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A long and winding road
By G H
Peiris
COLOMBO - Before heading off for Thailand
last week for the four-day meeting between delegates of
the government of Sri Lanka and of the Liberation Tigers
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a continuation of the peace
process that began with the December 2001 ceasefire in
Sri Lanka's secessionist war, Minister G L Peiris, head
of the government delegation, stated that the meeting
was "the second session of the first round of peace
negotiations".
He added that the meeting would
formulate a joint appeal for development assistance for
submission to the donor community, scheduled to meet in
Oslo next month. And, as the minister predicted, this
was largely achieved at the talks that ended on Sunday
in Nakhon Pathom on the outskirts of Bangkok.
Peiris added that the third session of the first
round is to be held in December 2002, by the conclusion
of which he expected the ceasefire agreement to have
been "consolidated". The second round of negotiations
will begin in January 2003 and will focus on "interim
mechanisms" - an interim administration for the
northeast, pending the final settlement of the ethnic
conflict. The third round, he speculated, would commence
in December 2003, and would deal with the "core issues"
of the conflict.
It is now 10 months since the
government and the LTTE decided to suspend the war and
usher in what has turned out to be the longest period of
peace the people of Sri Lanka have had since the
convulsions of July 1983. From mid-December last year,
there have been no mass murders; no political
assassinations; no attacks on economic targets.
The overall death toll of Sri Lanka's ethnic
conflict since 1983, placed at about 65,000, works out
to a daily average that approximates 10. By contrast,
since the beginning of the current year, the total
number of conflict-related deaths has been less than 30.
The innumerable barricades and checkpoints along
highways have vanished, and people in most parts of the
country move about freely.
Tamils in the north
buy essential consumer goods at normal prices, and have
access to basic services comparable to those provided
elsewhere in the country. Over 800 Tamils incarcerated
under the Prevention of Terrorism Act have been
discharged. About 30 "prisoners of war" have also been
released by the LTTE. Though the economic "peace
dividend" is yet to materialize, a trickle of foreign
investment has begun, and donors of aid have been making
hopeful signs. Tourists are back in fairly large
numbers. Colombo's tiny stock market is buoyant. The
city hosted the Asian Athletics Championship meet and
the International Cricket Council champions trophy
tournament in September - unimaginable even as recently
as a year ago. It is such considerations that provide
the most persuasive rationalization for the ongoing
peace effort and the most forceful impulses to ignore or
trivialize the illusions and risks these efforts so
obviously entail.
The illusions and risks are,
however, far more noticeable now than they were six
weeks ago, when direct negotiations between the
government and the LTTE formally began in Thailand.
Basic contradictions in the entire approach, ignored for
a time in the initial euphoria of peace, have begun to
affect public perceptions and impact on the negotiation
process. The difficulties of converting slogans and
cliches into concrete action have become increasingly
apparent. Divisions within the ranks of each negotiating
party have become more pronounced. And the opposition to
the peace process, though still fairly muted, has
gathered momentum, acquiring the potential capacity to
disrupt the entire process.
Perhaps the most
important contradiction in the ongoing peace process is
that, although one of the principal negotiators is
identified as the government of Sri Lanka, both in a
statutory sense as well as from the viewpoint of
political realities, the negotiations with the LTTE are,
in fact, being conducted by a section of the government
- the section headed by Prime Minister Ranil
Wickremasinghe. One cannot ignore the fact that
President Chandrika Kumaratunga - head of state, head of
government and commander-in-chief of the armed forces -
has remained outside the mainstreams of the peace
process, hardly ever consulted in the formulation of the
related strategies.
The LTTE allegation that the
president is attempting to sabotage the negotiations
lacks substance, but the presidential stance vis-a-vis
the negotiations has been incoherent and non-committal,
except by way of a barely concealed propagation of an
understanding among all concerned that, as leader of the
People's Alliance (PA), she would not allow her arch
rival Wickremasinghe and the ruling coalition (United
National Front - UNF) to make electoral gains from the
peace process.
In this context, a setback of
far-reaching consequence suffered by the UNF in recent
weeks is its failure at a constitutional curtailment of
the president's discretionary power to dissolve
parliament any time after the lapse of one year of a
general parliamentary election. Against the backdrop of
ongoing political changes in the country - notably the
declining cohesion in the UNF - one can no longer rule
out the possibility of presidential power over
parliament being exercised any time after December 5,
2002. In addition, this failure has prompted the LTTE to
raise doubts about the capacity of the UNF to convert
its negotiation pledges into necessary constitutional
reforms.
Yet another basic paradox in the
current peace process stems from the unavoidable
position of equality that needs to be accorded to the
LTTE in the negotiation procedures. That this is not
merely a problem of protocol has been evident all along
in matters such as the "most wanted criminal" status of
the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran in India, and the
status of the LTTE as a banned terrorist outfit in
several countries. This problem assumed sudden
prominence when, on October 31, while the negotiations
were proceeding in Bangkok, Prabhakaran was convicted
and sentenced (in absentia) by the High Court of Colombo
to 200 years' imprisonment for one of his alleged
innumerable crimes - the murder of 76 persons in the
bombing of the Central Bank at Colombo in January 1996.
Neither G L Peiris' prompt assurance that
Prabhakaran's conviction would not affect the peace
process, nor LTTE spokesman Anton Balasingham's polemic
that the government of Sri Lanka was guilty of more
serious crimes than the mere bombing of a central bank,
could detract from the fundamental dilemma stemming from
two considerations - the judiciary is an integral
component of the government engaged in the negotiations;
and the very same government is committed to upholding
the rule of law, and judicial decisions that flow from
that principle.
Sporadic violations of the
"Memorandum of Understanding" (MoU) - the formal
agreement between the Sri Lanka government and the LTTE,
signed in February 2002 - have all along posed a
potential threat to the peace process, and have tended
to escalate during recent weeks. There are several
possible explanations for the resulting deterioration of
the ground situation in the northeast.
Perhaps
the most plausible is that violations of the MoU by the
LTTE collectively represent a carefully orchestrated
plan by its leadership to evict government power and
authority from the northeast and make its hegemony over
that part of the country a fait accompli before
any serious negotiations commence.
A second
explanation could be drawn from the fact that the LTTE's
grip on the Eastern Province has always been more
tenuous than in the north, due mainly to the far greater
ethnic heterogeneity of the east. It is possible,
despite pretences to the contrary, that the brinkmanship
displayed by the Tigers in the east is directed from
their headquarters in the Vanni. Well informed observers
have also speculated that, conforming to the well-known
tendency for monolithic command structures of militant
groups to disintegrate, and for splinter groups to
emerge during moves towards appeasement, the LTTE
leaders of the Eastern Province (notably the hardliner
Vinayagamoorthi alias Colonel Karuna) are acting in
defiance of the Vanni high command in promoting
confrontation in their areas of control. In this
context, it is of interest that Karuna was incorporated
into the latest LTTE negotiating team in Thailand in
total disregard of the fact that he has personally
directed several civilian massacres in the east - one as
recently as 1999 in Gonagala, which involved the
mutilation and murder of 46 Sinhalese villagers.
The response of the Muslims to the ongoing
negotiations and to the intensifying political
turbulences in the Eastern Province (in which they
constitute slightly more than a third of the population)
is yet another problem that has acquired critical
significance in the past few weeks. The apparent
willingness of the UNF leadership to grant the LTTE a
position of eminence (if not of sole authority) in the
northeast has made the Muslim demand for an autonomous
unit of government consisting of the Muslim-majority
areas of that part of the country far more vehement than
it has ever been in the past.
The significance
of this is underscored by the fact that six out of the
total of nine members of parliament belonging to the Sri
Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) - a constituent unit of the
UNF - have embarked on a boycott of parliament in order
to press home their demand for an assurance from
Wickremasinghe that the interests of the Muslims will
not be placed in jeopardy in any compromise worked out
with the LTTE. This anxiety among the Muslims needs to
be understood within the context of their past suffering
at the hands of the LTTE, including several large-scale
massacres. It has been aggravated further by several
localized Sinhalese-Muslim clashes evidently instigated
by anti-government Sinhalese extremists. An SLMC
withdrawal from the UNF could eliminate Wickremasinghe's
majority in parliament and bring down his government.
According to Peiris, at least another year would
be required for the current negotiations to even
approach the core issues of the ethnic conflict. Why?
These issues and the related negotiating stands have,
for long, been well known. That being the case, what are
the changes expected between now and December 2003 that
would make mutual compromises and concessions easier?
Does the government expect an economic miracle, brought
about by an avalanche of foreign aid, to defuse economic
rivalries and tensions that impact on ethnic relations?
To reduce popular support for the LTTE among the Tamils
and/or weaken the secessionist cause? To increase its
own popularity in the Sinhalese segment of the
electorate and thus empower it to push through
constitutional reforms facilitating devolution of power
to the northeast? Alternatively, does the government
expect to strengthen itself militarily during the months
ahead so that, if negotiations on the core issues fail,
it would have the military capacity to crush the LTTE?
If this is the rationale that actually underpins the
existing timeframe of negotiation, then, surely, the
entire peace process could be heading towards a farce.
G H Peiris, senior professor,
University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and senior fellow,
International Center for ethnic studies.
Published with permission from the South Asia
Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism
Portal
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