Joke, deceit or truce?

By N. Sathiya Moorthy

(May 04, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) When the LTTE declared a unilateral ceasefire one more time, that too after it had lost much of the human-shield after the earlier military and territorial losses, Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabhayya Rajapaksa described it as a ‘joke’. A day later when the Sri Lankan Government announced a ‘cessation of hostilities’ and promised not to use heavy weapons and air power – one more time -- it became the LTTE’s turn to claim that Colombo was deceiving the international community.

Taken to the logical conclusion, the two original statements imply an unsigned truce. The two retorts between them carry an anticipation or expectation of the truce failing on an early date. Secretary Rajapaksa wants a little more time to finish off the LTTE once and for all. The LTTE seems wanting truce-violation by the other side for it to go back to the international community and complain – and against the latter, as well.

The JVP criticism nearer home and the caution by the UN Humanitarian Affairs chief Sir John Holmes need to be read in this context. The JVP would want Sri Lankans to believe that the Government had sinned by declaring a ‘conclusion of combat’. Sinking into deeper frustration with every successive electoral defeat, the party needs to look inwards for correctives, and not flog the war-and-peace issue as ever.

The Government that has prosecuted the war with great determination and greater success over the past years could be expected to have consulted the armed forces before taking such crucial decisions. In matters of war and peace, the forces know the best --- not the JVP or the rest. The decision is thus an acknowledgement that the military parameters are being met.

Sir John’s reminder that the Government’s commitment against the use of heavy weapons should not go the way of earlier promises of the kind could not have come at a better time. Not just the Government but even the civil society in Sri Lanka seems to have forgotten the past promises of the kind, made from time to time, either under international pressure or attributed to tactical reasons – of the war having slipped into a close-combat mode, where heavy weapons could only cause damage, including to the reputation of the Government and nothing more.

It needs no second-guessing to conclude that the LTTE had provoked the armed forces into revert to heavy weapons in the past months. If nothing else, the hundred thousand plus civilians freed from LTTE control did not seem to have resisted the army, as was sought to be made out earlier. They yearned for freedom, and they have got it.

It is the use of heavy weapons that makes for global headlines and provides justification for public demonstrations in global capitals when unarmed Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka’s war zone too are involved. Leave aside their echoing the Sri Lankan Government demand for the LTTE to lay down arms, the international community, having failed to convince the outfit leadership to free the civilians, has little to go by in terms of being able to persuade the Colombo leadership in turn.

If thus the current commitment of the Sri Lankan Government is not to go waste, the international community has to keep as much watch on the LTTE behaviour as on the circumstances that cause the use of heavy weapons by the armed forces. With much of the public demonstrations in global capitals losing the initial momentum, it is the upcoming parliamentary elections in the south Indian State of Tamil Nadu that may be the only hope left for the pro-LTTE elements elsewhere, too.

Though not the electoral players, at least the LTTE knows that the time is up – and it could count on the ‘Tamil Nadu factor’ at best until the May 13 round of nation-wide parliamentary poll in the State. Post-poll in this era of coalition politics, the Tamil Nadu parties will be preoccupied with government-formation at Delhi as the rest of the country. To them, poll-eve posturing and post-poll policy formulation by the Government at the Centre has remained distinct facets. The ‘Sri Lanka issue’ is no different.

It is here that the ball serves itself back to the Government’s court in Colombo. Short of declaring that it was a ‘vote for war’, President Mahinda Rajapaksa has held the thumbing victory for his ruling SLFP-UPFA combine in the Western Province Council polls, against the international community’s demands for a truce.

The poll also showed that the ethnic and linguistic minorities in Colombo city may have voted against the Government, which need to repair the situation, if it has to take the peace road following the war victory. The election, like those before it, also showed that the re-christened Democratic People’s Party of Mano Ganesan, a leader of Upcountry Tamils, is emerging as an alternative to the pro-Government parties of the kind but also to the LTTE-sympathetic, yet moderate, Tamil Nationalist Alliance (TNA) in these parts.

Yet, President Rajapaksa’s message to the international community needs to read with his promise to usher in a ‘Thirteen-Plus’ political solution. His earlier commitment to the Thirteenth Amendment, made ahead of last year’s Eastern Province poll, meant a consensus of sorts emerging between the nation’s ‘Big Two’ political players.

The Opposition UNP has no reason now not to support a Thirteen-Plus agenda, either, particularly if the Government replaces sweeping statements with actionable plans. If it is rhetoric between the Government and the LTTE that is being proffered as a poor substitute to the pragmatic on the truce front, similar is the case between the Government and the TNA on the peace front.

President Rajapaksa is now the ‘War President’ of Sri Lanka. He has an opportunity to be known in history also as a ‘Peace Statesman’, the way world has seen only a few before him. He needs to take the initiative, and others have little choice but to follow, if particularly the chosen path is also the right(eous) path.

-Sri Lanka Guardian