When There Are Many Victors And One Vanquished

In Sri Lanka, on the surface there were no winners only losers in this battle of wits. I was convinced for a long while that only fools rush in to claim victory when there is none; however, I am certain now we have Victors and Vanquished to place on record. The Victors are the countless victims, dead or alive, who stood in the path to Eelam and the Vanquished are the ones that perished perpetrating this massive fraud.

The brutality of ours conflict must raise our conscience and force a self-examination before moving ahead to find a lasting solution. The end was so costly that even an accountant would find tallying is pure madness just to determine the monetarily detriment to us. It involves precious lives perished on both side of the divide. At some point the warfare was so senseless that even keeping casualty figures became the high point of military success. The conflict in its own making disregarded the indescribable value of human life and denied the opportunity for each to one contribute to the making Sri Lanka, a place to call paradise. Thus, war is brutal and removes any reasonableness; destroys aspirations and brings economic cataclysm. It is our human nature, the experiences of WWII, Vietnam, Balkan etc. are often forgotten when a new conflict begin elsewhere.

To change for the better the victors must constantly ask how we ever got to this point. War doesn’t begin by just throwing a stone at somebody. It requires the use of weapons and the mechanism to acquire them. More often than not, all that is needed is to possess evil thoughts to instigate an armed insurrection and stand behind one pointed at the opposite to terrorize. Only those with criminal mentality coupled with terminal psychological conditions can justify such action and seek pleasure in seeing the victims agonize to make a point, that being, concede to the demands no matter how frivolous they are - like asking for disproportionate swath of land to call their state. They contradict conventional virtuousness; hence, they must be vanquished.

Instead, had they chosen the democratic path the victors would have never seen the agony of this war. By choosing this violence path, the vanquished hedged heavily on the terrorizing our nation and playing victim card. In fact, vanquished achieved only the latter very effectively galvanizing universal empathy to their cause under false pretence. The terror that the vanquished brought to our cities and villages made the victors insecure and vulnerable, however, they only made the victors more determined to eradicate the menace and hunt for its perpetrators. The vanquished never learnt that violence begets violence, but they could not or would not accept that the “ultimate one” will fail to deliver their Promised Land.

Our experience must educate us, the victors, a singular lesson – war is not worth pursuing. Seeking Eelam was a very naïve and a bad concept from the inception for the vanquished, a land grab that was designed for failure because they underestimated the victors determination to stop this nonsense presented for separation.

Now that the victors have conquered this virgin territory, we now know what’s like to live through one and never allow it to repeat. The only way to prevent this suffering ever happening in the future is to ensure that the democratic path is made clear to pursue to the end. Judicious victors should never put themselves in the position to ask ever again how they got to this point.