By Jayadeva Uyangoda, The Daily Mirror, Colombo, July 9, 2004
Sri Lanka’s peace process has now reached an unmistakable turning point. The Wednesday’s suicide explosion in Kollupitiya should not be allowed to mark itself as the beginning of a new process of low-intensity war. Without any further delay, President Kumaratunga’s government should take new political steps to revive the negotiations, bring the process of violence under effective control and restore the stability of the overall political process. Otherwise, Sri Lanka runs the immediate danger of relapsing into escalated violence.
Returning to violence in Colombo is indeed not a major surprise to those who followed, with consternation how the political process has been going through a period of instability. The new UPFA regime did not have an effective strategy to revive negotiations, or to manage the political consequences of the LTTE’s split.
Instead, the government allowed the situation to grow out of hand. Now the UPFA government should take the Wednesday event as a violent wake up call, reassess its inept political strategy towards the LTTE as well as the peace process and design a new initiative to return to the negotiation table.
Analysis
Returning to negotiations is the best course of action that President Kumaratunga should pursue. But, in pursuing that line of action, her government needs to develop a credible analysis of why it should engage in negotiations with the LTTE at all.
One key problem with the UPFA leadership is that they have not taken the trouble of exploring the windows of opportunity available in the process that their political rivals began in 2002.
Instead, they have substituted rhetoric for rigorous analysis. The UPFA has repeatedly given the impression that its understanding of why the LTTE has been seeking priority of ISGA over core issues in negotiations is embedded in an old mindset.
That in turn emanates from an inability of the Sinhalese political class to acknowledge its own leading role in shaping a trajectory of the ethnic conflict in which not the war, but accelerated economic development, can take primacy in the North and East under the LTTE’s control and management. Many UPFA critics have argued that the LTTE’s ISGA proposals are a stepping-stone to secession. But, a government that is serious about negotiated peace in Sri Lanka should also be able to see a negotiated ISGA as the prelude to reunion after years of a secessionist war. Without such flexibility of assessing a broad political process, no government in Colombo could have the courage or capacity to take the peace process any further. President Kumaratunga can hardly afford now to allow diverse currents in her regime or administration to push the political conditions around the peace process along various contradictory directions. She has to pursue political options to bring the negotiation process back on track. It requires political, not military, initiatives that should also enable her to stabilize the country’s political process that is in disarray at the moment. There are two political initiatives she can take immediately.
The first is addressed to the LTTE, and the second to the UNP and the opposition.
Initiatives
In the first initiative President Kumaratunga needs to announce that her government is now ready to resume negotiations with the LTTE on an agenda around the LTTE’s ISGA proposals in order to explore a negotiated interim settlement to the ethnic conflict. Dropping the stand on parallel negotiations on core issues should not be seen by her as a political setback. Any serious political gain for President Kumaratunga now rests not on her sticking to positional bargaining with the LTTE, but with her capacity to move forward in the direction of principled negotiations.
The second initiative for advancing the peace process calls for integrating the UNP and the Opposition in the peace process. The UPFA government is now repeating the same political idiocy that the UNF government did when in power by harassing and pushing the opposition against the wall. President Kumaratunga does not need to indulge in this politics of mutual destruction any longer, because in her last address to the nation she herself has proposed a very good plan to make the peace process inclusive and multi-partial. Her proposal to set up an apex body of National Peace Council under her leadership, but providing copartnership to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, is certainly an excellent proposal in the direction of bipartisanship in the peace process.
The proposed National Advisory Council on peace, consisting of representatives of political parties as well as civil society, is an equally good proposal for multi-partial process building. Setting up of the NPC would also be a step in the direction of arresting the mutually destructive politics of acrimony between the UPFA and the UNP of which the people are just tired. The UNP should see their involvement in an NPC as constructive from their point of view as well, because it locks both the President and the UNP in a bipartisan institutional process. Finally, there still remains a small window of opportunity for President Kumaratunga to take Sri Lanka’s peace process forward towards a constructive compromise. Needless to say, losing this moment will be quite costly.
Courtesy: The Daily Mirror ( Sri Lanka) July 9, 2004