Sri Lanka 2009-2010: a look in another’s mirror

By Dayan Jayatilleka

"…there have been much uglier ends to long and brutal wars like this one" - -Gwynne Dyer ("Sri Lanka’s future", Dec 24, 2009,)

(January 03, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) It usually takes an objective, empathetic outsider to hold up a mirror before us, reflecting our achievements and our failures. We have two in our midst: Padraig Colman who publishes in the prestigious Le Monde Diplomatique and Kath Noble, who sticks loyally to the local press when she is easily good enough to write for papers back home in the UK. Yet it is the more credentialed professional Gwynne Dyer, a commentator on world affairs whose syndicated column appears in forty five countries, author of several books (most recently on climate change) and an independent liberal-progressive if slightly cynical voice, who has best captured the considerable Sri Lankan achievement, failures and dangers ahead, as we close out this momentous year 2009 and head into a decisive 2010.

His terse re-counting in his Christmas Eve column "Sri Lanka’s Future" (Dec 24), which has appeared in the most diverse parts of the globe from Dec 24 to 29th, 2009, is a vital corrective to the intellectual and moral failure of the Sri Lankan intelligentsia to respect the successes and strengths of our state and society and the collective achievement of our peoples, while being critically aware of our flaws and fallacies. We either trumpet our triumphs with no regard to what has been left undone and needs to be done, or we flagellate our state and collective state of being for our failures with no acknowledgement of our hard fought and won successes. We are unaware or ignore either our strengths or our weaknesses. Neither is a sound thing to do and indeed undermines the health of the body politic and corrodes the social consciousness.

Gwynne Dyer’s opening paragraph is the most succinct recounting of what we, Sri Lanka and Sri Lankans have done this year, of which we must be proud, take credit for and give credit where credit is due. Those living today can judge themselves and their worth by the role they have played and the contribution they have made to these triumphs as well as to the raising and tackling of the tasks still at hand. This is what he says:

"First, the good news. Sri Lanka’s government, whose 26-year war against the separatist Tamil Tigers ended in total victory last May, is keeping its promise to let all of the 300,000 Tamil civilians who were captured in the final battle go home again. Not only that, but it is going to hold a free election next month – so free that the ruling party might even lose it."

He tackles the myth that there was a peaceful political solution to the issue of the Tigers.

"It’s easy to understand why the government headed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, Defence Minister (sic) Gotabaya Rajapkasa, insisted on a decisive victory over the Tamil Tigers, whose insurgency had caused 70,000 deaths over the years. There had been cease-fires and peace talks over the years, but the Tigers never really abandoned their goal of total independence for the Tamil majority areas in northern and eastern Sri Lanka.

That was utterly unacceptable to the Sinhala-speaking majority, so the war was bound to end in a last stand by the Tigers sooner or later. They could have carried on with suicide bombings and assassinations forever, but their territorial ambitions drove them to seize and hold ground with a more or less conventional military force. (They even had a navy and an air force of sorts.) That made them vulnerable to military defeat."

Dyer then deals with the issue of Western calls for ceasefires. His conclusion is the most objective answer to those commentators who bleat about the head on assault on an area where the LTTE was making a last stand, in the midst of civilians. As if this weren’t part of Prabhakaran’s strategy for survival and as if any state which faltered or blinked, would not be playing into his hands as well as setting a precedent for terrorist movements all over the world. The message would have gone out that the tactic of mass hostage taking, from Beslan to Puthumathalan, (or embedding among pseudo hostages) works. The presence of the civilians was a problem that the Sri Lankan forces should have, had to and did take into account, NOT a factor that should have deterred a death blow to the Tigers. We got it more correct than most under the circumstances: neither agreeing to a getaway through "international auspices’ nor using, for the most part, air power and heavy weapons in the Zone despite Tiger shellfire from within the Zone.

"All the well-meaning foreign pleas last May for a cease-fire to protect the Tamil civilians trapped with the Tigers were quite rightly ignored by the Sri Lankan forces. The Tigers always made sure that they had lots of innocent civilians around when they fought. The civilians absorbed a lot of the enemy fire, their deaths served to radicalise other Tamils–and cease-fires to protect civilians had frequently allowed the Tiger fighters to escape in the past."

Gwynne Dyer pretty much settles the dispute of who was responsible, decisively and by definition, for the military victory over the LTTE: the Rajapakse government.

"All it took to make that happen was a government willing to devote all the resources of the state to building an army able to defeat the Tigers in stand-up battle, and tough enough to refuse all negotiations until the enemy was completely destroyed. The Rajapaksas provided that government." (My emphasis – DJ)

Dyer’s description of what that government did is also a description of what its predecessors failed to: fight a total war. He deploys a key term —"willing"— which in turn indicates what was lacking in four governments preceding this one: the political will to defeat the Tigers and the clarity to have as the aim and objective of war, the "complete destruction" of the LTTE. I know this is true of the Premadasa presidency with which I worked closely, and the lacerating frustration I felt at my inability to convince the President that just such political will and clarity of objective towards the Tigers and the war, were the necessary conditions for guaranteeing the survival and sustainable success of his superb programs of development.

Columnist Dyer deals head on with the issue of incarceration or internment of large numbers of those Tamils who were with Prabhakaran almost to the last, a subject which warranted and requires rigorous critical scrutiny but on which much printers ink was absurdly expended in reproducing quotes about Nazi concentration camps and from Holocaust survivors! The international human rights community and their local fellow travelers seem to have forgotten that the Cubans who came across on the Mariel boatlift of 1980 during the tenure and at the invitation of the most liberal of western leaders, President Jimmy Carter, were confined in fenced off camps until there were riots with fatal casualties!

"Nor was Colombo wrong to round up all 300,000 Tamil civilians who were caught up in the Tigers’ last stand. Any surviving fighters were bound to try to hide themselves among the civilians, so a protracted sorting-out process was needed. But the Sri Lankan government promised that everybody except suspected fighters would be released within six months–and it has kept its word, more or less.

The camps have been emptying out fast over the past couple of months, and Colombo promises that everybody will have gone home by the end of January. There are justifiable complaints that not enough is being done to help former detainees resettle, but there have been much uglier ends to long and brutal wars like this one".

That last sentence of that paragraph is the best and shortest possible answer to the UTHR-J wallahs and the rather more seriously adversarial "war crimes" lynch mob out there baying for the blood of Sri Lanka’s leaders and military for the crime of destroying their favorite underdogs, the Tigers. It bears repetition: "…but there have been much uglier ends to long and brutal wars like this one".

Gwynne Dyer’s column constitutes no grist to the mill of GOSL propagandists because he squarely addresses the main postwar problem.

"The problem lies not in the past, but in the future. The Tamils are always going to be there, and the prospect of a peaceful future for Sri Lanka depends on reconciling them to coexistence with the Sinhalese in a state that treats both communities fairly."

He locates the upcoming election precisely against this backdrop and correctly critiques both candidates for their views on the ethnic issue which are hardly examples of enlightened reformism. Yes, we have no Obamas.

"The bad news is that it does not much matter who wins that election. Both the incumbent and the challenger are committed Sinhalese nationalists whose policies towards the Tamil minority militate against any reconciliation between the two groups. Tamils are less than a fifth of the population, so if tough treatment is enough to keep them quiet, then Sri Lanka faces a peaceful future–but repression has not worked in the past. .. The trouble is that it took an ultranationalist Sinhalese regime to create the army that defeated the Tigers, and it is still in power. It does not want to welcome the Tamils back into equal citizenship, nor does it feel that it needs to."

Being the top class commentator he is, Gwynne Dyer does not stop with that and declare himself agnostic. Given the choice available, he clearly indicates that which he thinks would be the worse choice, the choice that is least likely to improve things; the one that is likely to be more dangerous:

"The Rajapaksa government has called an early election for January 26 to exploit its victory and consolidate its hold on power–and if it should happen lose the election, then things may just get worse. (My emphasis-DJ)

The Rajapaksas’ challenger is none other than General Sarath Fonseka, who commanded the army that finally defeated the Tigers. The main opposition group in the Sinhala community, the United National Party, has banded together with nine smaller parties and put Fonseka up as their presidential candidate.

Fonseka could actually win, for his role in the defeat of the Tigers was just as large as that of the Rajapaksas. But he is also just as uncompromising a Sinhalese nationalist: as the war was nearing a conclusion, he was heard to say that Sri Lanka "belongs to the Sinhalese... (Minorities) can live in this country with us, but they must not try to demand undue things." Like equality, perhaps?

That is the attitude that drove the Tamils into insurrection in the first place. The next time it wouldn’t take the same form, but it could guarantee another generation of misery, insecurity (and perhaps also tyranny) for the long-suffering people of Sri Lanka."

As a commentator on international affairs Gwynne Dyer rightly raises the prospect which well read but emotionally overwrought local commentators fail to address, a prospect which is far more dangerous than dynastic rule or endemic corruption, which incidentally does not occur at all in his essay. He mentions instead, in a cautionary aside, the T word: "tyranny".