Dynasty Strikes

by The Action Group of Tamils; Kotte, Sri Lanka, February 22, 2004

The Sinhala President Chandrika Kumaratunga is locked in a personal power struggle with Sinhala Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe. We, The Action Group of Tamils (TAGOT), had anticipated Kumaratunga’s shenanigans almost two years ago. In our Press Release of 18 March 2002, we said she is fighting for her and her dynasty’s political survival. If the Constitutional provision [Article 31(2)], which limits a person to two elected terms of office as President, is not repealed soon, then at the end of her current second term of office Kumaratunga will go into political oblivion. It is in her interest to urgently amend the Constitution before the next presidential election.

But Wickremasinghe has other ideas. Firstly, he had announced that “talks” over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)’s proposal for an Interim Self Governing Authority (ISGA) would be long drawn out. In other words, he will not put substantive demands – especially to decommission weapons – to LTTE Leader Veluppillai Prabhakaran until after the coming presidential election. Because, Prabhakaran would surely refuse to decommission. That would fatally undermine Wickremasinghe cunningly crafted “peace platform” that gave his United National Party (UNP) a clear electoral advantage over Kumaratunga’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).

Secondly, he understandably will not assist Kumaratunga to repeal Article 31(2) of the Constitution and pave the way for her to return to power as President. After all, he himself has presidential ambitions.

The ominous implication for Kumaratunga is that she is barred from seeking re-election. Wickremasinghe’s obvious strategy is to ease Kumaratunga out of public office at the end of her present term, not later than 2006, and hopefully occupy the office of President himself. He gambled that Kumaratunga is very unlikely to move against him for two reasons. He enjoys international backing from the United States, European Union and Japan; and he occupies the moral high ground among large sections of Sinhala people because he concluded the Cease Fire Agreement (CFA) with the LTTE.

But Kumaratunga struck and she struck fast. She took control of the Defence, Information and Interior Ministries on the 4th of November 2003 and prorogued Parliament on the 7th. She alleged an unsubstantiated “threat” to “national security” as a reason for her precipitous actions.

Kumaratunga took over the Defence Ministry and engineered a confrontation with Wickremasinghe. She then exploited the stand-off as justification to dissolve his United National Front (UNF) coalition government. The implied threat was obvious: Kumaratunga would dissolve Parliament if Wickremasinghe did not agree to repeal Article 31(2).

Kumaratunga also set peaceniks after Wickremasinghe. Shortly after proroguing Parliament, she hosted five prominent peaceniks to a reception (together with selected representatives of business interests). The peaceniks are a Sinhala analyst well known for his rabid anti-LTTE (read: anti-Tamil) chauvinist diatribes; a Sinhala activist who conjured up toothless “peace” initiatives for over two decades in the salubrious confines of international conference halls and “peace” NGOs while the country slid deeper and deeper into militarism; a Burgher peacenik who is eternally hunched by what he believes is the crushing load of Sri Lanka’s “ethnic problems” on his slender shoulders; a Colombo-based nominally-Tamil peacenik whose self-declared “policy” initiatives have yet to see the light of day; and lastly a now mandatory Muslim activist.

At the reception Kumaratunga reportedly exhorted the peaceniks to help in working out a common programme for SLFP and UNP and underlined the need to “work towards a common goal, for a maximum of two years, at least to put the country on the right path.” Their fragile egos boosted and predictably seduced by the illusory glow of proximity to power, the peaceniks enthusiastically understood that “the right path” for Kumaratunga is the path back to power two years later. And they bent over backwards to whitewash Kumaratunga’s power grab.

An added reason is that the intra-Sinhala power struggle has immensely strengthened the LTTE politically. As the visiting Sri Lankan Foreign Minister quipped at a press conference in India, the crisis in the south is making the LTTE look like “the good boys”. So the peaceniks imagined that their historical task is to carry out a damage mitigation exercise to reverse this situation.

The Sinhala activist alleged that the ISGA proposal goes well beyond federalism. He failed to substantiate his allegation, which in fact was a ploy to detract attention from the government’s inability to propose a federal constitutional model based on internal self-determination as agreed in the Oslo Declaration. The ISGA is not a model for the whole country; it is concerned with powers that the Tamil-majority Northeast interim administration must have and therefore does not deal with federalism. But the LTTE, as the other party to the Oslo Declaration, ensured that ISGA’s provisions are in keeping with the principles of internal self-determination. It is up to the Sinhala government to come up with a constitutional model for the country that incorporates the Tamil aspirations expressed in the ISGA.

The Sinhala analyst divined a so-called “structural co-habitation” between the President and Prime Minister. They ridiculed Wickremasinghe for correctly insisting that Kumaratunga must return the three Ministries to the UNF government before he can consider any compromise with her. The Sinhala analyst took umbrage with the Prime Minister for rejecting the President’s offer to supposedly share defence powers; and he glorified as “de-facto Deputy Ministership” Kumaratunga’s laughable offer of the ludicrous portfolio of “Minister Assisting Defence”.

They pressured Wickremasinghe to repeal Article 31(2) and their assertions were lucidly summarised by the Sinhala activist. That constitutional provision, he alleged, “will undoubtedly effect the leadership role she can play” and is “artificially diminishing” her “role in Sri Lankan politics…to the detriment of the country at large.”

What exactly is the “detriment”? The Sinhala activist helpfully explained thus: “without her presence at the helm of affairs, there is the possibility of the SLFP reverting to the pre-Chandrika roots, with its emphasis on the negative aspects of state socialism and insular Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Such a political party would be the natural ally of ultra nationalist and left wing extremist forces.” And he chastised all those (read: Wickremasinghe and his UNP) who schemed to retire Kumaratunga at the end of her current term of office. “The political strategy that seeks the exit of President Kumaratunga from leadership”, he alleged dishonestly, “is likely to be a recipe for political polarisation and heightened need for authoritarianism in the future.”

But Kumaratunga and the SLFP are in fact all these and more. Before the ink hardly dried on the Sinhala activist’s wild assertions, she cheerfully led her SLFP into the United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) with the same “ultra nationalist and left wing extremist forces” of the Sinhala Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)! And the peaceniks’ assessment could not have been more wrong about the future. Kumaratunga’s continued presence in national politics is the surest “recipe for political polarisation and heightened need for authoritarianism.”

TAGOT fully agrees that the Constitution must be amended to remove the authoritarian Executive Presidency. Indeed in 1994 Kumaratunga made the empty promise to do just that latest by 15 July 1995! What is worse, Kumaratunga’s refusal to respect Article 31(2) of the Constitution under which she assumed power is a brazen contempt for the rule of law. The peaceniks are defending precisely this abomination under the cloak of encouraging cohabitation.

Obviously Kumaratunga expects to bring her SLFP back to power. She hopes to marshal a two-thirds majority in the new Parliament to repeal Art 31(2). Failing that, she’ll strive to form a Constituent Assembly with a simple majority to enact a new Constitution. Either way, she aims to keep open the path back to political power for her and infuse her dynasty with a fresh lease of life.

To achieve either objective, Kumaratunga allied her SLFP with a bitter long-term political opponent, the JVP, on the 20th of January 2004. Clearly each is manoeuvring to take advantage of the other. The SLFP is strategizing to eat into JVP’s mass base under cover of the UPFA; the JVP, on the other hand, plans to use the UPFA to further legitimise its claim to power and evidently hopes to ride on SLFP’s back to greater electoral success.

If the UPFA does capture power at the parliamentary elections scheduled for next month (April), would the JVP back Kumaratunga’s lunge for power? Is it in JVP’s interest to assist Kumaratunga to repeal Article 31(2) or draw up a new constitution that would allow her to continue to be a force to contend with? If so, what would be JVP’s payoff? Or, would the SLFP and the JVP face each other in the next round of intra-Sinhala power struggle?

The Action Group Of Tamils (TAGOT)
Kotte, Sri Lanka
Email: gntbgfy@ubgznvy.pbz'));