End of the Eelam War

Both sides of this war have suffered heavy casualties in its final stages. The Sri Lankan government is unlikely to extend power-sharing beyond what has been provided for in the existing system of Provincial Councils.

By G.H. Peiris

(May 19, Kandy, Sri Lanka Guardian) The resistance of the enfeebled Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) cadres to the military offensive of the government of Sri Lanka against their shrinking stronghold at Vellamullaivaikkal, a hamlet on the northeast coast of the island about five miles north of the town of Mullaitivu, ended on May 17, 2009. The pyrrhic finale was featured by a series of massive explosions around the bunkers in which the LTTE leaders are believed to have been holed up.

According to information trickling down to Colombo, officially unconfirmed, one hundred or more of senior LTTE leaders perished in the conflagration, and, of 78 corpses recovered by the Army, up to 10.00 am on May 18, those of Charles Anthony (Prabhakaran’s son), Nadesan (chief of the Tiger police force), Pulidevan (head of the LTTE ‘Peace Secretariat’) and Ramesh (former Batticaloa area leader of the LTTE) and several other Tiger veterans have been identified from their shattered remnants. Many in the Tiger rank and file had also joined the continuing outflow of Tamil civilians from this locality. An official announcement made in the afternoon of May 18, 2009, over Rupavahini, the main government-controlled TV channel, said that LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran, Sea Tigers' chief Soosai and LTTE intelligence unit chief Pottu Amman were among the LTTE leaders killed in the course of an Army attack earlier in the morning.

This victory of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces (SLAF) marked the end of an almost continuous counter-insurgency offensive that commenced in July 2006 following the ‘riparian’ challenge to government authority posed by the LTTE in the form of its capture of an irrigation channel network adjacent to the Trincomalee harbour in the Eastern Province, in a locality where it had surreptitiously established a formidable military base. From a long-term perspective, the victory would also be seen as representing the final collapse of the most destructive secessionist insurrection in post-colonial South Asia, initiated by several faction-ridden bands of Tamil militants about twenty-five years ago, and over which the LTTE established its hegemony by the early 1990s by ruthlessly decimating its more formidable rivals.

Both sides of this war have suffered heavy casualties in its final stages. The SLAF was hampered in its advances by the government-imposed ban on both bombing and shelling in operations within the ‘No Fire Zone’ (NFZ) which was intended to avert heavy casualties among an estimated 35,000 Tamil civilians continuing to be held hostage by the LTTE within its last bastion, even after the exodus of approximately 185,000 from the shrinking Tiger domain between April 21 and May 10, 2009. The progress of the Army offensive through close combat was also retarded by the fact that penetrable paths of access towards the LTTE bastion were saturated with anti-personnel mines, and because Tiger resistance entailed both ‘suicide attacks’ as well as heavy mortar fire from the rear of their human shield of captive Tamil civilians. Given these formidable handicaps, and in the context of the brutal measures that were adopted by the Tigers to dissuade the flight of civilians from their clutches, the fact that an aggregate of almost 220,000 Tamil civilians were able to escape into areas under government control was, perhaps, the most laudable success achieved by Sri Lanka’s Security Forces (SFs) in the last phase of their operations.

Ever since the retreat of the LTTE to the Mullaitivu area in late January 2009, the government of Sri Lanka had been subject to intense external pressures to suspend its military offensive and to seek a "negotiated political settlement" with the LTTE.With the advances made by the Armed Forces up to that time, and against the backdrop of entrapment of a large civilian population in the dwindling Tiger domain, there emerged a "humanitarian" outcry, especially from the West, which focused on the need to protect civilian lives in the war zone. The unexpected avalanche of refugees from the LTTE-controlled areas from April 21 had the effect of intensifying such pressures, backed as these have been by campaigns of frenzied agitation by expatriate Sri Lankan Tamils supportive of the LTTE cause in countries like Canada, Britain, Norway, France, Germany and Switzerland, acting with the awareness that, stripped of their civilian protection, the LTTE leadership was doomed.

The protest demonstrations staged by pro-LTTE groups in the Tamil diaspora, intended to induce the governments of these countries to intervene in the conflict, have taken the form of processions, rallies, sit-ins, fasts, property damage at Sri Lankan embassies, and, in one instance, an attack on an Indian diplomatic establishment. Understandably, their more damning accusations – genocide, indiscriminate shelling and bombing of civilian targets, torture of prisoners and other war crimes, ill-treatment of Tamil refugees – were hurled at Sri Lanka through pro-Eelam publications that appear on innumerable websites. The support of international humanitarian agencies such as ‘Human Rights Watch’, ‘International Crisis Group’, ‘Amnesty International’, and ‘Global Centre for Responsibility to Protect’, seemed to reinforce the indictments. With the Army offensive approaching its expected finale, the protest campaign appeared to find sympathetic resonance in the news disseminated by the larger media firms such as BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, Washington Post and New York Times which, though more restrained in tone, reflected similar positions, and tended to place the blame for the crisis squarely on the government of Sri Lanka, while appealing to the Tiger leadership to release its civilian hostages.

More ominously, leaders of some of these western countries – for example, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and his French counterpart Bernard Kouchner, Thomas Mayr-Harting, Austria’s Permanent Representative at the UN, John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs – added their voices to the crescendo of criticism, while attempting to persuade the UN Security Council to intervene in the conflict, and to block the release of a stand-by credit facility of USD 1.9 billion tentatively pledged to Sri Lanka by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Thus, although the official announcement by the Security Council (SC 9659 of May 13) contained a strong condemnation of the LTTE, it also expressed (implicitly) a suspicion regarding the "continued use (by the Army) of heavy calibre weapons in areas with high concentration of civilians". To the great relief of Sri Lanka, the pressures from India were milder than expected, especially against the backdrop of the fierce inter-party rivalry that prevailed in the run-up to the Lok Sabha (Lower House of Parliament) elections and the passionate fraternal support which the Tigers draw from certain fringe groups in the South Indian State of Tamil Nadu.

The government of Sri Lanka has vehemently denied the charges pertaining to its military operations, presenting in the process many sets of evidence intended to highlight its essentially humane approach to all aspects of what it constantly referred to as a "hostage rescue operation". These denials often encountered contradictions, at times even from the foreign diplomatic missions in Colombo, some of which, one must remember, have not been favourably disposed towards the Rajapaksa regime.The resulting intractability of the ‘truth’ finds vivid illustration in the story of a recent confrontation between Gordon Weiss, the UN Representative stationed in Colombo and Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry. A statement issued by the former quoted unnamed sources to assert that a hospital and the hamlet of Karyamullaivaikkal (within the ‘No-Fire Zone’– intended to serve as a refuge to civilians), where the hospital is located, was shelled by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) causing several hundred civilian deaths. This was widely reported by the international media, some of which even carried photographic embellishments of mutilated corpses and destroyed infrastructure meant to be seen as the resulting damage and loss of lives. When questioned by the government whether the information on the alleged attack was verified prior to the issue of the statement, Weiss’ response (to cite an official report that has not been refuted) was: "The problem I had was that of verifying my information, given the lack of access to the war zone"! What appears to be a credible refutation of the story of the ‘Karyamullaivaikkal atrocity’ is found in the battle-front observations reported by Muralidhar Reddy, the Colombo-based correspondent of The Hindu, in its issue of May 15, 2009 . But then, in this no-holds-barred propaganda war, the sceptic could riposte that journalists can be bribed.

A fact of overwhelmingly significance that does support the government claim that, since early April 2009, heavy weaponry has not been used in its attacks on the Tiger stronghold, is the excruciating slowness of its recent progress. Obviously, with their enormous superiority over the LTTE in manpower and arms, the SFs had the capacity to administer a sledge-hammer blow that would reduce the remnants of the LTTE to rubble within a few hours and with hardly any loss of its own personnel. For whatever reason – possibly, even the fear of external reprisals – the government had refrained from such precipitate action and opted for a far more cautious and careful strategy, albeit at a very high cost.

Despite the diplomatic niceties that continue to figure in personal encounters between the Sri Lankan leaders and visiting dignitaries from the West (except when President Rajapaksa is said to have responded with an uncharacteristically curt ‘no’ to the request for a ceasefire made by Miliband and Kouchner during their recent "peace mission" to Sri Lanka), beneath the surface, there is much disenchantment in the country regarding some of the external interventions. For instance, many large caches of weaponry, heavy machinery and other commodities used in combat and terrorist attacks, abandoned (or carefully stored underground for future use) by the LTTE during its retreat, have fallen into the hands of the Army in the course of its advances. What amazes even those familiar with the massive LTTE transnational network of operations is neither the size of this arsenal nor its contents – sophisticated field weapons including multiple-barrel rocket launchers and other heavy artillery; state-of-the-art electronic and satellite communication equipment; high-powered engines and components for the manufacture of aircrafts, submarines and fast attack vessels – but the fact that certain items found abandoned (cranes, heavy-duty vehicles, earth-moving equipment) could not have been smuggled into the LTTE domain through the usual method of deep-sea transfer from ships to smaller vessels that bring the contraband to staging posts on the northeast coast. There is no way these bulky items could have reached the Vanni except through the port of Colombo; and the required access though the port could not have been obtained except under the lax procedures that were followed in relation to the post-Tsunami reconstruction imports by innumerable ‘humanitarian’ aid agencies that descended on Sri Lanka at that time.To gain such access, moreover, ‘diplomatic’ collaboration was necessary. There is now a fast-accumulating body of evidence pointing to awareness on the part of the personnel involved in these transactions of the fact that their supplies were being channelled to the LTTE secessionist effort. According to local media reports, the evidence against two of the more LTTE-friendly ‘humanitarian’ outfits has been so conclusive that they have been ordered by the government to cease operations in Sri Lanka and quit the country.

Given the formidable constraints, the government of Sri Lanka appears to be handling the massive IDP refugee problem at a fair level of efficiency, receiving, especially from India, various forms of assistance such as those pertaining to shelter and health care. According to an official report, 27 ‘Welfare Centres’ had, by May 1, 2009, provided temporary shelter to 184,609 persons. More permanent re-settlement of the displaced has begun in Mannar District (western Vanni), but is likely to be a slow process. However, there is reason for guarded optimism in this regard in the record of progress witnessed in the Eastern Province, ‘liberated’ in late 2007, where the restoration of normalcy has involved, inter alia, the establishment of civilian control under elected institutions of government. Vinayagamurthi Muralitharan, alias ‘Karuna’, erstwhile maestro of the LTTE Army in the province, has been made a Minister of the Central government, and, on May 12, 2008, in a master-stroke of consociational power-sharing in a multi-ethnic polity, appointed Vice-President of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party – the party headed by President Rajapaksa.

Power-sharing through constitutional and other devices among Sri Lanka’s ethnic groups in a fair and equitable manner would, of course, be a vital ingredient of the efforts to restore peace and stability in the country. The widely prescribed form of such power-sharing is ‘devolution’. In responding to this prescription, however, it would be necessary to grasp the reality that devolving political power within a spatial framework is no panacea to ethnic conflict, especially where the minority communities on whose behalf the ‘self-determination’ demand is being made are spatially diffused. The vitally relevant Sri Lankan specificity in this context is that 54 per cent of the Tamils of Sri Lanka live outside the ‘northeast’– the area on which devolution is expected to focus. Moreover, one does not need to venture even beyond South Asia to find vivid illustrations of both the possibilities as well as the limitations of devolution as a method of diffusing secessionist impulses that endanger the territorial integrity of the State. Thus, present indications are that, in the foreseeable future, the government is unlikely to extend power-sharing beyond what has been provided for in the existing system of Provincial Councils established under the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was adopted as an appeasement measure based on the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement of 1987. One could add to this with a fair degree of certainty that, in its power-sharing offers to the political leadership of the Tamils, the government will also remain firm in its rejection of the empirically pernicious notion of a ‘Traditional Tamil Homeland’ that encompasses the northeast of Sri Lanka.

There are other reasons that would place devolution beyond the ‘Thirteenth Amendment’ low in the priorities of the government’s short-term post-conflict agenda:

* that, despite the collapse of the LTTE war machine in the Vanni, its massive transnational network of business and commerce is still largely intact;
* that pro-LTTE groups in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora will persist with their secessionist efforts (as, for instance, certain extremist groups in the Sikh diaspora continue to do in the aftermath of suppression of the Khalistan uprising in Punjab), and will receive sympathy and support from the self-appointed masters of the ‘international community’;
* that the awesome task of re-building the shattered lives of hundreds of thousands of destitute Tamils in the resource-poor and environmentally hostile Vanni demands centralised coordination at a plane that would facilitate implementational efficiency, and, even more importantly, avert the type of anarchic external ‘humanitarian’ interventions of recent post-Tsunami memory; and
* that the discovery of large caches of weaponry in the course of the Vanni military manoeuvres point to the likely recurrence of sporadic terrorist attacks on civilian targets and a proliferation of banditry and brigandage, especially in the northeast of the island.

President Mahinda Rajapakse is at present riding the crest of a wave of popular support of unprecedented magnitude. Political overtures which he has been offering the minority communities in the form of power-sharing at the Centre will, consequently, remain unopposed, at least for a time. This advantage, however, has to be viewed against the backdrop of the bleak fact that popular expectations of a post-war economic boom are unrealistically high and, indeed, fanciful, given the prevailing global recession, the extraordinarily heavy demands of reconstruction of the north, and the likely retaliatory/punitive curtailments of external aid to Sri Lanka in the years ahead.

G.H. Peiris is Professor Emeritus of the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.

-Sri Lanka Guardian