The only merit of the Sarath Fonseka campaign

By Kath Noble

(December 16, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) When it comes to foreign policy, Sri Lanka isn’t short of extremists. Suggest that there is any kind of middle ground between inviting the Americans to launch nuclear missiles at Mahmoud Ahmedinejad from the roof of the Dalada Maligawa and shifting Temple Trees to the outskirts of Pyongyang and you’d better be ready for jeers. The Government is powerless to alter the equation, we are supposed to believe.

I tackled this issue in a column I wrote for this newspaper a month or two ago, following the outcry at Hillary Clinton’s remarks about the use of rape in armed conflict. She needed to be challenged, because allegations made in lesser forums than the UN Security Council have stuck with no more evidence. However, screaming about her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and claiming that the State Department had been bought by the LTTE was foolish. It could only have strengthened her resolve. She wasn’t likely to look more favourably on Sri Lanka, in any case. More importantly still, the reference to this country was made in passing and without suggestion of action. Burning effigies of Uncle Sam would have been a ridiculous overreaction. There was little at stake. The frenzied response in Colombo was a sign that the intelligentsia had lost its capacity to analyse developments on the world stage in a rational manner, I argued.

This drew an impossibly shrill response from one retired diplomat. Criticise the Government and you must be with America, it seems.

George Bush made famous the line, ‘Either you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.‘ He was launching his War on Terror in the immediate aftermath of the strike on the World Trade Centre, and he wanted to make sure that the world understood the seriousness of the endeavour. The same rhetoric was adopted by Sri Lankan leaders when they decided to challenge Prabhakaran on the battlefield.

This kind of talk may have been necessary at the time. Both administrations were about to plunge their countries into what were inevitably going to be very bloody struggles, after all. Some degree of polarisation was inescapable. You can’t have a war without ugliness of some kind, I tend to assume.

However, Sri Lanka is now in a much better position than the Americans. This country has finished its war, while Barack Obama is still wondering how to get himself out of the mess that his predecessor left behind. Yes, there are things that need to be done to ensure that fighting doesn’t start up again, but that’s something else. Nobody is dying. Whether George Bush would have thought that all countries not sending troops to help invade Afghanistan and Iraq were actively helping Al Qaeda is a moot point, now that he has retired into what I very much hope will be complete obscurity. The current resident of the White House is clearly not prone to such blinkered thinking, and there is no excuse for it in Sri Lanka today.

Rather than perpetuating a confrontational approach when it is no longer a question of life and death, the Government ought to be looking to win America and other countries over, convincing them to offer support. Foreign eyes are a little more open than they were during the conflict, as demonstrated most recently by the report of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last week, and there is a lot more to be gained than lost. The mistakes made by the West during the recent fighting were at least in part based on their assumption that Prabhakaran could not be defeated without an unacceptable number of casualties. Whatever you think about the events of this year, Sri Lanka will not be in a similar position for a long time to come, if ever again.

I am sure that plenty of readers will by this stage be convinced that I am an ardent fan of America and would have this country function as its 51st state, despite everything I have written in this newspaper in the last couple of years.

It is blinkered thinking again. I want to see Sri Lanka working effectively with as many countries as possible. Its primary interests lie in the region and more broadly with other members of the South, and I have argued for these links to be strengthened in many different ways and on occasions too numerous to count, but I don’t believe that this precludes doing something to improve its relationship with the West.

Somebody wrote a letter to the opinion page a week or two ago, apparently in response to an article that I had written about the Government getting friendly with dictators and in particular inviting Than Shwe for a propaganda tour. They took the view that Sri Lanka had no choice, given the attitude of the West.

This is nonsense. There aren’t such a huge number of military leaders in the world that to avoid helping them would result in isolation. Burma is one in a handful of dictatorships. As was proven during the final stages of the conflict with Prabhakaran, a good number of other countries are willing to stand up for Sri Lanka when it really matters, if an effort is made to persuade them, as happened in the UN Human Rights Council. The country found it had plenty of support. That was thanks to India and many other functioning democracies in the South, not the generals of Rangoon or anywhere else.

Indeed, getting friendly with such regimes doesn’t help. Blinkered thinking is not so prevalent outside Sri Lanka. Most people can see that there was no pressing need to invite Than Shwe for a spot of meditation. Associate with him too closely and they will tend to assume that you think he’s not so different, which is hardly the case.

One of the key points, as far as I am concerned, is that an improvement in Sri Lanka’s relationship with America and others like it would not be hard to achieve. During the conflict, the West was pushing for a ceasefire and negotiations with Prabhakaran. Agreeing to that for the sake of George Bush or even Barack Obama would have been madness, and events showed that such an unreasonable compromise wasn’t necessary. I always thought that America could have been pushed into changing its mind with a bit of the kind of diplomacy exercised by Lakshman Kadirgamar, but that is beside the point. The difficult times passed without incident. In comparison, America is now demanding very little from the Government. Last week’s report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations confirms it.

While the Government is working out whether it can be bothered to rethink its foreign policy, events are making it even easier for them. They must be seriously annoyed by Sarath Fonseka’s run for the presidency, but I can’t imagine any other development out of their control that would be quite so useful in getting the West on side again. There surely can’t be anybody Hillary Clinton would less like to see elected than the former Army Commander, and I imagine she isn‘t the only one to feel a bit queasy at the prospect of a recently retired military officer in charge in Colombo.

To my mind, the campaign is another indication of just how far away from the central ground politics in this country has moved of late. That subject, however, must wait for another column.

(The writer cab be reached kathnoble99@gmail.com )

-Sri Lanka Guardian