| by N Sathiya Moorthy
( February 11, 2013, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Independence Day speech, addressed the rest of the world more than the Sri Lankan nation – and not exactly without reason. The speech should be noted as much for the absence of any reference to his earlier proposals for a PSC process to resolve the decades-old ethnic issue as to his Government’s purported perception that joining the Tamils in internationalising the ‘national problem’ could submerge livelihood concerns of the larger masses all across the country for some more time, long after the successful conduct of ‘Eelam War IV’.
It is a chicken-and-question if the international community’s emerging pressure had caused the Government to exit the post-war talks with the TNA – or, was it the other way round. Either way, the result is the same. No one in Sri Lanka or outside is talking about political reconciliation any more. Everyone is talking about post-war ‘accountability issues’, and/or the LLRC Report and the Government’s Action Plan.
Strategising to corner the Sri Lankan State continually in global forums, the international community has re-prioritised the agenda for both the Sri Lankan Government and the moderate Tamil polity nearer home. It’s a replay of the western ‘template model’ for creating a level-playing field for stakeholders to a conflict to negotiate as equal partners. The marginalisation of the State player in the process notwithstanding, the LTTE paid a heavier price, ultimately.
There is a lurking political vacuum in the country, which the TNA filled partly in these years after the war, but not anymore. The faceless nature of an emerging alternative, if any, would feed itself. The State structure, despite its stupendous success on the security front, would still not know where to look at or what to look for. The JVP insurgencies and the LTTE’s emergence have to be understood thus, if prevention, not cure, is the ultimate goal.
For over a year and more now, the Sri Lankan nation as a whole has topped talking about ethnic reconciliation. The polity is tired of it after decades of a single-issue national agenda, whose electoral consequences were/are not far to seek. The ghost refuses to vanish at relatively short-notice. With the result, issues of greater consequence have failed to be responsive. This includes live political issues such as corruption charges and lawlessness, human rights violations and impeachment of the Chief Justice.
Tri-ethnic port-city
Intended or otherwise, in this vacuum nearer home, the Sri Lankan State has taken the global battle to the enemy camp. President Rajapaksa’s reference to the UN Charter Principles in his Independence Day address in the tri-ethnic eastern port-city of Trincomalee was a further step in that direction. Yet, precedents do not encourage Sri Lanka to conclude that it could well dictate its destiny to the last ‘t’ in this ‘global village’ of internal contradictions and inter-dependence.
Continuing with his post-war symbolism of interspersing public speeches in Tamil areas with a tinge of the language, President Rajapaksa recalled in his I-Day speech, how the UN Charter provided for ‘sovereign equality’ of members, expected the rest of respect the territorial integrity of individual member-nations, and not interfere with their domestic politics. In the same breadth, he spoke about ‘equality for all communities nearer home’, seen otherwise as a deviation from his war-years commitment to giving Tamil more.
It was obviously not without reason that President Rajapaksa read the Book to the authors. It was possibly an expression of Colombo’s exasperation with the international community – after the latter had felt the same way about the former in the preceding months and years after ‘Eelam War IV’. Despite a vote against it at UNHRC-Geneva last March, Sri Lanka does not seem wanting to engage the US move of the proposed ‘procedural resolution’ this time, either. The resolution itself has remained a ‘paper tiger’, and Sri Lanka seemed to have anticipated enough.
After the inherently failed effort at the UN Security Council (UNSC), where Sri Lanka could count on veto-members in China and Russia, the UNHRC process is now being followed at the Commonwealth, whose ministerial Action Group (CMAG) may discuss Sri Lanka in April, before the Hambantota CHOGM Summit could consider it in November. Any loss of face, including possible down-sizing of representation by some member-nations or worse, could add to Sri Lanka’s ‘image problems’. Yet, a Government that made its people accept that ‘national pride’ was worth the loss of European Union’s GSP-Plus concessions may have a different take even on a world-wide punitive sanctions, where however the UNSC would still be the final arbiter.
Increasingly, the international community has come up with global problems of the West’s own making, couched as they are in a lingua that the post-colonial Third World communities and leaderships seldom comprehend, not definitely respect. On Sri Lanka, where the ‘Colombo Seven, Ox-bridge’ brigade took its time handing over the mantle to the earthier class, the West needs to observe and absorb what lies ahead before throwing up new problems, as a means to resolving the old ones. As experience here and elsewhere has shown, broad-banding problems is no solution to any.
Kite-flying or what?
“It is not practical for this country to have different administrations based on ethnicity,” President Rajapaksa said in the Independence Day speech. It’s at variance with his past declarations on power-devolution, based on the Thirteenth Amendment. Immediate global reaction that his declaration is a denial of promised autonomy for the Tamils, President Rajapaksa is yet to come up with his game-plan, if any – and thus clear the air.
If the idea is for the Sri Lankan State to treat all Provinces equally in matters of power-devolution, the Government should clarify it. If President Rajapaksa had intended kite-flying one more time, to evaluate the mood of the people, particularly the Tamils, and of the international community, he should be prepared for yet another instalment of collective condemnation. The rest of the majority Sinhala polity does not seem wanting to share the same, one way or the other.
Through the ‘Eelam War IV’ and afterward, the Sri Lankan Government has been talking about ‘external efforts’ at ‘regime-change’ in the country, if not with the same vehemence as the ‘accountability issues’ levelled against it. At Geneva and Hambantota, if it came to that in the latter case when CHOGM meets, ‘sovereign equality’ could embarrass the other side. Yet, the experience of the non-cartel, non-western nations have shown that numbers count, and numbers alone count, all the same.
Yet, with the Geneva resolution, now as then, focussed on the LLRC Report and the Action Plan, both in turn creatures of the Colombo dispensation, the Government would do well to come up with concrete proposals on what President Rajapaksa means by ‘equal rights for all communities’, and what could well be the elective processes, implementing mechanisms and instructive deadlines.
Any detailed Government proposal on ‘equal rights’ and ‘power-devolution’ could well then become the basic document for a PSC, which the Government had itself mooted. It would not talk to the TNA to finalise a basic document, nor has it come up with one that could inspire the TNA into reconsidering its position to stay out if there were no prior consultations.
Self-delusion
By coming up with a document on ‘equal rights’ and ‘power-devolution’, possibly prior to the March meet at Geneva, the Government could leave it to the TNA to decide – whether or not to join the process – and for the world community to judge the intentions of either side. Minus ‘sovereign equality’ that the militant LTTE and its moderate Tamil predecessors had sought, ‘equal rights for all communities’ within a ‘united Sri Lanka’ is what the TNA has also been seeking in the post-war years – with greater clarity and through a definitive approach.
The Tamils also seek guarantees that the promises would not be reneged, either at the formative stage, or at the implementation level, whichever party or leader is in power, and whatever the ‘coalition compulsions’ that may emerge, now or later. After all, it has been the experience of the Tamil polity and community, until the LTTE arrived on the scene, and began giving the Government and the Sinhala polity, a taste of its own medicine, albeit violently and without thinking twice about what they were letting the hapless Tamil population into.
It has been a comforting self-delusion for successive Governments in Colombo to believe that the Tamils alone had ‘internationalised’ the ethnic issue. Contrary to that belief, by wagering on the geo-strategic locale of the nation, the Sri Lankan State too has not introspected on a political solution, internally. Colombo has to understand the dynamics of ‘client States’, where the global benefactor universally decides what benefits the other would receive – when, how and how much.
‘Cold War’ or not, nations have come to grief, betting excessively on their strategic locale, as interpreted for them by other interested nations in contexts that they themselves do not have power to control, leave alone manipulate. Pakistan’s is a text-book case where a new page is getting added still – after those of Shah’s Iran and Marcos’ Philippines, not to mention Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
The US Seventh Fleet in Diego Garcia could not stop the birth of Bangladesh, nor did global benefactors feigned to secure their friends in distress in the other cases. JRJ’s Sri Lanka was no exception, either. At the end of the day, ‘supreme national self-interest’ is the name of the game. Colombo has a long way to go before understanding it in full. Colombo being able to play the game, as others are able to play theirs just does not happen.
(The writer is Director and Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email: sathiyam54@gmail.com)
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