by Taraki, [aka D. Sivaram], Daily Mirror, Colombo, September 9, 2004
Heckles and jeers are sure to greet one if one were to say that the Tigers too face criticism and political pressure from a cross section of their supporters here and abroad for “futilely sticking to the peace process”. The hecklers and jeerers on the southern side of Sri Lanka’s ethnic divide would call the statement preposterous because for them the LTTE itself is the arch war monger that doesn’t need any external prodding to draw the gun on Colombo.
Nevertheless, it is a fact that Pirapaharan himself has been ‘circumspectly’ cautioned on several occasions by his close supporters that the Tamil liberation movement might get permanently and futilely entrapped in the current ‘peace stalemate’, that the Sinhalese will actually utilise the peace interregnum to further entrench the unitary state while leading the Tamils up the garden path with the ever elusive promise of finding a federal solution.
Such issues on the Tamil side are very rarely glimpsed in the south for there is an entrenched proclivity across the political spectrum in the Sinhala polity to hear only what is pleasing music to its ears – that Karuna is on the verge of imploding the LTTE, Tamils hate the LTTE, Tamils live in mortal fear of LTTE’s terror, Tamils are ever ready to spontaneously rise up against the LTTE etc.
Critics of LTTE’s continuing adherence to the peace process and the cease-fire agreement argue that peace talks have often been used in the service of oppressor states to take the edge off the military momentum achieved by armed anti state movements at critical moments.
They say that the peace trap inserted at such a juncture where the state is teetering on the brink of collapse removes the critical pressure necessary to force it to radically restructure itself.
The Ertirean armed secessionist movement was able to compel Ethiopians to completely restructure their state on the basis of recognising the right of its ethnic peoples to realise their self-determination, because the separatist rebels were able to deliver an irremediably crushing blow to the Ethiopian armed forces because there was no strategic insertion of a peace trap at the conjuncture, Tamil critics of the LTTE say.
According to them, the strategic parity with the Sri Lankan armed forces which the LTTE achieved after the debacle of Operation Agni Khiela in April 2001 and the attack on the Katunayake airport compelled the Sinhala polity to abandon only the pursuit of a home grown military solution to the conflict by defeating the Tigers but it did not in any manner dent its political will to preserve the unitary state.
Two and half years of peace have well demonstrated that this strategic parity is not adequate at all to bring enough pressure on the Sinhala polity to make it seriously consider the radical restructuring of the unitary state to accommodate “legitimate Tamil aspirations”, critics of the LTTE’s peace policy point out.
In their paradigm, any defence deal that the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) makes with India or the United States and its allies would tilt the current strategic equilibrium in favour of the Sinhala polity and thereby would exacerbate the compulsion to pursue the path of militarily intimidating the Tigers and the Tamil polity to make them accept the un-restructured unitary state.
The LTTE’s statement criticising the UNP’s efforts to create an ‘international safety net’ was based on this line of thinking.
The critics say that the LTTE should have built on the military momentum it achieved in April-July 2001 to push the Sri Lankan state to a point where it may have had to inevitably restructure itself radically to accommodate Tamil aspirations.
In fact in early 2001 when President Kumaratunga unequivocally and repeatedly rejected the cease-fire that the LTTE unilaterally declared from Christmas eve 2000 and extended until April next year, Balakumar, former leader of EROS, wrote a response to those who argued at the time that cease fire and Norwegian mediation were going to be a life line to the GOSL and would eventually be used to contain the LTTE’s military power in order to stabilise the Sri Lankan state.
The critics whom Balakumar set out to reply to had held up three instances where the peace trap had taken the edge off the critical military momentum achieved by insurgent movements against states and thereby deprived them of their leverage to restructure those states.
They were the civil wars in Columbia, El Salvador and the Philippines. In 1997 the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted that the Columbian military was on the verge of collapse and that the Colombian state was fast losing control of the countryside. FARC, Columbia’s leftist insurgent movement, had developed rudimentary but effective conventional fighting capabilities and was on a relentless march to power.
At this juncture, the US prevailed on the Colombian regime to negotiate with the rebels. The FARC leadership, which, like the Kurdish rebels in Turkey, was deluded by the myth of the European Union countervailing US influence in the Columbian equation, agreed to talks. US pumped massive military aid to the Columbian army during the talks mainly in the guise of a campaign against the production of Cocaine. The Columbian state utilised the period to recoup its political fortunes.
FARC found the Columbian army knocking at its rebel capital when talks broke down eventually. The tables had turned.
And above all, FARC discovered to its great dismay that peace talks had done nothing at all to make the Columbian state restructure itself to eliminate the constitutional foundations of the dire social and economic inequalities that had plagued that nation for many decades – thanks of course to US national interests.
The second example was the fate of the insurgent movement in El Salvador – FMLN. In the eighties the FMLN emerged as the most successful Third World anti state armed movement. In 1989 the FMLN, having reached a militarily dominant position in the countryside, launched a surprisingly effective offensive from the wealthy suburbs of the capital, San Salvador.
Again the US moved fast to save another loyal client state from falling totally and irremediably into the hands of the left movement. UN mediated peace talks were initiated that year with the backing of the US.
Americans then pumped massive military aid to the Salvadoran army.
A peace agreement was reached in 1991 and was implemented in 92. But the pro-US political forces are still in power and the El Salvadoran state is yet to be restructured radically as the insurgent movement originally demanded.
Similarly the New People’s Army (NPA) of the Philippines finds itself locked in a peace process that is eroding the political will of its support population as a consequence of splits in the movement and its inability to get Manila to deliver anything politically concrete.
The Communist Party of Philippines (CPP) and NPA, its military wing, have waged war against US backed governments in the Philippines for more than thirty-five years.
The NPA emerged as one of the largest and most effective insurgent movements of the eighties, second only to the FMLN and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
The government of the Philippines began peace talks with CPP and NPA with America’s blessing in 2001. Norway was brought in as the third party facilitator.
The NPA is a shadow of its former self today. It has achieved none of its goals through the peace talks. It is split. NPA’s leader in exile, Jose Maria Sisson, is a virtual prisoner in Holland.
The US meanwhile has poured in military and economic aid to stabilise the government in Manila.
These are some of the main examples that critics of the LTTE’s peace strategy show to back up their arguments against continuing talks with the GOSL.
In his written response to these arguments in early 2001, Balakumar said that the LTTE leadership was aware of all such pitfalls in taking the decision to start peace talks with Colombo, that the Tigers had carefully considered how the peace trap had been used to contain and debilitate insurgent movements elsewhere in the world.
The critics are back now.They say that Sinhala nationalists are now fully convinced that the Tigers will never go back to war.
Therefore, they (the Sinhala nationalists) are doing their best to further entrench the unitary state and would actively pursue the military option in the form of foreign involvement to intimidate the Tamil movement into accepting Sinhala Buddhist hegemony. The JVP helps them corroborate their case in no small measure.
The LTTE leadership will have to carefully weigh the opinions of its Tamil critics too before it decides its next step in the peace process.
Daily Mirror, September 9, 2004