Devolution plus

By Izeth Hussain

"Humanity must perforce prey on itself like monsters of the deep." –– Shakespeare

(August 19, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) In an earlier article (Lakbima News of June 21), I argued the case for devolution and the implementation of the 13th Amendment. In a later article (Island of June 29) I argued the case – unashamedly and without batting an eyelid – against devolution and for a political solution on the basis of citizenship, of an unmediated relationship between the individual and the State irrespective of ethnic affiliations. The explanation for the volte-face is that in the course of writing my earlier article I came to realise, with more clarity than ever before, that my arguments for devolution had been developed within a paradigm in which a given, an assumption hardly ever challenged, was that the LTTE was militarily invincible. It seemed then that devolution was the best way of preventing the break-up of Sri Lanka. But the LTTE was militarily defeated and the paradigm has changed.

It seemed to me that in the new paradigm the most imperative of all the problems facing us was to somehow forge a degree of national unity that would enable us to withstand the dangers inherent in the new world order that has been shaping up after 1989. The problem is that the new world order can easily slide into imperialism, even a racist imperialism. That was how I read the HRC Special Session in Geneva – not in terms of an old imperialism, but in terms of an attempt to shape a new world order. It seemed to me that there is only one way in which Sri Lanka can avoid getting caught up in a possible slide to imperialism – not through military prowess, but by forging a high degree of national unity. The problem about devolution in this new paradigm is that it will almost certainly prove to be highly divisive. Therefore, if for various reasons devolution is seen as unavoidable, we must find a countervailing force which will work for unity, not for disunity. That countervailing force can be found in my view only through the ideal of citizenship, of the individual who is assured of fair and equal treatment through an unmediated relationship with the State irrespective of ethnic or any other group affiliation. The really serious problem that we have to face up to therefore is not the 13th Amendment Plus. It is Devolution Plus.

13th Amendment

I will now flesh out my argument. The first question to be addressed is whether devolution in the form of the 13th Amendment is indeed unavoidable. It all depends on whether or not India is prepared to be accommodative enough to regard the Peace Accords and the 13th Amendment as virtually abrogated. Otherwise, I am afraid we don’t have a viable alternative. Certainly it is arguable that the Jayewardene Government which entered into agreements and understandings with the then Indian Government had no democratic or other legitimacy. However, in international law and practice Governments have to abide by international contracts into which their predecessors had entered regardless of the question of legitimacy. But it can be argued with a high degree of plausibility, though not perhaps definitively, that the agreements reached with India were under duress, on which ground they can be regarded as invalid. Perhaps a counter-case can be argued, but the fact that cannot be made to go away is that the terms of the Peace Accords were certainly one-sided and therefore inequitable.

I am not however going to argue that case because it seems to me that in the present situation the factor that we must take into account more than everything else is the gun. It should be obvious that if India had no more than the military power of the Maldives we would not be bothering our heads at all over the 13th Amendment. Mao wrote famously that power flows through the barrel of a gun, and we can add, so do constitutions. I must make a clarification about what Mao meant because he can be easily misunderstood as meaning that in human affairs the final determinant is brute force. He, with his obsession about People’s power, would have clarified that the gun is an inanimate object through which power flows only when an animate finger pulls the trigger, behind which finger is an animate human being with thoughts, feelings and aspirations, and behind all that is the power of the people. Mao’s point was that that power would be potential not actual as long as the gun cannot be deployed on behalf of the people. My point in quoting Mao was to draw attention to the fact that in interacting with the rest of the world we must bear in mind the thoughts, feelings, aspirations – call it ideology or whatever – of the peoples of the world, constituting potential or actual people’s power, and also economic and military power. We recently had a taste of what the former can mean when the IMF loan was delayed for blatantly political reasons. As for military power, I need not spell out the disparity between India and Sri Lanka. Instead I will put down a bit of oral history that ought to go into our history books. It is that the late Pakistani President Zia-ul Haq used to insist that if we try to solve our ethnic problem against the will of India, we will "sink into a bottomless pit." The moral to be drawn is that if India insists on the 13th Amendment or some other form of devolution we should go along with it and try to make the best of it – except that we should never agree to a North-East merger.

‘Contentious little beats’

The next point that I want to flesh out is that devolution in Sri Lanka could turn out to be inherently divisive. Someone – who was it? – sagely and accurately observed that human beings are "contentious little beasts". Accordingly, centre/periphery tensions and conflicts of interest are practically unavoidable under devolution, and they can turn out to be exceptionally virulent given the background of our horrendous ethnic relations over so many decades. Arguably, it should not be beyond our ingenuity to work out constitutional arrangements that minimise the potential for tensions and conflicts of interest. But I am afraid they will not be of much avail unless there is on both sides of the ethnic divide a spirit of accommodativeness and the will to make a success of the devolutionary model. I see no sign of such a will because the TNA is already insisting on a North-East merger. Let us assume however that it does come to prevail because of pressure from India and other factors. My point is that even making a success of devolution will prove to be divisive because of underlying structural reasons that cannot be changed.

Structural Reasons

What I have in mind by "structural reasons" can be brought out by drawing a contrast between India and Switzerland on the one hand and Sri Lanka on the other. In the first two countries devolution on an ethnic basis applies to the whole national territory, identity politics is practiced on a nation-wide scale, on which basis both countries have attained a high degree of unity in diversity. In Sri Lanka devolution on an ethnic basis will really apply only to the North and East with their predominantly Tamil populations. In the rest of the island there will be the same system of devolution but the provincial units will not reflect different ethnic groups as in all of them the same Sinhalese group will predominate. In effect – once devolution is really put into practice – we will be having two different systems of governance, one of which will be devolutionary on the basis of ethnicity, and another which will also be devolutionary but on the basis of nothing at all. An ethnic polarisation of our politics may become impossible to avoid, and ethnically adversarial politics may become even worse than in the past.

We have to think more deeply about the implications of purportedly ethnic-based devolution in Sri Lanka where the ethnic ground realities are very different from what they are in India and Switzerland. One of those ground realities is that 54% of the Tamils live outside the North and East. Their needs and aspirations cannot be met through devolution. On the other hand, they can well be met to a very satisfactory extent if those Tamils can avail of growing economic opportunities outside the North and East, and they are given fair and equal treatment on a democratic citizenship model. It is a process that will make nonsense of devolution in Sri Lanka though not necessarily anywhere else. But of course there is the possibility that those Tamils will be subject to discrimination, in which case they will want to gravitate towards the North and East, and that gravitational pull will be all the stronger if devolution proves to be successful in those areas. It does seem realistic to fear that devolution in Sri Lanka will prove to be divisive for structural reasons.

Sovereignty sacrosanct?

The divisiveness inherent in devolution – practically inevitable for structural reasons as I am making it out – could come to have sinister implications in relation to the new world order that is clearly shaping up, something that can easily slide into imperialism. I will illustrate what I have in mind by noting the significance of some developments during the HRC Special Session. It will be remembered that there was a peculiar Western insistence that our Government should come to terms with the LTTE rather than inflict on it a final military defeat. I call that insistence "peculiar" because it went against a norm established under the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. According to that norm sovereignty is sacrosanct, which means that a government confronted by a rebellion has the primordial duty of putting it down militarily, the question of negotiations arising only if that were not possible. Consequently, I would argue, our Government had the primordial duty of finishing off the LTTE militarily when the opportunity at long last presented itself. But the Western powers were insisting on a new norm. It is based on the noble principle that violence should be eschewed except when it is unavoidable as the last resort, but putting down a rebellion against the State was not taken as constituting an exception. However Western violence in Iraq was in their view justifiable because it arose out of the responsibility to protect humanity from (non-existent) Weapons of Mass Destruction, and behind that was the drive to establish a new world order.

Another significant development was the pressure exercised on the SL Government not to commit genocide in the process of inflicting a final military defeat on the LTTE. But by that time it had become quite apparent that the Government would be meticulous about limiting collateral damage to acceptable levels as in the alternative there would be uproar in Tamil Nadu, followed possibly by Indian military intervention. Besides it was quite obvious by that time that the LTTE was on its last legs, and it would be stupid to engage in pointless killings as that would only alienate Tamil sentiments. What seemed really outrageous was that at the same time Pakistan was being exhorted to massacre the Taliban with no compunctions whatever about collateral damage, which reportedly included about a million refugees. It seemed a shocking example of double standards, but it was not so. In the Sri Lankan case native boys were killing native boys for local ends, which should never be allowed or hardly ever. In Pakistan native boys were killing native boys not for purely local ends but in the service of an emergent new world order. A million refugees were acceptable there, just as earlier in Iraq a million deaths were acceptable, as in both cases what was in question was an emergent new world order.

In the two cases I have cited above the grand principle in operation to bring about a new world order is the famous R2P––the Responsibility to Protect. Everyone in his right mind will agree that humanity should recognise a responsibility to protect innocents against mass butchery. The problem is that R2P has been used in the past for imperialist ends. For instance the British deposed the Kandyan monarch – according to the official British statement at the time – not because that was necessary to enable a gobbling up of Sri Lanka’s natural resources, but because British hearts bled over the sufferings of the Kandyan people at the hands of the despotic monarch. It seems, in fact, that R2P has featured in the grisly records of imperialism from ancient times. According to a book I happen to be reading just now, in 59 BC Julius Caesar sought and got from the Senate the post of Protector of the Gauls. In the next five years his armies killed a million Gauls and enslaved a million more, according to Plutarch. A friend tells me that Caesar in his book boastfully gave the same figures.

Let us not be cynical, however. We must acknowledge that over the last 2000 years imperialists have made much moral progress. True, in Iraq a million were killed, but a million more were not enslaved.

The problems raised in this article require in-depth treatment of a sort that is not possible here. I will conclude this article by merely mentioning the essential problems that require in-depth treatment. It is obvious by now that the supposedly bi-polar world of the Cold War is in the process of being replaced by a multi-polar new world order, in which the power-centres will consist of the US, Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and India. In the course of time other power-centres can also be expected to emerge. As I have argued above the new world order could come to have an imperialistic character, at least to some extent. That outcome is by no means inevitable, but we – meaning particularly small and militarily weak countries such as Sri Lanka – will do well to always bear in mind the factor of power in international relations – "Power flows through the barrel of a gun" – which is given cardinal importance in the "realist" theory of international relations.

Sri Lanka has to be concerned with India as the obvious emergent South Asian power-centre. In my view the factor of power as understood in the "realist" theory of international relations counted for little or nothing at all in Sri Lanka-India relations from 1948 to 1977. Our excellent relations were postulated on a very simple principle: Sri Lanka by itself can pose no serious threat to India, but it can do so if it gets together with other powers against India. J.R.Jayewardena failed to understand that principle, and was taught a lesson about the importance of power in international relations in 1987. I hold the view – admittedly an unorthodox one – that India has never shown an imperialist drive towards its neighbours, and that as long as that holds it should not be difficult to maintain excellent, or at least very satisfactory, relations with India. But, of course, we cannot be sure about the future. At present India is being seen as the counterweight to China, and we cannot know what complications may follow. Furthermore, we cannot be sure – on the basis of past performance – that Sri Lankan Governments will always show even a basic level of competence in the conduct of foreign relations.

Prudence requires that we bear in mind that the new world order may turn out to be rather horrible, in some ways and to some extent at least. We have to recognise that militarily we cannot withstand India, and that our best defence is in our unity. We must remember that in Sri Lanka the centuries of foreign conquest and domination were initiated in every case by divisiveness among the Sinhalese. The nation-state has made possible a much higher degree of unity than under any other state formation, for reasons that are not clear. We cannot hope for an ideal degree of national unity in Sri Lanka, but we should be able to go some way towards it. As I have argued devolution in Sri Lanka will be divisive for structurally unalterable reasons. If we are stuck with it, we must bring into operation the countervailing principle of citizenship, in which the individual can secure his legitimate interests and rights through an unmediated relationship with the State. Constitutional provisions alone will most certainly not suffice for that purpose. We will need an Equal Opportunities Bill and institutions such as Britain’s Race Relations Boards to make fair and equal treatment for the minorities a daily living reality.

-Sri Lanka Guardian