Brutal lessons not to be repeated

KOTA KINABALU — Well, dear readers, you should see this coming already after reading what I have written over the past few weeks. Indeed, after some reflection, I finally could not resist writing about this. In fact, it is just to borrow some experiences from other places around the world to prevent the same mistakes from being repeated in places where similar mistakes have not occurred — at least not on a comparable magnitude. A quarter of a century ago, when I was working for an international organization, I was sent on a mission to Sri Lanka, which was still in the midst of an essentially ethnic civil war. Later, after returning to Malaysia, I was also frequently sent by the educational institution I worked for to teach in Cambodia, which, though a neighboring country, had also suffered greatly due to man-made disasters. And, of course, earlier this month, I had the opportunity to attend a conference in Rwanda, a small central African country where an ethnic genocide occurred 30 years ago. Almost every time I went on such trips, I went with a degree of trepidation and left with a heavy heart because, to be honest, some of the factors that led to the tragedies in those places might not be absent in other countries either.

Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, is a place where, as soon as you land, the friendly locals who come to pick you up will almost certainly tell you enthusiastically how Singapore used Ceylon as a nation-building model when it sought independence. However, at that time, I had just flown from Singapore, which had already become an internationally advanced metropolis, to the war-torn capital of Colombo. The airport was surrounded by anti-aircraft guns, the roads leading to the city were in a state of disrepair, and in the city, almost every major intersection was fortified with military sandbags and mounted machine guns, as if they were preparing for a major battle. It was hard to imagine how this place could be compared to Singapore.