COULD THE LESSONS LEARNT HAVE BEEN FORSEEN?

BY Dr. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA

(September 01, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) Testimony by former senior officials at the Lessons Learnt panel has provided useful insights into what went wrong with policy perceptions, process and prescriptions during the CFA. Meanwhile the grapevine has it that the Royal Norwegian Government has called for tenders for academics and think tanks which can participate in its own ‘lessons learnt’ inquiry into what went wrong with its own efforts at a ‘peace process’ in Sri Lanka.

All this is necessary and useful. However, after thirty years of war, the crucial question remains, could any of the lessons now being learnt, actually have been predicted? Could any of this have been foreseen and avoided? Were there more accurate perceptions, assessments and analyses? Were other courses of action recommended?

Every Sri Lankan and Lankan-watching intellectual, policy commentator/analyst, ex-DPL ‘elder’, academic and Colombo-based diplomat should subject themselves to this test: what did they say at the time? How far wrong were they and why? Where and why did they get it wrong and how could that have happened?

The flip side of the coin also needs examination. Is it true that only a virulent strand of Sinhala nationalism got it right, or got it right first and got it mostly right? Is it correct that all contending strands of modernist-universalist provenance be they liberal, Marxist, or left-liberal, clung to the view that a military victory was impossible? Was this due to an intrinsic superiority of the ‘nativist’ or more politely, ‘indigenist’ perspective as distinct from a rational-modernist-universalist (‘Western/Westernised’) world view?

I shall reproduce extracts from two texts, the longer one from 1990, almost exactly twenty years ago, and the much shorter from 1993, and leave the reading public to exercise judgement and answer these questions.

The brief text is almost 18 years old, dates from the beginning of 1993, and is a gruelling five-page interview, almost an ideological interrogation, conducted by one of the best Tamil ultranationalist minds, DP Sivaram (alias ‘Taraki’). It appeared in The Northeastern Herald’s issue of January-February 1993, Volume 1, No 6, pp8-12. Readers will recall that the N.E. Herald is the publication that journalist and ex-detainee Tissainayagam was editing at the time of his arrest, having succeeded Sivaram in that post.

Particular attention is drawn to the question and answer about the possibility of a military victory over the LTTE. (The bold type is mine).

“Q. Which means it is possible for the Army in its current form to defeat the LTTE and restore the primacy of the democratic forces in Sri Lanka?

A. I think so. Of course, it will require enormous improvement in command and control, in strategy and tactics, in weapons systems and so on. But it can be done. It should and must be done.”

The interview was run by Sivaram with the caption ‘President Premadasa Should Be Little More of a Warmonger’ and is an abbreviation of the concluding remark by the interviewee: “Personally I would prefer President Premadasa to be a little more of a war-monger towards the LTTE than he has been so far!”

The 1990 text, i.e. dating from twenty years ago, deals with the question of understanding the Tigers and fashioning a strategy for negotiations. As is evident, the actual and potential disasters of the CFA and PTOMS respectively were clearly foreseeable and could have been designed in such a manner as to avoid disaster. The question is why did this not happen?

The 1990 text from which I share extracts was presented, with minor modifications, to two audiences, foreign and local. The first was at the Third Annual sessions of the Organization of Professionals Associations (OPA) dedicated to the theme ‘New Visions and New Initiatives for the Nineties’ held on October 4-6, 1990 at the BMICH in Colombo. The paper I quote from was classified under ‘Reducing Social Tensions’. The second, slightly longer version was presented days later at a seminar on Obstacles to Peace in Sri Lanka, organised by the Minority Rights Group, Swedish section, Sunnersta Herrgard, Uppsala, Sweden, October 7-10, 1990.

“I feel that the LTTE's current actions are quite consistent with their conduct over the years. Here. I am not referring to terrorism but rather to the fact that whenever there seemed to be a chance for a negotiated solution, the Tigers launched an attack so as to abort that possibility. You would recall that the attack on the 13 soldiers in July 1983 took place in a context in which President Jayewardene had finally invited the TULF to a roundtable discussion on Tamil grievances and terrorism. Prabakaran pre-empted it by the ambush...The Habarana massacre of 1987 and the Pettah bomb blast took place in early April just at the time that Mr. Athulathmudali, at the insistence of Dixit had announced a one week unilateral cessation of hostilities, restored telephone links and promised the lifting of the fuel embargo on Jaffna within weeks, if the ceasefire met with a positive response on the part of the Tigers. The LTTE reacted with the Habarana and Pettah attacks. These in turn provoked the aerial bombing of Jaffna, which the Tigers used to get international sympathy and Indian support. The Sri Lankan army followed the bombing with the Vadamaarachchi Operation. The rest is history.

My point then is that there is a certain pattern and consistency in the Tigers behaviour which we must discern and comprehend. Their conduct is not random, arbitrary, illogical. The pattern can be understood if we study their history just as Lord Buddha used to refer to the conduct of certain persons in their previous incarnations, so as to point out the consistent pattern.

What is the pattern?

(1) They fear a negotiated settlement through reforms because that will undercut their armed struggle and will be a substitute for their maximum goal. This is also the reason why the JVP opposed genuine negotiations.

(2) Therefore, they do everything possible to de-rail negotiations and force the 'closing off' of reformist options. They seek to polarize the situation so that armed struggle is the only option.

(3) They seek to discredit, undermine and annihilate all Tamil moderate political entities which would abandon the armed struggle and settle for less than Eelam.

(4) They try to provoke the Sinhala Armed Forces into massacring Tamil and Muslim civilians, the Sinhala people into starting ethnic riots and the Sinhala Government into calling off the search for a reform package. In this way, they polarize the situation and gain legitimacy or their form of struggle (violence) and for their goal (Eelam and nothing less).

...I believe that Prabakaran does not want any real reforms which will undercut his Eelam struggle. He did not and does not want the Tamil people and his cadres to get accustomed to a prolonged peace. Therefore he created incidents, situations of tension and finally precipitated the conflicts. The period before June 11th 1990 reminds me of two other phases that after the signing of the Accord in July '87 and the beginning of hostilities with the IPKF in October 1987 and earlier, the period before July '83.

...This does not mean that we must write off the negotiated settlement option. However we must bear in mind that the L TTE, like the JVP, is not a rational revolutionary guerrilla movement. Such liberation movements (e.g. Salvadoran FMLN, Zimbabwe's Zanu, the PLO) are usually amenable to negotiated solutions. The LTTE (like the JVP) is a fanatical movement which will not stop short of its maximum goaIs. The cyanide capsule is the best example of this, No other guerrilla/liberation movement has such a practice - except for certain individual agents on special missions. The Tigers are like the Japanese fascists in World War II the Kamikaze pilots. Therefore a negotiated settlement is that much more difficult. Even if one is arrived at, it is doubtful that they will adhere to it. Still, it is best to try...

...One of the few - very few - advantages the SLA have in this war, is experience. The SLA has fought a war with the Tigers before and some of us have also keenly observed the IPKF - LTTE war. If we derive the correct lessons from these, we can avoid certain errors, minimize our losses, shorten the war and also reduce the adverse political consequences that may flow from this conflict.”

Space constraints prevented the paragraphs below, which were in the Uppsala seminar paper (all papers were reprinted in LANKA, Uppsala University) being in the OPA’s printed digest.

“...I do not mean that the Government should negotiate insincerely as it did with Tamil groups including the TULF during the JRJ - Harry Jayewardene-Athulathmudali years. What I mean is that:

(i) The Government must not permit the LTTE to gain unilateral advantage through and during the talks and

(ii) That battlefield gains of the Government should not be bartered away at the negotiating table. This is what happened when the Accord was signed - though perhaps that was unavoidable then. This must not be repeated. A negotiated settlement must accurately reflect the battlefield situation, the prevailing correlation of forces. The Sri Lankan side must not be tricked or pressured into giving up at the negotiating table what it has won on the battleground.”

No prizes for guessing the interviewee of the ’93 Sivaram interview or the presenter at the ’90 symposia in Uppsala and Colombo. It was yours truly, this writer, (at the time in my early and mid 30s respectively). In 1990, I still entertained the possibility as an ‘outlier’ scenario, of a negotiated endgame with regional and international support, provided it was informed by the tough-minded Realist perspective I had set out. The early ’93 text shows that I was decidedly no longer of that view. What had changed? The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi proved that Prabhakaran was uninterested in and incapable of a negotiated final settlement, while the fall of the USSR and the shift to uni-polarity meant that Sri Lanka could no longer count on a balance in international institutions.

Is anyone listening to what I’ve been saying since the war was won? Read more...

AT LAST, A RUDIMENTARY ROADMAP?

by Dayan Jayatilleka

(August 29, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Lessons Learnt process is turning into quite an exercise in public pedagogy and performance, though it could be better. I rather liked Prof Rajiva Wijesinha’s ‘all round the wicket’ batting -- interspersed with episodes of whistle blowing (if one may mix one’s sporting metaphors) -- but then again I would, wouldn’t I? The mini-debate between LLRC chairman and former Attorney General CR de Silva and Ambassador Jayantha Dhanapala was rather a superfluity. Mr de Silva held that the Tamil people wanted equal status and equality of opportunity, not constitutional reform, while Mr Dhanapala seemed to demur, defending the need for an enlightened framework of basic law. They were both correct. Equality of citizenship and opportunity, while a guiding goal, needs Constitutional guarantee and expression, while any Constitution should be informed by the spirit of such equality while enshrining it as an explicit principle and aim.

The LLRC dropped the ball with Ambassador Dhanapala, failing to inquire into the post tsunami mechanism he negotiated with the LTTE. That exercise in ‘civilised diplomatic negotiation’ by an senior professional of great experience resulted in a mechanism that was so heavily laden in favour of the Tigers that it was hit by a ‘double whammy’: its main operational tier was frozen by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court and the United States refused to contribute a dollar in post tsunami assistance to it because US laws prevented funds being transferred to a terrorist-dominated structure such as the PTOMS was.

The PTOMS had a three tier structure. The apex body had three members; one from the legitimate government of Sri Lanka, one from the terrorist separatist LTTE and one from the Muslim community. In other words, the Sri Lankan state and the Tigers were placed on an equal footing: GG Ponnabalam’s ‘fifty-fifty’ with bells and whistles on, or rather, RPGs and Claymores. The story got worse. The key operational tier was the second tier, and there the LTTE had been conceded a larger number of representatives than the Government and the Muslims (5:3:2). The least objectionable third tier had representatives of the Govt, the LTTE and NGOs. The PTOMS was to be headquartered in Kilinochchi, the Tiger ‘capital’; the ‘heart of darkness’. This Tiger dominated structure was accorded the right to do ‘post tsunami rehabilitation work’ in the coastal areas hit by the tsunami, which mean it would have been utilised by the LTTE to rebuild its Sea Tiger network ( hit by the tsunami) and seed coastal areas under Sri Lankan military control, with clandestine Tiger cells.

Sri Lanka must thank the JVP and ex-Chief Justice Sarath Nanda Silva for saving us from the PTOMS and its consequences, though the final thanks go to the Lankan voters who opted for Mahinda Rajapakse over the Ranil-CBK combine.

Now for some good news: it was great relief to read an extensive statement by a senior Cabinet Minister of the Sri Lankan government which contained a lucid revaluation of the war and a clear, correct policy framework for the post war future. Unsurprisingly this came from Prof GL Pieris, and suitably enough, it was at a respected think tank (dating from the days of Mao and Zhou en Lai) in Beijing, strategically Sri Lanka’s most reliable friend over the long duration. Having listened to Prof Pieris address audiences from Colombo in 1990 through to Geneva during my stint, I am fairly sure he spoke ex tempore, being one of the few Sri Lankan speakers capable of doing so with easy success at any forum. The current Secretary General of SAARC, Dr Sheel Sharma, PhD in Advanced Physics, buoyed my morale when he admiringly observed this about our new Foreign Minister over lunch in Singapore after a talk/discussion at the Institute where I am based.

Prof Pieris accurately recreates the international and policy backdrop:

“...It is, therefore, worth pausing to reflect for a moment on how this became possible, because the gloomy prophesy that we heard all too often from the international community, was that it was simply not possible to prevail against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the battle field.

We were told, no doubt with good intentions, by countries which had a whole reservoir of military expertise, that terrorism could not be defeated militarily. The experience of Sri Lanka demonstrates the contrary, so the question is, how was it possible for a small country with very limited resources, with a small Army, Navy and Air Force to succeed, where other larger countries with far more substantial resources at their command, failed? What is the explanation of this remarkable phenomenon?”

He then makes a fundamental point which holds true for all imperial or expeditionary ventures at counter-terrorism. Neither counter-insurgency nor counter-terrorism can be successfully or sustainably exported.

“One of the most important lessons is that, if you are to succeed in an endeavour of this kind, the effort has to be made by the country itself. There is no way that you can call in the armies of another country.

However well meaning and well disposed that other country may be, it simply does not work on the ground because, directly you have the armies of another country fighting with a terrorist group within your own shores, what inevitably happens is that the population of your country tends to rally round, in support of the terrorist group against a foreign army that is seen as an invading force. Consequently, the first lesson is that, it is your own military that has to be entrusted with the responsibility of overcoming terrorism, of course with assistance from your friends.”

Having correctly cautioned that “the explanation of what occurred in Sri Lanka is multi-faceted. There is no single cause that you can attribute to what was accomplished in Sri Lanka” he rightly observes that “There were many components, many factors which contributed to this overall result. One was determined and resolute political leadership...”

Perhaps most relevant of all is his exposition of state policy for post war Sri Lanka, the first enunciation of its kind, doubly important because it was in Beijing, which gives the lie to the comforting insular myth that a political resolution is solely a concern of the West, Tamil Nadu and societies with a Tamil Diaspora (South Africa, Malaysia, Mauritius), and that the East, especially China, is immune from such interests and considerations. In the programmatic hub of his presentation, Prof Pieris says:

“...there is a lacuna which has been created by the physical elimination of the elected Tamil leadership.

The problem is, as you address substantive issues connected with the devolution of power or power sharing, whom do you engage with? Who are the legitimate interlocutors on the other side, especially at the grass-roots level?

President Rajapaksa does not believe for a one moment that a military victory, by itself, will provide us with a durable and lasting solution. I would say a military victory is a necessary condition, but it is by no means a sufficient condition.

There must be other requirements to be satisfied. In other words, a military solution has to be supplemented by political initiatives. That means that you must put in place arrangements for redistribution of power, empowerment of minority communities, all of which would require vigorous consultation with minority groups.

...we held free and fair elections which have enabled the Tamil community to elect representatives of their choice, to negotiate with the government in power.

... It is not possible mechanically to transplant into your own environment solutions which had worked well elsewhere, because no two situations are identical. You have to adapt successful solutions elsewhere, to suit the combination of circumstances in your own country. There is no size that fits everybody.

There is no universal prescription for problems of this kind...A particular solution that is suitable for your own country is determined by many factors such as one's own history and culture, the social and economic institutions in one's own country, the cultural mindset of people, their practices, customs, beliefs and value systems. The nuances of the local situation are of critical importance in determining the nature of the solution that is suited for one's own country.”

In the concluding part of his presentation, Prof Pieris demonstrates a sure grasp of ‘the key link’ (to dip into the lexicon of the Communist Party of China).

“In the post conflict stage, it is vital to move the country rapidly towards reunification and emphasis on a national identity. If you take South Asia, one of the basic policy dilemmas of South Asia is to answer a fundamental question. How do you reconcile ethnic and cultural pluralism with the concept of mature nationhood? This is a problem that not only Sri Lanka but every nation in South Asia has had to consider in earnest. To put it simply, what are the economic and social structures that you need to create in order to enable people speaking different languages, professing different religions, coming from different cultural backgrounds to feel at home, in one country, without any sense of exclusion? That is very important.”

This then, is at last, language the world can understand and relate to. It is precisely what the entire international community, including our staunch friend China, wants to hear. It is what our friends need to be reassured of, so that they can continue to support and defend us in all forums. It is what the world is waiting for us not just to say, but to do. The day we accomplish this task, the international siege will be no longer sustainable. This is the path that leads to sustainable peace. Read more...

Tamil politics and Tiger strategy in perspective

by Dayan Jayatilleka

(August 25, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) KP’s story continues to provide insights into the history of the LTTE, Tamil politics and the contemporary history of Sri Lanka. One disclosure stands out. "The then TULF leader A. Amirthalingham introduced me to Prabhakaran in mid 70s, most probably in 1976 and since then we worked together". (‘KP Speaks Out: An Interview with T.Selvarasa Pathmanathan alias KP’, Shamindra Ferdinando, The Island, Aug 5, 2010).

An exegetical attempt is subsequently made to downgrade its significance and render it ‘innocuous’. "KP was introduced to Prabhakaran – both 20 + years, by Amirthalingam when he was out of parliament (1970-77) and in with the grassroots as well as the violent upstarts." (‘Tamil politics post-LTTE: serious business or serial stories?’ Rajan Philips, Sunday Island, Aug 15, 2010).

Let us unpack the meaning of KP’s disclosure. The leader of the moderate secessionist Tamil party the TULF, Mr Amirthalingam, introduced KP to a young man known to be heading a terrorist organisation. For what purpose could he have done this? If he wanted to recruit KP he could have done so to the TULF or its youth/students wing. Instead he pretty much acted as a recruiter for a terrorist nucleus. There again, if Mr Amirthalingam wished to introduce KP to a militant leader, even one of an armed organisation, and especially the Tigers, he could have introduced him to Uma Maheswaran, chairman of the LTTE in 1976, and known to be an educated, politically minded man. Instead he chose to introduce KP precisely to the ‘pure terrorist’ or ‘pure militarist’, the shadowy youth, Prabhakaran who had already assassinated Alfred Duraiyappah. What is as remarkable is that he did this prior to July ’83, when it might have been understandable, if not exactly excusable. He also did this when General elections were scheduled for 1977, i.e. when chances of peaceful, democratic negotiated change or a peaceful platform for Tamil Eelam were still possible.

Mr Amirthalingam, who was a university friend of my father, a contributor to the Lanka Guardian, a compelling speaker in the English language (though not in the Sivasithamparam league) with whom I had only the most cordial encounters, was killed by gunmen sent by the very man he chose to introduce KP to: Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Moderates are known to consort with extremists, and radicals known to ally with the state, but not without a dramatic marker event which throws them together, as the Accord of 1987 brought together the SLFP and JVP, just as it did the UNP governed State and the SLMP (as well as groups such as the one I belonged to). By 1976 there were plenty of reasons ( such as the IATR tragedy of 1974) to provoke restive youth to take up the gun, but insufficient cause for a n avowedly moderate, responsible , parliamentary nationalist to have passed on contacts to a terrorist group. Sadly Mr Amirthalingam is depicted here as having done so prior to such a seismic shock (1979, 1981, Black July ’83) and with a General election a distinct probability. No moderate behaves that way, and one who does so can be classified as a moderate.

This brings us to Prof Urmila Phadnis’ observation that a distinct feature of Sri Lankan Tamil (sub) nationalism, in contrast to sub-nationalisms in India, is the "autonomist-secessionist continuum". The question arises as to whether mainline Tamil nationalism, even of the parliamentary variety, could be defined as moderate in it aims and affiliations, by any international standard.

Does this mean that there are no Tamil moderates, and/or that there are no moderate Tamil negotiating partners as the Sinhala extremists claim? I disagree. The Tamil moderates do exist, and they are those who have passed the existential test with flying colours, dissenting from and resisting the LTTE, albeit at various times. These are the EPDP, PLOT, EPRLF (Nabha wing), TMVP and personalities like Anandasanagree and SC Chandrahasan, currently grouped within the Tamil Political Parties Forum (though that forum does have former fellow travellers of the Tigers bringing up the rear). This is not to say that the TNA should not be seriously negotiated with. It must be, as it contains the bulk of the elected representatives of the Tamil people of the North and East. However, insofar as it hasn’t recanted on its support of the Tigers nor undertaken a criticism of the LTTE, the TNA cannot yet be strictly classified as a wholly moderate party by comparative international standards.

The third part of DBS Jeyaraj’s exciting interview with KP deals with Prabhakaran’s last days. KP makes much of the valour of the last ditch stand of Prabhakaran and his fellow Tigers but that begs two questions: why didn’t he bite on his famous cyanide capsule, and more basically, what does the fact that he was (out) manoeuvred into and trapped in that ‘killing box’ say about Prabhakaran as a commander and strategist?

The point is all the more valid when set against a recent publication; a large volume of 896 pages by Fidel Castro entitled The Strategic Victory. Being the first volume of his autobiography he deals with the decisive turning point of the Cuban revolutionary war, when a ten thousand strong force of US trained (for possible deployment in the Korean War) and equipped army of dictator Fulgencio Batista, supported by air force planes firing US supplied rockets, surrounded a mere three hundred strong force of equipped" guerrilla fighters led by Fidel and his fellow commanders Che Guevara, Raul Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos. Fidel’s guerrillas had already suffered a huge setback when the General strike of1957, led by their urban network the July 26th Movement, failed. The state decided to capitalise on this failure and press home the advantage, launching a decisive operation to surround and crush the Cuban revolutionaries. That was in 1958. By New Year’s Eve that very year, the Cuban army was in disarray and dictator Batista fled the country. Such was the magnitude of the turnaround in strategic fortunes that Fidel and his 300 guerrillas were able to effect.



True, a far great number of Sri Lankan soldiers besieged Prabhakaran, but the ability to raise that number was also a success of the political and military leadership on the Sri Lankan side. Far more significantly, Prabhakaran had a force under his command that was superior to Fidel’s 300 by a multiple of a hundred — not to mention a sea and air arm! Again, true, the Cuban revolutionaries had the advantage of a mountainous terrain, the Sierra Maestra, but Prabhakaran was supposed to be undefeatable in the Mullaitivu jungles with its impenetrable natural canopy. This was attested to in print by many an IPKF officer, including commanding General Kalkat who, even towards the end of the war was rather doubtful of the Sri Lankan army’s capacity to beat Prabhakaran in that terrain. The Tigers had another advantage that Fidel did not: he was fighting on his home turf.

It was reported that just before the last war, Prabhakaran made his fighters watch a movie called ‘300’, which was of course the movie version of an illustrated novella of one of the most famous battles ever, recorded by Herodotus in his Histories. That was the battle of Thermopylae in which 300 Spartans led by King Leonidas held off a Persian invading force of several hundred thousand before being betrayed and succumbing, but not before buying enough time for the Greek federation to rally and defeat the Persians decisively. Prabhakaran, with a starting force that was far greater, proved that he was no Leonidas, while Fidel in 1958, with a force of 300, proved that he was greater than Leonidas because he not only held off the vastly superior army that invaded his redoubt, but smashed the offensive, achieving a ‘strategic victory’ as he entitles his reminiscences of it, and going onto to win the war within a year.

The contrast between the Prabhakaran outcome and Fidel outcome proves not only the superiority of the Sri Lankan military’s strategy, tactics and performance, but also the qualitative superiority, almost to the point of incomparability, between the strategic leadership of Fidel Castro (and the Fidel-Raul-Che-Camilo combine) on the one hand, Velupillai Prabhakaran a.k.a the Sun God, on the other.

If I may anticipate readers who would think, not without reason, that this an unfair comparison (and at one level, comparing Prabhakaran with Fidel is like comparing a Hobbit with an Olympean) let me say that Prabhakaran and the Tigers compare badly in the realm of asymmetric warfare, with contemporaries such as the Eritrean EPLF (which prevailed in its aim), the Nepali Maoists (who combined guerrilla war, negotiations and electoral politics to emerge the top contenders for state power) and Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which caused the Israeli army to pull out of Southern Lebanon and then in 2006, fought it to a standstill.

Prabhakaran led a movement which was the world’s top terrorist organisation but not the world’s best guerrilla formation. He was terrorist maestro but not a master strategist of guerrilla and insurrectionary warfare, still less a virtuoso of warfare in general, unlike Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, Giap, and (Sandinista chief and now Nicaraguan President) Daniel Ortega.

If Prabhakaran had been a first class strategist he would have done as Mao did when after a decade, he abandoned the ‘Red base’ in Yenan in 1945, and made the timely shift (back) to mobile and guerrilla warfare. By 1949 Mao was in power. Prabhakaran failed to realise that the civilian populace he held onto as a human shield, with which he sought to deter Sri Lankan attacks and secure a ceasefire plus international intervention, had in fact become a liability which was slowing him down. He should have let the civilians go and dismantled his force early enough, into mobile guerrilla columns, and dispersed. The Tigers and their supporters (including the much vaunted and possibly imaginary ‘brains trust’ in the Diaspora) just weren’t brainy enough for that and were outsmarted by the Sri Lankan state, its armed forces and its friends.

As for those readers who may query as to why it then took the Sri Lankan military thirty years to defeat the LTTE, the answer is that it was about to or well might have, a decade into the war, in 1987, when it was brusquely interrupted by an ‘external shock’. Read more...

Identity, integration and lessons learnt

by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

(August 18, Singapore City,Sri Lanka Guardian) History tells us that ports are not only a driver of rapid development but a multiplier of modernization, and the Deep South, which after centuries of neglect has generated and benefited from a provincial power shift, will never be marginalised again. The quiet pride, hope and gratitude that most Sri Lankan citizens feel with regard to the Hambantota port and our long standing friend China, must be set alongside another lesson about our friends that we could learn from another recent development which has not drawn anything like the attention it merits.

If anyone should be called upon to testify before the Lessons Learnt panel, it is surely Mr Pathmanathan, better known as KP, who in an interview given to DBS Jeyaraj makes disclosures —or allegations— which are truly shocking. He says that several Western states stood ready to evacuate the top leadership of the LTTE, including Velupillai Prabhakaran, to safety in a third country. This is what he has said, on the record:

"I was in touch with international political leaders, top bureaucrats, diplomats, opinion-makers of different countries and also high –ranking UN officials. I contacted some of them directly. Influential people contacted some others on my behalf. In March 2009 I thought I had made a breakthrough but sadly Prabhakaran rejected the proposal.

I had a tentative plan with international endorsement. The LTTE was to lay down arms by hoarding them in specific locations. The words used were "lock –off". That is arms particularly heavy weapons were to be locked off in specific places. They were to be handed over to representatives of the UN. Afterwards there was to be a cessation of hostilities in which the people were to be kept in specific "no firing zones". Negotiations were to be conducted between the Govt. and LTTE with Norwegian facilitation.

Tentatively about 25 to 50 top leaders with their families were to be transported to a foreign country if necessary. The middle level leaders and cadres were to be detained, charged in courts and given relatively minor sentences. The low-level junior cadres were to be given a general amnesty. The scheme was endorsed by the West including Norway, EU and the USA. The Americans were ready to send their naval fleet in to do evacuation if necessary.

I don’t think there was any official intimation to Colombo but maybe they were sounded out informally. But the plan was never concretized because the main man concerned, Prabhakaran rejected it. I had written an outline of the plan and sent it to him for approval. If he said "Proceed" I would have concretized it and started work on implementing it. But when I faxed the details in a 16-page memorandum he rejected the 16 pages in just three words ‘Ithai Etrukkolla Mudiyathu’- ‘This is unacceptable’." (KP Speaks Out -2, DBS Jeyaraj Column, Daily Mirror Saturday, August 14, 2010)



If his disclosures/allegations were true (and if they weren’t I would have expected a contradiction) not only was KP, at the time a representative of a proscribed and notorious terrorist organisation, in touch with highly placed sources in the UN system and the West, but Prabhakaran, the man who stood accused of responsibility for the murder of a former Prime Minister of India, a Sri Lankan President, Foreign Minister, and Opposition Leader, was a candidate for evacuation by US forces. From their safe exile the top leadership of the LTTE would have re-kindled the dreadful war that ate at the entrails of Sri Lankan society. All Sri Lankans must surely digest the implications.

A cautionary note, though. Nothing that others can do to us can be quite as damaging as the gross strategic mistakes we ourselves make and the correct turning that we ourselves fail to make. The doctrine that ‘by oneself is one defiled’ and the injunction to ‘turn the searchlight inwards’ holds true for countries, nations and societies too.

Just last week, ISAS, the institute at which I am currently based, was a third leg of a tripod that hosted an especially interesting event on South Asia’s future at the National Library of Singapore. The catalyst was the Boston University’s Pardee Centre for Long Range Studies which tied up with the Singapore Institute of International Affairs (SIIA) and the Institute for South Asian Studies (ISAS) to discuss ‘South Asia in 2060’. The seminar was chaired by Prof Simon Tay, head of the SIIA, which describes itself as ‘think tank for a thinking society’, and author of Asia Alone: the Dangerous Post Crisis Divide From America.(I was glad to gather that Nihal Rodrigo and Dr Rohan Samarajiwa were contributors to the Pardee Center’s study).

Of the four factors that were identified as the key determinants of the future of each South Asian society and South Asia as a whole, the first and the last were: identity. As the Director of the Center of Long Range Studies from Boston, himself an Asian, said, the repetition of the term identity was neither mistake nor witticism. The first reference to identity was the current problems of identity of each society and the final reference to identity was how these would evolve and consequently how, as sum total, the identity of South Asia would evolve over the next fifty years.

The panellists were senior scholars or scholar-diplomats heading various institutions of advanced studies. Each South Asian state was treated in turn and their references to Sri Lanka were lucid and significant. The consensus was that "having overcome the challenge of terrorism, Sri Lanka had the potential to effect the fastest turn around in South Asia and catch up with the economic renaissance of the rest of Asia on condition that the Tamil minority was successfully integrated and a broadly inclusive identity was finally forged, as it had not been since Independence".

Thus, these top-notch analysts, none of them biased Westerners, clearly identified "the successful integration of the Tamil minority" as the most decisive single task facing post-war Sri Lanka, and the one which would ultimately determine whether or not there would be sustainable economic prosperity and social development, as distinct from temporary episodes of economic growth.

To my mind, this requires generosity on the part of the Sinhalese and pragmatism on the part of the Tamils, or if one may reduce it to single requirement, enlightened self-interest on the part of both communities and their leaderships.

No area of policy requires more careful thinking through than that of the state in the former high conflict areas of the North and East. These policies have their effect along two axes. The first is that of the integration of the Tamil minority and the overall project of nation-building. Nowhere is this more fraught than in a region where the populace is predominantly of a different, aggrieved ethnicity and/or religion than those of the makers and implementers of policy. Alienation can lead to resentment and resentment to resistance. Even if resistance does not lead to revolt and rebellion by a future generation, a sullen alienation will hang like a dark cloud over the picture of post-war Sri Lanka that the world sees.

Since our giant neighbour contains 70 million Tamils who consider themselves as having a relationship with the Tamils of Northern Sri Lanka (the proceedings, patronage and optics of the International Association of Tamil Research conference in Chennai this year should have put paid to any doubts on that score), our relationship with our Tamil citizens cannot but impact on our relationship with our giant neighbour.

Given the entrenched presence of the Tamil Diaspora in Western societies and the animus it has towards Sri Lanka and the Sinhalese, the proposition that Sri Lanka’s primary strategic relationship must be with the West looks untenable. Colombo must brace itself for continuing pressure from that quarter while striving to communicate better with those states and societies. The worst case scenario is not pressure from the West and the institutions it dominates, but pressure from the West and an absence of integration with the East.

Sri Lanka has to find its place as a liked and respected member of the Asian family and derive protection from that place. Increasingly critical scrutiny from the Global North is a problem but not the most serious one; intrusive scrutiny from the North combined with discomfiture, detachment and distancing on the part of the Global South, is a far worse prospect. Read more...

WORLD COURT ON KOSOVO: LESSONS FOR LANKA

by Dr.Dayan Jayatilleka

(August 01, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) Students residing and schooling in Colombo had the bar to university entrance set higher in the mid 1970s, what with district and media wise standardisation the order of the day. For Arts students the Mt Olympus was the Faculty of Law, and those few who had done well enough were informed that they had qualified /been selected for the Law Fac. Getting their kids in over the high bar of standardisation was a dream for parents in Colombo. That year my name was on top of the list of Arts students eligible for the Law Faculty but as Prof Kamal Karunanayake, then registrar of the UGC would testify, I opted instead – over considerable parental pressure-- for Political Science at Peradeniya. The reason was a simple realisation that ‘law’ and ‘justice’ were two quite different things; that law was weighted in favour of the existing power structure and that politics, by contrast, would not veil reality so much as provide a key to the comprehension of the decision making core, which affected everything else including the law.


The recent verdict of the International Court of Justice on the declaration of independence of Kosovo, validated in my mind, that teenage realisation. The Court held, in a non-binding and non-unanimous judgement, that the declaration of independence was not contrary to international law. Kosovo independence was the product of NATO bombing of Serbian forces and a subsequent period of peace, under UN auspices. Bernard Kouchner was the UN High Commissioner for Kosovo- a point which I made in an article written while in Australia, when he was nominated by the EU to the Independent International Group of Eminent Persons (IIGEP). That nomination, as well as the fact that the EU had a draft resolution on Sri Lanka on the table in Geneva already in 2006 (a year before I got there and three years before the ‘last phase of the war’) told me clearly, who had what in store for our country.

The so –called peace agreement that was entered into by the West and Serbia, explicitly recognised Kosovo as part of Serbia. How then did Kosovo become independent? It was ‘shepherded’ towards independence by the powers, personalities and institutions on the ground in Kosovo. This is what would have taken place if the CFA or the ISGA or the PTOMS had remained in place. This is what would have happened had we heeded the call for ‘humanitarian international intervention’ at any stage of the war.

In the period that Kosovo was under international i.e. Western supervision and reconstruction, all under the peace agreement that recognised the sovereignty of Serbia over it, something happened. A new initiative was launched to provide a breakout from that agreement and constitute an exit ramp which would make for open secession of Kosovo. This was the plan authored by former President of Finland Martti Ahtisaari. That is the same gentleman who was brought in under President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s second (and mercifully final) term for the purpose of playing a role in Sri Lanka’s peace process, by CBK’s ‘senior advisor on ethnic relations’, a brother-in law of the author of the LTTE’s ISGA proposal, close political ally of Mangala Samaraweera, and co-negotiator for CBK on the PTOMS proposal. Sri Lanka thus avoided a Serbian –Kosovo outcome, thanks to the strenuous filibustering of Lakshman Kadirgamar, who enlisted the support of the JVP and its paper Lanka, for the purpose. For his patriotic pains, and his objections to the PTOMS talks, he was kept out of the policy loop in his final days, and unconfirmed reports have it that his security was reduced. When Mangala Samaraweera as foreign Minister proposed the name of CBK’s ‘ethnic advisor’ to the board of the newly re-titled Kadirgamar Center, a surviving member of the martyred politician objected on the grounds of the undesirability of a possible LTTE informant on the board of directors.

The Martti Ahtisaari plan on Kosovo, which clearly advocated independence for the province, ran counter to the letter of the peace agreement on Serbia’s borders and its sovereignty over the province. However, it was then adopted by the United States, and turned into official policy. Under the western umbrella, and going against Russia’s cautioning that this would violate international law, set precedents and affect the architecture of the world order, Kosovo declared independence. Now the World Court holds that it is not in violation of international law. Will the Kosovo script be next used in the Kurdish region, to further an independent Kurdistan out of Iraq, Iran or Turkey?

The lesson is very clear. Learn from the best of the West; maintain a permanent dialogue and the most cordial relations with, but do not trust the West to the point of giving it or the international institutions under its dominance, a foothold which may allow it to determine your country’s destiny -- because it will always shift the goalposts, as it did in colonial history and throughout the 20th century. If this is what it did to Christian Serbia which backed the Allies and fought bitterly against the Nazi invaders, what will it not do to us Asians?

The Kosovo model was very much in my mind during my two years, the years of our last, decisive phase, at the UN in Geneva. I wrote several articles referring to it and one was published on several Serbian websites. A point I made was that the Serbian troops should never have pulled back from their dug in positions in Kosovo despite persuasion from Yeltsin’s Russia, because, as later NATO surveys confirmed, NATO bombing had inflicted but minimal damage on the well camouflaged Serbian troops, and had NATO forces resorted to a ground campaign as was inevitable, they would have been caught in a meat grinder by the Serbian troops whose doctrine as the former Yugoslav army, was based on the great Marshal Tito’s ‘partisan warfare’.

More pertinently to us in Sri Lanka is the intensive human rights/humanitarian issues campaign waged by or through the western mass media that preceded the Kosovo war. Personalities as diverse as Fidel Castro and Justice Christie Weeramantry opposed the Kosovo bombing at the time. Respected intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Perry Anderson, and Tariq Ali have uncovered the lies behind the human rights campaign while Prof David Chandler traced the policy doctrine of humanitarian – actually hegemonistic—intervention, in a book From Kosovo to Kabul. The former Foreign Minister of Sandinista Nicaragua, and Catholic padre of the famous Maryknoll order, until recently the President of the UN General Assembly, Miguel D’Escoto, denounced the doctrine that ensued, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), as the Right to Intervene (R2I)!

In a friendly, quasi-fraternal encounter at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, I suggested to Vuk Jeremic the articulate young Foreign Minister of Serbia that they should go for a UN General Assembly vote. He told me that they were first taking it to the World Court. That was a mistake, and the judgment may have a knock-on effect on the UNGA vote if taken now. Expert commentators say that Kosovo and its patrons are targeting the magic figure of one hundred.

During the last stages of the last war, Sri Lanka was to be the guinea pig of the Kosovo/R2P doctrine. This is why no compromise which made for international presence such as an office of the UN Human Rights High Commissioner or international inspection within a compressed time frame just after the war, could be the basis for any compromise in Geneva. That would have been the foothold, or the first step on the road to Kosovo.

That project, the Kosovo/R2P game-plan for Sri Lanka, is still ongoing, albeit by other means. In an article after our victory at the UN HRC Special Session, I wrote that this was either the last battle of the old war or the first one of the new war, and ventured to suggest that “a long Cold War may have just begun”. Read more...

The Self-Immolation Of The UNP

by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

(August 01, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) Change’ and ‘Unity’ are the two competing slogans within the UNP. Sadly the issue is wrongly framed for either slogan to do much good. The question should be whether change or unity should come first. If unity precedes change, it will also preclude change. Unity is thus being deployed as a slogan to counter that of reform aimed at leadership change or leadership change through reform.

If the SLFP ‘united’ around ‘Mathiniya’, i.e. Madam Sirimavo Bandaranaike in 1994, as it did in 1988, it would have remained in opposition until her death. It is because it was ‘disunited’ enough to replace her with Chandrika that the party swept in to office.

The UNP can and should be united after it has implemented change. It must unite under a viable, popular new leadership which can rouse enthusiasm. It is only if the party members and supporters feel energised by hope, that they will rally round the party, unite.

If the UNP can drop to 29.34% of the vote, then it is obviously not united, because voters are defecting or staying at home. If the party remains ‘united’ in this manner, a basic mathematical projection shows that it will wither away.

Karu Jayasuriya, a devoted party man, urges unity and avoids the mention of change. Now it must be recalled that Jayasuriya, dedicated though he is to party unity, actually crossed over and joined President Rajapaksa’s administration. That was not because he loved the UNP less but because he loved Sri Lanka more. He put patriotism above partisanship. Could he not have done so while remaining in the UNP benches? Obviously not! That option was impossible under the leadership of Ranil Wickremesinghe. Karu could not persuade Ranil to take up a patriotic stance in defence of the country during a crucial period in its history.

Now the problem I have is this. What makes Hon. Karu Jayasuriya think that the average voter, including the average UNP voter, is any less patriotic than he is? Simply because he has forgiven Ranil Wickremesinghe his manifest lack of patriotism, what makes him think that the peasant families of the Sinhala heartland, whose youngsters gave their lives and limbs in the war, will do so — especially when their emotions are rekindled by the presence of Ranil on the platform and the effective propaganda by government’s demagogic nationalist ideologues?

Jayasuriya lists the shortcomings of this government and urges unity to combat them. He must surely recall that the Sri Lankan voter responded negatively to such entreaties on the part of the SLFP, then in opposition, until they were certain that it would not mean a return of Madam Bandaranaike to power — so deeply engrained was the memory of queues and shortages. Similarly, the voter will not shift from the incumbent administration, which after all, delivered a historic victory, while the prospect exists of a return of Ranil Wickremesinghe whom the masses cannot relate to and who will ‘give away the store’ to the enemies of the nation.

It is only if the voter is guaranteed of a real change, of a new leadership that is every bit as patriotic as the Rajapaksa regime but is an improvement in matters of living standards and people’s prosperity that the voters will return to the UNP.

The Old Guard of the UNP assumes that economic hardship alone will drive the voters back to the party. This is erroneous. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s stint as PM is not remembered by the voter as a period of mass prosperity. On the contrary it was experienced as a phase of sharp cutbacks in public spending. Wickremesinghe himself is identified with the Jayewardene administration, the lopsided economic policies of which were cautioned against by Prime Minister Premadasa. His cautioning was ignored and a bloody insurrection resulted.

Colombo’s UNP elite would have been slain in their beds or sent off to slave in labour camps had Premadasa not been selected by the party and elected by the people in ’88. The party and the people responded to a personality who was manifestly no less patriotic than his main rival Madam Bandaranaike but was also known to be capable of improving the standard of living of the citizenry, as she was not.

The fundamental factor is that Ranil Wickremesinghe is historically obsolescent. He belongs to the Prabhakaran period of Sri Lanka’s contemporary history, and furthermore he belongs on the wrong side of that historical contestation. Ranil was chosen not by the party but by Prabhakaran, who assassinated every able UNP leader (Premadasa, Lalith, Gamani, Ranjan) and potential ones (Ossie Abeygoonesekara, Gamani Atukorale), leaving only Ranil untouched. Ranil returned the favour, acting as a puppet of Prabhakaran. He is indelibly associated with a period of shame in the long history of the island.
He and his associates are also seen as socially decadent, as Jayasuriya for instance is most certainly not. Surely the collective memory of UNP must recall the disaster of Sir John Kotelawela and Zsu Zsu Mohamed, so effectively skewered by the famous ‘Mara Yuddha’ cartoon in 1956?

This compound profile of anti-national treachery and social decadence makes Ranil electorally radioactive. That radioactivity affects the party as a whole. For the party to recover the UNP rank and file and the country at large must not see him in the frontlines. So as long as he is visible, the government’s ideologists and propaganda machine will chew up the UNP. Short of a visible change of leadership, how does Jayasuriya hope to re-infuse the party with what it lacks most, namely, hope?

Today, Wimal Weerawansa has beaten Ranil Wickremesinghe, the leader of the UNP, in Colombo. That is the evidence of how terminal the UNP’s crisis is, under Ranil. One fails to see the logic of ‘unity’ under the leadership of someone who cannot secure more votes than Wimal Weerawansa in Colombo itself. One also fails to see how such a slogan can have a chance of success. If Ranil’s leadership cannot deliver the goods (the votes) in cosmopolitan, globalised Colombo, how can it do so in the countryside, where the majority of voters are? Is this the leadership under which the UNP members are urged to unite: a leadership that cannot take the party to victory but only from one defeat to another and each time worse? Why would they?

The most dangerous aspect of calling for ‘unity’ without and before leadership change is the signal it sends out: that despite repeated and worsening electoral rejection at the hands of the voters of Sri Lanka for two decades, the UNP does not give a damn for the opinion of the voter; that the UNP is deaf and blind to the repeated signalling by the citizens of this country.

To be viable, the UNP must be brought in line with the repeated signals of the electoral marketplace. The party must show respect for the unmistakable feedback from the people. Unity cannot be on the basis of the decrepit, unpopular status quo. Change must precede unity. Unity can be restored only on the basis of immediate leadership change. To borrow President Premadasa’s concept, the UNP must be ‘people-ised’. Read more...

The UNP's crisis of existence

by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

(July 28, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) I am not now and have never been a member of either the SLFP or the UNP, though President Premadasa urged me to ‘come in through the National List, take a portfolio and do a job of work’. The only registered political party (as distinct from political organisation) I have ever been a member (actually an Asst Secretary) of, was the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party. Vijaya had enthusiastically announced to the Central Committee, the collective entry of a few of us from the then-underground ‘Vikalpa Kandayama’, naming me and another comrade. That would be one of his last Central Committee meetings. After his assassination by the JVP, I joined the party in fulfilment of that expectation. Of course I have supported two strong, courageous ‘patriotic- populist’ Presidents – Premadasa and Rajapakse – and episodically, two others, JRJ in the post Accord/anti-JVP year ’87-’88 and CBK from the re-election battle of ’99 to her ouster of Ranil (before her tilt against Karuna , her differences with Kadirgamar and her PTOMS lunacy).

This potted political bio-data has a point: when I comment on politics and present options, it is not due to partisan political affiliation, though it does flow from a political analysis and perspective.

There are those in Government and Opposition who oppose a leadership change in the UNP. While they may be correct from the perspective of their particular interests, my critique as a political analyst is of their assumptions and arguments. A major assumption is that Ranil Wickremesinghe is a maestro in the international realm. This is held to be so by his few fans in the UNP and the idea has now infected the Government.

What is the reality? Ranil Wickremesinghe was made Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs by JR Jayewardene who removed him from that post in a year! Most of his better quality US connections are actually Milinda Moragoda’s. Particularly pertinent is the fact that Ranil, being a dyed in the wool Republican, has no connections with the Obama administration. GL Pieris, liberal scholar of the law, fits the Obama administration’s ‘profile’ far more than does a tired old rightist like Ranil, who in his address to the UN General Assembly as Prime Minister, deviated sharply from the position of the Non Aligned and the rest of South Asia, by signalling support for George Bush’s disastrous Iraq war. Though I grew up hearing my fellow ‘ Colomboans’ of my parents generation assuring me that Ranil was nothing like his father Esmond, in the field of foreign policy he is very much his father’s son. Esmond Wickremesinghe advised Sir John Kotelawela on external relations and in Bandung, Sir John was awkwardly out of step with both India and China (something that Sri Lanka repeated only when a Lankan candidate for UN Secretary Generalship found his bid imploding as he failed to secure the support of either of the Asian giants). Kotelawela ‘s Esmond-guided moves in Bandung earned him the appellation of Bandung Booruwa in the Sinhala press, brought into stark relief his role as a Western puppet out of tune with rising Asia nationalism, and contributed to the UNP’s electoral catastrophe of 1956.

Given Ranil’s track record, it is safe to assume that what he tells the President that he will tell the international community, will not be what he says behind closed doors to the international community. This is not baseless calumny. As Prof Pieris said in his parliamentary speech on External Affairs in the Budget debate, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Report on Sri Lanka, better known as the Kerry-Lugar Report, actually discloses that Ranil Wickremesinghe was one of the few who urged the US to keep the pressure on Colombo.

I have always held Hon Karu Jayasuriya in high esteem and regarded him with considerably warm affection. In 1997, the Lanka Guardian magazine under my editorship ran a cover story on his bid for the Colombo Mayoralty, titled The New Opposition. Since then I have held, on the record that he would be a far superior leader for the UNP and the Opposition than Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Today it is with no joy whatsoever, that I feel constrained to contradict Mr Jayasuriya on the record, albeit with no diminution of my affection.

In a widely circulated article he has urged that the UNP rise to challenge the Government, and attributed its inability to do so, to inner-party dissonance and disunity. In saying this he is wide off the mark. Firstly, he has failed to identify that factor which is mainly responsible for the UNP’s lamentable state. Secondly he has named a factor which is far more a consequence than a cause. Thirdly, in identifying the cause of the UNP’s travails inaccurately, he is unwittingly prolonging the state of the party that he finds lamentable and is preventing the party from implementing the solution that can enable it to campaign resolutely against the status quo as he so ardently wishes.

The UNP was not disunited when it campaigned at the last General Election. It sank to a lower percentage than the SLFP under Mrs Bandaranaike did at the electoral tsunami of 1977. That was not because of disunity. The UNP did better at the Presidential election under a complete political novice, than it did under its present leader. The UNP did far better under the ‘emergency candidacy’ of Mrs Srima Dissanaike in 1994 than it did under today’s leadership.

The UNP is not sinking because of disunity. It is sinking because of its leader, Ranil Wickremesinghe. Over the years, dedicated party veterans such as Rukman Senanayake, NGP Panditharathne, and Daham Wimalasena have put this on the record. (The Panditharathne report followed an extensive grassroots survey). There is no point in striving to launch an anti-government campaign as Mr Jayasuriya seems to suggest, because the masses aren’t going to be mobilised under his leadership. They aren’t going to vote, much less get their skulls cracked open by Police batons. It took the dramatic changeover to the JR Jayewardene-Premadasa leadership for the UNP to be able to motivate the masses to join any campaign, in the 1970s.

Urging the party members and supporters to make one more effort to fight the government without first giving them an inspiring new leadership and programme is akin to urging someone to fill a perforated bucket with water and bring it to a construction site. What is necessary is to first plug the hole and then attempt to fill it with water. The replacement of Ranil Wickremesinghe as party leader is the conditio sine qua non for any recovery on the part of the UNP.

Instead of lamenting the disunity in the party, Hon Karu Jayasuriya could have saved it from its present fate and placed it on the course he indicates, by taking over its leadership during the rebellions of 1999-2000 and then again in the middle of this decade.

Of course I may be wrong. So why not put it to the test? Unite around ‘The Leader’ Ranil Wickremesinghe; don’t talk of changing the leadership, remain mum in the face of the mass media, and stride bravely forward to contest the Jana Sabha elections scheduled for early 2011, or any other election that comes the country’s way. If, sadly, I am right, the party will lose at least as badly as it did this time at the parliamentary elections or even worse. If on the other hand, I am wrong, the re-united United National Party will do better than it did earlier this year. The danger is administering this test is that there are no other elections scheduled until the terms of the president and the recently elected parliament run out. If the UNP doesn’t show a recovery by the Janasabha elections, then what will sustain the hope of the party members and voters for six whole years? How will the UNP survive? Without a robust UNP, what will be the shape and direction of the Opposition? Without a strong democratic Opposition how will democracy itself fare? Read more...

International Intervention & the Intelligentsia

by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

(July 25, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) When Julien Benda wrote of the treason of the intellectuals, he didn’t know the half of it.

“With both warring parties disregarding the right to life, only international intervention can save the citizens of Sri Lanka”. Before I tell you who purportedly said this, let me tell you where it came from. The Institute at which I am has, as most such outfits, a magazine rack containing the latest periodicals. My eye chanced upon a thick A 4 sized publication called The Little Magazine, Volume v11, Issues 3& 4, a special issue on Security.

Flipping it open to the contents page I noticed many topics of interest including one on Sri Lanka. The Editors had summarised each essay, and the one on Sri Lanka bore the summary that I have opened this article with. Now, I am a fair-minded chap or would like to think of myself as one, and it occurred to me that the Editor’s summary may be a distortion of what the writer said, so I turned to the essay itself and this is what I found:

“The largest share of the responsibility for this erosion of the rule of law and the culture of impunity lies with the Sri Lankan government...The LTTE’s military strategies and tactics have also contributed to the worsening human security crisis in Sri Lanka”. (p78)

Here is the telling conclusion of the essay: “How can this unfolding human security crisis be addressed in Sri Lanka? The best solution is for the government and the LTTE to return to the ceasefire, resume political dialogue and then work out a sustainable political solution. But that option does not seem to be among the priorities of either party. There is no room for other domestic forces or international actors to persuade or force the warring parties to give up their unilateral military agendas. That constitutes the real difficulty in alleviating the human security crisis”. (My emphasis- DJ)

The conclusion contains the writer’s important policy prescription: “Given all the limitations, a minimalist yet reasonable course of action available to international actors would be to put diplomatic and other pressures on both sides to refrain from war escalation. For such a containment or de-escalation option to work effectively there should be a concerted attempt by the major regional and international actors to design a common strategy for conflict management in Sri Lanka. The US, the EU, Japan, India, Pakistan, China and Russia should be co-partners in such a new international engagement in Sri Lanka. Among regional actors, India, Pakistan, China and Japan have a crucial role to play in a new phase of peace-building through de-escalation”. (p78).

The writer is described as a “political scientist and constitutional expert” is further described as “among Sri lanka’s most influential commentators on ethnic conflict and human rights”. Though one may not guess it from that description, it is Prof J. Uyangoda, who is referred to. He is Director, Centre for Policy Alternatives, and Head, Department of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Colombo.

It is fairly obvious that this article was written when the existentially decisive final war was on.

Several things leap out at the reader. Firstly, in the matter of impunity and the erosion of the rule of law, the Sri Lankan Government is held to be the main offender with the LTTE as a secondary one; an ‘also ran’ and that too only because of their “military strategy and tactics”, (not politics or ideology). This about an armed militia described as the closest to the European fascist movements of the 1930s, by renowned expert Walter Laqueur, as led by ‘the Pol Pot of South Asia’ by Pulitzer Prize winning John F Burns, and more recently, as ‘textbook fascist’ by The Economist. We are talking about the movement that blew away top-notch Tamil intellectuals like Neelan Tiruchelvam, Kethesh Loganathan and Rajani Tiranagama. On the other hand, the government, however authoritarian, is an elected one, which cannot quite bury an independent judiciary and parliamentary dissent.

Secondly, the author’s best case scenario (‘best solution”) is manifestly not the military defeat of the LTTE; not the victory of the armed forces of the democratic Sri Lankan state. Not even a military defeat paralleled or followed by the implementation of a political solution to the Tamil question, as the anti-Tiger Tamil organisations and indeed India, the world’s most populous secular democracy, pushed for. Nope, the best solution is a ceasefire and negotiations. This, as if it had never been tried by successive Sri Lankan and one Indian leader, most of who were murdered by the Tigers for their pains; and as if the CFA experience had not been gone through.

Thirdly, the solution proposed is an international intervention aimed at ‘conflict management’ through DE-ESCALATION, i.e. the de-escalation of the Sri Lankan military campaign. I say this because the Sri Lankan campaign was de-escalating the LTTE’s violence rather decisively and conclusively!

Fourthly, the writer clearly wished to prevent the military defeat of the LTTE and advocated international intervention for that purpose. He urges “diplomatic and other pressures” on both sides. In other words, he wanted non-diplomatic/extra diplomatic pressures brought to bear on the Sri Lankn state at a time that it was fighting to finish off the LTTE. What “other pressures” are there apart from diplomatic ones? Obviously economic and military pressures!

At a time that the international community was divided between those who were trying to de-escalate the conflict and in effect save the Tigers, and those in our region and Eurasia, who were supportive of the legitimate Sri Lankan state’s campaign to eradicate secessionist terrorism within its recognised borders, this writer argued for a united international front, not in support of the Sri Lankan state albeit with a component of advocacy of devolution, but precisely and explicitly to de-escalate the armed drive, and return to the ‘peace’ track, not with the elected Tamil representatives, but with a Tiger salvaged from destruction!

The article I have quoted from here is no isolated example. Before me is a volume titled South Asia: Societies in Political and Economic Transition, published in 2010, i.e. this year. It contains a chapter by the same academic who wrote the earlier mentioned article. The chapter is titled Politics of Sri Lanka: 2007-2008. In it, the writer opines that “Therefore, the LTTE’s military strategic aim seems to focus on preventing the Sri Lankn state from obtaining a military victory, eventually leading to a military and political stalemate. In the LTTE’s thinking, a strategic stalemate would also create new conditions for the international community to intervene in Sri Lanka’s conflict. The LTTE seems to envisage that international intervention in such a scenario would be a prelude to acknowledging a new political reality as well”. (p251).

Now what is blindingly obvious is that the LTTE’s thinking as identified by Uyangoda in this chapter is the same as Uyangoda’s policy recommendation in his journal article. The LTTE’s politico-military strategy is ‘international intervention’ which would in turn permit recognition of a new political reality, says Uyangoda. And what does Uyangoda himself appeal for, but ‘international intervention’ to secure ‘de-escalation’, ‘conflict management’ and ‘peace building’. There is a congruency and overlap between the positions of Uyangoda, and what he knows or depicts as the LTTE’s position and thinking!

These comic conceptualisations and analytical atrocities hold no surprises for me as a political scientist. What I find shocking are the values, the ethics and morality reflected in this stand. The affiliations and the networks advertised here are tarred with the same brush of treacherous appeasement of fascism and terrorism.

This is deeply symptomatic of the ethical collapse of the secular progressive intelligentsia, at a time when the history of their country and the needs of the people required them to stand up and be counted. The contrast could not be greater between Sri Lanka’s liberal-radical intellectuals and the committed or ‘engaged’ intelligentsia of the 1930s and ’40s who abandoned their earlier pacifism and stood at the helm of the anti-fascist and (before and after WWII) the anti-imperialist causes of their day, in the West and in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In contemporary Sri Lanka we had instead a neo-comprador intelligentsia which appeased fascism to the very end (as this essay shows).

It is this moral, ethical and intellectual vacuum that was filled by the Sinhala fundamentalists and fanatics. The citizenry will accept any intellectual or ideologue that will stand with them on existential issues of the defence of the independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of the country. They appreciate anyone who militantly champions the cause of a war to finally liberate the country of an abiding threat of large scale terrorism which consumed tens of thousands including the country’s most promising leaders. This is how the Sinhala ultranationalist and extremists, who were ideologically so marginalised in the 1990s under Premadasa, became the dominant ideological force of today. Lenin once said that “anarchism is the price the working class movement pays for the sin of opportunism”. Similarly, the anarchism of the southern Sinhala hard-line agitators is the price that our society pays for the opportunism of the southern liberal intellectuals. If the modernist or postmodernist secular, pluralist intellectuals wish to know who is responsible for the hegemony of irrationality today, they need only look in a mirror. Read more...

Tracking the Tigers' Trajectory

BOOK:- ‘THE TIGER VANQUISHED: LTTE’S STORY’ BY M.R. NARAYAN SWAMY

Reviewed by Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

(July 25, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) There are books that are a ‘must read‘, and others that are a ‘cracking good read’. MR Narayan Swamy’s latest book on Sri Lanka, The Tiger Vanquished: LTTE’s Story (Sage Publications, 2010), is both. It is an objective, balanced, reliable and fairly authoritative account of the last war, its prelude and its aftermath. It should be read across the spectrum, by Sri Lankans and non-Sri Lankans interested either in Sri Lanka or the broader themes of insurgency, terrorism and ethnic conflict. The long introduction is the best single text I have read so far on the last war, from build-up and backdrop to its grand finale and present-day prospects.

Prefaced by a cinematically perfect final telephone conversation in May 2009 between a trapped Tiger leader and his family in Europe punctuated by the ever-louder, ever closer Sri Lankan gunnery, it is a fast paced narrative woven through with analytical commentary. The author is neither Sinhalese nor Tamil, and therefore far enough from the emotions roused by the topic, but a journalist from the neighbouring country India with a nose to the ground and an engagement with the Sri Lanka story for decades, and therefore close enough to the subject matter.

MR Narayan Swamy was on the story which, in the bloody wake of July ’83, was beginning to bulk large in the Indian press. He is still on it, having never taken his eye off the ball. When he wrote his first book on the Tigers, he would not have thought it would be a trilogy, but that’s what it has amounted to. This book is the third of a triptych, and brings the story to a close while deftly pinning it to what went before.

Narayan Swamy is a reporter par excellence and this book is a reporter’s story. Like any good reporter he tries to cover it from as many angles as possible, balancing the report. He emerges as a specialist on the Tigers and on Prabhakaran in particular. Just as the earlier ones were of the rise and hegemony of the Tigers – and Prabhakaran—this is the book of its and his fall. It is neither pure description nor attempt at military history; it is solid political journalism.

The book traces and fixes the beginnings of the last war, confirming that had the tsunami not hit the island in late 2004, Prabhakaran’s final offensive almost certainly would have, and that he didn’t give the newly elected Mahinda Rajapakse more than a few weeks before he initiated armed attacks unilaterally at the end of 2005. On the political side, as an informed outsider who had observed Sri Lankan leaders grapple with this problem for decades, he discovers the importance of Mahinda Rajapakse’s clarity and determination in ending it. He confirms my reading that President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga spiritedly retaliated against the LTTE by capturing Jaffna in late ’95 and yet inexplicably lost steam shortly after, leaving room for the LTTE to counterattack devastatingly – and repeating that strange shuffle after her successful defence of Jaffna in 2000. The book reminds us of the historical contributions of the three who won the war -- Mahinda and Gotabhaya Rajapakse and Sarath Fonseka – and that is the order of ranking that rises from the narrative.

Narayan Swamy adds considerable value to our existing body of knowledge on the war. He pieces together from Tiger survivors that Prabhakaran expected the Sri Lankan armed forces to stop after the capture of Kilinochchi – helping us understand just how crucial it was that the offensive momentum was maintained and the old doctrine of ‘negotiations from strength’ was abandoned in favour of a war winning strategy aimed at defeating and destroying the enemy. Narayan Swamy also confirms that Prabhakaran expected the West to intervene and the Indian electorate to turf out the Congress, either of which he thought would provide him a safe exit.

The author breaks a story by revealing that under the BJP administration, Delhi had assigned several top officials of the intelligence agency RAW to join the Norwegian led ‘peace process’ and even help draft the Ceasefire Agreement. Luckily for Sri Lanka there was a change of administration and of attitude in New Delhi.

The record of contemporary history is set straight by the author who has no partisan axe to grind. The erosion in the morale of some of the Tiger cadre during and due to the CFA is captured in the account. Due strategic importance is given, as it usually isn’t in hagiographic renditions, to the Karuna schism (and its weaker precursor, the dissent of Prabhakaran’s deputy, Mahattaya). Narayan Swamy makes clear that Karuna’s was no treachery as many ultra-nationalist Tamils still have it, but a serious and predictable regional contradiction between Eastern sacrifice and Northern domination which went unheeded and unresolved due to Prabhakaran’s arrogance.

The author’s first (and first hand) impressions of Mahinda Rajapakse both as Prime Minister and President were that here was a man who was ready and even eager for peace but unlike any of his predecessors, was clearly determined from the outset that if war was resorted to by the Tigers, it would be a fight to the finish with the express goal of defeating them utterly. The book leaves no doubt that this, the determined new national leadership, was the single most important of several ‘game changers’ that enabled Prabhakaran to be vanquished. While there are commentaries that attribute that determination to everything ranging from Sinhala chauvinism to nepotistic need, these beg the question as to why all previous leaders were unable to do so with whatever motivations however exalted or base. As Lenin once quipped “there is no such thing as a sincerometer in politics” and it is impossible in serious political analysis to impute motivation in the absence of documentary evidence. Whatever the motivations of Mahinda Rajapakse, they got the primary job done.

MR Narayan Swamy is politically far too literate a commentator to present a mono-causal (still less exclusively Rajapakse-centric) explanation for the fall of the Tigers. Instead he identifies a cluster of three factors all of which came into being in the year 2004. It is this convergence of 2004 that killed Prabahakaran and his Tiger project, argues the writer. These factors were the Karuna breakaway, Mahinda Rajapakse becoming PM and the Congress returning to office in India.

Narayanswamy’s testimony unwittingly puts paid to the perspective that strikes an anti –Tiger posture but still bewails Mahinda Rajapakse’s accession to the Prime Ministership over Hon Lakshman Kadirgamar. The author discloses the fascinating detail that Delhi, by this time under a Congress administration, tilted in favour of Rajapakse over Kadirgamar in the Premier stakes. The PM ship was always the staging post for the Presidential candidacy, and if Mahinda were not the PM he would have had far less of a chance of being the SLFP’s Presidential candidate and still less prospect of winning. No Mahinda Rajapakse, no military victory over Prabhakaran—that much is borne out by this book.

This book, especially the substantive introduction and part-predictive postscript, should comprise essential reading for all students of and policy makers concerned with Sri Lankan and Tamil affairs. It is also relevant reading for existing and aspirant guerrillas and counter-insurgents everywhere. Read more...

Sri Lanka’s conflict: culture and lineages of the past

by Nira Wickramasinghe

There are two ways to lose oneself: by a walled segregation in the particular or by a dilution in the universal.—Aimé Césaire

(July 19, Colombo Sri Lanka Guardian) Walter Benjamin famously wrote, “History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the here-and-now.”1 Few would contest Benjamin’s critique of historicism and his argument that what is properly historical only reveals itself to a future generation capable of recognizing it–a generation possessing developers strong enough to fix an image never seen before and never to be seen again. In spite of this, many scholars and practitioners in the field of conflict and conflict resolution in Sri Lanka resist acknowledging the need to historicize their reading of the present. This paper will argue that understanding the fractured state of the Sri Lankan polity today and evolving reconciliation in any form is not possible without a rhizomatic approach to history–a situation where the future and past are constantly in the process of becoming each other. It is nothing new that the colonial graft has shaped the post-colonial state of Sri Lanka. Nationalist historians have recognized the colonial traces in the political system, bureaucracy, education and other sectors and have critiqued the traditional root causes approach to understanding historical events. This paper’s approach is different and based on the belief that origins of ideas and events are sometimes less interesting than how they reverberate throughout history. It looks specifically at how culture has been conceived in the colonial and post-colonial states. Rather than attempting to find causes of modern conflict or distrust in events of the past, it will explore how the epistemological position on culture of conflict resolution among practitioners has predetermined how civil war was resolved in the country and, in a sense, precluded other frames for reconciliation. The paper will first look at the lineages between colonial modes of political representation and modern day multiculturalism. The second part of the paper will analyze the links between the popular perception of the state today as a provider of welfare and the regime of entitlements put in place under colonialism. The third section will explore how by contrasting it with a looser and more flexible colonial approach to territory, both the new nation-state and proponents of imaginary homelands are permeated by the idea of culture-based territoriality.

The Importance of Culture: Colonial Modes of Political Representation

Much debate on how to resolve the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka is dominated by a faulty epistemology that assumes each group has some kind of culture and that the boundaries between these groups and the contours of their cultures–namely the Sinhalese and the Tamils–are specifiable and easy to depict.2 How we think inequities among groups should be addressed–and diversity and pluralism furthered–has been influenced by this approach. The solution to the sovereignty claim according to Tamil separatists, is for believers in the distinctness of cultures to divide the country on ethnic or cultural lines, instituting a more or less advanced federal constitutional arrangement.3 Multiculturalism is the theory behind this seemingly self-evident resolution of a nearly thirty-year conflict. The paradox is that in spite of the efforts of experts, the country remains in a state of war. Until now, reconciliation has been premised on a faulty reading of society as composed of clearly delimited communities. This leads to an unquestioned understanding of multiculturalism and federalism as panaceas for the current impasse. One can argue that the colonial epistemological graft has in many ways inflected how attempts at reconciliation between conflicting parties have been shaped over the past thirty years. In the same way, the past has been read as being made up of cultural groups locked in a contest for power.

Culture and Groups: Lineages of the Past

There are many similarities between the practices of the British colonial state in Sri Lanka and those of the post-colony. In its institutions and bureaucracies, traces of the colonial mold are still present. The urge to classify groups according to distinct cultural traits is at the center of the liberal state that grew from the shards of the colonial state. From the 1947 election campaign to the first independent parliament, D.S. Senanayake mentioned “several racial elements” existing in the country and praised each of them for their intrinsic qualities: “the thrifty Tamil,” the “Muslim trader,” the “adventurous European” and the “friendly Sinhalese” would all join “to build a great nation.”4

The imperative of enumerating groups in society through the census mode persists in the decennial censuses of the independent state. The official status of cultural groups are captured by the national identity cards citizens carry with them, the forms they fill for state and non-state institutions to enter their children into schools, applications for scholarships, employment and bank loans. Individuals frequently evaded these colonial divides, attempting to either bridge these imposed divisions or, in an even more subversive fashion, to foster hybrid moments. Defiance to or derision of colonial rule was displayed in the dress of some Sinhalese chiefs who chose to wear a sarong over Western trousers.5 But in the official sense, identities lost the substantial quality, the many forms and shapes they had in practice, and became objective features of people that could once and for all be delineated. Enumerations themselves would not have changed the shape of the varied and contextual identities of the peoples of the land, but their currency contributed to the gradual imposition of the idea–promoted by nationalists as well–that identities were like institutions: fixed and gelled. E.J. Livera, while applying for the post of systematic botanist in 1924, started his application signing, “I am a Ceylonese of the Burgher community and 27 years of age.”6 One of the conventions in the census even today is the “impermissibility of fractions, or to put it the other way round, a mirage like integrity of the body.”7 Multiculturalism, as it is practiced in 21st century Sri Lanka is a legacy of the colonial idea of society as cultural groups rather than a legacy of a sincere and principled approach to equity and justice. The modern Sri Lankan state does not incorporate any of the subtle practices or complex theories that inform the shape of multiculturalism in states such as Canada, the Netherlands or the United States. It is still the colonial frame that distinguishes the Sri Lankan understanding of multiculturalism.8

People saw potential entitlements under colonial rule in identifying themselves as one ethnicity or another. This further moored this perception of identities as embodying inescapable features of being. Colonial knowledge did not imagine identities or construct them; rather, it opened up a new realm for political identities to blossom.

Political Representation and Culture

The British bestowed political representation and cultural group identity upon persons they acknowledged as leaders of their community. The census was the basis for determining race-based representation in the colonial state and political representation was first distributed equally to selected racial groups. In 1833, a legislative council composed of British and natives (Ceylonese members) was established. In the selection of the natives, the governor nominated one low-country Sinhalese, one Burgher and one Tamil. During the seventy years that followed, the only change made to the constitution of the council was the addition of two unofficial members to represent the Kandyan, Sinhalese and Muslim communities.9 At the beginning of the 20th century, when the first cracks between the various ethnic groups started to form, Sinhalese, Tamils, Indians, Muslims, Burghers, Malays and Europeans all formed separate political associations which the British encouraged to jockey for power.10 Groups that were outside the colonial frame of cultural groups and who could not use the representation system in place to forward their demands–caste groups, regional groups, small linguistic groups–frequently used the petition to express their uncivil or barbaric claims.11

The adoption of a culture-based system of representation had double-edged consequences.

Firstly, it provided a platform for the new multicultural elite to express its discontent. But as seats in the legislature were determined on the basis of the cultural affiliation of the councilors, many of the pressure groups that sprang up were consequently culturally exclusive. This was the case in international organizations such as the Dutch Burgher Union as well as in regionally based societies such as the Jaffna Association and the Chilaw Association. The Jaffna Association was composed of Tamils, who mostly resided in Jaffna and engaged in commercial and professional pursuits. The Chilaw association was an association of wealthy Sinhalese landowners of the district of Chilaw in the Northwestern Province.12 Pliant and prone to compromise from its inception, this association never included the destruction of the colonial state a part of its project. The liberalism it professed rarely exceeded the half-hearted initiatives of reform issued from the colonial administration.

During the period between 1927 and 1928, its members were not in favor of universal suffrage but obtained it in 1931 nevertheless. Ranajit Guha, writing of a similar group in India, spoke of “mediocre liberalism.”13

Majorities and Cultural Rights Discourse

The colonial institution of race and culture-based representative government, as a prelude to self-government and citizenship for natives, invented distinctively modern forms of political identity and conflict in Sri Lanka, as well as in other colonies. Race, culture and later, nationality-based representative government, also resulted in the generation of new names and concepts including residents and aliens, indigenous and immigrants, majorities and minorities, to deal with perceived differences among communities. Representative politics spawned the concept of majorities.14

The three constitutions of post-independence Sri Lanka helped demarcate and define a majority from within the citizens, pitting them against non-Buddhists and non-Sinhala speaking minority communities. However, unlike the openly discriminatory legislation passed to determine who was a citizen and who was an alien in the late 1940s, it was under the guise of a rights-and-entitlement discourse that groups became stultified as minorities in a political sense and marginalized in the nation-state. Rajasingham-Senanayake has shown how rights mechanisms like positive discrimination or affirmative action were paradoxically used to the advantage of the ethnic majority.15 Thus, the rights discourse, and later multiculturalism, helped consolidate the majority community and gel minorities in a sometimes dependent and subaltern situation.

In fact, the focus on rights privileged the consolidation of the two larger communities: the Sinhalas and Tamils. As opposed to culture, caste was not accepted as a legitimate sphere of political action and mobilization. In actuality, there is a clear denial and delegitimization of caste-based discourses and practices against inequality and injustice, even in the discourse of multiculturalism. As Rajasingham- Senanayake forcefully argues, “democracy, the first ingredient for the legitimate modern nation-state, in practice perpetuated blindness to numerically insignificant groups.”16 Brow’s ethnography of a Vedda village in the Anuradhapura district shows how Veddas have been pressured into identifying themselves with the Sinhalese people. 17 In recent years, there has been a change in the official attitude toward cultural minorities. While many of the smaller groups, such as Veddas and Rodis, have been “forgotten, marginalized or assimilated with the consolidation of a bi-polar ethnic imagination in post-colonial Sri Lanka, the Tamils of Indian descent and the Muslims have been politicized as a distinct ethnic group since 1983.”18

In more recent times, the 2000 draft constitution, which was put forward and then shelved, constituted a bold attempt at a more sensitive approach to group rights. But it rested on the assumption that the multiple identities that existed in the nation-state were fixed and stable and therefore, a possible basis for territorially determined strategies of power-sharing. A Muslim is a Muslim, a Tamil a Tamil and a Sinhala a Sinhala. On this basis, for instance, the Eastern Province was to be carved into enclaves.19

If one accepts that all identities are forms of identification and “that a social agent must be conceived not as a unitary subject but as the articulation of an ensemble of subject positions,” the formation of cultural enclaves is troubling.20 The curse of multiculturalism is that while it provides more freedom and recognition to the group or community, it is also constrictive in that it denies the fluidity of identity.21 Multiculturalism cannot help but make the fragment essential.

A Regime of Entitlements: The Culture-Welfare Nexus

Colonial rule had in many ways entrenched the principle that different communities were entitled to different degrees of rights, dues and representation according to criteria that varied over time. Later, with universal suffrage and the newly independent country’s commitment to the welfare state, it was the citizen who was bestowed with certain privileges such as a free education and free health services– privileges citizens still partly enjoy.

The war in the North and East was partly caused by a perception among Tamils of discrimination in the distribution of welfare benefits such as places in universities and, more generally, state investment in developmental schemes. Since independence, people defining themselves as cultural groups vied for the spoils given by a benevolent state through their representatives in formal politics before eventually taking up arms against the state. The nexus between culture and welfare successfully deepened differences between communities, which existed at the political level, and brought divides into the domain of subaltern politics as well. The following section will suggest that the popular understanding of the state as welfare state–a notion that grew out of the regime of entitlements put in place by the British–gives room for cultural biases in distribution of resources and benefits on the part of state organs and competition for these resources among communities and cultural groups.22

The Citizen’s Sinhalese Peasant: Targeted Welfare Measures

When the colonial state distributed economic entitlements to cultural groups, they tended to coincide with occupational groups such as the Kandyan Sinhalese peasantry, the Tamil estate laborers and the Indian urban workers. In a similar fashion, after independence, the welfare state did not ostensibly target one community but focused on occupational groups, such as the peasantry, or social groups, like the poor or underprivileged. The section of the peasantry that received most from the benevolent state was the Sinhala peasantry. Welfare measures in the educational sector became a means to correct imbalances that existed between regions and communities, giving the Sinhalese underprivileged more redress than others, like the Plantation Tamils. The Kandyan peasantry in particular was regarded by colonial authorities as particularly deserving. British provincial agents and the British in general regarded the Kandyan region as the epitome of tradition, and they often displayed a patriarchal and protective attitude towards the Kandyans, who they regarded as less touched by modernity and as bearers of an authentic culture. In spite of this romantic vision of the Kandyan peasant, his welfare was recognized and given pride of place only in late colonialism. But from the 195Os, the plantation sector was less successful, as larger companies left the island, owing largely to the increasingly aggressive demands of an organized labor force. The early 1970s witnessed the nationalization of land and the larger tea, rubber and coconut plantations. The impact on agrarian relations was not felt as much as expected, as the state placed three-quarters of the restituted land under its control and only redistributed a quarter. 23 Twenty years later, the management of most of these plantations was handed over to private, mainly Indian, companies. Tea, rubber and coconut remained significant features in the economy of the country, but in keeping with the demands of the world market, underwent many mutations.

During the colonial period, peasant agriculture was neglected as the British encouraged the import of Indian and Burmese rice. But during the Donoughmore years (1931 to 1947), the Sinhala political class began to favor giving the peasant greater state assistance. The Donoughmore commissioners exemplified the new position of the late colonial state vis-à-vis the rural population, who they conceived of as in need of help and protection. The fact that peasants represented the majority of the population was clearly stressed.

‘It seems hardly necessary to observe that His Majesty’s Government is the trustee not merely of the wealthier and more highly educated elements in Ceylon but quite as much of the peasant and the coolies and of all those poorer classes which form the bulk of the population.”24

The colonization of new land in the dry zone from the 1930s onwards was very much aimed at ushering in a new era in peasant welfare, together with the avowed aim of increasing the production of paddy. A few years after independence, a Kandyan Peasantry Commission was formed under the chairmanship of N.E. Weerasooriya to inquire into the social and economic condition of the Kandyan peasantry in the Central and Uva provinces. This report upheld the nostalgic image of the peasant economy centered on the eternal peasant: “From time immemorial the Kandyan peasant has lived in small villages or ‘gamas’ and he continues to do so today.”25 The language was one of affirmative action, where equal citizenship entailed justice for some. “Rehabilitation is a different process and requires special treatment and a different approach.”26 The culprit was named Indian labor:

The peasant’s main occupation is agriculture, but his holding is too small to permit him to earn his livelihood from its produce. He is ready to take subsidiary employment, agricultural or otherwise, but the avenue of employment on the plantations is blocked by Indian labor.27

The efforts made in the late colonial period and in the decade after independence yielded some results. Between 1952 and 1985, the production of the paddy multiplied fourfold, while a near 90 percent rate of self-sufficiency was attained as a result of subsidized grain and fertilizers to producers. The extent of paddy land doubled as a result of investments in hydraulic works, an interest that had originated in the British period, which involved restoring ancient irrigation tanks in the North Central areas; constructing new dams in the South East (Gal Oya and Welawe Ganga); and finally, the large-scale project of organizing the Mahaweli river and its affluents.

The communal tensions that arose from the 1950s around development programs such as the Gal Oya scheme lend credence to the image of a partisan state. Later, the takeover of land from farmers of non-Sinhala communities in the Amparai and Trincomalee districts for sugarcane cultivation led to open hostility between settlers and other communities.28 Among the larger projects, the Mahaweli project stood out: It started in 1968 and aimed at irrigating 365,000 hectares of land in the dry zone and adding 500 megawatts of hydropower to the national grid.

The purpose of the project was not purely economic. The developmental discourse was enmeshed with nationalist underpinnings that emphasized the centrality of the Sinhala peasant, which became a “sublime object” in the popular ideology. 29 In the state ideology, development through irrigated agriculture achieved a prominent place: as a reincarnation of the ancient, indigenous and Buddhist culture of Sri Lanka’s golden age. The Minister of Mahaweli Development Gamini Dissanayake declared quite candidly in 1983, “The soul of the new Mahaweli society will be the cherished values of the ancient society, which was inspired and nourished by the Tank, the Temple and the Paddy Field.”30 This created the perception that the Sinhala peasant represented the authentic son/daughter of the land more than the urban worker did. Unlike the urban workers, the Sinhala peasants had no political party to represent their interests or fight for their rights. Unlike the Muslim or Tamil peasants, they had no party or union that would take up their specific problems. It was thus the state that would shoulder the responsibility of the peasant’s welfare.31

The actual dismantling of the welfare state occurred after 1977, when the United National Party government introduced a new economic policy based on economic liberalization and an export-led economy. However, only part of the welfare state package was dismantled. Although the health and education sectors were not seriously affected, a dramatic shift took place in the nature and emphasis of welfare policies. The most important change was that welfare was now targeted and selective rather than a right enjoyed by every citizen. Furthermore, while welfare expenditure was 10 percent of Gross National Products between 1970 and 1977, it fell to 4 percent in 1981. This drop was mainly due to the complete withdrawal of the food subsidy and to the reduction of consumer subsidies on certain products such as sugar and flour. Underpinning the overall strategy of international aid agencies was that food subsidies and welfare schemes were for the needy.

For the people of Sri Lanka, this meant privatization of public utilities such as transport and health care services. At the same time, there was an attempt to modernize the rural sector through social programs such as rural housing and electrification. For the poorest, the Janasaviya program, which was implemented from 1989 to 1995 following the food stamp scheme, provided a family allowance of 2,500 rupees combined with a self-help element. The emphasis of welfare had shifted. The purpose was no longer to provide social mobility, or even equal opportunities, but to give people access to the market. The Samurdhi scheme that replaced the Janasaviya program differed little from its predecessor and tended to display a similar political patronage. Unlike the early decades of independence, in which entitlements were directed in an implicit manner to differentiated communities, welfare schemes created other divides and spawned new identities based on economic factors that crisscrossed cultural identities. Concepts such as the “poorest of the poor” or “Samurdhi recipients” entered the political discourse as new forms of identification. They were, however, identities that people would not be proud to claim.

A Non-Participatory Citizenship

Partha Chatterjee has pointed out that the ideas of participatory citizenship that were so much a part of the Enlightenment notion of politics have fast retreated before the triumphant advance of governmental technologies that have promised to deliver more well-being to more people at less cost.32 In Sri Lanka, the dominant idea of citizenship, from its inception, was never conceived as an active political identity, nor was it conceived as a regime of participation in the affairs of the state.

A number of reasons can be adduced for this, among which the identification of the archetypical citizen with the paddy cultivator, a member of a depoliticized target group, is central. The fact that formal political groupings in the country appealed to cultural belonging rather than to common values meant that the emergence of a universal citizen was quite improbable. Even the Left fell prey to these politics.

The creation of nostalgia for a bygone age, where the peasantry was proud, prosperous and embodied all the values that the modern age has destroyed, is an ongoing process. This vision is still dominant in the state education texts read by children and parents in popular TV shows, advertisements and the speeches and policies of populist political parties, although proud peasants are today portrayed as a community in need of help. The idea of the citizen remains tied up in this representation of the Sinhala man as peasant, a vision that stemmed from its early framing as the “other” of the migrant plantation worker. Furthermore, the citizen is unambiguously a man, the woman being relegated to the role of mothering future citizens. The state’s refusal to conceive a form of citizenship that is not haunted by the past and shaped by myth has led to a complete rejection of alternative visions. Until the state conceives of a process of unlearning and forcefully unleashes it in the entire country, relations between communities will be plagued by prejudice and devoid of respect.

Culture and Territoriality/Spatiality as the Basis of Rights

Proponents of a federal solution to the national crisis often see the centralizing unitary state installed during late colonialism as the precursor and direct ancestor of the new independent state, flawed and partial to majorities.33 This paper argues that on the contrary, the colonial state is based on a tightly centralized conception of power but is nevertheless different from the new nation-state. It was not founded on a cultural understanding of territoriality; rather, it grew out of a new wave of thought influenced by the reformist political ideology of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, which promised to fundamentally change Britain’s relationship to its colonies.34 These philosophical abstractions were put into practice with the recommendations of a Royal Commission led by W.M.G. Colebrooke and C.H. Cameron, which the British Colonial Office deployed in 1829 to assess the administration of the island. The reforms that followed ended culturally-based administrative divisions in the country and placed the country under one uniform administrative unit. The model was clearly based on European states and the result was a homogenizing of the island’s territory by incorporating all differences into a single society and space.35 Thus, if the colonial state had, by various policies, contributed to strengthening differences between what they perceived as distinct cultural groups, a spatial division following such lines did not follow. As de Silva has succinctly summarized, “The pragmatic concessions they made to the demographic and linguistic diversity of the island were generally not embodied in administrative devices or structures.”36 One of the rationales for a looser understanding of territory was the wider circle of belonging constituted by the empire, which was promoted by various symbolic, as well as practical, measures. The empire was strengthened by celebrations of Empire Day, the renaming of streets and public spaces in the colony as well as a series of acts that reaffirmed the power of the empire; in 1905, if a Ceylonese subject posted a letter to any part of the British Empire except the Commonwealth of Australia, he or she would pay six cents for the stamp, while to Australia and all other foreign countries, the cost was fifteen cents, nearly three times higher. It was through such everyday acts and practices that the empire was made real for its subjects–rich, poor, colonized and colonizers.37

Furthermore, modernity in the colony came with a sense of outwardness rather than inwardness. This perception of the outside world was not limited to reaching out to the Empire at large but infused older currents with new energies. In the late 19th century, the awareness among Buddhists of a worldwide community of their co-religionists was sparked by the movement spearheaded by a lay preacher named Anagarika Dharmapala to protect and restore Buddha Gaya, the holiest Buddhist shrine. The Maha Bodhi Society established in that same year had a clear, pan-Buddhist approach. Dharmapala traveled the world to mobilize public opinion against the destruction of the holy site and even raised money from Buddhists of Ceylon and Burmese Buddhists to purchase the Maha Bodhi village at Buddha-gaya.38 Newspapers made frequent allusions to other Buddhist countries such as Siam.

People’s consciousness of being Buddhist in a modern world was shaped by the outwardness of it new bourgeois propagators, such as Anagarika Dharmapala, who traveled the country in an automobile to convey the message of Buddhism for the new age. Thus, the colonial state was not a closely bounded unit; it encouraged its subjects to feel for the empire but also allowed them to develop other supranational ties. This was also the case among Tamils in Jaffna who had close ties with Southern India through economic and cultural networks.

One can argue that the focus on culturally based territoriality by the principal minority group, the Tamils, in the 1950s and 1960s was largely motivated by the loss of specific privileges that Tamils had enjoyed in the colonial period. Language policy and colonization schemes were mainly how employment and development were bestowed upon members of the majority community.

In Sri Lanka, the term “colonization” meant the creation of agricultural settlements in the interior of the island. By the late 1960s, the government had alienated more than 300,000 acres of land to 67,000 people in major colonization schemes. The issue of colonizing of the Eastern and Northern provinces, with the alleged purpose of Sinhalising areas that Tamils perceived as their homelands, was an issue even before independence. In the language of the state, colonists were equated with the peasantry of the mythical Sinhala past while colonization was portrayed as a policy meant to redress perceived inequalities. Understandably, Tamil politicians did not partake in the enthusiasm for colonization. The Tamil Congress had made complaints to the Soulbury Commission as early as 1944 of Sinhalese settlements in Tamil majority areas in the Eastern province such as Gal Oya, Allai and Kantalai. Claims and counterclaims were made then and are still made with figures and maps to prove the growth of the Sinhala population in certain districts created by land colonization schemes. Tamil claims to a Tamil homeland were also made on the basis of their own ethnic myths.39

Colonization became a political issue for the Federal Party and eventually led to separatist demands. The state was aware of the problem: Both the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957 and the Senanayake-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1965 recognized the special rights of Tamils in colonization schemes in the Northern and Eastern provinces. Scholars disagree on the impact of colonization on the ethnic distribution of the Eastern Province. A comparison of the ethnic composition of districts between 1911 and 1981 indicates a marginal increase in the percentage of the Sinhala population in Northern districts and a marked increase of the Sinhala population in the Eastern Province. The colonization schemes of Weli Oya and Maduru Oya not only skewed the demography of certain areas in favor of the Sinhalas; their impact was further strengthened by the creation of electorates, such as the 1976 Seruvila electorate and Ampara electorate, to ensure that Sinhalese obtained representation in the Eastern Province.40 Clearly, the increase in the density of certain districts of Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Batticaloa and Amparai resulted primarily from the settlement of Sinhalese and their natural increase.41 Some scholars have argued that Tamil politicians had no right to criticize the settlement of Sinhala landless farmers in the Eastern Province when Tamils were free to settle in any province of the island and have done so. Few would contest that it would be unjust if the beneficiaries of state-sponsored colonization belonged to only one ethnic group. The exclusivist ideology that privileged one ethnic group in a particular territory–an ideology that has never been that of the state even in its most idiosyncratic incarnations–has not been similarly questioned since it means redefining the sacrosanct right of self-determination to include duties towards others.

In the last fifteen years, two important attempts were made to rethink the nation-state model and power-sharing between communities: the first was the passing of the thirteenth amendment or the constitution in 1987 under trying circumstances; the second was the attempt by the government of Chandrika Kumaratunge to introduce a draft constitution that would devolve considerable power to regions in a bid to solve the question of Tamil aspirations for security and autonomy. In both cases, however, the premise was the idea of carving the island along cultural lines and the assumption that only a territory based on self-determination would bring justice and security to minority groups. Although the thirteenth amendment and the 2000 constitution strove to give a constitutional response to Tamil demands, there were no attempts to change the vision of Sri Lanka as a land where clear-cut cultures coexisted.42

On 29 July 1987, President J.R. Jayawardene of Sri Lanka and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi of India signed an Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. This accord declared for the first time that Sri Lanka was a “multi-ethnic and multi-lingual plural society” and endeavored to provide an institutional framework for the power sharing between all communities in Sri Lanka.

The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, which was an integral part of this accord, was also the first significant measure to address the issue of the rights and grievances of a plurality of communities rather than of individuals or of a majority and a single minority. The distinct character of the Northern and Eastern provinces as “areas of historical habitation of the Tamil-speaking people” was recognized. According to the provincial council scheme still in force today, legislative and executive authority is devolved to eight provincial councils elected on the basis of proportional representation.

From the beginning, the provincial council system was in difficulty due to the opposition it met from both the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE), the dominant politico-military formation in the northeast that denounced the lack of real power devolved to the provinces, and the People’s Liberation Front (JVP), the radical youth movement in the South, which viewed the provincial councils as an imposed structure by an interventionist Indian government.43 When elections to the provincial councils were held in April and June 1988, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, the main opposition party, did not participate. Elections to the North Eastern Provincial Council were marred by difficulties owing to the LTTE opposition. Thus, due to historical circumstances, the provincial councils suffered from their very inception. The absence of compromise at the center contributed to further downgrading the powers of the provincial councils. Indeed, the constitution of the republic still affirmed the unitary feature of the state. The assumption was that the central government, dominated by the executive presidency, and the parliament were the prime actors in this framework.44

The state initiated the creation of provincial councils with little drive from the provinces. For the past two decades, they have been functioning nolo volo but are little more than institutions of political patronage. Partisan allocation of public resources and state intervention has paralyzed the provincial councils in the South. The central government, via a governor, has administered the North Eastern Provincial Council for the past ten years. The council was dissolved in 1990 after three years of functioning.45 The uncertainties in the peace process and the de facto LTTE control of large expanses of land in the North and East have given the state reasons to postpone the holding of elections.

In 1994, the United National Party lost the elections to the People’s Alliance, a conglomeration of left, left-of-center, and minority parties. One of the promises of the new government was to transform Sri Lanka’s 1978 constitution into a liberal-democratic constitution that would protect the freedom of the individual while recognizing community rights. Three types of reforms were apparent in the proposals enunciated since 1995–first, provisions directed at democratizing the institutions of the state; second, provisions to strengthen fundamental rights and the institutional safeguards of rights and justice in the judiciary; and third, provisions to increase the power-sharing mechanisms between the center and the regions and within the regions themselves.46 The idea was to solve all the problems in the South at once–corruption, poverty, lack of economic drive and inequality, as well as to draw a framework of power-sharing with the North and East. The proposals for constitutional reform released on 3 August 1995 redefined the nature of the state as a “union of regions” Sri Lanka was further described as a united and sovereign Republic.47

Deepening the process initiated with the thirteenth amendment, the draft constitution sought to give real power to specific communities by devolving power to all regions. This contrasted with the post-independence strategy of bestowing rights upon state-demarcated minorities. According to some authors, power-sharing constituted a paradigm shift.48 But it was also based on the perennial idea of regionally delineated cultural divisions as a basis for territorial delimitation and development.

It was no longer simply Sinhalese and Tamil territories that would be carved out, but smaller units such as the Western, Central, Southern, North Central, North Western and Sabaragamuwa Uva regions. The LTTE rejected the package of proposals in 1996. Anton Balasingham is reported to have stated they were “limited and inadequate, failing to address the political aspirations of our people.”49 In August 2000, the set of proposals further reconditioned and modified after extensive deliberations of a Parliamentary Select Committee were presented to Parliament in the form of the Bill to Repeal and Replace the Constitution of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka (Bill No 372). After three days of debate against it, the bill was indefinitely shelved with the dissolution of Parliament on 18 August 2000.50

Minorities in Majoritarian Regions

In the post-independence years, the state adopted the framework of entitlements for communities that had prevailed throughout the colonial modes of representation and gave it a new garb through the discourse of rights. The focus on rights in fact privileged the two larger communities, Sinhalas and Tamils. Caste in particular, as opposed to ethnicity, was not given acceptance as a legitimate sphere of political action and mobilization. There has been in fact a clear denial and delegitimization of caste-based discourses and practices against inequality and injustice even in the discourse of multiculturalism. The draft constitution that was put forward and then shelved constituted a bold attempt at a more sensitive approach to group rights.

Sri Lankan Muslims redefined their strategy regarding minority rights when the secessionist war began in the North and East. The displacement of large numbers of Muslim families and their relocation in refugee camps, the forcible eviction of Muslim communities by the LTTE from the North and the repeated massacres of Muslim villagers in conflict areas have created new tensions between Tamils and Muslims. The LTTE was responsible for four massacres of Muslims in the Batticaloa district between 1987 and 1990. The sense of insecurity among Muslims reached a climax when they made demands that went far beyond the rights discourse of previous decades. With the creation of a Muslim unit in the Sri Lankan armed forces and the arming of Muslim youth, the right to self-protection was a demand that could be read as a significant departure from the strategies of the earlier decades. Sri Lankan Muslims also redefined their rights with respect to the new constitutional schemes put forward after 1995. Muslim leaders were opposed to the idea of a merger between the Eastern and Northern provinces, which they believed would reduce their strength from thirty percent to seventeen percent, making them an “insignificant political minority.”51 The issue at stake today concerns the fate of minorities if power is to be shared between the two larger communities–Sinhalese and Tamils–on a purely territorial basis. Eric Meyer has shown that the distribution of communities varies from one region to another. He highlights three types of districts:

Areas with over 80 percent majority: the far north, Tamil majority; the farsouth, north central and central west, Sinhalese majority areas with approximately 25 percent minority population (national average): Colombo and surrounding areas and Kandy regions, Sinhalese majority with large Tamil and Muslim minorities; the Northwest and Eastern coast, Tamil majority with substantial Muslim and Sinhalese minorities areas with approximately equal representation between groups: the plantation district of Nuwara Eliya and the Trincomalee and Amparai districts in the east.52

Untouched by the complexity of the population distribution of Sri Lanka and by the overlapping of identities and cultural practices, Colombo-based think tanks continue to adopt a technocratic approach to the Sri Lankan conflict through an aggressive advocacy for a federal reorganization of the state. They are implicitly supported by the European Union, the United States, Norway and Japan, who see federalism as the crucial and dramatic political change that will bring about peace in the country.53

Minority communities today quite rightly fear the powers of a majoritarian state that moves unambiguously towards promoting Sinhalese culture and Buddhism while paying lip service to multiculturalism. The challenge today is to revitalize citizenship as an alternative to multiculturalism in a way that reaches further than legal rights and entitlements and within a state structure that recognizes multiple identities through multiple acts of identification. This would mean acknowledging the limits of pluralism by accepting the fact that all differences cannot be accepted and through devising criteria to determine what is admissible and what is not. Mostly, it means sapping the cultural exclusiveness of our schools, offices, clubs, associations and political parties. It means recasting our past and deeply probing pathways taken and pathways missed, while at the same time acknowledging that the past is the past although it permeates our present. “The past,” wrote Lefort, ”is not really the past until it ceases to haunt us and we have become free to rediscover it in the spirit of curiosity.”54 The graft of the past is not inevitable or embedded in unbreakable cement. It is important to read it anew and reinvent the present in the spirit of curiosity. Reconciliation does not simply signify dividing territory according to cultural identities with the view to devolve powers. Autonomy for the “other” is only part of the solution, as one can think sadly of two federal units, mirror images of each other, each practicing similarly exclusivist policies, each fostering dreams of authentic cultures and pure races. The focus on culture has disabled all other transformations that need to be enacted to create a better state. Devolving power is necessary, but a parallel strategy is needed, one that aims at radically transforming the existing state to ensure that common values of equity and justice for all its citizens are respected, and even more importantly, to nurture pride in cultural mélange and hybridism rather than in purity and authenticity of cultures.

NOTES

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” ttp://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html

2Seyla Bensahib, The Claims of Culture, Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4.

The advocacy campaigns of Colombo-based non-governmental organizations such as the National Peace Council, the Center for Political Alternatives and the Berghoff Foundation are all motivated by a single pedagogical aim, which is to spread the gospel of federalism among the Sinhalese majority population.

“UNP Manifesto,” (Public Record Office, Kew, CO 54/992/1).

Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (London:C.Hurst, 2006), 69-72.

Sri Lanka National Archives, Colombo, Lot 5/334.

Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons. Nationalism. Southeast Asia and the World (London:Verso, 1998), 36.

See Bensahib for a critique of Kymlicka’s multicultural citizenship. Kymlicka uses culture as “synonymous with ‘a nation’ or ‘a people’…that is, as an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history”; Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander, The New Social Theory Reader (London: Routledge, 2001), 235.

On the idea of race and political representation in the early 19th century, see Nira Wickramasinghe, Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Vikas, 1995), 1-28.

This period has been dealt with in the works of K.M de Silva. See K.M. de Silva, “The Formation and Character of the Ceylon National Congress 1917-1919,” Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies. 4 (January/December 1974); R.A. Ariyaratne, “Communal Conflict in Ceylon Politics and the Advances towards Self-Government,” (unpublished doctoral thesis, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University, 1973).

Nira Wickramasinghe, “La Pétition Coloniale. Objet de contrôle, Objet de Dissidence,” Revue historique de l’Océan Indien 07 (forthcoming).

SWRD Bandaranaike, ed., The Handbook of the Ceylon National Congress 1919-1928 (Colombo, Sri Lanka: H.W. Cave and Co., 1928), 39-47.

Ranajit Guha, Subaltern Studies VI: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 214.

Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, “Diaspora and Citizenship: Forgotten Routes of Identity in Lanka,” in Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora, ed. Bhinkhu Parekh, Gurharpal Singh and Steven Vertovec (London: Routledge, 2003).

Darini Rajasingham Senanayake, “Democracy and the Problem of Representation: the Making of Bipolar Ethnic Identity in Post/Colonial Sri Lanka” in Ethnic Futures: The State and Identity Politics in Asia, ed., Joanna Pfaff Czarnecka et al (London: Sage, 1991), 120.

Ibid., 119.

James Brow, Demons and Development: the Struggle for Community in a Sri Lankan Village (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996).

Rajasingham-Senanayake, 123.

Rajat Ganguly, “Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict: At a Crossroad between Peace and War,” Third World

Quarterly 25, no. 5 (July 2004).

Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993), 71.

Ibid., 76.

Laksiri Jayasuriya, Welfarism and Politics in Sri Lanka: experience of a Third World Welfare State (Perth, Australia: University of Western Australia), 2000.

See K.M de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (London: C.Hurst, 1981), 540-556.

“Report of the Special Commission on the Constitution of Ceylon,” (command paper 3131, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, Ceylon, Sri Lanka: 1928), 32.

Kandyan Peasantry Commission (report, Government Publications Bureau, Colombo: 1951), 75.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid., 5.

Yuvi Thangarajah, “Ethnicization of the Devolution Debate and the Militarization of Civil Society in North-Eastern Sri Lanka,” in Building Local Capacities for peace: Rethinking Conflict and Development in Sri Lanka, ed. Markus Mayer, Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, Yuvi Thangarajah (New Delhi: Macmillan, 2003), 24-28.

Slavoj Zizek, Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).

S.N. Tennekoon, “Rituals if Development: the Accelerated Mahaweli Development Program of Sri

Lanka,” American Ethnologist 15, no. 2 (1988): 294-310.

In general, the development of the agricultural sector slowed down after the 1980s. This sector represents today only one fifth of the GNP while only 38 percent of the active population lives off agriculture. There is in fact a dearth of labor in this field, which has been partly remedied by mechanization. Since the 1980s there has been a change in the structure of the economy, marked by a shift from agriculture to employment in industry and in the service sector.

Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed. Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 34.

See Rohan Edrisinha and P. Saravanamuttu, “The Case for a Federal Sri Lanka,” (report, The Center for Policy Research and Analysis, University of Colombo, Colombo, Sir Lanka: 1994); Ram

Manikkalingam, A Unitary State, a Federal State, or Two Separate States (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Social Scientists Association, 2000).

See G.C. Mendis, Ceylon under the British (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Apothecaries’ Co. Ltd., 1944); Colvin R. de Silva, Ceylon under the British Occupation, 1795-1832 (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Colombo

Apothecaries’ Co. Ltd., 1941-42).

Nihal Perera, Decolonizing Ceylon: Colonialism, Nationalism and the Politics of Space in Sri Lanka

(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 41-48.

K.M de Silva, ‘Traditional Homelands’ of the Tamils. Separatist Ideology in Sri Lanka: A Historical

Appraisal (Kandy, Sri Lanka: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 1995), 17.

Ferguson’s Ceylon Directory 1905 (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Ceylon Observer Press, 1905), 249.

Ananda Guruge, ed., Anagarika Dharmapala. Return to Righteousness: A Collection of Speeches,

Essays, and Letters of the Anagarika Dharmapala, Guruge (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Government Press, 1965), 615-626.

“Report of the Commission on Constitutional Reform” (command paper 6677, Ceylon, Sri Lanka: 1945), 47; G.H. Peiris, “An Appraisal of the Concept of a Traditional Tamil Homeland in Sri Lanka,”

Ethnic Studies Report 9, no. 1,(1991): 13-39.

C. Manogaram, “Colonization as Politics. Political Use of Space in Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict,” in The Sri Lankan Tamils: Ethnicity and Identity, ed. C. Manogaram and B. Pfaffenberger, (Boulder CO: Westview Press, 1994), 93-99; For a critique of this interpretation, see Patrick Peebles, “Colonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Dry Zone of Sri Lanka,” Journal of Asian Studies 49, no. 1 (February 1990), 30-55.

Peebles, 38.

International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Sri Lanka: The Devolution Debate (Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 1996); M. Somasundaram, ed., Constitution 2000:

Parliamentary Debates (Ethnic Affairs and National Integration Division, Colombo: 2000).

See Shelton U. Kodikara, ed., Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement of July 1987, (Dehiwala, Sri Lanka: Sridevi

Printers for the International Relations Program, University of Colombo, 1989).

Neelan Tiruchelvam, “The Politics of Federalism and Diversity in Sri Lanka,” in Autonomy and Ethnicity: Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-Ethnic States, ed. Yash Ghai (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 197-218.

For an insider’s view of the North Eastern Provincial Council, see Dayan Jayatilleka, The Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka, 1987-1990: The North-East Provincial Council and Devolution of Power (Kandy, Sri Lanka: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 1999).

Dinusha Panditaratne and Pradeep Ratnam, eds., Draft Constitution of Sri Lanka–Critical Aspects (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Law and Society Trust, 1998).

Tiruchelvam, 211.

Ibid., 210.

S.L. Gunasekere, A Tragedy of Errors. About Tigers, Talks, Ceasefires and the Proposed Constitution (Kelaniya, Sri Lanka: Sinhala Jathika Sangamaya, 2001), 45.

See http://www.priu.gov.lk/Cons/1978Constitution/ConstitutionalReforms.htm.

M.H.M. Ashraff, cit. in Jayadeva Uyangoda, Questions of Sri Lanka’s Minority Rights (Colombo, Sri Lanka: International Center for Ethnic Studies, 2001), 129.

Eric Meyer, Sri Lanka, Biography of an Island: Between Local and Global (Negombo, Sri Lanka: Viator Publications, 2003), 47.

Jayadeva Uyangoda, “Peace in Peril,” Frontline 23, no. 13 (14 July 2006): 10-13; “USAID, CPA Hold Symposium on Federalism,” TamilNet (6 February 2006).

Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1986), 123. Read more...