Lanka’s war against LTTE

India helped with crucial intelligence
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by Maj-Gen Ashok K. Mehta (retd)

(January 29, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) What the IPKF could not do – defeat the LTTE – the Sri Lankan forces have done, demonstrating that insurgency can be subdued with the right mix of strategy, resources and political will. India’s coercive diplomacy failed due to the lack of political will. External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s sudden visit to Colombo after the Republic Day celebrations in the aftermath of the human crisis arising from the war was designed to placate the government’s key allies in Tamil Nadu.

When years of negotiation did not bear fruit, a determined military campaign seems poised to end violence for a political solution to take root. Under the scanner are two other familiar assertions:that while you can have a political solution without the LTTE, you cannot have peace without it; and that only India can hammer out a durable political settlement. The man who has almost achieved the impossible task of taming the Tigers is Mr Mahinda Rajapakse, who is destined to go down in history as Sri Lanka’s greatest President, a modern-day Duttugemunu who vanquished Tamil king Elara in the second century BC.

I recall a former Sri Lankan Army Commander, Lt-Gen Hamilton Wanasinghe, telling me after the IPKF had left the island that if India had kept out “we would be able to sort out the Tigers”.

Yet, legitimate doubts persist. For the settlement to become lasting, will a political package for the Tamils be implemented soon; and has violence been reduced to levels that it no longer poses any threat to the North-East and the South of the country? The two are interlinked. Mr Rajapakse has said he is committed to a political solution which will follow military victory. His mantra for the resolution of the conflict is contained in four Ds: disarmament, democracy, development and devolution, in that order. The relegation of devolution to the last slot has encouraged the belief that Mr Rajapakse is chasing a military solution.

A victory would have been more palatable for the Tamils had devolution been as high a priority as the military campaign and been implemented after the liberation of the Eastern Province last year. Instead, Mr Rajapakse’s commitment to devolution and its content are being questioned. As for violence, it has increased in the East but is manageable.

Mr Rajapakse will declare a military victory once Mullaithivu district, Prabhakaran’s citadel, is captured. His next move will be graduated elections in the North, starting with Jaffna, replicating the template of the East. The ongoing all-out military offensive has been called a “humanitarian operation” to liberate the Tamils from the clutches of the LTTE terrorists. Some 300,000 Tamils, many being allegedly used a human shields, are in Mullaithivu.

For defeating the LTTE, Mr Rajapakse has to ensure that his forces weed out the Tigers from the thick Mullaithivu jungles just as the IPKF after capturing Jaffna had done by clearing Nittikaikulam before announcing elections in the North-East in 1988-89. Cleansing the populated areas of the Tigers is essential as people’s support is more vital for the warring factions than mere control of territory. That is why devolution and winning hearts and minds of Tamils ought to have preceded or been in tandem with military victory.

Mr Gothbaya Rajapakse, the President’s brother and a key manager of the military campaign, has said government forces will launch counter-insurgency operations to search and destroy the LTTE’s war-fighting capabilities in sync with the strategy of keeping the Tigers separated from the Tamils, rendering them like fish out of water.

While the fall of Mullaithivu will end the conventional phase of the war, it will mark the start of Eelam War V — return of Tigers to waging a guerrilla campaign. In order to relocate their military assets outside Mullaithivu district, they will have to buy time fighting the last battle. Although government forces have captured the LTTE’s six airstrips used to launch the nine air attacks in 2007-08, no aircraft has been found by the forces. Presumably, these have either been relocated on the island or taken out of the country; one report suggesting that Prabhakaran could have flown out in one of them. But Tigers have confirmed that he is in Mullaithivu, leading his fighters.

Tigers require to regroup and rethink their new strategy so that they do not become irrelevant to the ethnic question. As Tigers will continue the war by other means, the government must expect organised guerrilla warfare backed by terrorism to resume with or without Prabhakaran.

This war would not have been won without India’s moral and material support. Mr Rajapakse, who deftly turned its focus from ethnicity to terrorism, drawing a distinction between Tamils and Tiger terrorists, was successful in deflecting India’s periodic calls to end the war and start the political process. He said that India was helping in fighting the war. Calls from Tamil Nadu for a ceasefire were ignored. General Fonseka got so mad with Tamil Nadu politicians that he referred to them as “jokers”, prompting Mr Gothbaya Rajapakse to apologise.

The government also ignored National Security Adviser M. K. Narayanan’s warning that Sri Lanka should not seek weapons from Pakistan and China but should come to India which was a big power and it would decide Sri Lanka’s needs which would be defensive in nature. Mr Narayanan has described General Fonseka as the world’s greatest Army Commander.

New Delhi played a double game — outwardly calling for restraint, and ending the war to placate Tamil Nadu politicians, while quietly supporting Colombo with crucial intelligence and coordinated operations on the high seas which enabled the Sri Lankan Navy in 2007-08 to sink all the eight LTTE merchant vessels that ferried Tiger replenishments from overseas. This was the turning point in the war. Air supremacy, precision-guided attacks taking out top Tiger leaders and drying of funds from diaspora led to Tiger operational capacities dipping to an unprecedented low level, the trigger for the Northern offensive.

India, which intervened in 1987 to rescue Prabhakaran and the Tigers, stayed aloof in 2000 when the LTTE was on the verge of routing the military garrison and ignored Sri Lanka’s request for a rescue mission to evacuate troops. But in a strategic turn-around, New Delhi has facilitated Colombo’s defeat of the Tigers over the head of the government’s key DMK ally whose leader once called the IPKF an Indian Tamil Killing Force and who has been threatening to withdraw support to the government.

Till Mr Rajapakse came on the scene, India’s Sri Lanka policy was described as “exercising decisive influence without direct involvement”. After the military victories, Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon on a visit to Colombo this month praised Sri Lanka’s role in combating terrorism and characterised India-Sri Lanka relations as “having reached unprecedented level of depth and quality today” and “having withstood the test of time and adversity”. On another occasion during the same visit he described relations as “never so close, so warm and so deep”. China and Pakistan, which have played a major role in the successful conduct of the war, do not have to claim warmth and proximity to Sri Lanka.

While Mr Mukherjee will be unable to get Mr Rajapakse to halt the offensive, humanitarian concerns of Tamils will get addressed as they were earlier before the fall of Kilinochchi. Mr Mukherjee could learn a lesson on robust use of force in combating terrorism from the Sri Lankan story: from defeat to victory. He must press Mr Rajapakse to devolve power without waiting for the obituary of the Tigers to be written. - Sri Lanka Guardian