Presentation at the Launch of Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism

(This is a presentation I made at the launch of my book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism in the School of African and Asian Studies, University of London, on 16 July 2018. It was followed by a lively discussion chaired by Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS.)

In the Introduction to my book Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism, I explain why I wrote it. When the Arab uprisings began in 2010-2011, most socialists and progressives welcomed them. But very soon it became evident that they were being treated differently, despite the fact that they were sparked by similar conditions. In the words of historian Fawwaz Traboulsi, ‘These are revolutions that do not hide their causes: unemployment, dictatorship, social divides, the citizen’s abused dignity. To which they roar back: Work! Freedom! Social justice! Human dignity!’ Yet there was a striking difference between the respect with which a section of the anti-imperialist left treated the Egyptian revolution and their vilification of the protesters in Syria, thus supporting Assad by spreading his propaganda against them. What could account for this?

Introduction to Indefensible: Democracy, Counter-Revolution, and the Rhetoric of Anti-Imperialism

 

In September 2015, the image of little Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body washed up on a beach in Turkey, temporarily jolted the conscience of European politicians who had been preoccupied up until then with turning back the tide of refugees from Syria. The compassion and kindness of those who welcome refugees to their countries is certainly admirable, especially in contrast with the cruelty of the far right, which seeks to exclude them. We must ask, however: is this enough? As a member of the Syria Campaign pointed out soon afterwards:

Since the picture of Aylan hit headlines across the world, 6 children have been killed in Syria every day – the majority from barrel bombs and missiles from Syrian government aircraft. But their bloodied and blown apart corpses don’t make the front page of any newspaper. None of the other 10,000 children killed in the fighting have. What broke my heart this week was a cartoon by Neda Kadri, a Syrian artist, that pictured Aylan in heaven being welcomed by children: ‘you are so lucky Aylan! We’re victims of the same war but no one cared about our death.’ (Nolan 2015)

Despite the tendency of the mainstream media to conflate ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’, it is important to remember that they are different. Refugees are fleeing violence. Therefore, the only viable solution to the refugee crisis would be to end the violence that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions.

That is, however, easier said than done. Ending the Syria crisis would entail, first and foremost, identifying its causes. For some of those who call themselves anti-imperialists, there is only one cause: Western (that is, North American and Western European) imperialism, which is responsible for all the bloodshed, including the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS),[i] which, according to them, is responsible for most of the violence in Syria. An example of this argument is an article in the Guardian by Seamus Milne (2015) titled ‘Now the truth emerges: how the US fuelled the rise of Isis in Syria and Iraq’.

Foreword and Preface of To Do Something Beautiful (a novel)

 

Foreword to the Kindle Edition

     This novel was inspired by many of the women and men I have met in the course of my work: by their ability to keep alive their dignity, humanity, and even sense of humour in the midst of poverty and overwork; by their aspiration not merely to survive but to create a better world, to do something beautiful. However, poor people in isolation are powerless; if they compete with one another as individuals or groups, a few may come out on top, but the majority always lose. Therefore one of the most crucial and admirable qualities of these women and men is their capacity to build relationships of solidarity, friendship and love across traditional barriers of caste, religion, language and even nationality. The spontaneous warmth and generosity I have encountered among working women in widely separated parts of South Asia never fails to move me, and I think it would not be an exaggeration to talk of a common culture which they share despite superficial differences.

     There have been many changes since I wrote this novel in the 1980s. For example, information and communication technologies have been revolutionised, and the value of the rupee has fallen to less than a quarter of what it was then. The prices of essential commodities, utilities and services, especially food and public transport, have risen correspondingly or even more. Wages have increased, but at the lowest levels have not kept pace with inflation. At the opposite pole, there has been a vast accumulation of wealth, and consequently the gap between rich and poor has widened to obscene proportions. Lured by sky-rocketing real estate prices and the prospect of union-free workforces, many industrialists have sold their factories in Bombay and either subcontracted their work to small enterprises or shifted production to other locations where vicious union-busting is the norm even in large-scale industry. The big pharamaceutical factories have disappeared, as have many other large factories, and along with them the relatively well-paid and secure jobs they represented. On a more positive note, formal workers are now more aware of the importance of fighting for the rights of informal workers, democratic independent unions have proliferated, and these unions have formed an all-India federation that counteracts the earlier isolation of independent unions.

The Russian Revolution and Russian Imperialism

Lenin’s anti-imperialism

Unlike Western imperialism, which colonised overseas territories, the Tsarist empire expanded by annexing adjacent territories from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Black Sea in the south, from the Baltic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. In the Preface to Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he explains that in order to evade censorship, he had in 1916 substituted Japan for Russia, and Korea for ‘Finland, Poland, Courland, the Ukraine, Khiva, Bokhara, Estonia or other regions peopled by non-Great Russians’ (1). As a genuine anti-imperialist, he was as opposed to Great-Russian imperialist annexation of the territories of non-Great-Russian peoples as he was to Western imperialism.

However, many of Lenin’s colleagues opposed his policies favouring the right of Russia’s colonies to national liberation. After Finland’s independence was recognized in 1917, no other nation received the same treatment; but the larger nations of Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent Soviet republics, while smaller nations within the boundaries of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (including the Central Asian nations) became autonomous republics and autonomous regions responsible for matters of local government, education, culture and agriculture. A range of policies aimed at promoting the national, economic, and cultural advancement of the non-Russians was pursued: priority to the local language, a massive increase in native language schools, development of national cultures, and staffing the Soviet administration as far as possible with local nationals.

Lenin did not arrive at this position entirely on his own; indeed, in the early 20^th century, his position and that of the Iskra current to which he belonged was extremely unsympathetic to national liberation struggles in the colonies of the tsarist empire. Eric Blanc shows that it was non-Russian Marxist parties in the empire’s periphery – especially in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine and the Caucasus – who were arguing the positions subsequently articulated by Lenin. These parties, despite being committed in theory and practice to opposing ethnic nationalism and building proletarian unity across national divisions, emphasized the need for national independence as well as the autonomy of their own parties in relation to the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (2). Lenin was also influenced by the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, who argued that the socialist revolution could not succeed without the participation of the colonised peoples of the East (3).

Post-War Sri Lanka: Exploring the Path Not Taken

 Introduction

Almost immediately after Independence, the government of Sri Lanka enacted legislation depriving Hill-country Tamils of their citizenship and franchise; subsequent governments enacted laws and carried out policies discriminating against and persecuting all Tamil-speaking citizens, with the avowed intention of making Sri Lanka a ‘Sinhala-Buddhist’ nation-state. In response, Tamil militant groups set out to establish a Tamil state in the Northeast, resulting in a civil war that lasted twenty-six years. Even after the war ended in 2009, practices that had engendered it continued. 

This paper looks at the issues of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘nationality’ as well as ‘culture’ and ‘community’ as they have been studied in various disciplines, and attempts to explore alternative ways of accommodating different linguistic, religious and cultural communities within Sri Lanka, or indeed any nation-state, without either suppressing minorities or leading to conflict and separation.

Sri Lanka: A Democratic Revolution in the Making?

Rohini Hensman and Faizun Zackaria

 

A time for gratitude

 

Two disasters were recently averted in Sri Lanka. The first would have been the re-election of the corrupt and brutal Rajapaksa regime in the presidential election of 8 January 2015. Its defeat can be credited, first and foremost, to democracy activists across the spectrum – Sobitha Thera, trade unionists, students, teachers, women’s groups, political parties, social activists, artists, lawyers, civil society organisations,  the Movement for Social Justice, social media activists, and so on –  who organised the campaign for a common opposition candidate with such skill and courage that it succeeded despite the huge amount of money and muscle-power employed on the other side, and also to the Election Commissioner, who carried out a tolerably free and fair election against heavy odds. Secondly, to Tamil voters, who overwhelmingly rejected the Tamil nationalist plea to boycott the election (Weerawardhana 2015). The Tamil National Alliance in particular has played a commendable role in recent years, affirming their faith in democracy by opposing the continuous slide into dictatorship under the Rajapaksa regime. For Muslims to support the opposition should have been a no-brainer after the state-sponsored pogroms against them by Buddhist thugs of the Bodhu Bala Sena (BBS); that it took so long for their leaders to disentangle themselves from the old regime is a sad comment on the corrupt politics of patronage. Hill-country Tamils, most of whom had hitherto been in the clutches of plantation politicians like Thondaman of the Ceylon Workers’ Congress which supported the Rajapaksa regime, gave an overwhelming message that they can make intelligent decisions on their own.

 

However, there is no way the common opposition candidate Maithripala Sirisena could have won without the votes of Sinhalese voters, who voted for change in defiance of the violence, massive expenditure and racist fear-mongering of the Rajapaksa brothers. An analysis of the election results shows that Rajapaksa lost ‘because a large chunk of Sinhala voters who supported him in 2010 voted for the Opposition in 2015’ (Gunasekara 2015). It is notable that even the Buddhist monk party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya, articulated the need for change and mobilised their constituents to realise it. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) played an impressive role both in the campaign and before it, opposing attacks on Muslims by the BBS and highlighting the need for a political-economic democratic programme. Unfortunately, leaders of the mainstream Left parties remained with the Rajapaksas right to the end, although many members joined the common opposition campaign.

 

The second disaster, perhaps even more ghastly than the first, would have been a coup by Rajapaksa in the wake of his defeat in the election. For many people in Sri Lanka, this was the greatest fear. It has been reported that he conceded defeat only after the Attorney General, Solicitor General, Army Chief and Inspector-General of Police refused to endorse an attempt by him, backed by Mohan Peiris whom he had installed as Chief Justice, to stay in power (Sri Lanka Brief 2015). This allegation has yet to be proved, but if it is true, Sri Lankans owe an enormous debt of gratitude to these public officials who saved the country from sliding yet again into bloodshed and chaos.

A Tribute to Rajani Thiranagama: A Beacon for the Left

The 25th death anniversary of Rajani Thiranagama fell on 21 September 2014, and was marked in Jaffna with a series of events to honour her memory.

As the invitation to the memorial events explains:

Rajani remains an inspiration and symbol of hope to many in Sri Lanka who desire a just peace with democracy and dignity for all, especially minority communities in the country. We hope to explore spaces for a democratic practice in which people are able to participate. While we cannot speak for all communities, we wish to raise political questions about the different oppressions that pervade society. We are looking for spaces in which the voice of the people could be heard, in the economic, social and cultural arenas, which in sum make up the politics of a place. The post-war period offers us a space to question nation, class and gender; of paramount importance in all this is to focus on the needs, aspirations and (self) expression of communities who have been dispossessed during the long period of war and in the current context of development and post-war reconstruction.

A doctor, lecturer in Jaffna University, feminist, author, and human rights defender, Rajani was shot dead by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as she cycled home from work 25 years ago. She knew her life was at risk when she returned from a research trip to the United Kingdom a few months earlier, but was so convinced she was needed in Jaffna that she did not heed the warnings of friends. Many moving tributes to Rajani have been made over the years, but a theme that has been less explored is her contribution to socialist practice: a contribution that is relevant not just in Sri Lanka but worldwide.