Sunday, July 5, 2009
...MJT: So you just got back from Sri Lanka. What did you see there? What did you learn?
Kaplan: The biggest takeaway fact about the Sri Lankan war that's over now is that the Chinese won. And the Chinese won because over the last few years, because of the human rights violations by the Sri Lankan government, the U.S. and other Western countries have cut all military aid. We cut them off just as they were starting to win. The Chinese filled the gaps and kept them flush with weapons and, more importantly, with ammunition, with fire-fighting radar, all kinds of equipment. The assault rifles that Sri Lankan soldiers carry at road blocks throughout Colombo are T-56 Chinese knockoffs of AK-47s. They look like AK-47s, but they're not.
What are the Chinese getting out of this? They're building a deep water port and bunkering facility for their warships and merchant fleet in Hambantota, in southern Sri Lanka. And they're doing all sorts of other building on the island.
Now, why did the Chinese want Sri Lanka? Because Sri Lanka is strategically located. The main sea lines of communication between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, and between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. It's part of China's plan to construct a string of pearls - ports that they don't own, but which they can use for their warships all across the Indian Ocean.
Sri Lanka defeated, more or less completely, a 26 year-long insurgency. They killed the leader and the leader's son. But there are no takeaway lessons for the West here. The Sri Lankan government did it by silencing the media, which meant capturing the most prominent media critic of the government and killing him painfully. And they made sure all the other journalists knew about it.
MJT: Wow.
Kaplan: There are a thousand disappearances a year in Sri Lanka separate from the war. Journalists are terrified there. The only journalism you read is pro-government. So that's one thing they did.
The Tamil Tigers had human shields by the tens of thousands, not just by the dozens and hundreds like Al Qaeda. They put people between themselves and the government and say "you have to kill all the people to get to us." So the government obliged them. The government killed thousands of civilians.
MJT: Tamil civilians?
Kaplan: Yes. They killed thousands of civilians in the course of winning this war. It acted in a way so brutal that there are no lessons for the West...
A terrific and an informative interview. Though from all I've read the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) were no less brutal than the Sinhalese and arguably were more brutal, though that's a tit-for-tat I wouldn't care to engage in, though I'm happy to reform my opinion if evidence can be presented. There's the additional fact that the Tamils in Sri Lanka, based strictly on what I've read over the years, had a higher standard of living than the larger population of Tamils in the very southern tip of India.
That "there are no takeaway lessons" in the LTTE/Sinhalese civil war seems a fairly apt summation based upon all I've read.
I meant to add that introducing suicide belts - and the Tamil Tigers were not only "innovators" in this area, they used them with some frequency - is no small breech of a deontological moral norm in and of itself.
There's a large group of ideologues and others who are simply pragmatic from their pov, all who eschew deontological moral norms, and that's fine from a still broader pov of moral theory. But to put this in succinct terms, there are deontological ethical norms and then there are deontological ethical norms.
Suicide/homicide attacks and the moral/ethical judgements that inform their use, especially as a standard and frequently used political/insurgent tactic, should be of no minor concern, even for those who do not typically place much positive value on deontological norms.