From: vperera@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (vicumpriya perera)
Subject: Book Review : A book about Sri lanka
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington IN.
Date: Fri, 10 Apr 1992 01:34:13 -0500




Trouble in Paradise
----------------------

WASHINGTON POST: BOOK WORLD, 03/22/92
Copyright (c) 1992 The Washington Post Co.

By Steve Coll

   ONLY MAN IS VILE
The Tragedy of Sri Lanka
By William McGowan
Farrar Straus Giroux. 397 pp. $25
   ONE OF SRI LANKA's lesser misfortunes is to be ignored. Despite
having staged one of post-colonial history's most brutal and fascinating
Third World horror shows -- replete with death squads, ethnic fratricide,
 totalitarian insurgencies and the usual cast of misguided, Westernized
politicians -- this teardrop-shaped island nation in the Indian Ocean,
formerly the British colony of Ceylon, has managed to rip itself apart
during the last several decades without attracting much attention.
   Neighboring India dropped in with 50,000 troops five years ago,
hoping to sort out the island's mess, which it had a hand in creating.
But its soldiers soon returned home, bloodied and sulking. As for the
superpowers, present and former, they have generally left Sri Lanka to
its own appalling devices. Japanese businessmen touch down on the island
regularly, hawking cars and electronics, and members of the Western aid
community stop by with satchels full of blueprints for hydroelectric
dams and self-sufficient shrimp farms. But they have not stopped the
bodies from piling up.
   In the last decade, the total number of deaths from Sri Lanka's
shifting panoply of civil wars and ethnic conflicts is estimated to be
above 60,000. The figure swells daily.
   To outsiders, Sri Lanka's implosion seems especially tragic because
the island is paradisiacal. Its beaches are pristine and its palm
forests brim with elephants and coconuts. Sri Lankans themselves often
seem gentle and attractive, having achieved since
independence -- despite their recent habit of war -- the highest
literacy and lifespan rates of any comparably impoverished people in the
world. And yet these same people have also produced a broad culture of
violence and two guerrilla movements, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam and the People's Liberation Front, whose fanatical terror is
reminiscent of Pol Pot's Cambodia.
   William McGowan, an American teacher and journalist, arrived on the
island in 1986, stayed about two years and has now written a book about
his experiences, Only Man Is Vile: The Tragedy of Sri Lanka. (The title
is taken from Bishop Reginald Heber's hymn "From Greenland's Icy
Mountains": "What though the spicy breezes/ Blow soft o'er Ceylon's
isle;/ Though every prospect pleases,/ And only man is vile.") Swept up
by Sri Lanka's beauty and repulsed by its brutality, McGowan traveled to
the island's interiors to chronicle several of its bloodiest guerrilla
and army campaigns and to make sense of the larger forces at work in the
island's dissolution.
   Fashioned as a political travelogue, his book contains strong
passages, such as a vivid tale of Christmas in the battered eastern town
of Batticaloa. McGowan lunches in a "bullet-scarred refectory" with
Jesuit priests who have devoted themselves to defending the region's
ethnic Tamil minority from Sri Lankan and Indian death squads. Outside
the refectory, war rages. Inside, a priest from New Orleans puts "Silent
Night" on a cassette player before he talks politics -- in case, he says,
 "we are being bugged."
   But while McGowan is a good listener, a careful reporter and a
sensitive observer, he seems unable to decide what he thinks about Sri
Lanka. In an unfortunate preface, he compares his assessment of the
island to the predicament of a servant at his Colombo guest house who
sweeps flower petals into piles, only to have them blown away by the
wind. "During most of my stay there, I rarely felt I had anything but
the most tentative, uncertain grasp of the war and what it was about,"
McGowan writes.
   While this humility is occasionally refreshing, McGowan's lack of an
argument or even a consistent point of view about Sri Lanka makes it
difficult for either the specialist or the newcomer to become engaged in
his travels. McGowan examines closely the puzzle pieces of Sri Lanka's
divisiveness -- the roles of ethnic nationalism, language, religion,
economics and historical identity. But each time, he leaves the pieces
in a jumble.
SOMETIMES McGowan embraces a wispy anthropological relativism to explain
the island's conflicts, suggesting that because Sri Lanka's culture is
different from his own, he has no right to analyze it. Other times he
asserts himself, as when he argues with a nationalist professor from the
island's Buddhist, ethnic Sinhalese majority who wishes Sri Lanka could
become "Burma without the mistakes." McGowan recognizes the man's
murderous chauvinism. But he seems afraid to take on the professor's
argument directly or to deal with its chilling implications, for fear of
being judged "a Western supremacist."
   One fascinating prism through which to see Sri Lanka's fratricide is
suggested by an assertion McGowan makes early in his book. "Sri Lanka,"
he writes, "failed to build a stable multi-ethnic, multicultural society
because it embraced many of the very concepts and ideas that
multiculturalists in the West have advocated." But the author lets this
provocative suggestion drop, as if it were a mere musing. In the end,
McGowan returns to the United States engulfed in dread and forboding
about Sri Lanka's future. One wishes he would go back to the island,
this time determined to untangle the contradictions and solve the
mysteries that seem to have driven him away. 
   Steve Coll is the South Asia correspondent for The Washington Post.
   @CAPTION: Moslem women in Eravur, Sri Lanka, mourn relatives killed
by Tamil rebels.


THE END. 
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