The Way of the Mirage

(January 27, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) "The LTTE will go to whatever lengths necessary to prolong the war and to make it costly, not just materially and financially but also in terms of civilian lives. That is the nature of the Tiger. The heinous attacks on civilian targets in the Moneragala district are only a foretaste on what awaits the country as the official Fourth Eelam War progresses."
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by Tisaranee Gunasekara

"You were going motionless…..until you were smothered in the quicksand".
Neruda (The Dream)

The regime has great expectations: a short, sharp war; a decisive victory; administrative decentralisation in devolutionary garb as a political solution to the ethnic problem; economic maladies abating with the reduction in defence expenditure. And all of this to happen before the year is out! It is natural for the Rajapakses to be infatuated with such a beguiling scenario. But their notion of a ‘fast food war’ cannot be taken seriously without suspending one’s critical faculties and succumbing to false and unrealistic optimism (as the dominant segments of American polity and society did at the onset of the Iraqi invasion).

The LTTE has suffered many defeats and set backs since the commencement of the Karuna rebellion, from the loss of the East to the killing of Col. Charles. But the official Fourth Eelam War will not be the cakewalk some expect it to be. The Tigers will fight hard, fight dirty and fight to the finish. This in no way means that the necessary attempt to defeat them should not be made. It merely means that attempt should be based on realistic assessments of the enemy’s strengths and capacities (for instance it may not be very sensible to commence major offensives believing that more than 132 Tigers were killed in the week of Jan 8-15 alone, as claimed by official sources).

The LTTE will go to whatever lengths necessary to prolong the war and to make it costly, not just materially and financially but also in terms of civilian lives. That is the nature of the Tiger. The heinous attacks on civilian targets in the Moneragala district are only a foretaste on what awaits the country as the official Fourth Eelam War progresses. Though the Tigers will face some international opprobrium as a result of such terrorist strikes, the potential gains can far outweigh such losses. If, for instance, the LTTE, by repeatedly targeting Sinhala civilians can ignite an anti-Tamil backlash in the South, that will be a near panacea for all its ills. Even if that grand design fails the LTTE could, with such strikes, bring the war to the entirety of Sri Lanka, and provoke the Lankan Forces to carry out revenge attacks against civilian Tamils – thereby creating the international environment needed for a Kosovo or East Timor outcome.

The Indian Factor

The international relations of a country should not be conducted in the manner of an inter-school debate. Legion are the arguments we can use against those countries which use the human rights cudgel against us. But what do we gain from winning such debates apart from an ephemeral glow of self-satisfaction? Such verbal confrontations will not persuade our critics to change their negative image of us; instead our reputation will worsen and the likelihood of punitive actions against us enhanced. Such a trend is already discernible; in the last one and half years we have won many debating points vis-à-vis the West; we also had to face aid curtailments and soft military sanctions, including from the US. If media reports are to be believed more punitive measures will be enacted by the West in the coming months; Japan too may follow suit. In such a context the limited backing that China, Russia and Pakistan can afford to give us plus the solidarity of the majority of the Third World will avail us little.

The President seems to be attempting to counter these negative international trends by coaxing India into our corner with flattering offers, a born again devotion to the 13th Amendment and a memorial to the IPKF. Unfortunately his tactic does not seem to be succeeding, if the recent joint remarks by the Indian and British Prime Ministers are anything to go by. Both leaders emphasised the need for a ‘credible devolution package’ within a ‘united Sri Lanka’ – a clear euphemism for a federal solution. Though Delhi may be happy with the IPKF memorial, that in itself would be too little to outweigh the President’s attempts to impose a watered down version of the 13th Amendment on the APRC. The JHU has already stated that it is opposed to the granting of police powers to the Provincial Councils as per the original 13th Amendment. The JVP too will find many provisions in the Amendment unpalatable. In any case the 13th Amendment has been qualitatively debased by the regime’s departure from two of the fundamentals of the Indo-Lanka Accord – the merger and the homeland concept. Given all these negatives, the version of the 13th Amendment offered by the administration is unlikely to be palatable to either the moderate Tamils or to Delhi.

Mr. Rajapakse has indicated that he would prefer India to play a more active role in Sri Lanka, an obvious tactical ploy to discourage Western involvement. India will not become directly involved in Sri Lanka again, so long as Vellupillai Pirapaharan is alive. If Mr. Pirapaharan dies of natural causes or is killed by enemy action, India will willingly go back to playing the role of the Big Brother, intervening directly, with the blessings of the West, to compel Colombo to offer a federal solution to the Tamil people. The US and the EU may impose the most stringent sanctions on Sri Lanka; but they will not militarily intervene in the Lankan conflict. The only country that can and will intervene militarily in Sri Lanka is India; that intervention will kill the unitary state and it can happen only in the absence of Mr. Pirapaharan. Contrary to the rosy expectations of many a Sinhala supremacist, the demise of the Tiger leader will not render greater devolution unnecessary; it will merely make an externally imposed federal solution inevitable.

The regime does not seem to be seriously interested in taking steps to improve Sri Lanka’s human rights record. In fact both the JVP and the JHU will decry any such attempt as kowtowing to the international community. In this context the Prime Minister’s recent statement that the Armed Forces have been given a free hand to defeat the Tigers would sound ominous to most Tamils, not just in Sri Lanka but also in Tamilnadu. Tamilnadu will be unhappy with any military offensive against the remaining strongholds of the LTTE. However if we are careful to minimise direct or collateral damages to Tamil civilians, Tamilnadu will not go beyond strongly worded resolutions and a couple of demonstrations. This is why the armed forces should not be given a free hand to prosecute the war. The politicians must intervene to ensure that the armed forces make a conscious effort to minimise the cost to civilians, irrespective of LTTE provocations. The Tigers would want as many civilian deaths as possible; if we oblige them, through carelessness or heedlessness, the West will impose sanctions and Delhi will be forced to follow suit in order to prevent the destabilisation of Tamilnadu.

The other factor which can ignite Tamilnadu opinion is an anti-Tamil backlash in the South. Psychologically the barriers to another Black July have been considerably dismantled. For the first time since the demise of Cyril Matthew, there are cabinet ministers openly voicing racist sentiments, Champika Ranawaka’s now infamous comments to Al Jazeera being a case in point. More disturbingly the President seems comfortable with the xenophobic outlook and outpourings of his allies. Majoritarian chauvinism is suddenly acceptable, even in official circles. This attitudinal change makes another ethnic riot possible, particularly if the Tigers continue to attack civilian targets in the South. And the Tigers will, because the dividends of igniting another Black July will be rich beyond avarice – even of a Vellupillai Pirapaharan.

Illusions and Realities

Is the government ready for a scenario which includes an unfinished war, international sanctions, economic crisis, popular distress and Southern unrest? This is a highly possible scenario unlike the regime’s impossible one of total victory in a few months. Has the regime a plan B, a plan dealing with what it is going to do if Vanni and Killinochchi do not fall at the expected lightening speed? An indicator of what awaits the Rajapakses at the hands of some of their own allies if the expected victory does not materialise is available in last Sunday’s edition of the unofficial JVP paper, Lanka. The JVP is an unreliable ally at the best of times. In fact it is already preparing the ground to ditch the regime if the expected quick victory is not forthcoming. The JVP’s plan seems to be to open a second front in the South on economic issues. The war in the North will become unsustainable if the South is destabilised by strikes and demonstrations

The best possible scenario for Sri Lanka would have been a genuine national government between the PA and the UNP with the inclusion of the more moderate elements of the JVP as well as the democratic minority parties. Such an alliance could have conducted the war against the Tigers in the North while coming up with a political solution to the ethnic problem by marginalising Southern extremists. But this scenario is impossible so long as the pro-Tiger Ranil Wickremesinghe remains the leader of the UNP. The President put paid to the possibility of effecting a change in the leadership of the UNP when he lured all the most likely alternatives to Mr. Wickremesinghe into the government. A moderate national coalition which is anti-Tiger and pro-devolution is thus impossible, barring a miracle.

A generous devolutionary formula with adequate legal safeguards against secession seems the most sensible solution to Sri Lanka’s plight. Irrespective of the outcome of the war, we will have to devolve more power to the minorities. The only question is whether we will share power willingly or wait until we are forced to do so by external players and factors. In any case, the LTTE came into being and thrives in a unitary Sri Lanka. A unitary state thus cannot prevent separatism from taking root in a country. On the other hand a quasi-federal/federal state may make a majority of the minority community content with the status quo, therefore disinclined to back separatism. There will always be those extremists who will yearn for a separate state; our task should be to create an environment which will marginalise these recalcitrant elements, to render them powerless in the community. But the extremists in the minority community cannot be made ineffective by pandering to the whims and fancies of the extremists in the majority community. A political solution that can satisfy Tamil and Sinhala extremists can never be; our task would be to seek a political solution that can satisfy the moderate elements of all communities. The LTTE is a bar to such a moderate solution as are the JVP and the JHU. Ranil Wickremesinghe failed because he wanted to find a solution agreeable to the LTTE; Mahinda Rajapakse will fail because he does not want a solution that is disagreeable to the JVP and the JHU.

A strategy that is based on unrealistic assumptions, wishful thinking and the backing of Sinhala supremacist elements, whose ideas and agendas are totally at variance with the actually existing nature of Sri Lanka and the world, is bound to fail. And its failure will crown appeasement as the only way out of the crisis. Sans a coalition of moderates the regime will remain dependent on the JVP and the JHU, compelled to adhere to their extremist agendas in order to survive. The war will not be the ‘fast food war’ of the regime’s imagination but a costly and a prolonged one. By the time the Rajapakses realise the dangers of the path they embarked on with so much verve and so little thought, they and the country would have reached the ultimate impasse, a politico-economic place reflective of that pithy Latin proverb: a precipice in front; wolves behind.

(Courtesy- Sunday Island)