And Be Aware
by Wakeley Paul, Esq., November 14, 2004
sangam.org/articles/view2/635.html
The war in Iraq will be Bush’s undoing. The present relentless attack on Fallujah is no different to what the Americans did in Vietnam time and time again, or what the SL army faced in the NorthEast. In fighting insurgents, armies have no front lines or rear guards, because insurgents attack them from everywhere. You drive them out of one area and they just flow back like water again, there and to another.
These observations are taken from soldiers who have related their first hand experiences from having fought these wars, not some intuitive brilliant surmise on my part. These soldiers speak from the scar tissue of first hand experience. The effort even by the most powerful army in the world to turn every area into a neutral playing field has proved to be well nigh impossible, which is why North Vietnam triumphed over the Americans and the LTTE slammed the Indian and SL armies into submission.
These gallant but doomed struggles by governments to suppress active dissidents only lead to a monumental sacrifice of lives, never those of the children of the nation’s leaders. The children of insurgent leaders are on the front lines like everyone else. Once again, Americans should never forget that it was their insurgency that won them their war of independence. That insurgency, like all insurgences, was branded and damned by their opponents as the equivalent of a ‘terrorist’ one.
Both Bush and Kumaratunge have nearly frozen themselves out of civilized diplomacy, he in the Middle East and she in the NorthEast. Bush’s closest ally, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is now struggling to try and get Bush to thaw and remove himself from his arrogant isolation, and recommence negotiations between Palestine and Israel.
Kumaratunge, on the other hand, has played each party against the other in a desperate bid to survive, but pretends with equal facility to be the soul of unity, while stalling, if not killing, all efforts at peace negotiations with the LTTE. Her efforts to seek solutions through conciliation and compromise are a farce, because the various parties are at widely too divergent odds with each other for that to be possible. Her wavering tactics and strategies do not change her goal, which is to find reasons for abandoning the peace process. Her efforts to be dismissive by asserting that there is no partner to negotiate with must be quashed and discarded for the lies that they are.
Kumaratunge’s negotiating partner, the LTTE, has been the only party that has remained consistently committed to the continuation of the peace talks. There is no question that stalemates can fuel anger and breed despair, but the LTTE has succumbed to neither temptation. It is she who remains dysfunctional and deadlocked. She is no longer a symbol of hope for the revitalization of the talks, she is an obstacle to their realization.
Kumaratunge’s efforts to sidetrack the peace process can lead to her political demise, and the Sinhalese people, who seem to resent the grant of any powers to anyone other than themselves, may well elect the more radical JVP in her place at the next election.
The question then is, how will the International community view such Sinhalese intransigence? More importantly, what steps will they take to cure them of this disease? So far we have had threats but no fire behind them, and this keeps Kumaratunge tap dancing to the same old, outworn tunes from the past. This wily survivor may ignore the sirens that should be sounding in her head that her days in power are fading away. She should shy away from her self confidence and face the harsh realities ahead instead.
All this will probably not result in an implosion in the minds of the Sinhalese leaders. It reflects instead Sinhalese leaders and their subjects who are willing to linger on and teeter at critical crossroads, rather than recognize the magnitude of the the problems at hand. The question is, how long can they remain handcuffed to their intransigence and lack of concern?