by The Action Group of Tamils (TAGOT)
PRESS RELEASE
21 December 2004
We, The Action Group of Tamils (TAGOT), unhesitatingly compliment the Sinhala President Chandrika Kumaratunga for her political skill. She is implacably opposed to negotiating a political settlement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). But she has cast the ultra-Sinhala Jathika Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) as the scapegoat. So, the Core Group (US, UK, Norway and Japan) of governments in the international community has blamed the JVP for obstructing the resumption of “talks” with the LTTE (Daily News, 16/dec/04).
Kumaratunga attempted to shift attention away from herself by two clever manoeuvres. The first one failed; the second, succeeded.
First, she invited the Opposition United National Party (UNP) to jointly work with her United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) coalition government to explore a political settlement. If the UNP had accepted her invitation, Kumaratunga would have heaped, at the very least, a large share of the blame for the inevitable failure to begin “talks” on the UNP. If the UNP rejected her invitation, she would have accused its Sinhala leader Ranil Wickremasinghe of scuttling her “peace” initiative.
However, Wickremasinghe nimbly sidestepped the trap. He regretted such collaboration is not possible, but assured with equal sincerity that his party would unreservedly support whatever settlement Kumaratunga reached with the LTTE. So Kumaratunga now cannot blame the UNP for her failure to negotiate with the LTTE.
Second, Kumaratunga duplicitously proclaimed that constituent parties of her coalition government are agreed on commencing negotiations with the LTTE on the basis of the organisation’s proposal for an Interim Self Governing Authority (ISGA). The JVP, a coalition partner in the UPFA, should have cleverly confirmed her claim and cheerfully encouraged her to proceed with “talks.”
Instead, the flatfooted JVP leadership fell headlong into the trap. Its rabidly anti-Tamil leaders did what Kumaratunga had anticipated; they sharply contradicted her assertion and forcefully declared their opposition to the ISGA.
So, the JVP unwisely put itself forward as the scapegoat. The party’s obstinacy has let Kumaratunga masquerade as a peacemaker. The JVP compounded the blunder by shooting off an intemperate letter to the ambassadors of the Core Group (Asian Tribune, 18/dec/04).
The background to Kumaratunga’s claim, that the UPFA fully supports her position, is a confidential message the LTTE sent her through the Norwegian mediators (TamilNet, 11/nov/04). Kumaratunga did not comment on the message. Instead, she categorically demanded the LTTE must agree to recommence “talks” by the end of November (Daily News, 17/nov/04). The strident note in Kumaratunga’s two-week deadline has to do with the content of the LTTE’s message, which invited the President’s United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) to issue an official declaration confirming its “unified stand on peace talks” (TamilNet, 16/nov/04).
TAGOT fully understands that at first glance these exchanges could appear boring repetitions of the tedious past. But in fact a far more complex process is at work now.
In his 2004 Heroes’ Day Address the LTTE Leader Veluppillai Pirabakaran requested “all the political parties constituting the governing Freedom Alliance, as well as…the opposition United National Party, to declare publicly their official policy on the fundamentals of the Tamil national question, particularly on the core demands of the Tamils concerning homeland, nationality and the right to self-determination.”
Pirabakaran’s request is timely for an important reason. From 1956 to the present, every major Sinhala political party has waffled on the question of Tamil national rights. They have deceptively mouthed empty phrases about “decentralisation” and “devolution,” about crafting a solution “acceptable to all communities” within a “united” country. But at every instance they have deliberately sidestepped the Tamil demands of homeland, nationhood and national self-determination.
Almost ten years ago Kumaratunga added a refined twist to this mystification during her address to the Sinhala nation immediately after being sworn in as President on the 12th of November 1994. Reading from a prepared text, President Kumaratunga said: “We will ensure that our approach to peace will fully address the necessity to safeguard and strengthen the rights of the Sinhala people, while recognising dignity, self-respect and equality of treatment of all communities. This will form the essential basis of a negotiated solution to the ethnic problem” (Daily News, 14/nov/94).
In other words, Kumaratunga’s “essential basis” did not refer to equal individual rights for all citizens irrespective of ethnicity. Instead, she viewed her Sinhala people as a nation that has collective or national “rights.” The Tamils, she obviously believes, are not a nation; they are merely a community, an euphemism for “minority.” She avoided using the word “rights” when referring to Tamils because, in her myopic Sinhala view, the Tamil “community” cannot possess national rights. But she patronisingly assured Tamils that the Sinhala nation would offer them “dignity,” “self-respect” and “equality of treatment” – not equality of rights.
What is worse, Kumaratunga committed herself to “safeguard and strengthen the rights of the Sinhala people.” Why must Sinhala rights be safeguarded and strengthened? Who in Sri Lanka is threatening Sinhala rights? The implication is obvious. She conjured up a Tamil threat to the Sinhala nation; it was time-tested Tamil-baiting.
Kumaratunga’s “essential basis” is a less unsophisticated formulation than those of her forebearers in office. Her predecessor, Sinhala President DB Wijetunga, had been blatantly chauvinistic. He claimed superiority of the Sinhala “tree” on which the subordinate Tamil and Muslim “vines” spread. In his Mahavamsa worldview, the “tree” has rights; not so the “vines.”
A decade later, virtually nothing has changed. Kumaratunga could not resist Tamil-baiting while addressing a public rally in Moneragala in early December. She alleged that Wickremasinghe, the Sinhala leader of the Opposition United National Party (UNP), may have “some sort of a [secret] pact” with the LTTE Leader Pirabakaran (Daily News, 3/dec/04).
We must not forget that Tamil politicians in the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) and other Colombo-based Tamil parties venerated Kumaratunga as the “symbol of peace” during the 1994 presidential election.
Kumaratunga continued Tamil-baiting this month. She gave a cynical anti-Tamil twist to the grenade attack on the Colombo concert by Indian artists on 11 December. The following day she reportedly alleged at a public rally in Matara that “the UNP had now taken the role of the LTTE to explode bombs in the south to create a climate of terror as they had failed in their attempts to get Prabhakaran to explode bombs in the south” (Daily News, 13/dec/04). So she once again accused the UNP of working hand in glove with the LTTE to destabilize the country!
There is a further tactical reason behind Pirabakaran’s request that the UPFA and the UNP must declare their positions. In the past Sinhala leaders have engaged in “talks” without officially committing either their party or government to any position with regards a settlement of the Tamil national question.
When the then President J R Jayawardene held India-sponsored “talks” directly with the LTTE-led Tamil National Movement in Thimpu in 1985, the Sinhala President sent a delegation headed by his brother and Attorney-at-Law, H W Jayawardene. Doubts were raised as to the official standing of the delegation because neither H W Jayawardene nor other delegates were members of President Jayawardene’s ruling UNP government. So President Jayawardene conferred Plenipotentiary status on his brother to project the delegation as an official representative of his government.
After the inconclusive “talks,” New Delhi formulated the August 1985 “Draft Framework of Terms of Accord and Understanding” in consultation with H W Jayawardene, who placed his signature on the document. Tamils naturally assumed that the Draft Framework had become the official position of Jayawardene’s government on the Tamil National Question.
But President Jayawardene pulled another rabbit out his opportunistically bottomless hat. He announced that Mr H W Jayawardene placed his signature for purposes of identification only. President Jayawardene explained that the Draft Framework would become the official position of government only after it had been placed before his Cabinet and after it had been adopted by the Cabinet. With characteristic cunning, he never placed the Draft Framework before the Cabinet and that Indian initiative died in its tracks.
We Tamils, faced a disturbingly similar situation between October 1994 and April 1995. Kumaratunga sent a 4-member delegation to Jaffna to hold “talks” with the LTTE. It was led by her Private Secretary and included two of her personal friends from the private sector and an academic. None of the delegation members during the first three one-day rounds of “talks” had official standing within her then-ruling Peoples Alliance (PA) government. Indeed Kumaratunga excluded members of her government from the delegation.
The PA’s disinformation claimed that the delegation for the fourth round was “expected to include Cabinet Ministers and MPs” (Sunday Times, 5/mar/95). Nothing of the sort happened. This confirmed what critical Tamil opinion suspected, that Kumaratunga’s delegations were unofficial groups with no authority to make commitments.
The deception continued. When Kumaratunga announced her August 1985 “Devolution Proposals” (Daily News, 4/8/95) with great fanfare, Tamil people once again believed that the Proposals were her then-Peoples Alliance government’s official position.
But her Minister for Constitutional Affairs Prof G L Peiris helpfully explained that the Proposals were Kumaratunga’s “basic ideas with regard to devolution.” The next stage, he said, is to prepare the draft chapter on devolution. Kumaratunga would then present it to the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) on Constitutional Reform and thereafter it would be placed before Parliament for approval by a 2/3rd majority (The Island, 6/8/95). Only then would the draft chapter become the government’s official position.
None of this happened. Kumaratunga exploited the Proposals to justify her Dharma Uddhaya (holy Buddhist War), which was launched almost simultaneously to invade Jaffna that year.
Is it any surprise that Pirabakaran, in his 2004 Heroes’ Day address, said that the LTTE “is not prepared to walk the path of treachery and deception once again?”
Pirabakaran’s comments must be seen in the context of the LTTE’s September 1994 position. Immediately after Kumaratunga was elected Prime Minister, Pirabakaran initiated a dialogue; he wrote to invite her PA Government for “talks” (The Island, 8/9/94). About two weeks later the LTTE made the unprecedented announcement that the organisation is willing to drop the Eelam demand: that it is “prepared to accept a `substantial [devolution] package’ as an alternative to its demand for a separate State” (The Island, 22/9/94).
Pirabakaran made this offer more than 10 years ago !!! He reiterated the LTTE’s position in the 2002 Oslo Statement, that the organisation is willing to explore a federal alternative; and he followed it up with the 2003 ISGA based on internal self-determination in accordance with the Oslo Statement.
In stark contrast, up to now, Kumaratunga and Wickremasinghe have dodged the responsibility to declare the official positions of their respective governments (when in power) and political parties (when out of power). Instead they have steadfastly pursued a military solution to the national question.
A few weeks ago the UNP voted massively to support the UPFA’s defence budget to help raise the military capabilities of the Sinhala armed forces. Clearly neither Sinhala party is inclined to negotiate with the LTTE.
In our view, both parties, therefore, must share the entire blame if violence breaks out once again.
Dr S Sathananthan Ph D, Secretary
The Action Group Of Tamils (TAGOT), Kotte, Sri Lanka
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