Conditions and Pre-conditions

By N. Sathiya Moorthy

(March 30, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) As was only to be expected, the four-party Tamil Nationalist Alliance (TNA) has not responded positively to President Mahinda Rajapakasa’s invitation for talks. To cite the worse than abject civilian conditions in the war-zone to stall whatever little hope of whatever mitigation was possible under the larger conditions of has become the branded response of the TNA, over the years. This, it says, is doing in the name of the larger Tamil community.

The TNA also wants an end to the war, for participating in talks. This is also what the cornered LTTE wants. If such were the case, the Government would rather hold direct talks with the LTTE, which alone continues to matter in the TNA-centric politics of the larger Tamil community in the country.

The Alliance, while not condoning the LTTE holding tens of thousands of Tamil civilians hostage, claims that such ‘harassments’ were commonplace in war. Just ‘harassments’, this? It’s cavalier to the core, much worse than the way the Alliance says the Government is handling the humanitarian crisis in the North. .

The TNA should then have no cause to complain that the Sri Lankan Government was out to split the combine, as it had done in the case of the Opposition UNP and one-time ally JVP, among others. Such ‘harassments’ are again commonplace in politics. President Mahinda Rajapaksa may have excelled in it, not that it should be condoned.

Throughout the term of the current phase of civilian crisis in the North, the Tamil polity in the country has been contend with citing figures given out by international agencies and NGOs. The Government has its own figures, which the TNA contests – maybe with some justification, too. But for the Alliance of 22 Parliament members not to have been able to figure out the numbers involved too is saying a lot.

In comparison, the recent LTTE call for unconditional talks with the Government should be welcome. So should be the Government’s modified stand of expressing a willingness to consider the LTTE idea if – and only if – the militant outfit freed the tens of thousands of Tamil civilians trapped in the ever-shrinking area still under its control.

In reiterating a willingness to talk in an overseas media interview, LTTE Political Wing leader B Nadesan also made sure that the international community accessed it as seriously as the Diaspora Tamils, if not more. Still, it’s the kind of approach that has consistently made the LTTE’s intentions as much a suspect as its methods.

The LTTE’s call for unconditional talks is only a reflection of the ground conditions. However, in adding that the ‘separate State’ issue could be decided through a referendum, the LTTE was only denying itself through the left hand, what the right hand was seeking. It smacks of practised insincerity.

It works like this. Should the Government decline the referendum call, by citing the LTTE’s earlier willingness to work within a united Sri Lanka, it would naturally revert to the forgotten ceasefire agreement (CFA). For the LTTE, any revival of the CFA, where acknowledged or not, means not only a suspension of war, which it needs very badly than ever before, but also North-East merger.

Either the Government yields on this score – which the LTTE knows it would not – or yield to charges of State brutality. It would all be a non-starter, the immediate cause for which would not be understood by the curious but non-serious domestic polity and society in western capitals.

In referring to ‘talks without pre-conditions’, Nadesan was only reiterating the known LTTE position. In the LTTE’s appreciation, the phrase would apply as much to the Sri Lankan Government as to the militant outfit. Translated, it would mean that the Government should not insist on the LTTE laying down arms to facilitate the political process.

Minister Keheliya Rambukwella’s call for the LTTE to let off the civilians before the Government could react to Nadesan’s interview assumes significance. As Government spokesman, he had climbed down a rung from the earlier position of the Rajapksa dispensation wanting the LTTE to lay down arms ahead of talks.

By offering to keep the LTTE proposal open for consideration until after the civilians had been freed, the Government was granting a concession of sorts. Until recently, it was not willing to do so. It was an indirect acknowledgement of an emerging situation that was becoming increasingly impossible, particularly for the trapped civilians.

The irony of the LTTE’s present condition is that it refuses to acknowledge that it is in a bad condition and is no more in a condition to dictate pre-conditions, veiled or otherwise – and act accordingly. Until such conditions prevail, it would be difficult for those who have known the LTTE’s ways, to accept that the LTTE was not really laying down pre-conditions.

Friends of the Tamil community, of whom there are many, and those of the LTTE – not many takers, though – need to convince the latter that the end-game is on, and pre-conditions do not work. It is not only history that victors in war write, or re-write. It is also armistice that they pen.

The LTTE has had its way with the CFA after the ‘Kattanayake I’ attack, and earlier too. Better the condition in which the loser leaves the battle field, better will be the conditions attached to the peace pact.

Having pushed domestic insurgency into an all-out war after the LTTE had begun thus, the Government needs only to recall what unjust armistice had done to history – and may have in store for the future, too. It could be the Treaty of Versailles in its time, or all those peace pacts in Palestine, in even more contemporary times.

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The writer is Director, Chennai Chapter of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF), the Indian policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi.

-Sri Lanka Guardian