In Defense of Dharma

Just-War Ideology in Buddhist Sri Lanka

Tessa J. Bartholomeusz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135788568
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

This is the first book to examine war and violence in Sri Lanka through the lens of cross-cultural studies on just-war tradition and theory. In a study that is textual, historical and anthropological, it is argued that the ongoing Sinhala-Tamil conflict is in actual practice often justified by a resort to religious stories that allow for war when Buddhism is in peril. Though Buddhism is commonly assumed to be a religion that never allows for war, this study suggests otherwise, thereby bringing Buddhism into the ethical dialogue on religion and war. Without a realistic consideration of just-war thinking in contemporary Sri Lanka, it will remain impossible to understand the power of religion there to create both peace and war.

1
NARRATIVE, ETHICS, AND WAR¹

Introduction: method and scope of the study

Can war ever be just? This question has been asked in cultures as diverse as the USA and Iraq, in the past as well as the present, and has been answered in a variety of ways. Not only has this question been asked in specific cultural contexts, eliciting manifold responses, it has also been asked by international bodies comprising representatives from nations that, in the post-World War II era, have pushed for international laws governing military conflict. As scholars have made plain, international law regarding war, which prevails in cultures with and without a historical legacy of Christianity, has its origin in Christian ideas about military conflict. That is to say, international law tends to look back to Christian arguments about valid reasons for war as well as what constitutes proper conduct in war.² Outside of Europe and the Americas, international laws about war have been assimilated (and sometimes rejected) by cultures that have different historical legacies and assumptions from the Christian West. For instance, although some Muslims spurn international law because of its connection to Christianity and thus to the West (which is perceived as an enemy of Islam), it is none the less the case that, in many Muslim cultures, international law and internal discourses on war “coexist as complementary systems.”³

A similar case can be made for Buddhist Sri Lanka. Despite the Buddhist heritage of Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), some Sri Lankans embrace international law, notwithstanding (or, perhaps, because of) its association with the Christian West. Indeed, it is not unusual to read essays in the local newspapers on the relationship between Sri Lankan and international law.⁴ As much was true a hundred years ago as it is today. For instance, in 1892 A. E. Buultjens, the Buddhist editor of a Ceylon Buddhist magazine, in a retrospective on Buddhism under the British, pointed out that “war, for the purpose of conquest and domination, has been defended in the rules of international jurisprudence, only when permanent good can be introduced where anarchy and tyranny heretofore prevailed.”⁵ Of course, Buultjens’ point was that no permanent good had issued from Ceylon’s domination by the British, and thus it was time for the latter to go. In making his point, Buultjens called his readers’ attention to what he perceived to be an international criterion for waging a legitimate war, that is, just cause. In the present context of Sri Lanka, where a civil war has been raging since 1983, and where bomb suppressers, along with other useful commodities, are advertised regularly in the local papers,⁶ international laws on war continue to coexist with local ideas about military conflict. To illustrate the former, when, in 1998, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lakshman Kadirgamar, delivered a speech at the commissioning parade of the Sri Lanka Military Academy, he alluded to international laws and the young cadets’ obligation to uphold them, especially in their war-torn country:

the armed forces have to make an effort … to observe the distinction – the difficult line – between combatants and non-combatants. We are fighting not merely to vanquish an enemy, we are fighting ultimately to build a lasting peace in our country.

In Minister Kadirgamar’s view, the goal of peace is a just cause for war, a war in which non-combatants must be protected, also a concern of international law.⁷ In short, as the Minister’s views suggest, international just-war criteria permeate contemporary political rhetoric in Sri Lanka.

In addition to underscoring the criteria of just cause and the protection of civilians, Minister Kadirgamar directly referred to international laws regulating war:

It is internationally agreed that modern conflicts should be governed by certain rules. While it is universally recognized that the armed forces of a state have a duty to protect and assert the sovereignty of the state, they also have a duty to protect the human rights of non-combatant civilians. The line between combatants and non-combatants is clearly drawn in international law.⁸

As we shall see later in this study, Minister Kadirgamar contextualized his discussion of international law within a discussion of Arjuna, the warrior hero of the Bhagavad Gita, a classical Hindu text,⁹ and not within Buddhism. Yet his speech suggests the degree to which religious stories (as well as international norms) shape discussions about war in contemporary Sri Lanka.

In addition to having a foundation in international law, contemporary thought on military conflict in Buddhist Sri Lanka is also based on ancient Buddhist ethical stories, the morals of which are debated, and have relevance, in the present. When Sri Lankan Buddhists ask questions about war, they reveal many cultural assumptions based on religion, as is the case cross-culturally; Buddhists (at least in Sri Lanka), like Muslims, then, have tested international laws against their own cultural assumptions, developing distinctive types of thinking on the question of whether or not war can be justified.

Indeed, my concern here is with just-war thinking in Buddhist Sri Lanka. I should imagine that it will attract two audiences: one, interested in just-war traditions, and the other, Sri Lanka specialists. But given that both audiences may be unfamiliar with the discussion that the other takes for granted, it may be useful to begin with a familiar line of thinking as it is expressed on a familiar turf – that is, the idea of “just war” in the USA.

In the spring of 1999, as US politicians, including President Clinton, debated NATO’s war with Yugoslavia over Kosovo, they appealed to well-embedded European cultural assumptions regarding war and peace. In the debates, some politicians assumed that the evils of war can be balanced by the peace that eventually will prevail, thereby adducing a criterion of Christian just-war tradition. In doing so, and indirectly with Christian apologetics (that can be traced to the writings of St Ambrose and St Augustine, fourth- and fifth-century Church fathers), they ratified NATO’s air campaigns against Slobodan Milosevic’s forces. Though scholars and Christian apologists (some of whom are also scholars) have not achieved consensus on the precise formula or number of just-war criteria, often the criteria are grouped in two categories: one governs the choice to go to war, jus ad bellum (St Augustine’s main concern); the other governs the prosecution of the war, jus in bello. While both categories loomed large in contemporary American political rhetoric about the crisis in Kosovo, two of the components normally categorized under jus ad bellum – namely just cause and proportionality – were particularly striking.

For instance, during the months that framed the Balkan crisis, reference to just cause and proportionality was overt: Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, argued on the television news program NBC’s Meet the Press that NATO had “just cause” to go to war against Milosevic’s regime, given the Serbian’s agenda of ethnic cleansing aimed at eradicating ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.¹⁰ He reiterated this claim during a Republican presidential debate in February 2000.¹¹ Directly referring to a feature of just-war thought – namely just cause, or the notion that there must be a very good reason to declare war – the senator defended NATO’s actions. Moreover, he spoke of the “humanitarian slaughter” that must accompany such a campaign, underscoring the inevitability of the loss of life of non-combatants in wars with just cause. In other words, McCain propounded an element of Christian just-war ideology, that is, proportionality, or the criterion that, in the end, and despite loss of life, more good than evil will have been done.¹²

Echoing Senator McCain in 1999, and illustrative of the political rhetoric in the months that spanned the Balkan conflict in 1999, MSNBC’s Equal Time program entitled its 2 April episode, “Is this a just war?” CNN’s Crossfire program followed a few days later with a debate between a US ethnic Albanian and a US Serb regarding the province of Kosovo and its religious and historical significance for those who contest it;¹³ of course, for the former, defense of Kosovo – of religious significance to ethnic Albanians – constituted just cause for war. President Clinton, too, in a newspaper editorial, framed NATO’s war against Milosevic with the rhetoric of just cause: Milosevic, after all, was guilty of “singling out whole peoples for destruction because of their ethnicity and faith.” Therefore, Americans had every reason to participate in, and even lead, NATO’s war, for religious freedom must be defended. Moreover, in his editorial, entitled “A just and necessary war,” Clinton wrote that “we had to act,” that NATO was left with no alternative but to engage in war: “When the violence in Kosovo began in early 1998, we exhausted every diplomatic avenue for a settlement.” Here, Clinton alludes to an important feature of the jus ad bellum: the idea of war as “last resort.”

Clinton, McCain, and the others, living in an era that has established public international laws governing war, formulated their ideas in relationship to those laws. As scholars of just war tell us, however, it is also the case that those laws, no matter how much they have been purged of features that may reflect their origin, are based on Christian thought about organized military conflict. In short, Christian just-war thinking, taken for granted in modern US politics and in international law, is a persuasive narrative for the defense of certain US values, not the least among them, religious freedom (in the USA and abroad).

Thus, in regard to the USA’s involvement in NATO’s war against Milosevic, we find that an understanding of the USA’s religiously rooted values is indispensable for comprehension of US political and military action. In fact, as Clinton’s written ideas on the Balkan crisis suggest, the idea and practice of justwar US style cannot be separated from the religious sphere, no matter how much US citizens may resist a conflation of the religious and the political. Arguing for a resort to war, in part to defend what are taken to be fundamental religious rights, President Clinton testifies to an American cultural assumption regarding war and its justification.

At the same time, it must be noted that, during the Balkan crisis, some US politicians argued that the war against Milosevic was not entirely just. Jesse Jackson, reverend and politician, who led a mission to Yugoslavia to free three US soldiers held captive there, advanced the idea that the bombing of Yugoslavia was not the proper course of action to impede Milosevic’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. Though during the Balkan crisis Jackson conceded that “there are morally just wars,”¹⁴ he also pleaded the case that diplomacy, and not bombing, had the best chance of achieving NATO’s stated goals. Given the number of civilians who had died during NATO’s bombing campaigns, i.e. “collateral damage (I detest that bloodless term!),”¹⁵ Jackson urged that we give peace a chance. Moreover, he pointed out that, inasmuch as Milosevic had been thoroughly demonized in the US press, it was easy for NATO’s forces to target him and his supporters for, after all, “we don’t negotiate with demons, we exorcise them.”¹⁶ As we shall see in the pages that follow, the process of demonization to which Jackson refers, an inevitable aspect of war, is an oft-repeated theme in contemporary Sri Lankan political and religious rhetoric about war and its justification.

Jackson challenged many Americans’ assumptions – that some organized conflicts are necessary and righteous, in this specific case, the USA’s involvement in NATO’s war against Milosevic – by appealing to the very religion that imbues contemporary US just-war thinking: Christianity.¹⁷ Thus, as the competing narratives regarding the justice of the conflict in Kosovo suggest, Americans debate the dominant framework for Christian thinking about war, testing it for its applicability in real situations.

Like contemporary Americans, whose views on war (whether for or against) are underwritten by a just-war tradition that is essentially and historically Christian, some Sri Lankans engage the narratives of Buddhism as they debate the war in Sri Lanka. And like US politicians who supported NATO recently in the Balkan crisis, Sinhala Sri Lankans test their justifications for war against counter-narratives in the very religion that ratifies their resort to war. In other words, some Sri Lankans propose that war can be justified if certain criteria are met, whereas others (re)present a narrative thread of Sri Lankan Buddhism that advances that one should never resort to violence. In short, in Sri Lanka, as in the USA, ideas about war are contested with moral theories, based on religion, that are assumed to be true. In the case of Sri Lanka, however, reflection upon religion and religious narratives to bolster moral theories about war is more directly articulated than in US just-war rhetoric. In other words, while their US counterparts reflect on the just-war criteria that, themselves, are inextricably tied to religion, Sri Lankan politicians and others, as we shall see in the pages that follow, cite religious narratives and stories as they grapple with the criteria that provide for justified war. In Sri Lanka, then, religious narratives are directly invoked, the sub-texts of which are offered as types of just-war thinking; in the USA, more often than not, religious narratives are indirectly invoked by way of direct reference to the justwar criteria.

The difference in orientation toward religion in the USA and Sri Lanka in regard to just-war thinking in part may be accounted for by competing notions of secularism. Although, as we have seen from our look at the debates about the Balkan crisis, the religious and political spheres in the USA can overlap, nevertheless Americans have historically resolved that the government must not interfere in matters relating to religion. In short, in response to their constitutional heritage, Americans have resisted an overt blending of religion and politics. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, as it has evolved as an independent nation-state since 1948, has produced a unique type of secularism, enshrined in its later constitutions, that privileges Buddhism while accommodating secular ideology. For instance, the most recent Sri Lankan constitution grants Buddhism “the foremost place”, and at the same time it protects all the religions of the island and guarantees freedom of religion.¹⁸ In this “Buddhist secularism,”¹⁹ specifically local concerns, based on religion, are wedded to ideas that link Sri Lanka’s present to its colonial past, which has its own secular heritage. To illustrate, by the middle of 1998, the government of Sri Lanka (elected in 1994 under the leadership of Chandrika Kumaratunga) had spent SLRs 1,485 million (rupees) “to foster, protect [the] Sasana,” that is, Buddhism.²⁰ This goes to illustrate that the neat binary categories, religious/political, that scholars have come to expect, must be called into question in the Sri Lankan context: the particular type of secularism that is proposed by the Sri Lankan constitution takes for granted that religion and politics are intertwined. Indeed, though Kumaratunga is assumed to be a secularist,²¹ she nonetheless has promised constitutional protection (in her proposed constitution) of a Supreme Advisory Council (Uttarithara Bauddha Upadeshaka Mandalaya), which comprises twenty Buddhist monks. (The monks, however, resigned in 1997 because, despite Kumaratunga’s patronage of Buddhism and of them, they consider her to be weak on “stopping anti-Buddhist activities in the country.”²²)

Here it is instructive to note that India, too, has developed a notion of secularism, “different from the Western one, in which the state, rather than excluding religion from politics, is exhorted to be evenhanded in its dealings with multiple coexisting religions that give direction to the lives of their adherents.”²³ As much is true of Sri Lanka, where, for instance, when the opposition party, the United National Party (UNP), met in 1998 to discuss strategies to contest the next election, the “Executive Committee decided to meet the religious heads and explain matters to them.” They went first to consult with the “Nayaka Theras,” that is, the chief Buddhist monks of the island; then they visited Christian clergy, followed by a meeting with the Hindu religious dignitaries. “M. H. Mohammed pointed out the question does not arise in relation to Islam because there is no Muslim ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Editors’ Preface
• Preface
• 1: Narrative, Ethics, and War
• 2: Just-War Thinking in Texts and Contexts
• 3: Dharma Yuddhaya and Dharma Warriors in Sri Lanka
• 4: Buddhism, Pacifism, War, and Ethical Orientations
• 5: Sri Lankan Buddhism and Just-War Thinking Revisited
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Primary Sources (and Translations)