It’s not the Tamils stalling settlement in Sri Lanka
Is Sri Lanka’s moderate Tamil leadership to blame for the absence of a
political settlement to the island’s festering ethnic conflict? There is
definitely enough blame to go around in Sri Lanka, but Dayan
Jayatilleka takes the case too far in his article in The Hindu, “From devolution to the deep blue sea” (Op-Ed, June 18, 2013).
He argues that the Tamil Nationalist Alliance (TNA) has overplayed its
hand, fails to understand the weakness of its position and asks for
deals that are no longer on the table. They should instead, he asserts,
embrace and vigorously defend the Indian-imposed 1987 settlement —
contained in the 13th amendment to the 1978 constitution — which most
Sinhala hawks would willingly either do away with or prune down to the
point of irrelevance.
All this may well have substance, but the absence of a political
solution in Sri Lanka is not the result of a convention speech by the
TNA leader, or because of their tactical incompetence. It is almost
entirely because the Rajapaksa government has been doggedly hostile to
the idea of a political settlement and has systematically undermined or
sabotaged every initiative in this direction since it came to power in
November 2005. From the All Parties Representative Committee (APRC) of
2006 to the implementation of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation
Committee (LLRC) of 2011, the government has wantonly undone whatever it
has grudgingly done.
Underlying this is a deep conviction on the part of Sri Lanka’s ruling
fraternity that there is not and was never an ethnic problem in Sri
Lanka, only a terrorist problem that has since been defeated. There is
not only a deep distrust of the TNA for their close relationship with
the LTTE, but distrust of the need for an ethnic political settlement at
all. What’s more, in the domestic sphere, the Rajapaksas control pretty
much everything and have the ability to get things done and undone at
will. They have sweeping powers of the executive presidency, a
legislative supermajority large enough to enact controversial
constitutional amendments, and a cowed and pliant judiciary. They
control a vast security apparatus, have quashed or co-opted all
meaningful political opposition, have little to fear from the media, and
enjoy widespread support from the majority community. In contrast, the
TNA, which is itself a loose amalgam of organisations riven by internal
factional disputes — and that has lost many of its most eminent leaders
to assassins from both sides during the war — controls virtually nothing
except a handful of parliamentary seats from the north and east.
Neither generosity nor guile on their part would have moved the
government an inch closer to institutional reform, or even to upholding
its existing institutions and allowing them to function accountably and
responsibly.
International face-off
What has been marginally more effective in directing the Sri Lankan
government towards pursuing its own enlightened self-interest is the
gathering storm of international displeasure. The threat of an
embarrassing showdown at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting
(CHOGM) at Colombo this November is undoubtedly what has advanced the
idea of elections to the Northern Provincial Council (NPC). The
elections will likely be held in September, so that an elected
government in Jaffna will be on show in time to show the world at the
summit.
The TNA may well participate and win these elections, and come to wield
what may be reduced to municipal-level powers. But the deal-making to
get them there has been largely externalised, as has opposition to the
Rajapaksas more generally. An array of international players — including
the U.N. Human Rights Council and the Tamil diaspora — and new agenda
items such as human rights, war crimes, and humanitarian aid have
stepped in to contest and challenge the government in the shaping the
future of the political settlement in Sri Lanka.
The most influential actors in this emerging agenda are regional and
international powers such as India, China and the United States, who
have a range of competing interests and rivalries at stake that moderate
and shape their interventions. India’s paternalistic advocacy for the
rights of the Sri Lankan Tamils is, for example, tempered by
geopolitical concerns about the rising influence of China, as well as by
commercial and domestic security considerations. Moreover, those in
India who are outraged at what happened in Sri Lanka should bear in mind
that Sri Lanka’s counterinsurgency and conflict resolution strategy is,
upon closer scrutiny, not that different to India’s own approach.
In this new international face-off, there is an implicit understanding
that pressure on human rights, accountability, and justice for the
thousands of civilians who died at the end of the war is not an end in
itself, but a means towards pressuring the government to deliver a
political settlement. This is a bargain that the Rajapakses, the TNA,
and other domestic and international players are well aware of, and play
along with. To put it bluntly, many who wield the stick of war crimes
accountability against Sri Lanka are in reality uninterested in taking
it to its conclusion, but use it as a maximalist pressure tactic to get
the Rajapaksas to play ball.
A chasm
In the midst of all this, the TNA, who, by right of their 2010 electoral
mandate, have some legitimate standing to represent the Tamils, are
instead powerless bystanders waiting by to pick up the crumbs from the
larger negotiations. The only thing they have left is their support base
in the north-eastern Tamils. If they are hesitant to embrace the 13th
amendment, then it is not because they are unrepentant extremists who
speak in forked tongues, but because they are responding to their base.
Sri Lanka’s Tamil parliamentarians have long struggled to balance the
yawning chasm between the Jaffna’s aspirations and Colombo’s realities —
and this has in the past led to abuse and violence directed at them by
both sides.
Dayan Jayatilleka rightly points out that the Tamil negotiating strength
is different in the post-Prabakaran period. But it is also important to
bear in mind that today’s Tamil negotiators do not enjoy the kind of
hegemonic authority that the LTTE had to impose a deal on their people.
Just as the 2000 constitutional draft, and the Ranil Wickremasinghe
government of 2001-2004 collapsed under the weight of Sinhalese
opposition to concessions, the TNA or any other Tamil party will
similarly lack legitimacy if they give up too much too soon, or if they
are too eager to agree to whatever Colombo or New Delhi offers.
(Rajesh Venugopal is a London-based Indian academic.)
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