk then refers to the P-TOMS, ‘the organizational set-up suggested for the distribution of aid to the tsunami victims’, which was of course a concession offered by the government, rejected by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional. Now Mr Schalk might disagree with that judgment, as many others did including the President at the time, but none of these opponents has argued against it on a legal basis, as opposed to simply asserting prejudice. Unfortunately for Mr Schalk, as the present government too has found, Sri Lanka has an independent Supreme Court, unlike the Tigers would have, given that their guidelines on the ‘Judicial Administration of Tamil Eelam’ begins with the stirring assertion ‘It functions on the basis of the direct approval of His Excellency, Mr V Prabhakaran, the National Leader…Only he has the authority to reduce or increase the sentences of the courts wherever the need arises. All laws are made with his approval.’