Southern Provinces poll & the post- War crisis

By Dayan Jayatilleka

(October 13, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) The just concluded Southern Province elections provided a surface snapshot of the domestic aspect of our postwar crisis. The result was a relative victory for the UPFA government and an absolute defeat for the UNP led Opposition. A comfortable win by any standards, the victory for the Government was relative rather than absolute. This is because “Southernism” and the Ruhuna factor in the wake of a military victory which was South-driven should have seen the UPFA score at least as well on home turf as it did in multiethnic Uva, if not better. It was an absolute rather than a relative defeat for the UNP because it could not get up to a measly thirty percent, which is far lower than the vote that Ms. Srima Dissanaike, pitch-forked into a Presidential election in the wake of her husband’s assassination by the Tigers, was able to secure in 1994 for the UNP of which she did not have the membership at the time of nomination.

This is one aspect of the political dimension of our crisis: the Government’s popularity and hegemony are in decline but the democratic Opposition is also in decline and unable to pick up the slack. Our political crisis is the crisis of an absent centre space. Both Government and Opposition are victim of two diverging types of extremisms and pressure groups, the Government to the majoritarian “hawks” and the opposition to the minoritarian “doves”. Neither the Government nor the Opposition occupies the moderate centre space, which is where the vast majority of the citizenry are. Will the Rajapakse administration make a course correction and “govern from the centre”, and will the Opposition re-brand and relocate to the centre-space?

However, this is only the surface visual of the postwar crisis. The most striking thing about the postwar crisis is that there shouldn’t be one. We have just won a war, removing the most obvious (but not only) obstacle that which held us back as a country for decades. We should have simply mainstreamed into the world system and economy, integrating with the Asian economic miracle and catching up for lost decades.

Why didn’t the UPFA win more resoundingly in the South, registering a virtual walkover? It is because there has been no economic peace dividend for the masses and also because of rising disaffection on domestic governance issues. Why has there been no peace dividend? Not only because of a global economic downturn but because we have not overcome the policy landmines that lie between us and that peace dividend. These policy landmines and roadblocks have not been removed because they are not seen as roadblocks but as desirable by some sectors of the power bloc and the ruling coalition.

This brings us to a more crucial question: Why are we in a postwar crisis? Because we are deadlocked as to the direction in which we want to head and the destination we wish to get to. There is no informed open discussion about the nature of the postwar order. This despite the warning and example given by one of our most distinguished citizens, also a distinguished citizen of the world, Judge CG Weeramantry in an early postwar essay carried in the Daily Mirror.

This too is only one aspect of the matter. The truth is that we are agreed with the unstated proposition of Never Again, by which is meant that there should never again be a separatist challenge and that our military victory must be irreversible. The predominant if invisible, subterranean perspective in the state and (Southern/Sinhala) society seems to be that Tamil separatism should not only be uprooted but that the soil in which its seeds may germinate should be upturned. This view is one of permanent roll-back and counter-reformation, targeting or diluting even the 13th amendment and redrawing the map of the North and the East. It is a hard-line neoconservative perspective.

There is a contrary view, which is that Tamil separatism can be pre-empted only by a more liberal approach which goes beyond the 13th amendment to explore federal or quasi-federal alternatives.

To both these approaches there is an alternative third approach, which is one I hold, hopefully not in isolation. This is a policy mix that recognizes the need for a long term and secure military presence in those areas as well as certain security red lines, which however must be broadly parametric rather than narrowly prescriptive, strictly professional rather than ethno-religious. This recognition is coupled with another, namely that Tamil nationalism cannot be stamped out and if there is a perceived threat to their collective identity we shall face blowback. This may not take the form of the renewed insurgency, which our military can handle easily, but a civic conflict, which it cannot and must not be forced to. We are not the Israelis, and the recent remarks and moves by the US, UK, EU, and UN together with the visit of MPs from neighboring Tamil Nadu demonstrates that our treatment of the Tamils is under international scrutiny. Therefore we must combine security measures with political devolution within a unitary state, and improvement on the human rights and humanitarian fronts. This is a Realist approach.

Sri Lanka’s postwar crisis is one of the inability, unwillingness or delay in making the transition from a Just War (in content if not always in method) to a Just Peace. Had we done so, there would be no crisis. There are those who will say that we cannot make the transition because the war was not just and that the absence of a Just Peace is evidence of the unjust character of the war. This is simply untrue. The Sri Lankan Final war 2006-9 met all the criteria of a Just War as did those waged against the Tigers from 1987onwards. The Six Day War of 1967 provides the classic example of a Just War which failed to move on to a Just Peace.

In a related feature, the postwar crisis also results from the divergence of external and internal pressures and State’s inability to balance optimally and successfully between the two. External realities – not only the EU but more importantly the US; not only the West but also India—will not let the State implement a West Bank model in the North. The idea that lobbyists, including influential third country lobbyists, would get the West and especially the USA on side, or off our back proved to be, shall we say advisedly, a mirage. On the other hand, the state feels it cannot eschew such a closed model and the drive towards it, because of hard-line domestic pressure groups which form part of the constituency of the ruling coalition. Failing to chart a Middle Path and balance between these contending forces, the State finds itself deadlocked.

The option it has chosen is to pile on domestic political victories, which in the absence of a change in opposition leadership, will result after the next parliamentary and Presidential elections, not in a dictatorship but in what political scientists call a “one-party dominant” state (or system), such as prevailed in India from 1947-’77 or Mexico until the defeat of the PRI. This is usually the product of a chronic failure to evolve a viable national level Opposition as an alternative government.

-Sri Lanka Guardian