Human rights and minorities in the blog reported world

There was a good, straightforward update article up at Liberal Conspiracy the other day, from Conor Foley, an aid worker, and covering the now unreported misery of thousands of Tamils in Sri Lanka, in the aftermath of the total defeat of the LTTE at the hands of the Sri Lankan national army.

The article received a total of 10 comments (2 of them from me), as opposed to the 81 that Laurie’s literary criticism of Harry Potter received.

That, of course, is not surprising in itself.   People are more able to comment on issues they know at least something about, and not many people know much about Sri Lanka; indeed, I didn’t feel able to comment on a similarly informative post about the current strife in Western China.

But the disparity in comments does raise a couple of questions – firstly about how the developed world should react to problems in far away countries with no strategic/geo-political importance and little domestic concern about them, and secondly (following from the first question) how the blogsopheric community might be able better to engage with such distant and unknown issues in a responsive manner which is realistic about the limits of general knowledge but at the same time somewhat more ethical about responding to what is brought to its attention.

First, how to deal generally with an issue like we now have in Sri Lanka, given the reality, however sad. that it’s likely to be low down the priority list, below other more ‘relevant’ hot spots like Iran, Afghanistan, or even the Congo, where at least their is cobalt to be squabbled over as well as people being killed in vast numbers.

I think the first thing to do might be to start to group these ‘little, faraway’ difficulties with each other to start to make some sense of them – often not easy – with a view to some kind of approach benefiting from a sort of economy of scale not just in terms of resources, but also in terms of the capacity to attract and retain media and public attention.  This is already, unintentionally, the case in the Middle East, where events in Iran, for example, are seen in the context of the need for some kind of ‘Middle East’ solution.

So what can we group Sri Lanka with?

I think the best starting comparison may be the suffering of the  Bihari community in Bangladesh. This is the Urdu-speaking minority which was ‘found’ to have sided with Pakistan in the struggle for independence in 1971 (when East Pakistan became Bangladesh).

As in Sri Lanka, there was a clear and decisive victory (actually by the Indian army, which withdrew rapidly), and the  Bihari community was effectively at the mercy of the victors.  Nearly 40 years later, almost all of them live in isolation from the rest of the population in the shanty towns into which they were first forced (though at first sight, the areas don’t look too different from your average Bangladesh shanty town) and institutional discrimination against them in terms of employment, education etc has become so deeply embedded that hardly anyone outside really notices.

It seems to me, from afar, that exactly the same kind of thing could happen now in the north of Sri Lanka (though of course discrimination was a cause of the war in the first place), and that early intervention to persuade the Sri Lankan government (and resource it) that this is not the best way forward is needed.

I don’t know what the diplomatic answers are, though I do believe things like sporting sanctions can work (in Sri Lanka’s and Banglaesh’s case it would be cricket.   All I’m trying to set forth here is that that some kind of South Asian regional plan is needed to move things forward, so that Sri Lanka is not singled out for its record towards its subjugated minority, when pretty well all the rest of the countries in the region have similar issues e.g. . India with its ‘tribal’ communities around both Orissa and the far North East states and the horrific discrimination and brutality that goes on, Bangladesh with its Bihari (and Chittagong Hill tribes), and of course perhaps, more intractably, Burma with its murderous intentions and actions towards the Rohingya. 

With the exception of Burma all these countries are, after all, supposed to be democratic states operating under the rule of law and with a state that gets pretty well all the way into the vast reaches of the respective countries.  Surely, therefore, it’s not too much to expect that a co-ordinated approach to human rights development might have some effect, however that is managed (perhaps through the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation).

The next question is how, as a ‘blogospheric community’, we try to engage productively, beyond either ignoring or avoiding them, posts like Conor’s, who does not assume prior knowledge or make judgments about us for not knowing what he knows.

I don’t know the answer to this either, but I think some of it entails trusting, for example, Sunny as editor to bring forward reliable but innovative accounts not covered by the mainstream, and react on that basis in the way that is now common to the domestically-oriented blogosphere – promulgation/ethical plagiarism and, when critical blog interaction is reached, relevant internet-based action (on the odd occasion this brings forward non-internet action).

This is in fact what Harry’s Place seems to be quite well already, though with an exclusive focus on the Middle East and an infuriating tendency to see everything through the same prism of holier-than-though-liberalism-but-little-substantive-analysis-of-root-causes . I’d argue though that some of its causes are wrong and the writing often sanctimoniously muddle-headed, the process and the consequent appeal is one that can be adapted and built upon.  It’s about using the familiarity with each other that we develop within the blogosophere, where you learn whose writing you want to trust and pass on, pro-actively, seeking to make the links and analytic comparisons of the type I have briefly attempted above, and to start coming up with solutions that the wider press and then those with the institutional resources, whether they be NGOs or states, find hard not to engage with.