SL: MILITARY VICTORY OR POLITICAL VICTORY!

Impending military victory, pending political questions
by Rajan Philips
This is supposed to be the year of victory over the Tigers. Prime Minister Wickramanayake even predicted that the Sri Lankan troops may be in Kilinochchi before Sabragamuwa and North Central Provinces go to polls on Saturday. Regardless of when the troops will reach Kilinochchi, most observers seem to agree that the LTTE is not going to hold out much longer in its Vanni stronghold. The natural question is what is going to happen after that. In fact, there is more than one question and a military victory may not answer any of them.

Will the government troops totally eradicate the LTTE? Can they achieve this goal even if they want to, for as General Sarath Fonseka has publicly stated the LTTE will remain as a guerrilla force even after a military defeat so long as Tamil nationalism is alive and kicking? What will the government do to deal with Tamil nationalism? Will it sincerely, honestly, flexibly and fully implement the Thirteenth Amendment? Anything less will not cut mustard as a political solution worth the name. Anything more will be asking for the moon from the present government.

Or, will the government, given its current war mindset, decide to leave things as they are? That would be fine by those who are seeking only private gain at the expense of public good. The government might avoid doing anything more with the unlucky Thirteenth Amendment, just as it is ignoring what should be a luckier (by Chinese numerals) Seventeenth Amendment? The war mindset, it needs to be said, is only the newest manifestation of the old communalism that used to consume almost all of the non-Left Sinhalese leaders in the past. In that mindset, whatever its manifestation, there is no room for accepting Tamils and Muslims as equal citizens. Thankfully, this view is rejected by many Sinhalese now, both Left and Right, within as well as outside the government. Tragically, however, the apex of power and decision making in this government is labouring under the old communal sway.

What of Tamil nationalism? Will it change course after what has been the LTTE experience, which appears to be turning into a debacle? Or, will it chart a different, unconventional fighting path? Many seem to think that Tamil nationalism cannot be snuffed out by military means alone, and that without a political solution it will re-emerge as a new avatar. The problem with Tamil nationalism is that for all its defensive and justificatory claims, it has not been able to achieve any of its declared goals. A new avatar will not fare any better unless the two so called nationalisms – Sinhalese and Tamil – redefine their relationship based on unifying premises and common objectives.

It will not be too uncharitable to call the two nationalisms as ersatz, or imitation, if not wannabe, nationalisms that have begotten each other and cannot be without each other. TULF leader Amirthalingam used to say that "it is majority communalism that begets minority communalism". It is so with its more sophisticated avatar called nationalism. Insofar as Sinhalese nationalism is sustained to the exclusion of the rights of Tamils, Muslims and Hill Country Tamils, the latter’s resentments will manifest in one form or another and will be a drag on all Sri Lankans. None will gain and everyone will lose.

This has been the story so far - to wit, the disfranchisement of the Hill Country Tamils, state-sponsored colonisation of the East, imposition of one official language, state take-over of denominational schools, standardization of university admissions, the burning of libraries and churches, murder in the Batticoloa Cathedral, kidnapping and killing of people for ransom etc. If the same story continues, nothing will change and the army’s anticipated victory would also be in vain.

The Question


All of this takes me back to my starting question: what will the government do politically after the anticipated military victory? Broad as it may seem, the question is very narrow and limited to our fundamental national problem involving the State and the different peoples of the island – the Sinhalese, the Tamils and the Muslims. The government has a full slate of other questions along with an empty slate of achievements on – the economy, inflation, the precarious situation of the garments industry, law and order taken over by thugs and rascals, corruption at the low, high and highest levels, pre-election violence in the peaceful South, open war on media workers and so on and so on. But on the main national problem, what is the government going to do? That is the question.

It is still not late, nor is too early, for President Mahinda Rajapaksa to come right out and make a statesmanlike statement as to what he plans to do on the National Problem after a military victory. A well placed member of Colombo’s chattering classes once told me that it would be too much to expect a statesmanlike position from this President. I am inclined to be more charitable. He has at least on two occasions in the recent past taken unstatesmanlike positions on the National Problem – first, when he directed the SLFP to agree that the District and not the Province should be the unit of devolution and, second, when he announced that he was constrained to act primarily on behalf of the section of the Sinhalese who voted for him. Just last week, he vowed to continue the military offensive until both Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu are captured, and warned against Sri Lanka becoming the West’s lap dog.

I am not hoping or praying for Rajapaksa to reverse these positions and show magnanimity in the expected victory. All I am saying is that he could reverse himself and, if he wants to leave a positively lasting impact on the country, he should. ‘Transformation’, if not Reformation, was what many of us thought would happen to the LTTE if we had persisted with the ceasefire and restarted the peace process. We should give the same latitude to this President and his government, even though signals emanating from within the government and pro-government circles are far from encouraging.

The reported formation of a Thirteenth Amendment group within the government to canvass for its full implementation only affirms the government’s lack of enthusiasm for the Amendment, or for finding a satisfactory political solution. I am not disparaging the sincerity and honesty of the Sinhalese politicians in this group, who are all good men, although the less said of the Tamil politicians involved in this the better. No group of Sinhalese good men and Tamil political toads will be necessary if the President comes out of his communal shell and declares that he will implement the Thirteenth Amendment in full - to the letter of the law and the spirit of the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement.

This will require some transformation on his part for in his nearly three years as President he has done everything to undermine not only the Thirteenth Amendment but also every other initiative that was attempted after 1994, many of them generated by his own Party. He even scuttled his own initiative, the long dead but yet to be cremated All Party Conference. But the clever man he is, President Rajapaksa has let others do the talking to impress everyone, especially New Delhi, that his government is fully committed to implementing the Thirteenth Amendment, albeit separately in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. So along with the question what the government is going to do, we may ask a more direct question: when will the President say what he and his government are going to do?

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