NEW
DELHI - While India is ready to enter into a "defense
cooperation agreement" with Sri Lanka, it is wary of
being drawn into any military involvement in the island
nation's two decades-old civil war that has seen violent
strife between ethnic Tamils and the Sinhalese majority
- leaving over 60,000 dead on both sides.
And
that explains the delay in the signing of a formal
defense agreement that was at the heart of Sri Lankan
President Chandrika Kumaratunga's four-day visit to
India recently.
According to Professor S D Muni,
South Asia expert at the Jawaharal Nehru University, the
two-year peace talks between Colombo and the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are stalemated. For that
reason, he said, Kumaratunga's government was keen to
beef up military preparedness with Indian support.
"The Sri Lankan government does not want to
initiate a conflict but would be interested in deterring
the LTTE from starting one. And the Tigers look as if
they are on the brink of launching another offensive,"
Muni told IPS.
Colombo held six rounds of talks
with the Tigers between September 2002 and March 2003.
But last April, the rebels abruptly pulled out of
negotiations demanding recognition, first, for the right
to self-rule before proceeding any further.
Kumaratunga's India tour preceded a three-day
visit to Sri Lanka by Norwegian Foreign Minister Jan
Petersen in a new bid to revive the peace talks that
were supposed to follow a ceasefire that Oslo
successfully brokered in February 2002.
Petersen
held discussions with both Kumaratunga and the reclusive
LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran in the rebel
stronghold of Kilinochchi without success, and chief
Tamil rebel negotiator Anton Balasingham and Norwegian
envoy Erik Solheim held closed-door talks at the
international airport late Saturday in an effort to keep
the salvage effort on track, diplomatic sources said.
But they, too, failed.
Colombo, too, seems to be
in an intractable position. According to former Indian
army general A S Kalkat, the difficulty for
Kumaratunga's government lay in the fact that the LTTE
had become a de jure power in the north and east of the
island and was running every aspect of civil
administration in the areas within its control.
A veteran of India's military intervention in
the Jaffna peninsula to help implement the 1987 Indo-Sri
Lanka Peace Accord - which ambitiously provided for the
disarming of the formidable LTTE - Kalkat said the new
defense deal would essentially be a reiteration of the
older one minus its military commitment.
Kalkat,
who currently chairs the independent US-based
International Council on Conflict Resolution, said
despite the failure of the Indian army to disarm or even
subdue the Tigers, India remained the only power capable
of influencing the course of the current peace talks.
"The Norwegians mean well but their role is
limited to that of honest broker and the LTTE is keenly
aware that they do not have the power [unlike India] to
underwrite any arrangement," Kalkat told IPS in an
interview.
In 1987, the Tamil Tigers reluctantly
accepted the peace accord under Indian pressure. Under
the accord, a new northeastern provincial council was
formed and the Indian army was deployed as peacekeepers
in the north and east.
However, differences
between India and LTTE soon surfaced and led to clashes
between Tiger guerrillas and the Indian peace keeping
force. About 1,200 Indian soldiers were killed during
this phase of the conflict. India had to pull back its
forces from Sri Lanka in 1989 following the election of
Ranasinghe Premadasa, a strong critic of Indian
mediation.
Last June, an international
initiative led by Japan to persuade the LTTE to come
back to the negotiating table failed despite an aid
package offer of US$4.5 billion. Japan's special envoy,
Yasushi Akashi, who called for tangible progress in the
peace process before the money would be released, came
back from visits to Colombo and Kilinochchi in early
November a frustrated man. He complained about the
"visible lack of progress" and reaching an impasse in
talks with both sides.
The Tigers' chief
ideologue, Balasingham, sniffed at the proposal saying
that "a solution to the ethnic conflict cannot be
predetermined by the resolutions or declarations of
donor conferences, but has to be negotiated by the
parties in conflict without the constraints of external
forces."
But there are strong hints in the
country that a new Indo-Sri Lanka defense deal could be
in the making. And this has already drawn protests from
the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) which was backed by
the LTTE in the April general elections held in Sri
Lanka.
"Tamils feel that the proposed defense
agreement between India and Sri Lanka would encourage
Sinhala rulers to prepare for another war abandoning the
current peace process," TNA member of parliament P
Sithamparanathan was quoted as saying in a statement.
She added that recent visits to the island by India's
top military brass including army chief General Nirmal
Chander Vij have "caused apprehension among Tamils that
preparations are under way for another war in the
island".
But Kalkat pointed out that India would
be ill-advised to be involved again, militarily, with
Sri Lanka if only because it still had to consider the
sentiments of 45 million ethnic Tamils in the Indian
state of Tamil Nadu - separated from Sri Lanka's Jaffna
peninsula by the narrow Palk Straits.
Apart from
the 1,200 Indian lives lost in 1987, the Indian
peacekeeping force was immensely unpopular not only in
Tamil Nadu and the Jaffna peninsula but also among the
Sinhalese majority who considered it a violation of
their country's sovereignty.
The best option,
now, under the present difficult circumstances is for
Colombo to do its own dirty work, although New Delhi can
always be counted on to render good neighborly help
because of the shared belief that religion, ethnicity
and language cannot be the basis for secession. In any
case, Kalkat puts it succinctly: "There cannot be a
military option to what is a political situation."
