Ethnic Cleansing: A Dirty Business
June 1st, 2009So the Tamil Tigers are no more and yet another ethnic conflict comes to a miserable end. How many killed for this? Has it made any difference? It may take some time for that question to be answered. Like many ethnic conflicts, this one seems to have gone on for a long time making one wonder what exactly it was all about.
My parents actually lived in Sri Lanka for a short time just before the civil war broke out. I spent the Xmas holidays on 1980/1 visiting them and enjoying the gorgeous beaches of the south west and the green hinterland. When I heard that civil war had broken out it didn’t really resonate with me. As a 14 year old, the Sinhalese and Tamils I had met just seemed like people. Also growing up with the conflict in Northern Ireland never far from the news, it seemed par for the course.
People, even of the same colour and country, could still engage in war. Both sides of my family have been on the wrong end of the ethnic vacuum cleaner so maybe I was just inured to it.But these days I am very tuned into any mention of ethincity and references to improving the hygiene of ones home country.
Whilst pondering the end of the latest carnage I was floored by the story of a Catholic man who was beaten to death by a group of Rangers football supporters in a small town in Northern Ireland. It was after Rangers had triumphed by winning the Scottish soccer leage competiton that a bunch of Rangers fans, Protestants, decided to pay a visit to the Catholic part of town and basically murder someone. Which they did.
So it continues. It’s a bit 20th century though.
Nowhere is immune from this.
What about that gorgeous Kingdom of Happiness, Bhutan. Apparently a wonderful place to visit and a very progressive society. In fact about 5 years ago I included Bhutan in a paper on E-government. It was quite advanced for a small mountainous country. No mention in the Wikipedia entry of ethnic cleansing.
Yet in the last 15 Years nearly 15-20% of the population has been cleansed and evicted from the country. What the..???
They certainly kept that quiet. 120,000 Bhutanese have been transformed into refugees living in 7 camps in Nepal. Some have found their way here to Christchurch to start a new life.
It feels like an ongoing epidemic……it’s hard to know when it will stop. Our identity is so important to us, yet at the same time it allows the tyranny of the majority an easy way to express any kind of anger or frustration. As Amartya Sen writes in “Identity and Violence“,
“..a major source of potential conflict in the contemporary world is the presumption that people can be uniquely categorized based on religion or culture”.
Indeed but it’s our willingness to succumb to group behaviour and peer pressure that allows atrocities like ethnic cleansing and genocide to happy. How can we move away from the “clash of civilizations” and to an appreciation of the person?
Actually I don’t know if we can. It seems so ingrained in our nature. Of course we can all educate our children and imbue them with values that include compassion, kindness and care.
I wonder how technology will help? I have a feeling that will play a bigger part than we realise. Maybe when all the teenagers around the world are connected through the semantic web……who knows?
Tags: bhutan, christchurch, ethnic cleansing, ethnicity, genocide, human rights, identity, kevin mcdaid, northern ireland, refugees, religion, repression, sectarianism, semantic web, sri lanka, tamil tigers, technology, violence, war
August 1st, 2009 at 5:44 am
Hi Raf Manji, I applaud your accomplishments and appreciate the work you do but I encourage you to do more homework and know other side of the story before you write an article like this. In Bhutan’s case, the whole issue just got politicized and overblown. Using the term ‘refugee’ is just not apt in Bhutan’s context. It is simply an immigration issue every affluent country deals with. Be my guest and visit Bhutan to liberate yourself from such delusion. Have a good weekend. Cheers~
August 2nd, 2009 at 5:05 am
Lotrin,
Thank you for your comment. There are always two sides to any story but in this case its hard to argue with the facts which are well documented.
http://www.bhutaneserefugees.com/timeline.php
I also think the term refugee is quite accurate. A refugee is described as follows
“Under the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of their nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail him/herself of the protection of that country.[1]”
Denied nationality due to the 1985 Citizenship Act would qualify those affected as refugees. Its a well used and timeless process used by many governments around the world.
Classify a certain subset of the population as “x” and use that as a way to “remove” them from the country. If they protest in any way then its easy to imprison them and cast them as political activists or, these days, as terrorists.
To cast this as an “immigration issue” fits nicely into this paradigm.
Having said that I am very much looking forward to visiting Bhutan one day. The refugees I have met tell me its a beautiful country. In spite of their suffering they still have a deep love for their homeland and hope themselves to visit again one day.