WHIPLASH BY TAMILNAADU! WAKE-UP CALL BY GOI!!

India, Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu and the LTTE........by Rajan Philips

The situation in Sri Lanka calls for a more nuanced understanding of the different issues, parties and interests at play than the simplistic view of it as a straightforward military operation by a sovereign and democratic government to defeat and disarm an abominable terrorist organization. New Delhi’s expressions of concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and the neglect of the political process in Sri Lanka indicate such a realization on India’s part, and could lead to some desirable changes in Colombo.

Encouraged by its military success in the Eastern Province, the Sri Lankan government mobilized its resources for a swift military victory in the North. The government obviously calculated that all the other tasks - mitigating humanitarian impacts, resettling displaced people, installing an interim administration and eventually holding elections for a new Provincial Council in the North – could come later, just as it was done in the East. Given the LTTE’s intransigence and its singular contribution to breaking the ceasefire and restarting the war, the Sri Lankan government seemed to have sensed a convenient indifference, if not a tacit go ahead, on the part India and other concerned Western governments, to its all-out military offensive against the LTTE in the Wanni.

As deadlines for capturing Kilinochchi come and go, and despite the unprecedented military advantage it now claims to have secured over the LTTE, the government’s exclusive military plan has run into significant non-military difficulties. The biggest of them is the growing humanitarian crisis in the embattled northern districts. The rather facile, if not cynical, description of the war by the Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, Rohitha Bogollagama, as a "humanitarian operation to free our people from the fascist and dictatorial control of the LTTE terrorists", flies in the face of ground realities and political credibility. There are nearly half a million (according to relief agencies and British government sources) displaced people in the North. Over 200,000 of them are ‘repeat IDPs (Internally Displaced People)’, repeatedly displaced over two decades owing to intermittent fighting and the tsunami disaster of 2004. About 30,000 have been displaced ten times or more. Providing relief to the displaced in the war zone is already a difficult task, and it will become even more daunting with the onset of the northeast monsoons.

The government did itself no favour in ordering international relief agencies out of the conflict areas. The LTTE’s bungling bomb-dropping in Vavuniya (its seventh overall) apparently gave the government the excuse that it could not take responsibility for NGO staffers. Even though sent out of sight, international agencies and foreign governments have remained concerned, and as conditions kept worsening they waited for a cue from New Delhi.

The Tamil Nadu whiplash

If Delhi needed a straw to break its silence, it got a whiplash from Tamil Nadu. The humanitarian situation in Northern Sri Lanka, more than anything else, galvanized seldom seen solidarity spanning the entire Tamilian political spectrum to demand in unison action by New Delhi. It was not the usual pro-LTTE suspects who facilitated the mobilization – but the Tamil Nadu branch of the Communist Party of India. All the other major parties of Tamil Nadu – the ruling DMK, the ADMK and the Congress joined, with the ADMK carefully making it clear that its sympathies were with the "common people and not the LTTE." Chief Minister Karunanidhi was forced by the political groundswell of concern to break coalition protocol (DMK is also a member of the Congress-led ruling coalition at the centre) and publicly call on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to "intervene immediately and stop the genocide of Tamils in Sri Lanka." New Delhi could no longer sit on the fence.

After a few high-profile diplomatic exchanges, the Sri Lankan President telephoned the Indian Prime Minister on 18 October. According to the press statement issued by Delhi, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh "expressed his deep concern on the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the North of Sri Lanka, especially on the plight of the civilians caught in the hostilities … (and) emphasized that the safety and the security of these civilians must be safeguarded at all costs." The Prime Minister "further mentioned that the rights and welfare of the Tamil community of Sri Lanka should not get enmeshed in the ongoing hostilities against the LTTE … (and) reiterated that there was no military solution to the conflict and urged the President to start a political process for a peacefully negotiated political settlement within the framework of a united Sri Lanka."

Interestingly, the statement issued in Colombo spoke of the briefing given by President Mahinda Rajapakse to the Indian leader on "the current situation in the North, where the security forces are engaged in an operation to disarm the LTTE and restore democracy, peace and stability to the region." The Sri Lankan President also "reiterated that the security forces are under strict instructions to avoid causing any civilian casualties, during this operation." But the Colombo statement is silent on whatever the two leaders talked about the "political process for a peacefully negotiated political settlement."

Although not contradictory, the different emphases in the two statements are indicative of the dilemmas faced by the two governments. The Sri Lankan government is clearly determined not to give up the military advantage it now has over the LTTE by being pressured to declare a ceasefire by India or anyone else. For its part, India has not asked for a ceasefire, but only that the government of Sri Lanka must give the highest priority to addressing the humanitarian situation, and clearly differentiate between the military offensive against the LTTE and resolving the Tamil political question. It has urged Sri Lanka to restart the political process.

Extremist and ultra-nationalist forces

Some of us have been questioning the government’s sincerity and seriousness about a political solution from the time President Rajapakse rolled up and cast aside all the progress that had been achieved in the search for a political solution and necessary constitutional changes during the twelve-year tenure of his predecessor, President Chandrika Kumaratunga. The great achievement of that period was the sea change in the values and attitudes of Sri Lanka’s two main political parties – the UNP and the SLFP. After decades of marginalizing and alienating the minorities, the two parties acknowledged that the state of Sri Lanka was in dire need of being restructured to reflect and enable the equality of citizenship of all ethnic groups, and not just the Sinhalese.

One of the really worrisome developments of the last few months has been the tendency to rollback this attitudinal change and to revert to the chauvinistic language and the values of the 1950s. The popular Army Commander Lt. General Sarath Fonseka started the slide saying that the Sinhalese accounted for 75% of the population and the minorities should realize this and desist making undue demands. The Minister of the Environment, Champika Ranawaka, who belongs to the extremist Jathika Hela Urumaya group, went further and opined that "the Sinhalese are the only organic race of Sri Lanka. Other communities are all visitors to the country, whose arrival was never challenged out of the compassion of Buddhists … What is happening today is pure ingratitude on the part of these visitors."

The National Freedom Front, the breakaway JVP faction supporting the President, summed up that President Rajapakse has no mandate to seek a political solution and that military solution is the political solution. Even a usually progressive and minority-friendly activist and commentator like Victor Ivan patronizingly advised the Tamils, while defending "Mahinda’s anti-LTTE war", that the Tamils should welcome just the elimination of the LTTE even if nothing else changes politically and constitutionally after the war. While these reactionary views have been roundly condemned by quite a few Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim Sri Lankans, they did raise the menacing prospect of the government being totally hijacked by Sinhalese extremists and ultra-nationalists.


The hand of extremism and ultra-nationalism is also evident in the Eastern Province where the new Provincial Council is having more than teething problems. The new Council represents an irreversible modification to the original intent of the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement and the Thirteenth Amendment. From hereon, President Rajapakse and his government could lay the foundation for the multi-ethnic Eastern Province to become the microcosm of a new, plural and power sharing Sri Lanka by vigorously honouring the rest of the Thirteenth Amendment - in regard to language, land settlement, security, social and physical infrastructure and economic development. Or, they could simply and easily turn the East into a permanent reflection of Sri Lanka’s troubled past.

Indeed the East appears to being pushed back to the past rather than ushered into a new future. Eastern Province Tamils and Muslims are alarmed at the signs of ‘Sinhalisation’ of the new Provincial Council administration that is being set up. They also fear future changes in the ethnic composition of the Province through encouragement to new Sinhalese settlers. All three communities feel insecure amidst the continuing violent interactions between the security forces, the LTTE and the TMVP factions. New High-Security Zones are being established displacing people out of their homes and they will become permanent landmarks on the liberated lands of the ‘rising East’, just as they are in Jaffna already.

The performances of the former militant and the former LTTE Tamil groups and the government’s patronization of them are also hardly encouraging. These groups are yet to become a blessing and not a curse in disguise or otherwise. They have liberated themselves from the LTTE only in name but not in undemocratic spirit or method. They are too subservient to the government politically, while the government in return turns a blind eye to their rampant acts of kidnapping and killing of Tamils and Muslims that have been going on for two years and more. Rather than checking the activities of these groups, the state security forces add to the misery of the already traumatized Tamils who trek to Colombo by subjecting them to periodical security sweeps and mass registrations. This is hardly the way "to free our people from the fascist and dictatorial control of the LTTE terrorists", that Foreign Minister Bogollagama is claiming that the government is doing.


Political wake-up call

In sum, while the military plans of the government have run into non-military difficulties, the political process relating to the Tamil question has suffered a serious setback. A few steps forward militarily but many steps backward politically – is not an inapt description of Lanka’s predicament. Let us not bring the economic dimension into the picture.

New Delhi’s intercession was a much needed wake-up call to arrest this political recession. The early signs are that the hardliners in the government may be forced to go silent, making space for moderate views to have some influence on President Rajapakse and his government’s decisions. India’s non-insistence on a ceasefire but insistence on restarting the political process has found resonance among influential voices in the government circles and outside. In fact, Dayan Jayatilleke, Sri Lanka’s Ambassador in Geneva, K. Godage, retired diplomat and formerly Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in Delhi, and the ‘Sunday Island’ editorial of 19 October, all in different ways, have gone further than asking for a restart of the political process. They are urging the government to proceed with finalizing a political solution independent of the military operations against the LTTE and not wait till the military operations are over.

Much good work has been done in this regard by members of the Left Parties, Tissa Vitarana and D. E. W. Gunasekera, who are also Government Ministers. The two have been sidelined by the rush of military blood and visions of military glory within the government. India’s sober counseling should help bring back the two Ministers and other likeminded government members to the President’s inner circle in a fruitful and purposive way. Tissa Vitarana is also the Chairman of the beleaguered All Party Representatives Committee, the work of which has so far been used primarily as a diversion against criticisms of the government’s failure to work towards a political solution. It is time that the Committee is expanded to include all the political parties, and not just the government parties, and its work used as the basis for new policies and constitutional changes.

None of this will happen unless President Rajapakse puts his mind to it and commits himself to finalizing a political solution. The broad parameters and even the details of a political solution – some of them to painstaking degrees – have been identified through the hard work of the Experts Committee and the All Party Representatives Committee. President Rajapakse created these bodies and then chose to ignore their work and recommendations because they were unacceptable to the JVP and JHU, both extremist and occasional fellow travelers of the governing coalition. New Delhi should encourage the Sri Lankan President to ignore the extremists and work with the more rational and principled Ministers and advisers of his own government.

By raising its concerns the way it did, the Government of India has addressed for the time being the legitimate sympathies in Tamil Nadu for the physical and political plights of the Sri Lankan Tamils without confusing them with whatever emotional empathy there might be in Tamil Nadu for the LTTE. The significance of the stand taken on the Sri Lankan situation by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and other political leaders should not be dismissed as Tamil chauvinism and electoral opportunism, although there are strands of both in Tamil Nadu’s whiplash at Delhi. Instead, it would be more productive to see if Tamil Nadu’s concerns could be used to achieve something practical and beneficial for Sri Lanka in general and for Sri Lankan Tamils in particular.

The LTTE’s involvement although ideal is not a pre-requisite for the finalization of a political solution, just as the military defeat of the LTTE should not be a precondition to it. Implementing the solution in the Northern Province, on the other hand, will require some involvement of the LTTE, or elements of it, since the LTTE, according to General Fonseka himself, is likely to survive a conventional military defeat on the battlefield and return to its guerilla roots. For this reason, the possibility of using the intercession of Tamil Nadu leaders to involve the LTTE in implementing the political solution should be explored by New Delhi and Colombo.

courtesy: www island.lk