BETA

" It is undoubtedly inevitable that what you might call surgical military action against terrorism should take place". This is certainly not the voice of God, the product that all religions go about seeking to advertise.  This is the voice of the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend and Hon. Doctor Rowan Williams and the most lack lustre of them all.

It is not customary for an Archbishop of Canterbury to proffer temporal advice on political or military matters either to the head of state (monarch)  or the head of government (Prime minister) but it is enigmatic as to why the Most Rev. Williams as head of the Anglican communion in Sri Lanka volunteered advice of such nature to the head of  the Sri Lankan state and government.

The term “surgical military action” suggestive of Hitlers’s “Final Solution” to the Jewish question, in Sri Lankan terms and in the current context has  seriously sinister connotations. Military action taking place in Sri Lanka is not against the LTTE but directed against the innocent Tamil civilians through aerial strikes, shellings, disappearances displacements starvation and abductions.  It is for these that the Mahanayake of the Asgiriya Chapter Most Ven. Udugama Sri Buddharakkitha Ratnapala stated: “…. it is the bounden duty of the clergy and religious leaders to extend the hand of support and not interfere with the administration, and bring undue pressure and distract him (President Rajapakse) from the course he is following " (Ceylon Daily News May 09 2007); appended.

Even among the Tamils, one would find  in abundance  the “Children of God and members of Dr Rowan Williams’ flock. SJV Chelvanayagam the former undisputed leader of the Tamils who until death in 1975 advocated the struggle for a separate Tamil state was a devout Christian and an Anglican at that.
 
Perhaps, the Dean while being in Sri Lanka wished not to live dangerously  lest he earn  the wrath of the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinists and be called all kind of names. Instead, discretion being the better part of valour, he preferred to religiously listen to the gospel according to the Asgiriya and the Malwatte Mahanayake Theros. What was more dangerous was that what he said was stated with very little learning on the Tamil national question. What he missed to realise was that the Tamil struggle for national liberation could not be painted with the same brush as used for the al quieda and the Taliban, and win acclaim.

The gospel according to the Mahanayake Thero further said: “It is just a handful - a group of people who respect nothing and show no regard to human life and human rules who had taken up arms and try to create mayhem. They are guerilla groups and they have created rifts and ethnic strife we experience today. The peace-loving ordinary and simple people of the Tamil community have been caught up in this strife.” What the scholar in the Dean failed to ascertain was as to “how and why the genesis of the guerilla group came to take place in the  first place,  in the serene climate where ‘the people would like to live in peace and harmony as one family-brothers and sisters….”  And what the Mahanayake Thero, probably in a temporary bout of amnesia, did not say was the manner in which the brothers and sisters were treated over the years including the periodically state engineered race riots against them from 1956 to 1983 and how they are  being continued to be treated. Hardly “an example for others to follow”!

The Dean’s statement to the President, to say the least, smacks of arrogance and cynicism, if not cowardice. He stands dwarfed in sharp contrast to the towering  images of some of his illustrious predecessors especially  the charismatic the late Most Rev. and Hon. Dr Hewlett Johnson often referred to as the Red Dean who even in the midst of the cold war, in support of Marxist Leninist politics,  had the mettle to speak up to say, for example,: “Socialism in my view  is not only the scientific but the logical consequence in our age of Christian morality.” and again  to say "[capitalism] lacks a moral basis" and that "it is the moral impulse [of communism] ... which constitutes the greatest attraction and presents the widest appeal." Consequently  he was not a very popular Dean among the powers that be but respected and admired for his courage.

Christianity, in a manner of thinking is a religion of the people- founded as a folk religion, and the most materialistic of all in the meaning of the synthesis of philosophical dialectics and materialism.  In this context, it is little surprise that Christian (Catholic) priests in Nicaragua should have  take up arms in support of the Sandinistas  to fight in the national liberation struggle  for the oppressed Nicaraguan people.

If the Archbishop of Canterbury can advocate military action against the Tamil people what should prevent the Tamil people in return employing militancy in winning their freedom and just rights in their struggle for national liberation.

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