Close encounters of Various kinds - TULF.

THOUGHTS FROM THE HISTORY
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By David Selbourne
[Lanka Guardian, Oct. 15, 1982, pp. 12-13.]

(July 29, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The days of Appapillai Amirthalingam, the secretary-general of the TULF, must surely be numbered. He described himself to me as ‘no longer leader of His Majesty’s loyal opposition, but of a liberation movement’. Yet he has not only been leading his own troops away from the sound of gunfire, but at the same time denying the obvious: that it is the activities of the Tigers which have induced Jayewardene to discuss Tamil demands with the TULF in the first place. Moreover he told me that ‘we will have to learn to get used to the army in the Northern Province’. ‘How?’ I asked him. ‘Like we live with mosquitoes’, he answered, laughing. He did not sound like the Tamils’ liberator.

There are many sets of horns to his dilemma: among them, that to pacify his own Tamil militants, he is trying to extract concessions from the Sinhalese by discreet, and even secret negotiation which only the force of the militants, or a mass campaign of civil disobedience could possibly deliver.

He himself believes that dialogue, not the approach of the election season, has led to the containment of repression (though at best, it is only a lull in official anti-Tamil violence). ‘I have no army, no police, to give my people protection’, he told me. ‘I had to go to those with power and get them to maintain law and order. If I had told Jayewardene to go to hell, so many more Tamils would have gone to heaven. We are not fighting from a position of strength. We are walking on the edge of a razor’. He calls his a ‘pragmatic’ approach, and says that in the complex chess game he is playing, or thinks that he is playing, with Jayewardene, ‘we have enough brains not to be checkmated’.

The TULF President, M. Sivasithamparam, asserts (without conviction) that negotiations with the Sinhalese have ‘enabled us to buy time, to regroup ourselves’; and R. Sambanthan, the TULF MP for Trincomalee – which is gradually going under to Sinhalese colonization – that ‘we are plugging for more and more delegation and devolution’. But the main TULF leadership has already lost the support of the Tamil younger generation; even Amirthalingam’s own son is opposed to what his father is doing.

Part of the trouble is that, as Tamil militancy has grown, the TULF’s elderly parliamentarians, many of them lawyers – they call it the Tamil United Lawyers’ Front – have got out of their depths with the talk of ‘armed struggle’; to say nothing of the fact that they have more in common, in class terms, with their opposite numbers that divides them. Amirthalingam even sympathizes with Jayewardene’s own dilemma. ‘I am able to see’ he told me, ‘that he cannot move as far as he would like’; but what Amirthalingam apparently cannot see is that he is himself being overtaken.

Sivasithamparam, at least, acknowledges that it is ‘too late to ruminate on whether negotiation was an error’; V. Yogeswaran, the popular and outspoken MP for Jaffna, says that ‘the talks should never have been started’ (‘I was elected on a mandate to bring about Tamil Eelam’, he added); S.C. Chandrahasan, the son of S.J.V. Chelvanayakam, a previous leader of the Tamils, declares roundly that the talks have been ‘fruitless’, and that ‘though the TULF may be seeking compromise, our people will never accept it’.

Certainly, with Lenin (increasingly) in their pockets and guns in their holsters, the Tamil militants in the north are now a world away, not only from traditional Hinduism, but from the leather-bound law reports in the Colombo offices of most of their leaders. ‘After the 1981 riots’, Chandrahasan says, ‘I told our youth: give the TULF one last chance. Instead they went back to dialogue. Ours was a mass movement’, he says bitterly, ‘until the TULF opted for negotiation’.

It seems only a matter of time before he takes over his father’s mantle from the discredited TULF leaders. And his is not Amirthalingam’s language: ‘repression’, he declares, ‘helps to make our struggle a reality and suffering takes us towards our goal.’ Amirthalingam stresses the weakness of the Tamils; Chandrahasan their determination. And if the latter were to succeed to the leadership, there would not merely be an end to negotiation, but a boycott of Sri Lankan institutions, and the setting up of a provisional government, whether in Jaffna, or ‘in exile’.
-Sri Lanka Guardian