BETA

The anti-Tamil war in Sri Lanka is getting bloodier by the day. The Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) carries on with its human rights abuses and war crimes.

The international community has rejected GOSL a place in the 47-member United Nations Human Rights Council. Rightly so!

War with Tamils? Peace with Tamils? A big military operation against the Tamil North? Elections for the Tamil East? Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) discusses these questions without irony, as if they were equivalent options. Like a person in a showroom making a choice between two cars.

And nobody powerful or influential within GOSL cries out: War is the height of stupidity!

Carl von Clausewitz, the renowned military theorist, famously said that war is nothing but the continuation of politics by other means. Meaning: war is there to serve policy and is useless when it does not.

What policies did the anti-Tamil wars in the last thirty years serve the GOSL?

Ninety-four years ago, World War I broke out. The immediate cause was the assassination of the Austrian heir apparent by a Serbian student. The first attempt on the main street had failed, the assassins had already given up hope when one of them came across the victim again, by sheer accident, and killed him. After this almost accidental killing many millions of human beings lost their lives in the following four years.

The assassination served, of course, only as a pretext. Every one of the belligerent nations had political and economic interests that pushed it into the war. But did the war really serve those interests? The results suggest the opposite: three mighty empires – the Russian, German, and Austrian – collapsed; France lost its standing as a world power beyond all hope of recovery; the British Empire was mortally wounded.

Military experts point to the shocking stupidity of almost all the generals, who threw their poor soldiers again and again into hopeless battles, which achieved nothing but slaughter. Similar to what General Fonseka is doing to his young Sinhalese soldiers.

Were the statesmen any wiser? Not one of the politicians who started the WW1 imagined that it would last so long and be so horrible. In early August 1914, when the soldiers of all the countries marched into the war with merry enthusiasm, they were promised that they would be home “before Christmas.” Just like Mr Rajapakse’s deadlines in 2008.

The Second World War was, seemingly, more rational. The man who launched it practically single-handedly, Adolf Hitler, knew exactly what he wanted. His opponents, like the Tamils in Sri Lanka, went to war because they had no choice, if they did not want to be exterminated by a monstrous dictator.

Hitler wanted to destroy the Soviet Union and reach a compromise with the British Empire. He belittled the United States and almost ignored it. The result of the war was that the Soviet Union took over a large part of Europe, America became the main world power, and the British Empire disintegrated forever.

Indeed, the Nazi dictator proved, more than anybody else, the utter futility of a war of aggression as a political instrument at this point in time. After the destruction of Hitler's Reich, Germany did achieve his goal. Germany is now the dominant economic and political power in a united Europe – but this was attained not with tanks and heavy guns, without war and military might, solely by diplomacy and exports. One generation after all the German cities had become heaps of ruins in the Nazi adventure Germany was already flourishing as never before.

The same can be said about Japan, which was even more militaristic than Germany. It achieved by peaceful means what the generals and admirals had failed to achieve by war.

Only a generation ago, a brutal war initiated by the Americans was running amok there. Masses of people were killed, hundreds of villages burned, forests and harvests destroyed by chemical agents and soldiers fell like flies. Why? Because of the theory of dominoes feared by the Americans. Just like the theories bandied about by the anti-Tamil Indian opinion makers and their friends in Sri Lanka.

The theory went like this: if all of Vietnam were to be taken over by the Communists, all the other countries of Southeast Asia would fall. Each one would bring down its neighbour, like a row of dominoes. Reality has shown that this was complete nonsense: the Communists took over all of Vietnam, without affecting the stability of Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. When the war memories faded, Vietnam indeed followed the path of its northern neighbour, China, but in the meantime China has a flourishing capitalist economy.

The First Lebanon War was, perhaps, the most hopeless and dim witted of Israel's wars, a cocktail of arrogance, ignorance, and a complete lack of understanding of the opponent. Israel wanted to – (a) destroy the PLO, (b) cause the Palestinian refugees to flee from Lebanon to Jordan, (c) drive the Syrians out of Lebanon, and (d) turn Lebanon into an Israeli protectorate. The results: (a) Arafat went to Tunis, and later, as the result of the First Intifada, returned to Palestine in triumph, (b) the Palestinian refugees remained in Lebanon, in spite of the Sabra and Shatila massacre that was intended to panic them into fleeing, (c) the Syrians remained in Lebanon for another 20 years, and (d) the Shi'ites, who had been downtrodden and beholden to Israel, became a powerful force in Lebanon and Israel's most determined foe. This was repeated in Mrs Kumaratunge’s anti-Tamil War for Peace of the nineties in Sri Lanka.

Albert Einstein considered it a symptom of madness to repeat again and again, doing something that has already failed and to expect a different result every time.

Most Sinhalese politicians and generals conform to this formula. Again and again they try to achieve their aims by military means and obtain contrary results.

Tamils in Sri Lanka went to war because they had no choice