The proximate cause that led me to write this article was a question asked by a friend of mine who earn his daily income by selling sundry items in Kandy pavement. He is known to me for almost 40 years as we were members of the same political party in the 1970s and 1980s. He has been always a careful observer of events that have been taking place in national and international political arena. His question reads like this: “Comrade, it seems that the LTTE will be definitely defeated in the military front soon. Since it has been a military-politico organization, I think it would weaken or even disappear with the military defeat. So don’t you think Sri Lanka’s situation in February 2009 would be similar to its situation in February 2002?” The question puzzled me, so my immediate response was: “what do you mean?” He explained: “In February 2002, you people described the Sri Lankan situation as ‘no war, no peace.’ I think in February 2009, we will be back at the same situation -‘no war, no peace.’” Although I did not have much to say responding to his observation, I found it was quite interesting and insightful. Are we back on square one? I thought that it would be pertinent to jot down my thoughts on this challenging question.

There would be many affinities between February 2002 and February 2009. In December 24, the LTTE declared unilateral ceasefire for a month to which the GoSL positively responded. In February 22, 2002, two contending parties, the GoSL and the LTTE signed a ceasefire agreement thus systematizing the informal agreement that was operative for two months. Many observers, Sri Lankan and foreign, portrayed this situation by using the phrase, ‘ No War [writ small], No Peace [writ large]‘. This description signified the transitional nature of the outcome of the signing of the CFA, meaning, that although direct military confrontation came to an end, the cause of the conflict remained to be addressed. The causes of conflict are not confined to the so-called root causes of the conflict but included multiplicity of grievances generated by the war situation. In other words, the wide spectrum of conflicting factors included immediate attendance to humanitarian issues to long-term issue of restructuring the Sri Lankan post-colonial state. Hence, the cessation of hostilities between two main contending parties were seen as an opening up of a new space within which deep-rooted and difficult substantive issues could be addressed and the humanitarian contingencies directly attributed to war could be removed. In February 2002, the Eelam War 3 between the GoSL and the LTTE was ended by the Sri Lankan government agreeing to bring in the main contending party, the LTTE, as an equal partner to conflict settlement process. It was anticipated that the two parties with Norwegian mediation and financial contribution by the donor community would be able sit and discuss substantive issues in order to come to an amicable settlement. However, the process failed to bring in expected results.

The situation in February 2009 would be at least at surface level quite similar. It is likely that the Eelam War 4 would be ended by the end of February 2009. So that, as in February, ‘No War [writ small] would be achieved but by different means. In February 2002, the war was ended by recognizing the LTTE as an equal partner in conflict settlement process and accepting that there was a territory controlled by the LTTE. This is consistent with the notion of power symmetry in classical conflict resolution theory. The situation today is however significantly different. The principal contending party is removed from the equation or its importance is substantially marginalized. Hence, this time war would be terminated by the removal of one party with the military victory of the other. However, the causes of conflict would remain unchanged after the end of the military conflict. Although, this result is not the outcome that the classical conflict resolution theory anticipate, the situation that would emerge is somewhat similar to ‘no war, no peace’ situation that existed in the post-CFA period. My situation analysis is summarized in Figure 1.                 

 

FIGURE 1

Comparing post-February 2002 and post-February 2009

Issue	Post-February 2002	Post- February 2009
1.     Relationship  between contenders	Making contenders (the GoSL and LTTE) partners of problem-solving	Removing the principal contender (the LTTE) from the equation through military defeat
2.     Direct Military Confrontation	Came to end through an agreement between contenders.	Came to end by defeating one party, the LTTE
3.     Outcome	No war, no peace; One part of the country was under the LTTE rule.	No war, no peace GoSL controls the entire territory.
4.     Causes of conflict	Remain unresolved	Remain unresolved
5.     How to address them?	Through negotiation with third party mediation	Still undecided. Possible mechanisms (a)   The wining party (the GoSL) deciding the agenda; (b)   The winning party in consultation with friendly Tamil parties setting the agenda; (c)    Setting the agenda in consultation with India as a third party; (d)   Both (b) and (c).

 

The orthodox conflict resolution theory and the policies based on it had failed to unleash processes making shift from ‘negative peace’ to ‘positive peace’. Signs were visible after the third round of talks in Oslo, Norway that the process was not moving ahead. Finally, the peace process collapsed although ceasefire prevailed until August 2006 and the party that signed the CFA was defeated at the Parliamentary election held in April 2004. The signing of the CFA definitely provided a new space, but the lack of political will, strategic action by the contending parties, especially the LTTE, the absence of human right protection attached to the CFA and total neglect of human rights violations by the GoSL, Norwegian government and many EU countries, the resistance of Sinhala extremism had contributed to the failure of the 2001 peace process (see for details, Sumanasiri Liyanage, One Step at a Time: Reflections on the Peace Process in Sri Lanka, Colombo: South Asia Peace Institute, 2008).  

Emerging scenarios and the way in which armed conflict would be ended soon have once again revealed the flaws of classical conflict resolution theory. It is difficult to argue that the space that would be created in post-February 2009 may be less conducive to addressing the issue of national integration and the associated economic, political, social and cultural grievances of numerically small nations and other ethnic groups. One may even argue that the removal of one extremist character (the LTTE) from the equation may even contribute to widening the space open for other characters. However, post-February 2009 situation may be more complex and the final outcome depends on the interventions of multiple agents representing different points in the ethnic and political landscape. The outcome in my opinion would depend on four variables that can be discussed separately although a degree of interdependence between them may be theorized. The four variables are:

1.     The relative independence and strength of Sinhala exclusive nationalist elements like JVP, NFP, Hela Urumaya and their front organizations;

2.     The relative independence and strength of the Tamil nationalist parties (TNA, TMVP, EPDP, PLOTE, Anandasangaree wing of TULF), Muslim parties and Malayahai Tamil parties;

3.     The strategic and instrumental rational actions of the SLFP in general and Rajapakse family in particular; and

4.     The Indian factor, (Indian elections and Indian international and regional policy priorities, Indian investments in Sri Lanka).

Many conflict resolution experts have already concluded that emerging post-war situation would be detrimental to a democratic solution and to the aspirations of the numerically small nations and ethnic groups as they have envisioned that post-war politics would be dominated Sinhala exclusive nationalist elements. While accepting the fact that Sinhala nationalist feelings would be encouraged by a military victory over the LTTE, I do not want to be a pessimist. There may be a significant section of Sinhala population who would not share Sinhala exclusive nationalism. So I envision if democratic forces in the country can organize themselves on clear social-democratic agenda and try to enter into a democratic front with non-exclusive nationalist parties mentioned above, the situation may be converted into a space that promote and facilitate more constructive outcome. The way in which the ruling party act would depend on the relative strength of and balance between the Sinhala exclusive nationalist forces and the democratic and non-exclusive nationalist forces. The latter would be able to receive the moral support of India whatever the outcome of the Indian elections.    

The writer teaches political economy at the University of Peradeniya

e-mail: sumane_l@yahoo.com

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End of January 2009. The political situation in Sri Lanka has seen considerable developments through 2008 and especially during the month of January 2009. The main focus today is the war against terrorism, also described as a ‘humanitarian’ mission, intended at defeating the LTTE and it military might. On the management of the military forces and elaboration of military strategy, the Sri Lankan government has achieved considerable feats, and has provided the political and military leadership required to the execution of successful military operations. As Austin Fernando, the former Defence Secretary under the Wickramasinghe government of 2001, notes in his recently published book (My Belly is White: Reminisences of a Peacetime Secretary of Defence. Colombo: Vijitha Yapa Publications, 2008), the mandate President Rajapakse received in December 2005 implied the popular will for a different, i.e. military strategy in dealing with the ethnic conflict. After three years in office, it is clear that the Rajapakse government has promptly executed this task.

The BBC Sinhala service reported on 27 January 2009 that Ranil Wickramasinghe, leader of the parliamentary opposition, commends the government on its unprecedented military successes. The Opposition Leader also mentions the importance of a political solution to the ethnic question in the post-war phase. This air of military successes is coincided by a strange phenomenon, which is extremely harmful to the very democratic principles upon which the state is founded: murder, assaults, abductions, beatings and imprisonment of journalists and destruction of media establishments. A look at the turnover of events in the last few months provides ample proof that the primordial ‘freedom of expression’ has been substantially challenged in contemporary Sri Lanka. Repeated attacks on the media culminated with the assassination of Mr Lasantha Wickramatunga, the Senior Editor of The Sunday Leader. This was preceded by an attack on the studio complex of SIRASA, one of Sri Lanka’s most popular television channels. Both Mr Wickramatunga and SIRASA’s news team share one feature in common. They constitute, together with others such as the editor of Ravaya, a segment of the media that strives to practice a form of journalism that differs from the state-owned media and other privately owned print and electronic media. As far as Mr Wickramatunga was concerned, he represented a clear voice of dissent, in an effort to bring the unsaid, inside story, place a contrary view and a view of dissent before the reader. Considerable criticism has been levelled against his reporting and his newspaper, and does not require further elaboration here.

Recent attacks on media personnel have resulted in the expatriation of several prominent journalists, which (unless they practice their profession from abroad) is a severe blow to Sri Lankan journalism. The latest victim of violence against media personnel is the Editor of Rivira, a Sinhala language newspaper. One of the main questions that the politically conscious Sri Lankan citizen ought to raise is: ‘what could be the basis of suppressing the media in the current political context?” Easy as it may seem, this turns out be a difficult question to answer.

Journalists have been attacked and murdered in many countries around the world, and all such attacks are marked by unresolved mysteries and underlying political implications. The large majority of journalists who suffered that fate have been those critical of governments in power. Investigative journalists are highly vulnerable. In the present-day Sri Lankan context, understanding the repression of the media requires some thought on the potential threats that the media could pose to the existing government.

In an article published in a blog (“Lakbima Blog: A voice of reason from Sri Lanka”) on 6 February 2008 on SIRASA’s news bulletin the author strives to demonstrate that SIRASA’s presentation of news is rather flawed and partisan. The arguments provided are indeed convincing, and it is not my intention to contest them. The key point here is that the news bulletin on SIRASA News 1st differs from that of other Sri Lankan TV channels. There can be differences in the importance accorded to daily headline stories, the manner in which they are presented, the extent of impartiality, and ‘inclusive’ coverage (i.e. covering news items that concern all segments of the polity, including the parliamentary opposition parties, smaller political organisations and civil society lobbies). Regular unbiased viewers of SIRASA News 1st may agree that it is somewhat futile to see a potential threat to the state in kind of journalism News 1st practices. The government of Sri Lanka has amply shown the extent of its military capabilities and its commitment to protect the interests of the Sri Lankan state, and a media organisation that practices a different type of journalism should not be deemed a challenge by a government of that nature. Popular criticism levelled at News 1st however shows that a contrary view is widely held by a substantial number of Sri Lankans today. Over the last few days, News 1st videos have virtually ceased to appear on free Sri Lankan video websites such as col3neg and srilankantube.

Concerning Mr. Wickramatunga, he was not only a practitioner of journalism of dissent, but also an insider into the Sri Lankan political sphere. It is indeed a possibility that his close political connections and his outright opposition of the state’s military strategy made him a potential challenge to the state. Once again, the state is armed with strong assets including intelligence services, and it cannot be justifiably stated that the state is incapable of protecting itself from any form of infiltration or conspiracy. Preventing journalists who are critical of a government and the dissenters from working freely is a blow to both freedom of expression and the peoples’ right for information.

One salient factor applies to both News 1st and journalism of dissent. In any democratic state, the presence of media that reports news in different ways and from different angles is an essential component of democracy itself. The presence of News 1st in Sri Lanka is essential, as it enables the television viewer to come across a reading of events that differs from that of the other media networks. It leaves him/her with not one, multiple possibilities of interpretation of an issue. The same applies to journalism of dissent, which focuses on portraying the unsaid story. This may cause challenges to a government in power, which can be met with legal measures, the development of transparency, and in more delicate cases (such as national security and defence-related matter), by the official exercise of censorship. Silencing journalism of dissent by violence and murder, and destroying the assets of media institutions with a difference does not resolve anything. It goes without saying that whoever is behind such acts is committing an extremely harmful deed upon the people of Sri Lanka. If such repression continues for a prolonged period, it is bound to produce a people and especially a younger generation incapable of critical thinking, logical reasoning, and immature to appreciate and debate opposite viewpoints. People should be given the opportunity to come across a wide range of print and electronic media with different readings of events. In Sri Lanka, this can extend from state owned media to and private media such as News 1st, and elements of dissent. This variety encourages the reader/viewer/listener to think hard, and formulate his/her own views, instead of being fed on similar news items with converging ideas. Agreeing or disagreeing with any viewpoint is up to each individual. The In this respect, the Lakbima blog mentioned above is in itself a positive factor, as it shows how the author has formulated his/her own view on News1st by a dose of critical thinking. This may no longer be possible for Sri Lankans if different and conflicting voices are prevented from being heard in the sphere of journalism.

As the state and its senior officials have repeatedly highlighted, the military offensives against terrorism are to be followed by a deeply involved effort in drafting a political settlement to the ethnic question. This involves a deep understanding of the genesis of ethnic unrest in post-1948 Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Tamil grievances and the political aspirations of all other ethnic and political groups. This alone would enable policymakers to draft a settlement that responds to the requirements of each group. This is bound to be a long and tedious process, and a settlement should be strong enough to prevent the rise of separatist militantism in future. A valuable lesson learnt from pre-1983 governments ought to be remembered here: any consistent and extensive solution to the ethnic question is bound to be opposed by different groups including those upholding a Sinhala nationalist discourse (which has now developed into an institutionalised element in Sri Lankan politics and tends to constitute Sri Lanka’s influential extrême droite). This can also be explained as an inherent inability and/or unwillingness to consider, understand and appreciate the point of view of ‘the other’. It is in this challenging context that the presence of different views in the media becomes essential. It enables the voices of people with different and conflicting views to be heard, resulting in a vibrant and heated debate on peacemaking in Sri Lanka. Terms such as ‘peacemaking’, ‘conflict regulation’, conflict resolution’ and ‘conflict transformation’ should no longer constitute the frequently used terms of diplomats and those working for NGOs and think tanks. As it is epitomised by the advent of citizen journalism, issues that concern Sri Lankans need to be dealt with by all Sri Lankans, and every voice counts. Every argument and counter argument is important, and provides invaluable food for thought for the popular debates on crucial issues. This makes it essential to provide the space for conflicting voices to emerge in all its forms of media. Preventing this will inevitably prevent crucial voices from being heard, and will in turn have a negative impact on policymaking including the search for a political solution to the ethnic question.

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The trick is to grasp the main needs of the present while being able to see into the future, with its problems and prospects, while being aware that the choices we make today, in the here and now, will determine the shape of tomorrow.

First things first: the Tigers have been almost completely overthrown and almost totally defeated, but not yet and not quite. The task is to stay focused and finish the job, resisting all external pressures from whichever quarter however exalted or powerful.

If the foot-soldiers of an army survive but not its General staff, it is almost impossible for it to continue to fight, but as long as a leader and his General staff survive, they can raise an army. Antonio Gramsci reminded us of this, with Napoleon Bonaparte as the classic example.

Velupillai Prabhakaran and his commanders are still alive, and as long as they remain so, they pose a deadly threat to the Sri Lankan state. The war can be said to have been won only when they are eliminated. That remains the task at hand.

The Tigers have a Plan A, B and C.

Plan A is to generate an international outcry which, together with Tamil Nadu pressure, will force a halt or slowdown of Sri Lankan armed forces operations, even if it does not result in their best-case scenario of a ceasefire and negotiations. The ludicrous but intentionally diversionary parallels with civilians in Gaza are best countered by reminding audiences that the Sri Lankan state is not preventing civilians from escaping the conflict zones, unlike the Israeli state which kept and keeps Gaza “an iron cage” or “open prison camp”, with its exits — barring the one controlled by Egypt — sealed off.  

Plan B is a sustained slow-burn guerrilla struggle in the Mullaitivu jungles, combined with terrorism in the urban centers. That is the Taliban strategy. This has dubious prospects given that the Sri Lankan armed forces won’t take their eye off the ball as did the Americans, and in any case, there are no Tora Bora mountains and a porous land border for the Tigers to escape into and across.  

Plan C, that of escape and re-entry, is best set out by the late Sri Lankanologist Prof Urmila Phadnis’ student Sudha Ramachandran writing in the Asian Times Online (Jan 27):  ‘Pro-LTTE sections of the Tamil Diaspora are in favor of Prabhakaran moving overseas, so that he can revive the LTTE from outside the island and “then strike at the Sri Lankan government at a time of his choosing to free the Sri Lankan Tamil people again”. It is expatriate Tamils who funded the LTTE’s war for the past several decades, fueling Prabhakaran’s dreams of setting up an independent Tamil Eelam and ignoring his at-times brutal rule over the Tamils. And it is this community that he can count on now to provide him with sanctuary overseas’.

 Sudha Ramachandran’s essay also hints, albeit unintentionally, at the downside of handing Prabhakaran over to any other country’s jurisdiction in the unlikely event of capture: “…Prabhakaran has been captured alive before. That was in Chennai (then Madras) in 1982, when he, along with a leader of a rival militant group, was arrested for exchanging fire on a busy street. The Sri Lankan government pressed India for his extradition and India agreed. But then things changed. Mass rallies organized by P Nedumaran, a Tamil nationalist who continues to be Prabhakaran’s most loyal supporter in India, opposed the deportation to Sri Lanka on the grounds that the two would be tortured there. The pressure worked. India said Prabhakaran would be tried here and stayed the deportation. He never was tried. Prabhakaran was granted bail, which he eventually jumped and went on to wage a deadly separatist war against the Sri Lankan state.” 

There is only one way to pre-empt these fallback options of the Tigers and their supporters, namely to crush all LTTE resistance, extirpate the LTTE’s leadership and annihilate its fighting cadre in the ongoing campaign in Mullaitivu and whatever un-liberated residue of Kilinochchi.

There are those such as the highly regarded General Kalkat who commanded the IPKF, who give credence to the guerrilla option. Talking to him, Kallol Battacherjee of The Week (India, Feb 1, 2009) retraces the important history of the decisive days in the IPKF-LTTE confrontation:

“Velupillai Prabhakaran was no mouse in October 1988. …The IPKF captured the land routes of the Tigers. Then they took Wanni, Jaffna and Kilinochchi. At Nitikaikulam, they cornered Prabhakaran. Sensing his end was near he turned tail and escaped through a 7km tunnel into a forest near Mullaiteevu. The Indian soldiers had it easy till then. But what followed was decisive, and still shapes India’s response to the Sri Lankan conflict. “The LTTE surprised the IPKF by booby trapping the forest near Mullaiteevu; they knew the terrain like the back of their palm and put up fierce resistance,” said IPKF commander Gen. (rtd) A.S. Kalkat. The Indian attack plan was to drive the Tigers from the forest, but Kalkat found that the forest was the Tigers’ best ally.”

What is Lt. Gen. Kalkat’s conclusion? “It is perhaps one of the most dangerous forests in the world and till the Sinhalese forces defeat the LTTE there, they cannot be called real victors,” Kalkat said. For him, the Sri Lankan campaign of 2008-09 is a copy of his campaign of the late 1980s. “The ultimate battle of the Sri Lankan army against the LTTE is yet to be fought”. 

This much is true, but the conclusion he derives or seems to derive, that the outcome is still wide open and victory is uncertain for the Sri Lankan forces, is unwarranted. It is unwarranted because Gen Kalkat tells the truth about Nithikaikulam and the IPKF experience, but not the whole truth.

I know, because General Kalkat used to report up the chain of command to general Suneet Francis Rodriguez, the Chief of Staff of the Indian Army who was in overall command of the IPKF operation, and while the Nithikaikulam battle was on, EPRLF founder-leader K. Padmanabha, Suresh Premachandran (deputy leader) and I were in General Rodriguez’ office, with its maps and scale models of the terrain. I was, of course, using an assumed identity.

The top brass was gung-ho. The IPKF Para commandos were going in after Prabhakaran, braving the booby traps and the claymores, and may well have got him — except that politics intervened.

As several top Indian personalities including Shri JN Dixit have disclosed, at the same time the IPKF jawans and the Para commandos were risking their life and limb, the RAW was in negotiation with the LTTE’s representative in Madras, Kittu. Those talks seemingly bore fruit, if fruit it was, in the form of a package deal which permitted the LTTE to keep a specified number (300, if I remember rightly) of automatic weapons including M 16s for the personal protection of the leadership, while it came into the mainstream of the Accord. It is possible that Kittu negotiated in good faith, not knowing the real thinking of Prabhakaran who kept his cards very close to his chest. It is also likely that the RAW negotiator (in charge of the Sri Lanka operation and named as such by Lalith Athulathmadali) was already in the LTTE’s pocket or was in the process of being ‘turned’ by the Tigers-something that was suspected only after the Rajiv Gandhi assassination a few years later, though it should have been suspected after EPRLF leader Padmanabha’s murder in Chennai in 1990, the year before Rajiv was killed by the same LTTE cell.

RAW chief Anand Verma took the Kittu deal to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and won over some top officials eager to secure the Tamil Nadu vote. Not everyone was that gullible in New Delhi and with the decision making circle divided and in deliberation, a compromise was struck: General Kalkat was asked to draw up encirclement - in the event, involving 5,000 troops. This delay in pressing home the advantage with the elite Para Commandos permitted Prabhakaran to escape, dig in and turn the tables eventually on the IPKF. This he did, not merely militarily but politically and psychologically.

JR Jayewardene was still Sri Lanka’s President at the time. Mr. Verma even flew to Colombo to persuade President Jayewardene to endorse a ceasefire with the LTTE but failed in his effort, with JRJ insisting on the total decommissioning of weapons.

Even if the Ravana-esque villain of the Indian re-telling of the IPKF tale, namely Ranasinghe Premadasa, had not been born, the IPKF would have been pulled out, because that was a solemn campaign pledge made, in order to win Tamil Nadu, by VP Singh, who triumphed at the general election.

This is why the IPKF analogy does not hold, though the Tamil Diaspora and Indian analysts may find some comfort in the thought that Prabhakaran will do to the Sri Lankan armed forces what he did to the IPKF from his redoubt in the Mullaitivu jungles. The IPKF was not motivated, there was political dissent in its rear, the institutions of the state were at variance, the standard armament of the infantryman was the ridiculous SLR (the FN rifle) pitted against the Tigers’ Kalashnikovs and M-16s (mostly purchased with RAW funds or procured through its channels, bypassing the procurement red tape which ensnared the IPKF), and there was hardly any use of tactical airpower-except on October 10th 1987, in Chavakachcheri, courtesy of the Sri Lankan side, a strike that injured Prabhakaran.

Of central importance is also the main goal and objective of military strategy. The IPKF had a wholly erroneous goal of pushing the Tigers to the negotiating table. It wasn’t even sure if killing Prabhakaran should be an objective, and it certainly wasn’t one held to consistently. In a brilliant piece of deception, the LTTE fed the RAW who fed the IPKF the nonsense that LTTE deputy Gopalaswamy Mahendraraja alias Mahattaya was a deadlier foe; more anti-Indian because he was allegedly “Naxalite influenced”, and should be eliminated so his baleful influence on Prabhakaran was ended. Rajiv Gandhi was victim of this utterly erroneous reading.

 

By contrast, this time the Sri Lankan government and state have political clarity and a unified will to win. This time, a gutsy Deputy Minister of Defense isn’t having to fight a war while recruitment is drying up due to a unilateral antiwar campaign (”Sudu Nelum”- White Lotus) spearheaded by  a fellow Cabinet Minister. This time the Sri Lankan armed forces have a clear objective: the elimination of the LTTE as a fighting force. This is as it should be, for General Vo Nguyen Giap has said that the goal of all military strategy should be the annihilation of the living forces of the enemy. The IPKF ignored this dictum.  

The Sri Lankan armed forces have none of the disadvantages and delusions the IPKF labored under. Therefore Prabhakaran cannot perform the same miracle of survival and recovery that he performed against the IPKF.

There is something to be wary of though. As the latest issue of Security Index, the premier Russia journal on international security, co-published by the Centre for Policy Studies, Moscow and the Centre Russe d’etudes Politiques, Geneva, says: “America’s serious mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan were not so much military as political, made well after the main stage of the military operation was over.” (Yuri Fedorov, ‘Black August or The Return of History’, Security Index, Winter 2008/9, p.95) 

This then is the category of mistakes Sri Lanka must avoid, and be conscious of as the victorious end of the war draws closer like the red sail of an incoming ship on the horizon, to use Mao’s metaphor. These were the mistakes of the Bush administration, and with our own version of the Republican neoconservatives, cultural warriors and religious right-wingers who determined and distorted US perspectives forcing a deviation from Realism, it is the kind of mistake we could easily make. Unlike the USA we will have no Barack Obama to redeem us from their consequences.

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New meters will monitor ‘patriotic TV watching’ by citizens

By Banyan News Reporters

Colombo, 15 January 2009.

The television remote controller poses a serious threat to the country’s national security, the government has determined. A new law will soon be introduced to register and regulate this electronic item.

The ubiquitous gadget helps unpatriotic persons to change the channel when matters of national importance are being broadcast on state TV channels. This, in turn, deprives the government its rightful opportunity to address and inform all its citizens, security advisors have pointed out.

There is also the possibility that terrorists or their sympathisers could use remote controller as a ‘weapon of mass distraction’, to keep citizens uninformed or misinformed about the government’s resounding military victories in the North.

“As a responsible government firmly believing in our right to inform the people, we must ensure that every citizen is reached. At this turning point in our history, we cannot allow subversive technologies to undermine the great strides we are making against terrorism, corruption and poverty,” said Lackeyman Horagulla, head of the National Centre for Media Security.

The new law, to be brought in under Emergency Regulations, will require all households to register their remote controllers with the nearest police station. At registration, a microchip is to be embedded in each unit with a unique code number. With remote electronic surveillance, the authorities will be able to determine which TV channel is being watched in any household at any given time, and how often channels are changed.

“We want the process to be as non-intrusive as possible,” Mr Horagulla explained. “We have no wish to enter any houses and disturb people. We just want to make sure that everyone watches Rupavahini or ITN or at least the other patriotic channels when critical information is being transmitted. We must educate our people.”

The government had earlier considered acquiring sophisticated equipment that can over-ride any terrestrial TV channel and forcibly impose state-sanctioned content. However, this course of action was not pursued as it could lead to protests of interference and was likely to be challenged in Supreme Court by some private channels.

Monitoring household patterns of channel surfing would help achieve the same result at a much lower cost and with no legal complications, security analysts noted. State TV channels would soon be showing guidelines on patriotic television viewing, especially when news and current affairs programming is being broadcast.

Senior officials at Rupavahini and ITN denied that they recommended this action due to their consistently dismal audience ratings and declining advertising revenue. “We are proud to be the nation’s official channels and do not consider we have any real competition in being the patriotic voice of our political masters,” they added.

They privately acknowledged, however, that all their attempts to discredit their main rival channel had failed to work. Over 40 per cent of the entire country’s TV audience remains fiercely loyal to the People’s Channel. This includes many of its vocal (’patriotic’) critics who watch it secretly.

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It looks like one of the more winnable conflicts in an age of the global ‘war on terror’. The Sri Lankan government appears to be on the brink of announcing victory in its drawn-out battle against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The armed separatist group, listed as one of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups, has fought successive Sri Lankan governments for over a quarter of a century in the guise of liberating the island’s Tamil community from a state that has increasingly marginalised linguistic and religious minorities. However, the question remains as to whether the victory would be pyrrhic when finally manifest, consolidated on irreparable damage to the county’s increasingly fragile democratic institutions and centuries-old multicultural, multi-religious and hybrid social fabric.

Several conflicts have been assimilated to the global ‘war on terror’ in the aftermath of 9/11 and the United States-led global ‘war on terror’ that casts a long shadow in South Asia. In 2006, the conflict in Sri Lanka was officially renamed a ‘war on terror’ after a highly internationalised Norwegian-brokered ceasefire agreement collapsed. Prior to that, the past quarter of a century of violence punctuated by three abortive peace processes, was known as an ‘ethnic conflict’ or a ‘liberation struggle’, depending on the perspective. The current government has worked hard to portray its battle against the LTTE, now in its final stages, as a ‘war on terror’. This time the top priority is to recapture the island’s northeastern territories controlled by the LTTE’s quasi-state, and the LTTE leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, who is also wanted by India for assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

One is familiar with the adage ‘one man’s terrorist is another’s liberation fighter’, a phrase that was common in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America during the era of post-colonial struggles for self-determination and independence from European empires. The Sri Lankan government also terms the current bid a ‘humanitarian war’ to liberate innocent Tamil civilians from the grip of an organisation that has held people as a buffer and human shield to deflect the onslaught of the military and air force. On the other hand, the LTTE claims that it is seeking to liberate Tamil-speaking people from the abuse and humiliation meted out by the post-colonial state dominated by the majority Sinhala community. There is good evidence to suggest that minority communities in Sri Lanka have had a raw deal in the form of discriminatory policies on language, education, land settlement and development. There have also been episodic riots and pogroms against minority Tamils and Muslims since independence in 1948.

Clearly the conflict in the island is complex and it is necessary to look beyond the blame game between the two principle protagonists and the gloss of the ‘war on terror’ to seek sustainable solutions. After all, sustainable peace would need to be based on an analysis and address of the root causes of conflict. In the case of ethno-nationalist guerrilla movements such as the LTTE, once a group loses territory, it may melt into the people and return years or decades later to fight, if the root causes of the conflict are not addressed. Several long-term, low-intensity conflicts that predate the global ‘war on terror’ in South Asia make this apparent.

 

Democracy as Collateral Damage

At independence from Britain in 1948, the prognosis both for democratic governance and development in the island nation then called Ceylon was generally rated excellent. Sri Lanka was considered a ‘model democracy’ with an established record of peaceful co-existence between diverse ethnic and religious communities until the armed violence erupted in the early 1908s. Its social indicators (literacy, health and education), were the envy of much of the developing world in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, and they remain the best in South Asia.

Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen was fond of referring to Sri Lanka and its particular development model and trajectory as an ‘outlier’ because of high levels of social development despite relatively low per capita income. Later it was expected that the island, given its size and ethno-religious mix, would develop like Singapore rather than Malaysia which was seen to have an uneasy ethnic peace [1]. Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore was indeed the role model for the J. R Jayawardena regime in the late 1970s and 1980s. However, somewhere along the way, the country’s politicians and policy-makers seemed to lose the plot and were subsequently ambushed by the LTTE, which in its early days was funded by India’s intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), during the period of proxy wars of the Cold War. Although the LTTE was started locally in the late 1970s to secure the rights of a minority marginalised by the state, it subsequently morphed into one of the world’s most ruthless terrorist groups.

After the ethnic riots of 1983 which may be better described as a pogrom, the LTTE grew exponentially. A quarter of a century of violence killed over 70,000 people, mainly in the north and east of the country, and displaced between 5-10 percent of the island’s 20 million people. The LTTE forcibly evicted the Muslim minority population from the northern Jaffna Peninsular in 1990, claiming they were a security threat to the Tamil homeland. A significant number of Tamils displaced in the conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE have formed a powerful disapora in North America, Europe, Australia and parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia, and from afar, they have contributed to sustain family members and communities as well as subsidise the conflict in their homeland. It was largely with the funds generated from the diaspora that the LTTE was able to run a de facto state for almost a decade in the northern and eastern parts of the country. However, its territory has been slowly but surely retaken by the ongoing military offensive of the government to ‘liberate’ the Tamil people. 

It was against this backdrop that the first week of 2009 saw the fall of the capital of the LTTE’s de facto state in the north of the country. A few days later, troops gained control of the Elephant Pass base and the A-9, the main trunk road that links the southern capital, Colombo, to Jaffna, the cultural capital of Sri Lanka Tamils. Celebrations were held throughout the country while government institutions hoisted the national flag. The capture of the LTTE’s capital was termed ‘an incomparable victory’ and the President used the rhetoric of the ‘war on terror’: “What our heroic troops have achieved is not only the capture of the great fortress of the LTTE, but a major victory in the world’s battle against terrorism”.

For 23 years, parts of the A-9 highway had been controlled and sealed off by the LTTE. The securing of the highway means that travel between Jaffna and Colombo would no longer need to be by sea or air and would bring down the cost of living in the Jaffna peninsular. The Sri Lankan government also plans to roll out reconstruction and development plans for Kilinochchi, now a ghost town vacated by civilians fleeing the military onslaught and air force bombing campaign to dislodge the LTTE from bunkers dug deep in the earth. Simultaneously, the first two weeks of 2009 saw a dramatic rise in refugees arriving in South India. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only humanitarian organisation operational in the conflict areas, 200,000 people have been displaced.

It is axiomatic that, as externalised threats are perceived and nations go to war, civil liberties and rights in the domestic sphere are eroded. This phenomenon was observed by Max Weber, a founding father of the discipline of sociology. Within days of the celebrations following the capture of LTTE’s de facto capital, one of the island’s leading journalists, Lasantha Wickrematunge, Editor-in-Chief of the Sunday Leader newspaper, a liberal anti-establishment paper known for exposing corruption and nepotism in the state apparatus, was assassinated in broad daylight in Colombo. At his funeral, where thousands gathered, an effigy of the Sri Lanka’s President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, was burnt. The slain journalist’s funeral was attended by political leaders, media representatives, civil society organisations and senior foreign diplomats in Colombo. The slain journalist, who was also a lawyer, had penned his own obituary three day’s before his assassination: “And then they came for me”, naming in all but words his killers. His final editorial published posthumously which has come to be known as the ‘letter from the grave’ constitutes a powerful indictment on the regime that would be hard to shake off in a country where astrology, the symbolic and uncanny, carries significant weight in politics. Minimally, the state is accused of promoting a ‘culture of impunity’ that has rendered Sri Lanka ‘one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists’ according to the organisation, ‘Reporters without Borders’. In the past two years, at least eight journalists have been killed in the country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

As the war (including an information war) has escalated, the phenomenon of extra-judicial killings has risen. Wickramatunge’s assassination was in the wake of a series of killings and intimidation of journalists and lawyers, and attacks on independent media institutions in the south. A few weeks earlier, the largest independent television station in the capital, MTV, criticised by segments of the state of being unpatriotic, was attacked by a masked gunman in a city teaming with security forces. A few months earlier, the house of a leading lawyer and head of Transparency International, Sri Lanka, who had appeared in several fundamental rights cases, was struck by grenades. In August 2008, Sri Lanka lost its seat in the United Nation’s Human Rights Council and has since turned down several requests of the United Nations Human Rights Commission to set up an observer mission to monitor the situation in the country.

 

Needed: An Exit from Violence

Implicit in renaming the conflict in Sri Lanka a ‘war on terror” is the suggestion that the current war is a ‘just war’, which has elicited considerable support from members of the international community engaged in the global war on terror. The challenge of war, be it a ‘just war’, ‘humanitarian war’, a ‘war on terror’ or even an oxymoronic ‘war for peace’ is to avoid destruction of the lives, institutions, values and ideals sought to be liberated or protected. The LTTE, which began as a movement for the rights of a minority community against state discrimination, over time morphed into a self-sustaining war machine that has sapped the strength of the very community it sought to protect. During the decades of conflict, there have been several rounds of negotiation with the assistance of the international community. However, the LTTE has failed to grasp the opportunity to negotiate peace for the war wary and depleted population that it seeks to ‘liberate’.  

The armed group has been, for some time now, fighting a war of diminishing returns. The globally networked organisation, which draws support from a significant diaspora in North America, Europe and Asia, has been banned in many countries. Likewise, successive regimes in Sri Lanka have periodically used an emergent ‘war economy’ to benefit from violence, while extended periods of Emergency Rule has seen the attenuation of the rule of law, while a growing culture of impunity has stymied investigation of grave human rights violations, corruption, and rent-seeking behaviour by state actors, non-state actors and paramilitaries. Hence the conflict has been also referred to as a ‘dirty war’. Over the two and a half decades of conflict, a variety of politicians, members of the defence industry and paramilitary groups had acquired illegal personal profit and political power as the economy periodically morphed into a ‘war economy’. Sri Lanka seems to be in the midst of one such cycle. At the same time, the regime may be increasingly dependent on the use of majoritarian nationalism and the militarisation for survival, given the soaring cost of living with one of the highest inflation rates in South Asia. Sri Lanka has the largest defence budget in South Asia in percentage terms. At the November 2008 budget, President Rajapaksa, who is also the Minister of Finance and whose brother is the Minister of Defence, promised to raise defence spending by seven percent to a record US$1.6 billion in 2009, according to figures presented to the Parliament.

In his inauguration speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt remarked, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”. Naming a complex conflict such as Sri Lanka’s ‘war on terror’ may be counterproductive. Indeed as John Sidel, a specialist on Indonesia noted in his book, “Riots, Pogroms, Jihad”, that since 9/11 an industry of terrorism experts has reframed diverse types and forms of complex political conflict in South Asia and Southeast Asia. To call Sri Lanka’s complex conflict simply a ‘terrorist war’ or an ‘ethnic conflict’ is to get history and indeed geography wrong. For it is necessary to talk of state terrorism in the same breath, as the LTTE is no doubt vicious terrorism which has included violence against the very community it seeks to liberate, including the assassination of those who do not agree with it, recruitment of women and child soldiers, and perfecting the suicide bomb.

There is little doubt that the LTTE engages in terrorist acts and combating it requires special measures. However, renaming Sri Lanka’s complex conflict a ‘war on terror’ may leave little space for the reasoned analysis required to understand and address the root causes of the conflict so as to ensure a lasting political solution that would underwrite sustainable peace. The quarter of a century-long conflict in the country cannot be solved by military means alone. It would require a political solution that ensures power-sharing with the minorities in the north and east. Otherwise the LTTE would very likely regroup and return to fight another day, as has occurred in the past. However, because the current regime in Colombo has key nationalist parties as its allies, it seems unlikely that it would be able to deliver a genuine power sharing package at this point in time. The All Party Representatives Committee, convened almost three years ago to formulate a political solution, has yet to deliver a solution acceptable to all Sri Lankans, particularly the island’s minority communities.

 

Epilogue

Arguably, it was in recognition of the collateral damage that the global ‘war on terror’ inflicted on democratic rights, values and the rule of law that United States President Barack Obama, in his inauguration speech, signalled a change in strategy and method to deal with threats to peace, “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake”. The global ‘war on terror’ may no longer be expedient for states that are required to address complex domestic identity conflicts through genuine power sharing agreements.

 

References

Horowitz, Donald, 1989, “Incentives and Behaviour in the Ethnic Politics of Sri Lanka and Malaysia”, Third World Quarterly October, 1989.

Sen, Amartya, 1993, “Capability and Well being” in The Quality of Life. Amartya Sen and Nussbaum, Martha C. eds. Oxford. Clarendon Press.

Sidel, John, 2007, “Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia”. Cornell University Press.

 

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[1] Sri Lanka’s success was often posited in comparison with Southeast Asia’s emergent nations. Thus Donald Horowitz stated in a retrospective on Sri Lanka that “any knowledgeable observer would have predicted that Malaysia was in for serious, perhaps devastating, Malay-Chinese conflict, while Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) was likely to experience only mild difficulty between the Sinhalese and Tamils” (1993, 1).  

 

 

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