Published in Tehelka

Tehelka is one of India’s leading independent English language news magazines. It’s an award-winning publication now well-known for its top-quality reportage of politics and news in South Asia and for its daring ventures in investigative reporting. 

I have been an ardent admirer and reader for many years, and now I’ve been published in it for the first time.

My piece can be read online at Tehelka here.

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The Lankan Monks That Believe in Violence

IT IS a regular humid, traffic-jampacked weekday evening in Colombo on 12 April. At one of the busiest intersections in the city, a group of people gather. They light some candles and, slowly but surely, gentle voices begin to fill the air. They are reciting, if you listen closely, a combination of excerpts from the Subhasitajaya Sutta (where the Buddha teaches the importance of “well-spoken” words) and a line from the Sri Lankan national anthem that, roughly translated, means “We are all children of the same mother”. However, this quiet little vigil doesn’t last long. Soon a number of Buddhist monks, flanked by civilian supporters and policemen, emerge from the gigantic building on the opposite side of the road. They abuse, manhandle and harass the candle-lighters, demanding they end the vigil and disperse, and ask the police to arrest them, calling them “traitors”. The police take some demonstrators to the nearest police station. No formal arrests are made, but they are allowed to leave only after giving statements.

The aggressors were from the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) — an extremist Sinhala- Buddhist organisation that has been fuelling an anti-Muslim sentiment in Sri Lanka recently and is a neo-fascist hate-group of sorts led by some Buddhist monks. Self-proclaimed defenders of Buddhism in Sri Lanka and protectors of the majority Sinhala-Buddhist community, they are not unlike what the Shiv Sena is for Hindus in India.

Frighteningly, they have many supporters who believe their claim that Sri Lanka is under threat, naturally, from the minorities. While hundreds of people attend their rallies, they have also acquired a significant following online — their Facebook page has over 8,000 ‘likes’ and their brand-new Twitter account is gathering momentum. The BBS has gained renown for a unique brand of hate-speech, which twists ‘morality’ to suit their cause and instills in their supporters the kind of paranoia typical of racism, endowing them with a sense of moral righteousness. In short, the BBS claims that Muslims, Christians and certainly the Tamils have no real place in Sri Lanka, a “Sinhala-Buddhist nation”. They can live there if they want, but only as second-class citizens, under the rule of the ‘superior’ Sinhala-Buddhists.

The rise in religious extremism and a renewed vigour in anti-minority sentiments come four years after the Sri Lankan government defeated the separatist Liberation Tigers of the Tamil Eelam (LTTE), ostensibly ending nearly 30 years of civil war. Many Sri Lankans had hoped it would mean lasting peace and stability, but that was not to be. It is in the prevailing atmosphere of despair and frustration, amid flagrant corruption and the crippling cost of living, that fundamentalism has taken root. The general feeling of anger and anxiety has been channelled by hardliners into a campaign of hatred against ‘the other’. The Sri Lankan Muslim community has not provoked this attack in any way. Instead, it is the BBS’ cleverly timed propaganda that appeals to the Sinhala-Buddhist’s fears in a powerful way.

In fact, the trajectory of the BBS has been chillingly familiar, resonant of well-known fascist movements in history. First, they systematically demonise the minority community they wish to target. The BBS leads a campaign of vicious lies and rumours about the Muslims through their rallies, online forums and text messages. These statements are as absurd as they are untrue: there was once a text message in circulation saying that a particular brand of sanitary napkin in the local market, manufactured by a Muslim-owned company, was using a ‘poison’ that would render Sinhala-Buddhist women infertile. At their meetings, they rage about the rapid growth of the Muslim community, claiming they are ‘breeding’ to ‘overtake’ the Sinhalese, although the Sinhalese make up 74.9 percent of the nation’s population and the Buddhists, 65 percent — a majority of them Sinhalese. Muslims form only 9.7 percent of the population.

Second, they attack the target community’s religious beliefs, rituals and places of worship. In April 2012, a 2,000- strong mob led by monks raided a mosque in a town in central Sri Lanka during prayers. Just a month later, another mob attacked a mosque in a Colombo suburb, throwing rocks and rotten meat. About five such incidents have been reported over the last year, while organisations like the BBS have put immense pressure on certain mosques to shut down. In some cases, they were successful. More recently, the BBS managed to halt the Halal certification on animal-based products in Sri Lanka. This campaign was carried out unabated, publicly supported by government officials at the very top, particularly Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, who is also the brother of President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Third, they shut down businesses owned by members of the target community. On 28 March, there was an attack on a Muslim-owned apparel business, Fashion Bug. Later, video evidence showed the mob being led by a robed monk. Chillingly, the crowd, standing among the debris, cheers as the monk flings a rock and shatters one of the windowpanes of the building. Policemen stand around, seemingly there to protect the attackers from harm, not to stop the mindless attack. That perhaps is the final step, or something all fascists do quietly along the way: they get the powerful behind them.

How and why the government sees this as being in line with its own agenda is a mystery. A common belief among moderates is that for the government, it helps to have a ‘new enemy’. After the defeat of the LTTE and suppression of the Tamils in the north, perhaps targeting a new minority secures their place as the protector of the people.

THE BBS and its actions clearly violate the law; they should be condemned by those in power and stopped for engaging in and inciting communal violence. Instead, the Sri Lankan government has maintained a stoic silence. No condemnation, no legal action, no serious investigation. Large sections of the citizens, therefore, feel comfortable aligning themselves with the BBS and its ideology.

Moreover, the deeply ingrained culture of blind respect and reverence for Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka gives the BBS a shield of protection, a sense of invincibility. The support of the masses comes easily after that. Anyone who publicly criticises the monks or questions their agenda is branded a traitor to the nation. On their virtual forums and at their rallies, they discredit any critics, labelling them everything from “enemies of the state” to “bastards” to “sexual deviants”.

Not surprisingly then, the peaceful, moderate segments of Sri Lankan society have not been quick to organise resistance against the BBS. Where, then, can the resistance to this mindless campaign of hate come from?

The vigil organised on 12 April was the one of the first public civil actions against the BBS. It will not be the last time that critics are intimidated and forced to shut up, however. Yet, for a vigil attended by a relatively small group of people, the disproportionately aggressive response they were met with from the BBS and the police was telling.

The vigil was organised by a group calling itself ‘Buddhists Questioning Bodu Bala Sena’. They were clear that they did not want an “anti-BBS protest”, opting instead to carry out a peaceful demonstration where the non-violent philosophy of Buddhism was highlighted. Joined by others, including non- Buddhists, the group chanted verses about the Buddha’s teachings on “well-spoken words”, the antithesis to hate speech, and sang a few lines from the Sri Lankan national anthem about national unity. The agenda of the vigil was clearly non-political; rather, it attempted to show from a Buddhist perspective that the BBS could not call itself a Buddhist organisation as long as it engaged in hateful violence.

While solid political resistance may be necessary in the face of this new aggressor, the most effective kind of resistance may just need to come from within the Buddhist community itself.

Most progressive Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka shy away from the public eye; but this situation requires them to step forward to galvanise and lead both Buddhists and non-Buddhists to stand against the BBS and its false ideology. Intellectuals and scholars need to write and speak about the core values of Buddhism, thereby shattering the power of the BBS’s rhetoric. Sinhala-Buddhists need to do their part in ending this violence, which is being carried out in their name. Sri Lankans need to rally around a singular objective: we have a common enemy, but it’s not the minorities as we have been told.

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Drawing the Battle Lines

Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) and its supporters at a rally in Maharagama, Sri Lanka.
Photo courtesy of AFP.

Published originally on Groundviews and subsequently on Firstpost.

The growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Sri Lanka is pushing us to respond in numerous ways:  we are talking, flustered, hopeless and helpless, shouting in outrage (when no one will listen), holding our knees to chests, trying to pull ourselves inside, into some sense of comfort and safety, whispers of more war, more conflict on our lips. The annoyance has turned to fear; the irritating din of the crowd has turned to the cries of a mob. In a matter of months, we have grown from worried to scared; that mob have grown from an absurd joke into a very serious problem. Worst of all, it has pushed some of us to retreat into the empty shells of ourselves, hiding our heads, hoping it will just blow over.

Here, at the threshold of this calamity, we teeter on the edge, about to make our most grave mistakes all over again; it may not blow over before it has destroyed so much more than we are willing to sacrifice.

The Bodu Bala Sena and Sinhala Ravaya and other similar groups obviously have a clear agenda – we are done with the Tamils, so let’s make the Muslims our new enemy. This suits the agenda of our current regime, in fact they were just done with a civil war and wondering how to keep the masses further mesmerised, hypnotised – fear of a common enemy, naturally, is just the way they’d like to do it.

These are dangerous, violent hate-groups that seem more sinister with each passing day, as it becomes clear that they are willing to attack their ‘enemy’ in the most horrific of ways. They are prepared not just to physically hurt people, their homes and their properties, they are willing to engage in the most lowly kinds of attacks; humiliating people and ripping them of their dignity, attacking their beliefs, rituals and faith and inventing and spreading totally ludicrous lies to demonize them. It’s school-yard bully stuff, medieval stuff – totally unsophisticated, totally cruel, and yet totally effective in creating fear when you have the numbers on your side.  It’s made more dangerous by its very public association with the highest powers that be, who have condoned their actions and ideology by giving in to their petty, unreasonable demands and never once publicly condemned them.

So while most Sri Lankans are crushed beneath the weight of every-day life – the cost of living, corruption, lack of civil liberties and rights – our ‘great leaders’ are able to prey on our innermost frustrations, fears and insecurities, turning it into a hatred of ‘the other’ and thereby drumming up support for this dangerous campaign of hate.  They are fooling us; distracting us from the harsh realities of life in Sri Lanka; distracting us from a crumbling economy, a faulty and unsustainable faux-reconciliation process and the fact that they have categorically been accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Our responses to this violence are varied as they are fascinating. Don’t they remember July 1983, you ask.  They don’t care. Don’t they remember how marginalising and victimising an ethnic minority led to a civil war of nearly 30 years, you ask. They don’t care. Remember how we all suffered? you ask. Do you want another war? you ask. Maybe they do.

Most often, we avoid delving into the deeper issues; we try to avoid feeling the deeper things. We want to prevent another war. We want to prevent another catastrophe – but only so we don’t have to suffer on behalf of someone else. Let’s for a moment put aside the larger questions about racism and fascism. Let’s put aside everything we know about every civilian’s right to life, the right to protection from the state from discrimination. Let’s put aside the right every one of us has to pursue any religion we like and freely engage in the worship of any faith without the fear of persecution. Let’s instead consider how one could draw glaringly obvious parallels between this situation and other horrific moments in our own history as well as the histories of other nations and other peoples. Let’s at least consider the fact that this could affect every one of us personally if it goes unabated.

If it’s hard to muster up the courage and the determination to fight for the rights of another community just because you should in principle, let’s at least consider the fact that none of us will survive more ‘ethnic conflict’.

Prejudice has no logic; it is an irrational hatred born from an irrational fear of the unknown and we are all complicit in different ways. It’s moments like this that require every single one of us to step up and take some responsibility, to care. Think, talk, act, now. Do your bit, do whatever you can. Disassociate yourself completely and publicly from individuals/organizations that support these campaigns of hate; and when you do, tell them why. Talk back, debate, get angry with the people who think it’s OK; it’s never OK. Find out everything you can behind the ideas and agendas of these campaigns, keep yourself informed and always ensure the information you’re getting is accurate and unbiased. Share this information.

It may not seem like there’s a lot you can do, but it’s time to pick a side. This is not the time to be non-partisan, undecided or apolitical. There’s a lot that extremist bigots are willing to do that peaceful moderates are not, but conviction should not be where we come up short.

The battle lines are being drawn. The fundamentalists are always quick to do so. Where do you stand?

Buddhist Monks on Rampage in Sri Lanka

 

Photograph via Colombo Telegraph.

There is video evidence of a recent attack in Colombo, Sri Lanka where a Buddhist monk leads a mob in attacking a Muslim-owned establishment.

Hear that crowd cheer. This is the beautiful tropical island paradise we want to promote to tourists and spend our days waxing lyrical about? This is the suddenly booming economy we’re so proud of? This is the exemplary behaviour of a post-war country at ‘peace’? Get a grip. We’re living in a fucked up, corrupt, third world dictatorship that’s ruling over a largely racist, petty and backward society.

 

Remembering in Jaffna

Nallur Kovil, Jaffna (2013)

The only thing apart from a small makeshift shrine in this room is a cot; a good, old-fashioned baby’s cot made from sturdy wood. The cot is stuffed with photographs; mostly black and white photographs, presumably old photographs, in their frames. The cot is almost overflowing with these photographs, artefacts from the life and history of the family that once lived here. Eerily, a missing tile in the roof gives way to a beam of sunshine which pours directly on to this cot. Someone says, ‘Life imitating art’ and she is right. We’re all thinking something of that sort. It seems disarmingly like we are looking at a carefully constructed art installation; all the titles, the captions spring to mind, something about the terrible pain and loss caused by war. But this is no art installation; here it is. Old photographs stuffed into an old cot, left here in this abandoned home.

And this story, in varied versions, is one you encounter again and again. Though Jaffna town is seemingly bustling, as you drive through sweeping plains and lagoons large and small and into the quieter more rural areas of this Northern province, you start arriving at the homes which have been left behind. Many of the families which once occupied these homes now live in other countries. In some instances, they pay a caretaker to stay there. In some instances, other people live there, having discovered it in their moment of need. In some instances, the families have  come back to ‘settle matters’; these homes are relatively well-kept, sometimes with shiny new toilets – there is some idea that the family may return, even if just for a holiday. And in some instances, the sheer extremity of the moment of abandonment is clear; photographs still hang on the wall, everything remains more or less like it was left, just dustier.

You will also find that strange, unique thing of truly abandoned houses, allowed to fall into ruin, just structures with bullet-holes taken over by vegetation. This phenomena, visible all over Sri Lanka’s North and North East, is especially striking in Jaffna. It contests, so dramatically, the reality within which we all live: a universe in which property and land and houses mean something, are worth something. In our world, when you decide to leave a home, you ‘take care’ of it. You demolish it and sell the property. You sell the property with the house on it. You don’t just leave; leave the house, leave it for so long that it becomes nothing more than a skeleton, an outline, and eventually one with the natural landscape of the area. But this is a different kind of leaving: the kind that ensures you never come back, you never want to come back, that the coming back would be so difficult or impossible that nothing else matters more than getting away. I suppose that is war.

This is a place to which I had never been, not in my living memory. My mother says she brought me here to Rajini Thiranagama‘s funeral, in late 1989. I was just over a year old. I don’t remember it, of course. But that was the first and until now, last time I had physically been in Jaffna – this erstwhile Northern capital, hub of knowledge and Tamil culture, once, long ago, home to a centuries-long medieval Kingdom and its royalty, a place who’s story now is inextricably linked with that of Sri Lanka’s civil war.

Yet Jaffna, like all of Sri Lanka, is only privy to one kind of remembering: the kind that is thrust upon you in the form of the rare Army outpost or the bullet-rigged home. There is no room here for the kind of remembering in which we choose how and what is important to remember.

You’ll see Alfred Duraiyappah’s name in several places, on buildings and on plaques on buildings; but there will be nothing to tell you that he was assassinated by the LTTE in 1975, for his liberal politics and pacifist ideology; nothing to say that this man was one of the first in a long line of lives lost along the way. You can walk in and walk around the beautiful Jaffna Public Library, with its iconic white dome high in the sky, but there is nothing there to tell you that in 1981 it was destroyed completely in a fire lit by members of the Sri Lanka Police force and government-sponsored paramilitary groups. There is a town, a surprisingly underdeveloped town, but nothing there to tell you exactly why this is so; nothing to say that this town has changed hands several times over, from oppressor to oppressor to oppressor over the last 30 years. Nothing to say anything about the violence, the killing of innocent civilians, the disappearances, the displacement; a violence that was whole and absolute and complete, that destroyed everything from the tangible, temples and homes and offices and schools and hospitals, to the intangible, culture and hope and optimism and civility.

And yet, on the other hand, much of Sri Lanka is full of signs, visible signs, that it was once a part of a war; we have monuments to the dead of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces everywhere – rows upon rows of names at which families can lay flowers and civilians can give thanks for their bravery and sacrifice, we have monuments erected to celebrate the Sri Lankan Army’s victory over the LTTE.

Will this be our legacy, all that we have been forced to erase and all that we are forced to remember? Is this what we will leave behind; in the place of memorials, commemorations and monuments to civilians, even just a line, a moment to say, ‘This is what we lost, and we are sorry’, we have instead silences and voids and huge statues depicting military glory being erected in these voids.

A legacy of a certain kind of remembering, but not the other kind; where some of us get to mourn our losses and not others, some of us get to have our monuments and not others, where some of us get to move on, and not others.

You Still Don’t Really Get It, Do You? (My Women’s Day Post)

The famous image was used to promote feminism in the 1980s but was originally drawn to be used as WWII propaganda.

I watched an episode of Oprah Winfrey once about dolphin conservation; she said saving dolphins was important because dolphins had been known to rescue humans. It made me so angry, and was another brick in the wall of my long drawn-out hatred of the woman. I couldn’t understand how she didn’t see how blatantly wrong and ignorant she was being. How could she not get that dolphins needed to be saved simply because they had a right to exist, needed to exist? That we had to help save them because it was us, we, who decided to come along and start killing them?

I opened today’s Times of India to find their huge Women’s Day spread. Its focus is on women’s safety in India; in public transport, in the workplace, in the home. Has India lived up to the aspirations of its women, this article asks. Quite thoroughly, through surveys and opinion polls, it tries to find out how safe women feel in India, and what they suggest be implemented to increase their well-being and safety.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it irks me that India’s mainstream press thinks this is an appropriate investigation to make on Women’s Day. Is it that I’m so tired of ‘women’s safety’ monopolizing all conversation we have about women in our part of the world? I can’t help but feel like Times of India, just like almost everyone else, has totally missed the point. But this is the reality; we are not capable of simply celebrating women.

Immediately to the right of this spread is an article penned especially for the paper by John Kerry, US Secretary of State. In this he talks about courageous women across the world, and says,  ’…it is so vital that the United States continues to work with governments, organizations and individuals around the world to protect and advance the rights of women and girls. After all, just like in our own country, the world’s most pressing economic, social and political problems simply cannot be solved without the full participation of women.’

A few other articles in the paper point out why it’s important to protect women: because they daughters, mothers, wives. Yet some other celebrate women excelling in fields that are considered typically  ’male’, bravo, we are surprised.

Effectively, women are celebrated a) because they have been victimised for so long and we feel bad, or b) because they are mothers/wives/daughters, or c) because they are crucial to solving the world’s larger problems (no shit) or d) because we’ve just realized they are actually every bit as useful as men.

We turn our women into heroes after we have made victims of them; we celebrate them after we have beaten them down. We cannot ever just amaze at their complexity before they are forced to excel, marvel at their strength before they are forced to be courageous in the face of heinous violence. We cannot ever fight for their rights just because we will not accept a world in which they do not have every right they are entitled to; just because. We did not ever fight for their rights before a fight was needed.

And here we are, many of us believing the battle already won. How foolish to think that, now, when you look around on International Women’s Day 2013 and you see how many people really just don’t get it. Of course we’re talking of thousands of years, generations upon generations of patriarchal structures; economic, legal, national and international structures that simply don’t accept that women are human beings of the same descent as men. I suppose it takes longer than a few hundred years to erase the impact that those structures have had on our psyches and way of life.

So, to the new-age argument that Women’s Day, like Women’s Rights, may no longer be a necessity, I say think again. You’d be surprised at how few people, even in this day and age, actually get it.

One Billion Rising in Sri Lanka

One Billion Rising, 14 February, Colombo. Photo courtesy of Tehani Ariyaratne.

We are rising to end violence against women on Valentine’s Day, 2013.

Rising because we can; we must. Because we as a society are responsible for what happens to our women.
Because it’s important for our sons to know what we know, that they learn what we have learned.
Because on this day of ‘love’, we want to say we love our women; we will protect them; we will stand for them and by them.

Some of us are rising because not all of us can, yet. Because we live in hope that soon there will be a day when everyone will.
Because One Billion is not a small number; it is not a number the world can ignore.

We are rising because we can no longer stand by pretending we have no power.
We can no longer look the other way, unaffected until it happens to us.

We have the power because we make these societies. We live in them. We can change them.

We are rising because we refuse to be merely the victims.
Because there’s no way they can keep one billion of us down.

 

We Will Never Know Her Name

Thousands take to the streets in Delhi to demand justice.

Yesterday morning the young 23 year old woman who was raped and beaten in Delhi on December 16th, succumbed to her injuries, giving up the harrowing fight for her life in Singapore – far from her home, and removed, I presume, from many of her loved ones. While she was removed from her home, the circle of people who love and  know her, she was also removed from a larger entity, a larger community: her country. In that country, thousands are mourning. Her friends and other family still at home will be remembering her and beyond them, outside their doors, thousands of people she never knew have taken to the streets in the nation’s great capital Delhi. A fact that is impossible to ignore is that Delhi, and some other parts of North India, have frequently been the site of similar – though not always as horrendous –  acts of violence against women. This is not an isolated incident. Far from it.

The Indian media and members of both major national political parties have had a field day with adjectives, calling this crime everything from vomit-inducing to disgusting to heinous. In the last week, this anonymous woman has become the symbol of India’s fight against sexual violence. The Indian media and political groups are calling her ‘brave’ and claiming ‘her fight has become India’s fight’; the Indian President has called her a ‘true hero’. Placards of protesters say she is an inspiration to them all. This young woman has unwittingly been turned into a martyr.

But the price this cause demands, then, is far too high. If one has to pay with one’s life, who wants to be a hero? Who wants to be a martyr? Why does someone have to die for it to become a ‘fight’? All their assurances that she is inspirational and heroic are coming too late. India’s women are not heroes until they are victims.

This was never ‘her’ fight; it was, or should have been, always India’s fight, but India has blatantly ignored its responsibilities to this cause for too long. India was looking the other way; it was leaving its young women to fight it all alone. This is not the kind of fight we can engage in alone. This is a fight for nations, for governments, for the authorities, for societies at large. This is a fight for everyone out there raising sons or educating boys.

Once again, however, India is dodging the real problem, and therefore the real battle. In the aftermath of the recent Delhi rape-case, everyone from politicians to protesters are asking for new legislature and better law enforcement. While both these elements are crucial to a peaceful and just society, this one-dimensional demand shows a blatant disregard for the root-cause of the problem. India’s rape-problem is not just about weak law enforcement or legislation; it is chiefly about social attitude. We’ve seen and heard much to support this argument; just one example is the sting investigation carried out by Tehelka in April this year, in which they exposed the views and opinions of leading Delhi police officers on the matter of gender-based violence, such as sexual harassment and rape. The interviews were like echoes of each other: they all believed strongly that most often, women just ask for it. And they are not alone.

India’s real problem is that it doesn’t understand the problem. The people in charge don’t even understand what it’s about. They don’t understand that this level of rape and sexual violence stems from a deeply ingrained disrespect for women at all levels of society; that it stems from the fact that our communities were built for centuries on values that are intrinsically anti-female. They don’t understand that this problem is at the very fabric of our identities, our perception of who we are and our value-systems. They do not see that sexual violence is about violence itself; it cannot be done away with, by simply passing meaningless new bills that never get implemented, or tightening police protection in areas where incidents have taken place. They don’t understand that rape is not a female issue, but actually a male issue. They should be asking ‘Why do men rape?’ rather than ‘What can women do to be safe?’.

India deals with rape by shutting big cities down by 11 pm, forcing a lack of cultural life and further alienating India’s youth from those in power. India deals with rape by telling its girls to take precautions, be careful, don’t drink, don’t be alone with men, don’t be out late at night. India deals with rape by shouting ‘Hang the rapists’. Neither of these are the solutions to actual problem. The Delhi-case shows superbly, more than ever before, that rape has nothing to do with how careful or careless you are, or where you live, or who you’re with. And it shows – more clearly perhaps than ever before too – that rape will not end with punishment or the death penalty.

Many young people – both women and men – in India today are calling for the hanging of the criminals. I hope that India can move past this initial, instinctive reaction to reach a more evolved resolution that reflects truthfully our desire for justice, but also advocates peace. I hope all young Indians on the streets today, standing in the cold, saying what they feel, remember that the real fight for women’s rights is one that calls for the right to life, dignity and equality for all; that it would not be useful, or right, to pursue a primal blood-lust in the name of this nameless girl.

We will perhaps never know her name. For now, we can remember her, and in her memory, and the memory of so many others, ask for justice. For now we can ask for the perpetrators of this terrible crime to be arrested and tried. For now we can ask that the people in charge sit up and pay attention to the escalating issue of sexual violence in the region. For now. I hope in time, in her memory, and the memory of so many others around the world, we can ask for lasting peace and equality for all, and that our pleas, demands and requests will be heard and met.