Freedom of Hate Speech

*Reader discretion advised: Post contains quoted content which could be considered objectionable or offensive.

Lately, sentiments of violent Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalism have turned into powerful Orwellian prolefeed (From 1984: a constant stream of mindless entertainment produced to distract and occupy the masses), not simply stirring up repugnant chauvinism but actively promoting hate and violence against those who do not subscribe to their novelty Sri Lankan Buddhism. This prolefeed has found a fertile breeding-ground on social media; regional, local, national-level pages belonging to various extreme Sinhala Buddhist factions mushrooming at alarming frequency. Each group has disturbing reach and terrifying engagement by members who post vile, incomprehensibly hateful, racist comments provoking and even on occasion, threatening physical and sexual violence and death.

These Facebook pages have become spaces for free but detrimental expression that demands our action, considering the spate of violence against places of Christian and Muslim religious worship, Muslim-owned businesses and even patrons. These hate campaigns have gained wide, concerning ground on Facebook in particular, where a demographic comprised of (arguably impressionable) young males whose malevolence is commended and egged on unchecked.

The BBS page for example, posted photographs of participants from the peaceful vigil which happened in Colombo last week under the album title ‘Treasonous Savages Who Distorted the National Anthem’ and ‘Enemies With No Race or Religion’ (translated from Sinhalese), requesting members to help identify the traitors. The comments attacking race, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and gender on these photographs which were mostly made in Sinhala (transliterated and text) by members of the Facebook group were truly horrifying.

‘He’s a (expletive) that sells his mother for a living’

‘Tiger prostitutes (expletive)’

‘Nightclub prostitute bitches’

‘May these people be struck by lightning the sons of prostitutes (expletive) devouring this country. This is our country, a Sinhala country, devils.’

‘They are prostitutes with no race or religion’

‘These people haven’t even grazed past Buddhism. They are NGO people. If they were so concerned about the country and Buddhism, where were these (expletive) when temples were being bulldozed? They are just giving (expletive) here, it would be good if they mind their business without getting murdered by the real Sinhalese’

‘Bastard dogs’

‘These are a bunch of Colombo people trying to be cute. Have they even taken shelter from the rain at a temple? They are trying to teach us religion they should be taken in for questioning to the CID.’

-> Response: ‘Excellent comment. They should be raped.’

‘They  look like midgets chased out of South India. There’s not even an speck of Buddhism in them. They look like Ethiopian cows.’

‘Don’t worry I was there when this NGO band protested in front of the Bodu Bala Sena Base. They have even distorted the National Anthem. They are rising to destroy the Buddhist power, but the security forces and the priests of the Bodu Bala Sena intervened and successfully defeated this treasonous, unpatriotic effort. (BBS Monk)

‘(Expletive) if I see you in Battaramulla, I will definitely open up your (expletive), you dog. Be careful when you’re on the road, you NGO cow born to a dog. (expletive)’

-> Response by BBS monk: ‘Help us identify this man’

‘These (expletive) planned this while Gnanasara Priest (BBS monk) was out of the country. If Gnanasara was there these people would have been stripped and forced to run away naked.’

‘Nature will punish these people. When you’re on the road be extra careful, there are big lorries and buses coming your way’

‘Don’t be disheartened by these efforts, even Lord Buddha defeated the Demons. This protest was not done by real Sinhalese, but a flock of mixed-race miscreants. If you need anything priest, we are always with the Bodu Bala Sena’

These comments are a mere sampling of what is being said in response to the photos of the participants who attended the peaceful vigil. Not only was the content aimed at identifying participants in order to orchestrate an abhorrent response on-line (and frighteningly maybe even potentially off-line, given the identification of people’s names and places of employment), the comments unquestionably call for murder, physical violence and rape.

The process of reporting the page and its contents to Facebook appears to be straightforward: The ‘I think it shouldn’t be on Facebook’ option provides you with another to report ‘Hate speech’ under multiple categories of  targeting race or ethnicity, religious group, based on gender and orientation, based on disability or disease. While there is no ‘all of the above’ option which sum up the BBS page’s contents, myself and many others have reported this page and similar pages repeatedly. Facebook, however, does not find this reason enough to either issue a warning to the page owners to moderate, clean up the content or have it taken down. Understandably, the content is in transliterated and text Sinhala, which at first glance will not check any hate speech boxes, but does terrifying and unapologetic hate speech only deserve Facebook’s attention if it is in English?

While liberals may argue that shutting these pages down are a threat to the freedom of speech in a country where most freedoms are delusional at best, do these pages deserve space for engagement (and evident indoctrination as far as an impressionable young membership is concerned)? While the admin-uploaded contents do not directly threaten harm to anyone (save for requests to members to help identify so-called perpetrators and distastefully condemn them in captions and album titles), the administrators are allowing rabidly racist commentary to continue, irrefutably violating Facebook’s Community Standards.

While the BBS page was taken down briefly yesterday, today it has returned with English language comments deleted (likely for the benefit of Facebook checks on hate speech), while the Sinhala language content remains untouched. Additionally, when those captured in the photographs reported the content to Facebook as harassment, the social media platform failed to respond to multiple complaints. Meanwhile, these photos are being shared and commented on, rapidly replicated in similar pages, subject to streams of comment abuse, shocking misuse and photo-manipulation. We must be weary of the pervasive and fluid nature of social media, and consider its impacts outside the relative freedoms, anonymity and bravado of the Internet.

Where freedoms have been fought for over centuries of human history, they are not simply easy entitlements won by others long-gone for willful abuse, but must like all rights be tied to responsibilities. Those who do not respect these responsibilities, are entirely undeserving of these freedoms- especially where they are actively encouraging hatred and inciting violence against those who do not subscribe to their beliefs.

Of Protests and Introspection

Tuesday.

Protests. I am hesitant to weave through the crowds at Town Hall after work, but I am curious. Patriotic music echoes. Head aches. Black and white corporates assembled. Signage in English, a language that a fraction of the population speaks. Who are these signs intended for?

No War Crimes in Sri Lanka, Look Elsewhere

Don’t Be Mislead by Terrorists, Listen to the People

All Sri Lankans Hate Violence.

Help Sri Lankans Live As One Nation

They are mostly young. Women in sunglasses fan themselves, shading their faces from the evening sun. Men in ties tote corporate banners photographing. They link arms and grin for photo after photo. Amateur photographers armed with camera phones click. Pose. Click. Pose. Click. New profile pictures are buzzed off into cyberspace. Such amusement, it could have been a cricket match.  A confusion of slogans and Sri Lankan flags wrapped on their heads or shoulders as a sign of respect, perhaps?

A mockery of the three decades of life that was lost to the island unfolds. Its suffering reduced down to an ideological pissing contest between geopolitical overlords and Third World underlings. These puppets revel, they cry ‘NO to war crimes and NO to Western Conspiracies’. I wish I could ask them to define both.

Estimates of the war’s casualties range from 80,000-100,000. The numbers from its later phase remain hotly contested. Ranging from 40,000 as suggested by international observers to the government’s ever-fluctuating numbers between 0 – 1,400 – 3,500 – 5000. Perhaps, we will never know save for those of us who knew real loss then, of family or friends. Real people with names and faces, who were loved and mourned for.

In May 2009, when the government confirmed its military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) following months of intense fighting, it also left an estimated 300,000 civilians displaced. Housed in welfare camps, Sri Lanka‟s internally displaced population faced a devastating humanitarian crisis riddled with critical predicaments of nutrition and sanitation. According to the United Nations’ Joint Humanitarian and Early Recovery Update as late as September 2011 (well over 2 years after the end of the armed conflict), 7534 internally displaced persons remained in camps waiting to return to their areas of origin, while 384, 401 people returned to the Northern Province (UNOCHA, 2011). A few thousand still remain suspended in the limbo of internal displacement. A bloodied past, a purgatorial present and an uncertain future.

They protest in vehement denial, so unabashed about their heritage, their pride, their arrogant patriotism. Sri Lankans, they roar! Yet I wonder what they have done to earn this glory besides hold up a placard, wrapping a flag around their heads and choosing sides in a game they have not even bothered to understand.

By denying the realities of the war they deny the existence, the humanity of those victims whose lives will forever be shaken in ways they cannot ever comprehend. They forget or ignore the uphill battle left in revising policy and discriminatory practices so deeply engrained in Sri Lanka’s social fabric. They deny thousands of fellow Sri Lankans equality of citizenship by decrying their tenuous present and horrific experiences are fictions concocted by the international humanitarian apparatus.

I wonder why such public gusto, such concern has not been channelled towards pressuring an internal mechanism for fostering reconciliation, to push through necessary policy documents that still stutter between ministries and attitudes towards inclusion, integration and the sustainable peace we as a nation owe to those civilians who fought and survived three decades of war.Not just those of us who were touched by a history of bleak news reports and the lurking fear of a bomb blast in the city, but those who have lost far too much for words or tears.

The LLRC even with its apologist contradictory wording and repetitive lip-service calls for changes that need speedy implementation. In the very words of the polemic resolution there exists,

‘.. The need to credibly investigate widespread allegations of extra-judicial killings and enforced disappearances, demilitarize the north of Sri Lanka, implement impartial land dispute resolution mechanisms, re-evaluate detention policies, strengthen formerly independent civil institutions, reach a political settlement on the devolution of power to the provinces, promote and protect the right of freedom of expression for all and enact rule of law reforms..’

Are these protestors denying the existence of these realities and the interlinked need for changes? How many of them even bothered read the LLRC, or even this resolution they are so opposed to?

—

Thursday

The resolution passes and the sentiments pendulum between unapologetic apathy and ignorant rage. I am disgusted, as hate is spewed towards the United States and India. A cricketing rivalry with the latter turned vitriolic against its supportive stance on the resolution. India raised the LTTE, someone announces to cyberspace. Or perhaps it was such anger and ignorance directed at a section of our own people.

Implementation with technical assistance, the resolution calls. Sri Lanka is indignant, bitter, even. Its pissing contest against the galactic empire lost, even with the support of China’s rebel force.

The rage, the ignorance the horrific claims that clutter my virtual world sadden and disgust me as I see more protesters still uncertainly lurking at Town Hall.The conflation of anti-US sentiment with the purpose of the resolution thickens.

G.L Peiris states,

‘The most distressing feature of this experience is the obvious reality that voting at the Human Rights Council is now determined not by the merits of a particular issue but by strategic alliances and domestic political issues in other countries which have nothing to do with the subject matter of a Resolution or the best interests of the country to which the Resolution relates.  This is a cynical negation of the purposes for which the Human Rights Council was established.

Many countries which voted with Sri Lanka were acutely conscious of the danger of setting a precedent which enables ad hoc intervention by powerful countries in the internal affairs of other nations.  This is a highly selective and arbitrary process not governed by objective norms or criteria of any kind.  The implications of this were not lost on many countries.

As far as Sri Lanka is concerned, our policy in respect of all matters will continue to be guided by the vital interests and wellbeing of the people of our country.  It hardly requires emphasis that this cannot yield place to any other consideration.’

—

Perhaps what we as a Nation, should be concerned with instead is our grave need for introspection and realising what passive crimes occur each day through our own choice of ignorance, apathy and prejudice in the name of a misguided patriotism.

Knowing that I am not alone in my sentiments however, comforts me.

Perhaps there is hope? Perhaps.

A Year in Black, White and Colour II

Continued from here.

Cambridge’s May Week in June ended with a bang.

July was for wanderings

Good times with friends

And that little matter of graduation

Along with a final Cambridge sunset

Moved back home

Rediscovered Colombo

The old

But new in a city that had stayed closed up for so long

Time for travels had come (photo by my talented friend Tanya Lazar, you can find more of her photography here)

Some closer to home

Trincomalee

Richmond Castle, Kalutara

Some Far

Petronas Towers, Kuala Lampur

Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion, Penang

Batu Caves, Gombak

Spent with good friends

and good food (Raju’s roti canai, Petaling Jaya)

All travels (and good things) must come to an end

With lazy days

And new beginnings

So concludes 2011.

It’s been a blast.

Mind Your Language?

Remember that old British show from the 70s aired in Sri Lanka decades later, successfully sending adults and children of the 4-TV-channels-only-1990s-island into fits of laughter?

Marked by hilarity and all kind of politically incorrectness, the show thrived on the comedy of caricatured national and language stereotypes. For those unfamiliar with the show’s premise, it focused on the miscommunications and ensuing amusement in straight-laced Mr. Jeremy Brown’s English as a foreign language class. There were the kerfuffles that followed the quarrelsome Indian and Pakistani, the teasing coquette Francaise and a series of other parodied characters from Spain to China.

Funnily enough like most shows that egg laughs out of ethnic or national stereotypes (Outsourced,  The Kumars at No. 42 and Goodness Gracious Me), the show was probably funnier to the very people that were made fun of. Much like how desi jokes that make fun of brown people are so much funnier to other brown people (Outsourced,  The Kumars at No. 42 and Goodness Gracious Me, Russell Peters: I’m looking at all of you). This probably goes to show that we are indeed puppets of a devious colonial puppet-master ideology subscribing to complex theories of racial stereotypes, the colonisation of the mind and asymptotic mimicry as suggested by Homi Bhaba. That or optimistically, we possess the necessary ability to laugh at ourselves. You decide.

However, the truth is that while ex-coloniser audiences shift uncomfortably in their seats at race, nationality or accent related jokes in this post-politically-correct world (one assumes), the rest of us poor sods  giggle and hoot in agreement about Indian Standard Time, lecherous desi men (Rasmalaaaaiii) or many a mangled idioms coupled with brilliant comedic timing that the writers of Outsourced were particularly skilled in (cold chicken anyone?).

‘What’s to be did when the happen comes?’*

Even a rambling blog post could not possibly succeed in analyzing Sri Lanka’s language debate: highlighting the need for bilingualism, trilingualism, changes in state policy, society and beyond. Which is why, this is not ultimately a discussion on those particular politics, but rather a whole other social circus.

Having been raised in Colombo, I come from a fluidly trilingual house where English dominated and Tamil and Sinhala followed, a feature more common as a bilingual variant to many other people I know here. The grandchildren of a colonial hangover, we were taught the intricacies of Shakespeare, Eliot and Austen assisted by a turn of the century Longman’s English Grammar Book. Our language education was subject to particular thoroughness coupled with an overwhelming sentiment of shame attached to any mistakes or linguistic faux-pas- pronunciation in particular. Somehow, it was ingrained that mistakes were comparable to indelicate and ultimately unacceptable social blunders. So we grew up with vernacular English language skills, another generation of unwitting neo-colonised with elocuted enunciation and privy to quippy little Sri Lankanisms; like a series of private jokes about how we are so cleverly able to subvert the language of our colonisers. The blackguards!

Among friends and family, burgeoning in our tight little school girl cliques, our discussions flowed almost exclusively in English forging harmless, unmalicious boundaries in those years. The only point I am making with that statement is that it is just the way things were and I suppose, still are. Maybe it was different in other schools, or even for boys, but for us, I reiterate it was just the way things were.

So what does this mean in the grander scheme of things?

When I left Colombo to Britain 5 years ago, there was constant surprise. ‘HOW do you speak English so fluently ‘without an accent’ no less?’

The question, one that I find rather insulting, dogs me around at most introductions. ‘Your English is wonderful.’

Yes, it is. Because it is what I’ve always known, no different from you.

Upon returning to Colombo a few months ago, I begin to notice an even odder phenomenon. The assumption at most introductions that I cannot speak either local language, hand in hand with labels I don’t care to examine here.

The mushrooming of international schools and the popularity of English language education in Colombo (especially) has produced a generation of kids (and salespeople- I’m sorry but this is true) with dizzying accents. These young people have had little exposure to their mother tongues thanks to parents who are desperate to give their offspring a fighting chance in this doggy-dog world. Because English matters in the Sri Lankan job market. It really, really matters.

‘You can follow Sinhala right?’ I am often asked. Tamil is not even a question. I find this irksome, especially where assumptions are simply made with no questions or consultation. You can’t speak Sinhala, or worse, you think you are too good to speak Sinhala.

In these instances, I do not even bother to correct the typos on the labels that have already been pasted.

Much of my own serious education was in English, the language I am thus most comfortable in expressing my thoughts academically and otherwise; something, I do not feel the need to apologise for, particularly given the illogical disdain and labels I frequently encounter. Lately, I have been preoccupied with whether I am unintentionally disparaging people by either making them feel compelled to speak in a language they are uncomfortable with or worse not communicate at all? But truth is, despite my ability throw around an easy colloquialism in either local language, I am able to respond in whichever local language I am addressed in, and surely this is no inadvertent sin?

Language has been a hotly contested issue in Sri Lanka, encompassing decades of political debate and social discussion laying the foundations for inequality and prejudice within the ethnic conflict.

From education, employment and social relationships, language informs stereotypes, forging connections and sometimes-illogical prejudice.

However, when shades of the same language inspire such irrational divides, what hope do we have for achieving any form of cohesion beyond the ethnic issue?

Can we thus aspire to a cohesive bilingual or trilingual Sri Lanka?

* A line from an old Sri Lankan English snobbery joke. And yes, there are many.