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.

‘It didn’t look like you were the type to see a Tamil film’

Having missed the screening of Ini Avan at the EU Film Festival last month, D and I were quite pleased to see that it was being screened at Savoy. So we set aside our Sunday (23rd) to catch the 1.30 screening at Savoy, Wellawatte. Responsibly, I checked the showtimes and D and I made it to the cinema at a respectable 1.15.

Upon requesting tickets from the counter (in Sinhala, so there was no question of this being a language-related misunderstanding), we are told that the film (Ini Avan- we specified a few times) has a special screening time of 3.00pm and that we would have to come back. I ask them in turn, why they can’t update the website to that effect and they say that the information conflicts with the other screening times- which, if of course untrue since each film/EAP theatre has a dedicated page. Fine we say, and ask to buy tickets now. They refuse to sell, saying that ticket sales only open at 2.00pm. Fine, we’ll be back before 3.00pm.

So after mulling around Colombo for an hour and a half, D and I return with A in tow. The three of us head to the counter inquiring for tickets and the same seller has the audacity to (very rudely) laugh at us and say ‘oh it’s actually at 4.15′.

Of course, I lose my cool. I explain to him that when I very clearly inquired (regarding the film and the website times) he insisted that the screening was at 3.00pm, when he could have easily just sold us tickets for the 1.30 that we originally asked for. There’s not paying attention and then there’s making a sheer mockery out of your customers- especially given that they refused to sell us tickets for the 3.00pm screening saying it was too early.

So I ask, do you really think people have nothing better to do than to keep coming back every couple of hours to the cinema according to the whimsy of the sales staff? Then they laugh at us and say,

‘Well I asked you to come back for the 3.0opm Hobbit screening since it didn’t look like you were the type to see a Tamil film’

Because, your appearance as a visibly ethnic stereotype matters when the cinema staff decide for you what film you should be seeing and what they sell you tickets for. Especially when you dare show up to see a Tamil film without making your best effort to highlight your ethnicity as a qualifier to watch a film in your mother tongue.

A sharply asserts in Tamil, that she is indeed Tamil and asks what he meant by that.

They find it acceptable to laugh at us in response, a sneering sort of laugh that has everything to do with the fact that we are women and they somehow are making a joke of us. They won’t event let us buy tickets for the 4.15- once again apparently, it is too early. The manager is apathetic and completely unhelpful, laughing along with his clever salespeople.

Then they say (and they are finding this hilarious) ‘Well you could always go to Concord (in Dehiwela) it will be 4.15 by the time you get there.’ Snigger.

They clearly don’t want us to 1. make a scene 2. see this film.

We leave to Concord and get there by 4.00. What do you know, they got that wrong too (or lied). The film started at 3.00.

That was 4 hours of our afternoon wasted, out of what I can only interpret as some form of bad joke, deliberate misinformation and absolute disrespect to customers coupled with some sort of negative twist of ethnic and gendered differentiation. I might be reading too much into this, but the unapologetic and snide attitudes of those employed at Savoy, doesn’t have me in a particularly forgiving mood.

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Utterly appalling customer service by the Savoy staff aside (rest assured, I will never return to Savoy), Sunday’s incident highlights a greater quandary.

I would like to inquire how many of us make a conscious choice to dress Tamil or Sinhala everyday? Should A be embracing an ethnic stereotype of sari, pottu, flowers in her hair finery? Should I be highlighting my mixed-heritage with some form of indication to both to satisfy judgment on what film I am ethnically and linguistically qualified to see? If you don’t speak English/Sinhala, does that mean you will be redirected to seeing a film in your own language because you don’t look the type of person who can watch an English/Sinhala film? Would the situation have been different if we were three men who perhaps would not have taken the mockery lightly?

Nascent Tamil language cinema in this country is still at a fledgling stage and I encourage you all to support local film making, especially when artists are attempting to draw attention to extremely important social issues that require greater attention. The predicament of ex-combatants in Mullaitivu, which is addressed by Ini Avan is one of particular relevance to present day Sri Lanka, being at the stem of manifold social integration issues ranging from attempts at illegal migration to social exclusion and economic marginalisation.

Post 2009,  amidst all the problems and challenges that remain conveniently undiscussed, we can only hope to look forward and do our part in building a lasting foundation for reconciliation and integration.

However, when you go into a cinema and someone is still making a bluntly unfounded judgment call about your ethnicity and its relevance to what films you may want to see, one must really wonder if any progress has been made, and deliberate how much further we have left to go in changing people’s petty attitudes towards differences.

Sri Lanka, Reconciliation and Lessons from Polanyi

Polanyi. Markets. Coase. Firms. Olson. Collective Action. Ostrom. Tragedy of the Commons. Knight. Social Conflicts. Chambers. Poverty. Kabeer. Gender. Akerlof. Identity.

Analysing Institutions in development was the bane of my existence a year ago. From social hierarchies to the bureaucracy of aid, endless readings and long-winded essays on how economic principles meet and mesh with social realities do not feel distant enough just yet. Being in the business of development however, has provided an intriguing counterpoint to this labyrinth of policies, practicality and the ‘packaging’ of jargon and its potential for social change in a manner that can be widely understood.

Numbers games are easy enough.  State-sponsored extortion covers fuel, electricity, potatoes and otherwise. Pay hikes compelled by union action culminates in a few blokes swinging off the Lipton Circus Fountain and the police getting trigger-happy with teargas. Wages are increased and prices go up since Western powers are after all conspiring to pack Sri Lanka back off to the Third World where fly ridden children are sucked into the neo-colonial aid machine, catalogued, photographed as the face of an organizational calendar and paid in awareness leaflets and oversized teddy bears from First world primary school pen pals. $9.99 a month salvation and one less distended-bellied child. Praise be!

The relevance of social and political context informs Polanyi’s conception of the market’s “embeddedness” which suggests that economy is integrated into society. This view inevitably challenges good ole’ Adam Smith’s description of man’s “propensity to barter, truck and exchange one thing for the other”. This subordination of the economy to politics and social relations underscores what Polanyi further asserts as the need for the government to play a role within the economy through the imposition of sanctions protecting national interests, rather than relying on the intangible economic theories of self-equilibration. While the markets of the world play the number games of hunger games, what of social change? Polanyi tells us that the market cannot be disembedded from society, but do the same gold standards and price tags apply? Can we measure social change in numbers or achieve it through lingo-heavy policy recommendations?

Policy design in Sri Lanka resembles something akin to a Smithian free market; the disembedded marionette strung by the ‘invisible hands’ of political and legislative powers. An uncanny automaton awkwardly flailing amidst real people and real social problems, one that’s trying to get these people, their politics and their problems in line with repeated mechanical recitations of the equality-for-all constitution.

Within development, the predicament of the numbers game (or the epic failure of economists as the rest of us social scientists like to believe) is being noticed. Mostly because the IMF and World Bank’s history of basic needs approaches and structural adjustment programmes caused more problems than they solved. The call for the integration of the global into the local forms an oxymoron of a one-size-fits-all square scheme being shoved into the triangle of a local market. The international development apparatus’s failure to account for the social and political embeddedness of local institutions and recognise that these institutions are not necessarily socially efficient and calibrated to fit into the neat boxes of a monitoring and evaluation report has proved to be detrimental to achieving any real development. Or do I mean empowerment and upward mobility?

After my automaton-like flailing (anthropology strings attached) amidst a group of economists versed the finer points of Keynes, I realise that within the framework of institutional analysis, what becomes significant is the agency of human behaviour and choice that economic theories limit as a set of axioms upon which predictions might be based. Much like policy yes? Wordy promises that fail in localised implementation initiatives. The development apparatus too is reluctantly learning from its mistakes and doing bold, hippie things like qualitative studies that are no less patronising in obtaining quotes on what it’s like to experience poverty from a ‘poor woman in India’ (calendar girl photo included). It is also looking at institutional analysis as a means of tailoring solutions to ground-level, social problems, by examining social institutions with an ethnographic astuteness that I promise you will herald significant positive changes towards achieving development goals like ending poverty and creating world peace (anthropologist’s bias, savvy?).

As far as reconciliation in Sri Lanka goes, a policy automaton is being ‘perfected’ (I suppose) in the hallowed halls of ministries with long names and shallow goals. The three-year mark since the end of the civil war in 2009 is creeping up on us and little progress has been made towards implementing anything tangible.

The LLRC was (should have been?) Sri Lanka’s institutional analysis; a document of ethnographic thoroughness that addresses the social minutiae through a broad-based consultation process that considers the deficiencies, hierarchies and limitations which are hindering the country’s progress towards reconciliation. Douglas North suggests that if an institution is made up of humanly devised regulations and enforcement, one must also consider the human limitations that factor into the creation and maintenance of these institutions, particularly the perpetuation of hierarchies and creation of ideologies by those in power. Within the more specific example of ethnicity (which I don’t believe requires too much explanation as a key agent in Sri Lanka’s social, economic and political landscape), Posner suggests that if ethnic politics serves the purpose of coalition building to gain greater advantages by virtue of a shared ethnicity, policy design will mirror these imbalances. Thereby, what can be questioned is whether a valid institutional analysis can be conducted from within an institution comprised of those positioned within the institution to serve a public mandate within for example, a democratic political system or a governmental one such as the LLRC?

A panel of old timers in talcum wigs failed or perhaps inadvertently (too optimistic?) brushed over this necessity, producing 400 odd pages of carefully selected (repetitive and sometimes contradictory) statements and legal gobbledygook. Thus we arrive at a familiar stalemate: the one-size-fits-all scheme square that attempts to fix a veritable Rubik’s cube of social problems pertaining to ethnicity, conflict, affirmative action and a return to square one policy capable of instrumenting social change. Yes that is two-dimensional ink on paper apologetically recommending more two-dimensional ink on paper legal and constitutional changes. What must be considered also is that institutions themselves are able to further inculcate the social divisions from within which they arise.

So, what now? Mandates, imbalances, validity and all? Invite the sticky-fingered West in for a ‘independent investigation’?

Civic responsibility comes to mind, but civil society and policy are equally bland in these parts. No collective action zing, until those marginalised by poor policy and a majority’s apathy return to a repetition of armed conflict. Fight for your rights, yes? ‘Che Guevara want you to rebel!‘ The sticker on a tuk-tuk I see every morning proclaims.

Upon realising this, we must question and challenge (covered under broad-based public consultation yes?) its limitations. Given the sheer number of people who are so clearly aware of/care about foreign intervention, should care enough to get some local awareness intervention going? Ha.

It is necessary that legal and constitutional fairness is in place, but implementation cannot succeed as shining idealization in an ink on paper promise.

It must be methodical, meticulous; examining social, political and economic bodies as ideologically founded and politically motivated institutions that function in their own right. It is necessary that the social “embeddedness” of these are thoroughly scrutinized and not reduced to a series of series of bureaucratic interactions of exchange, but as those subject to the tides of human prejudices, society and politics. The need lies in identifying the social divisions, issues of integration, not as our now proverbial free market independent from the social and political context. Reconciliation in Sri Lanka does not simply require state of the art policy perfection sparkling with idealist jargon and a mention of South Africa thrown in, but a thoroughly localised examination of the social and political realities upon which institutions are built. It requires analysing the powerful social divisions of ethnicity that draw on the potency of language, history, heritage and culture, how it features deeply and pervasively within the formal institutions of politics and governance. What must also be acknowledged is that Sri Lanka’s history has been mapped on what Posner (2005:2) identifies as the ‘formal rules, regulations and policies that structure social and political interactions’ and how these institutions in turn have shaped people’s identity choices, where ethnic politics can be viewed as a form of coalition–building for greater political and economic advantage. Policies and politics which led to ethnic groups acting in their own self-interest as they could only receive knowledge or human capital from members in their own group resulting in a phenomenon of ‘ethnic capital’, which subsequently leads to income differentials between groups.

Easterly  suggests that good institutions are founded to provide minorities with legal protection and ‘constrain the amount of damage one ethnic group could do to another’, but what of institutions that are inherently tilted? What we can hope for is a worthy effort as both state and civil society to fix the tilt. Where many a nation is plagued with the challenges of establishing sustainable democracies or combating ethnic inequalities, the least we can do is strive to genuinely understand what made us this way.

Readings:

Easterly, W. 2001. ‘Can Institutions Resolve Ethnic Conflict’ in Economic Development and Cultural Change, 49, 4.

Knight, J. 1992. Institutions and Social Conflict, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

North, D.C. 1995 ‘The New Institutional Economics and Third World Development’, in Harriss, Hunter, and Lewis (eds), The New Institutional Economics and Third World development. London and New York: Routledge.

Olson, M., 1971, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Ostrom, E., 1990, Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation: The Political Origins of Our Time, Boston MA: Beacon Press.

Posner, D. N. (2005). Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.