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A concerted propaganda war against Tamils and Peace

Clearly seen in the Sinhala and English media today is an unprecedented and meticulously planned propaganda war against Tamil Nationhood, the Tamil freedom movement and the Liberation Tigers who spearhead the freedom struggle.

The main target of this propaganda war is destruction of the peace process. The political thinking on the lines of Sinhala Budhist supremacy and its pall-bearing leadership has always been very careful in ensuring that peace efforts, in whatever form they may be, should not end up in granting of any political rights to the Tamil people.

It is no exaggeration to say that the media in the south has taken on it a significant role to give pride of place to such political thinking based on naked racialism and it is also no gainsaying that this propaganda has assumed unproportionately larger dimensions during the past four decades.

At a time when expediency dictated to the Sinhala polity that Sinhala is 'the' official language and this is a Budhist nation, the Sinhala electorate were made to interpret that the Tamil people have no rights in this land and they were only a migrant population and this vicious and mischievous interpretation gave birth to hatred and violence against Tamils, it is the media in the south that contributed largely in making a tiny spark into a wide spread wildfire.

It is this wild fire that has engulfed this nation in a war- fire for the last two decades. Ironically though, a malicious programme to suppress the Tamil aspirations and by extension to oppress the Tamils, has now assumed proportions that can destroy the whole nation. Yet, these majoritarian supremacist 'thinkers' do not seem to have any semblance of thinking for the nation. If this nation is in a tragic state, these are the people responsible for it.

A sycophant minister, it is said in Tamil folklore, supplied oil to a wicked and unjust king to set fire to poor peasants' huts. The media in the south is and has been doing this very same thing for a very long time. If the politicians with an extremist hue propagated racial hatred against Tamils for political expediency, the media in the south was in no way second to them. Increased circulation of their 'merchandise' notwithstanding, the media definitely has an agenda of its own in negating the Tamil aspirations.

Silencing of guns is said to be peace and if one reasonable elects to call it 'relative peace', even that is subject to sabotage and some elements in the southern polity and the media in the south take a lead role in this orchestration. Even at a time when the people, the real stakeholders of peace in the nation, fear that the peace process is hanging on a tenuous thread of hope, the media in the south has not brought down the aggressiveness of the tone in this hatred campaign.

If the future peace and stability of this country, as being predicted by many an observers, is being pushed to the precipice, it is only because of the propaganda war relentlessly prosecuted by the media in the south against the Liberation Tigers as one party to the CFA, the Norwegian Government as facilitators and the peace - supportive international community at large. We see a commonality among the various media organizations in the south and sometimes an overwhelming desire to beat one another in this vicious propaganda campaign.

29 August 2004

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