SriLanka: From Tamil typewriters to Sinhala helicopter gunships

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From TamilCanadian

URL: http://www.TamilCanadian.com/

Article URL: http://www.tamilcanadian.com/pageview.php?ID=4196&SID=547

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Politics: From Tamil typewriters to Sinhala helicopter gunships

Source: Northeastern Monthly - July 2006 By: Dr. S. Sathananthan

The Norwegian head of Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission (SLMM) Major General
Trond Furuhovde (retd.) alluded to the Sinhala leaderships incapacity to
understand realpolitik a few weeks before the February 2006 Geneva Talks:
the Government of Sri Lanka, he wrote, must accept things which in
principle it dislikes. (TamilNet, 30/jan/06) There are two benchmarks that
perhaps best illustrate Sinhala leaderships inability to do this. In 1958
the Sinhala government enacted the Official Language (Special Provisions)
Act prodded by protests of Tamils against the acutely discriminatory
legislation imposed two years earlier that made Sinhala the sole official
language and effectively relegated the Tamil people to second-class
status. The pivotal provisions of the Act require the state to either
communicate with Tamil-speaking persons in the Tamil language or attach
Tamil translations to all its Sinhala language communications with Tamils.

Even this meagre relief turned out to be eyewash. Tamil-speaking persons
continued to receive official documents and communications in the Sinhala
language without Tamil translations. Many non-violent Tamil activists
challenged this blatant infringement of Tamils linguistic rights in the
1960s, more than a decade before the LTTE was born. The response of
Sinhala politicians and liberals can only be described as duplicitous;
Ceylon, they alleged, is a poor country and its government has difficulty
fully implementing the Act because it lacks financial resources to buy
sufficient Tamil typewriting machines! By the 1990s, the gross and
systematic violations of their national including linguistic rights and
discrimination in employment by the Sinhala state catalysed the
transformation of Tamils non-violent agitation into widespread armed
resistance, with the LTTE as its cutting edge.  Ironically the same but
more impoverished Sinhala state began purchasing infinitely more costly
helicopter gunships and multi-barrel rocket launchers to pursue the armed
conflict with the LTTE-led Tamil National Movement.

But like its predecessors the current Sinhala government too seems to
learn nothing and forget nothing. For example, Tamil medium schools in Sri
Lanka have been receiving circulars and other official documents from the
Central Ministry of Education in Colombo in Sinhalese language only. No
translation is provided because 99% of clerks in all eighteen branches of
the Ministry of Education are Sinhalese (TamilNet, 23may06). The present
Sinhala refrain is that the state is short of money and so it cannot hire
clerks who are native Tamil-speakers! But the same state is seeking 60
million dollars worth of urgent military supplies from Pakistan (Daily
Mirror, 7/jun/06)!

In his address to the American Chamber of Commerce, Colombo, the US
Assistant Secretary Richard A. Boucher suggested to President Mahinda
Rajapakse's government that Tamils can be assured of their right to use
their language and provided with equal opportunities in public and private
sector employment (US Dept of State, 1/jun/06). Evidently he grossly
overestimates the Sinhala leaderships atrociously poor grasp of elementary
realpolitik the wisdom of yielding gracefully that which is unwise to hold
by force.

The late leader of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK), S.J.V.
Chelvanayakam, had commented five decades ago, in 1958, on the Sinhala
leaders woeful ignorance of realpolitik. The agreement he concluded with
the then Sinhala Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike  the
Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam (BC) Pact  envisaged the creation of
rudimentary district councils in Tamil-majority northern and eastern
districts with far less powers than existing municipal councils. But the
proposed elementary decentralisation of authority was too much for Sinhala
chauvinists. Immediately after Sinhala politicians unilaterally abrogated
the Pact, Chelvanayakam reportedly told them: today you refused to yield
our modest demands; the next generation (of Tamils) will take a lot more
from you. It is said the Sinhala leadership at that time found his
prophesy amusing!

Perhaps the co-chairs (US, EU, Norway and Japan) of the donor consortium
resorted to realpolitik when they individually and collectively delivered
three statements: by the EU on 29 May, the co-chairs on 30 May and by the
US on 1 June 2006. The Sinhala-controlled press played up the EU
statement, which proscribed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE),
to claim the governments campaign to further internationally isolate the
organisation has been a resounding success and it also highlighted
selectively the strictures against the LTTE in the three statements. They
restated well-worn demands that the organisation must renounce terrorism
and violence, respect democratic rights and negotiate a political solution
within a united Sri Lanka; and reiterated the warning that the LTTE will
face further isolation if it fails to meet the demands. Sinhala
politicians issued exuberant press statements relishing what they alleged
is the victory of Sinhala character over machinations by cunning
foreigners and white tigers (Norwegians). There was plenty of backslapping
over how they pitted the co-chairs and, by extension, the international
community against the Tamils; and some of them began hallucinating a
military victory over politically weakened LTTE.

The public bravado provoked the Dutch ambassador in Colombo. He warned: I
dont think this message [in the co-chairs statement] is well understood so
far, because I dont see it in any headline. I mean if you say the
international community would diminish international support, the headline
would be Sri Lanka on the brink of war and of being internationally
marginalized. That is part of the statement which we feel is just as
important as, or even more important than the listing of the LTTE (Daily
Mirror, 2/jun/06).

The co-chairs appear to be creating the impression they expect reciprocity
from the Sinhala government in return for coming down hard on the LTTE. In
their 30 May statement (The Morning Leader, 31/may/06), they explicitly
recognised the Tamil and Muslim peoples of Sri Lanka have justified and
substantial grievances that have not yet been adequately addressed. They
encouraged the government to further develop concrete policies for
addressing the grievances of minorities and to show that it is ready to
make the dramatic political changes to bring about a new system of
governance according to the basic principles enunciated during the
successful period of negotiation in 2002-2003. They include the commitment
by the government (and LTTE) to explore a solution founded on the
principle of internal self-determination in areas of historical habitation
of the Tamil speaking people, based on a federal structure within a united
Sri Lanka in the December 2002 Oslo Statement.

Boucher seemed to warn Rajapakse that Americas pro-government policy could
change. He emphasised, the government should provide a positive vision to
Tamils and Muslims of a future Sri Lanka where their legitimate grievances
are addressed and their security assured. At a subsequent press conference
he did not mince words. Tamils, he asserted, have a very legitimate desire
... to be able to control their own lives, to rule their own destinies and
to govern themselves in their own homeland, in the areas theyve
traditionally inhabited (TamilNet, 4/jun/06).

A Tamil peacenik weighed in on the side of the co-chairs. He lamented the
lack of strategic objective on the part of the government as far as
conflict transformation is concerned (TamilNet, 14/may/06). A Sinhala
peacenik prescribed: the only logical step to be taken is to strengthen
the CFA and work towards a negotiated solution (Sunday Observer, 30 April
2006).

But even the proverbial child knows the Sri Lanka Constitution will not
permit any devolution of power whatsoever. Constitutional amendments to
facilitate devolution  assuming the unlikely theoretical prospect where a
Sinhala leader may wish to introduce them  would not see the light of day
because Sinhala chauvinists who control government will deny the necessary
two-thirds majority votes in parliament and torpedo approval in a
referendum. No dramatic political changes are at all possible and the
co-chairs must surely be aware of this. It follows that the co-chairs must
definitely know  Tamils already do  that the Sinhala leadership strapped
in the constitutional straightjacket and steeped in the Sinhala-extremist
Mahawamsa mindset cannot and will not permit anything remotely resembling
a viable political solution to emerge through the so-called peace process.
The government does have a strategic objective, which is a final military
solution. The 2002 Cease Fire Agreement (CFA) therefore is an irrelevant
pantomime.

What lies behind the co-chairs apparent censure of the hound (Sinhala
government) while seeming more determined to run with the hare (Tamil
people)? Obviously they cannot expect Rajapakse to make a U-turn, to come
up with a political solution that recognises Tamils homeland and national
rights. What then is the co-chairs hidden agenda for the peace process?
What could be the Machiavellian logic behind their robust call for a new
[federal] system of governance that they know is patently impossible?

In all probability the co-chairs are fine tuning their counterinsurgency
strategy, by conjuring the illusion that the government would respond to
pressure they exert and cough up a political solution. That fits nicely
with the demand by the EU parliament that LTTE must decommission weapons
as a pre-condition for negotiations: its 17 May Resolution urgently calls
on the LTTEto be prepared to decommission its weapons and to set the stage
for a final political settlement of the conflict (Clause 2).

Second, the co-chairs must also be aware that by purveying the illusion of
an imminent political solution they are colluding with the Sinhala state
to legitimise its armed aggression on the spurious grounds that the
governments offer is virtually at hand and LTTEs intransigence leaves the
state no option but to mount military offensives to crush the
organisation. The then President J.R. Jayewardene was the first
practitioner of this grotesque strategy, of course in the name of peace,
in the mid-1980s.

Third, they may be hoping Rajapakse, acting directly or through his All
Party Conference (APC), would dredge up a solution  any solution  which
the co-chairs could unilaterally endorse and present to the LTTE as a fait
accompli. An alternative approach could be for the government to induce
so-called democratic (quisling) elements among Tamils to ratify the
solution and impose it at the point of a gun.

These three aspects of counterinsurgency dovetail neatly with the
co-chairs rediscovery of the wheel, that Tamils have grievances. They are
of course not acting out of sheer altruism  that shimmering bubble burst
long ago. Their evident objective is to project the LTTE as an
organisation addicted to war, as the obstacle to implementing any solution
desired by the Tamil people and thereby to divide the Tamil national
movement and weaken the LTTE. So the Dutch ambassadors deceptive claim is
no surprise; he alleged the legitimate rights of the Tamil peopleis
different from a faction or a political party that says they represent all
the Tamils (Daily Mirror, 3/jun/06).

Sinhala peaceniks have for long propagated the same canard in a catchy
phrase: the government can satisfy the political aspirations of the Tamils
but not the military ambitions of the Tigers. The ground reality however
is vastly different. The LTTE is manned by the fourth generation of cadres
which means over the past four decades the organisations roots have spread
wide and deep within Tamil society. Almost every extended Tamil family has
either direct or indirect links that welded the Tamil people and the LTTE
into an organic whole and has transformed the organisation into the sole
repository of Tamils aspirations.

The Tamil guerrillas are the proverbial fish swimming in friendly (Tamil)
waters. Every political manoeuvre to catch the fish by the government
from the 1984 APC to the 2000 Draft Constitution  and by the co-chairs
flatfooted peace process could not turn Tamils against the LTTE. Having
failed to defeat the LTTE, the government is seeking to drain the pond
which means unleashing collective punishment on Tamils to deter support
for the organisation. In fact the Sinhala armed forces have already
unleashed violence against Tamil civilians. Murders, disappearances and
massacres of Tamils are being systematically executed by the armed forces
and paramilitaries. A recent innovation is extra-judicial execution of
Tamil intellectuals, activists and journalists. The LTTE has predictably
retaliated with devastating effect. The co-chairs and the SLMM roundly
condemn the LTTE for alleged killing of civilians but turn a blind eye to
repeated massacres of Tamil civilians by the armed forces.

Draining the pond  including strategic hamlets similar to those built by
US in Vietnam and UK in Kenya  to physically and forcibly isolate Tamils
from the LTTE in the Northest Province is likely to be the defining the
feature of Eelam War IV now underway.

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