JOIN USA military victory
The brutal war between the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has ended as a zero-sum game. Clearly, there is a victor (the Sri Lankan government) and a vanquished (the Tigers). For the government, the decisive military victory has come in multiple forms — recapturing of vast territories (about 15,000 sq miles) spread over eight districts in Northern and Eastern provinces over which the LTTE exercised control since 1990; annihilation and neutralisation of its top leaders and cadres and destruction of its military and political infrastructures.
Colombo’s declaration of its victory coincided with the purported killing of LTTE chief Prabhakaran, thereby linking the decimation of the group with the elimination of its leadership. This is, therefore, not only an act of revenge against the Tiger leadership but also a war-ending strategy — ‘a fight to finish’.
The LTTE’s collapse as a pack of cards has exploded the myth about its invincibility. Throughout the war it had been merely defensive to the Sri Lankan military’s well calibrated offensive operations using conventional military strategy.
Faced with shortage of arms, ammunitions and manpower to challenge and resist the superior fire-powered military’s pressure, the LTTE could not stop the fall of territories and escape from eventual defeat.
In 1976, when Prabhakaran formed the group as a national liberation movement, he had an unrelenting faith in its power to achieve its desired Eelam goal. Being an idealist who had singularly built the outfit from scratch in an atmosphere of state repression, he underestimated the state’s power and refused to use his group’s military capability for political bargaining.
In pursuit of its unchallenged dominant position in the Tamil Eelam movement, he had eliminated or weakened the rival militant groups, forcing some of them to join hands with the government. The powerful ideology of vengeance and sacrifice uniquely remained central to the LTTE. Perhaps, he never thought that the sacrifice made by both the Tigers and Tamil community for the past five decades would go waste one day. Such was his overconfidence and commitment to Tamil Eelam that he was prepared to face defeat, but unwilling to give up the armed struggle. He said in 1990 that “people cannot give up their cause, their rights, for fear of defeat.”
Unfortunately, the costs of the military victory have been truly unimaginable. It is the innocent civilians who have paid price in terms of their lives. By using its air power and heavy artillery indiscriminately in the civilian-trapped so-called no-fire zone, the government showed its utter disregard to international humanitarian laws.
If internal wars are won in the way the Sri Lankan government has done, it is not at all a difficult proposition for many states. But, emulating the Sri Lankan experience is dangerous in the civilized world. There is no military solution to an ethnic conflict, and a military victory achieved at a heavy cost is unsustainable if a meaningful political solution is not found.
By all indication, the current military victory does not signify the end of the five-decade long conflict. It simply means a distinct change in the nature of struggle, from armed resistance to political agitation, until the legitimate aspirations of the minority Tamils for equality, security, identity and justice are met.
Making use of the political space created by the LTTE’s defeat, the democratic forces supported by the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora may coalesce against the majoritarian state and mobilise the community for a sustained political movement if peace offered is unjust and meaningless. In this the role of Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora may tend to assume greater significance.
The government should be magnanimous and reasonable towards the minorities in providing a credible solution based on greater power-sharing and autonomy. However, the indication is that the militarily emboldened government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa may not engage the Sri Lankan Tamil leaders in negotiations to make a peace deal; rather it will try to impose one that is prepared under its guidance incorporating the existing limited autonomy principles enshrined in the '13th Amendment'.
Denial of greater autonomy to the minorities will expose the regime’s deceitfulness and question the credibility of its military victory. Unification of territories does not mean integration of people and making them loyal to the state; the latter requires reforming of the Sinhalese Buddhist state so that the minorities become equal stakeholders along with the majority. This is something difficult to achieve in the post-war situation.
Civil society weakened
The fear of persecution grips the society. The authoritarian streak in the government has made both the liberal Sinhalese and minorities vulnerable. The civil society is thoroughly weakened. Therefore, peace in the island implies not only resolving the conflict but also democratising the polity by dismantling the war-time policies, structures and instruments, and restoring the credibility of institutions like judiciary.
It is important that the government complies with the international norms and opinions by opening the war-zone to the independent agencies and media. The whole truth about the war cannot always be kept buried under its debris; it has to be told to the international community on whom the government relies for reconstruction of the war-ravaged region.
(The writer teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)