Today the richest 10 percent in the country continue to get more than 40 percent of the national income, and the Western Province gets over 50 percent of the national income, keeping alive the truth of the JVP slogan that the rich milk is for Colombo while the watery cucumber is for the rural areas.Accordingly, the best time to come up with a political solution to the ethnic conflict is now, when the government has an incentive to come up with such a solution and is pledging to do so.

If the government is able to come up with a political solution that is acceptable to the moderate majorities in the ethnic communities, there will be immense pressure on the LTTE from both the Tamil people and the international community to decommission their weapons and end the ethnic war for all time. On the other hand, if the past is to be any guide to the future, the defeat of the LTTE by itself is unlikely to lead to a just and negotiated political solution which has been resisted by racist elements in the polity for the past fifty years.

Sri Lanka’s past experience of military solutions indicates that the impetus for political reform ends once the government defeats its opponent. An example would be the JVP insurrection of 1987-89. At the height of the insurrection, President Ranasinghe Premadasa pleaded with the JVP to talk with him and share power with his government. But once the government militarily defeated the JVP there was no more talk of power sharing or of fundamental political reform.

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Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has declared that the government is determined to militarily defeat the LTTE in a comprehensive manner. According to him, only then will a political solution be possible. It is likely that the Defence Secretary’s views are shared by a sizeable proportion of the population who have no confidence in the LTTE’s peaceable intentions. Mr Rajapaksa has also said that the government’s recent victories over the LTTE in the east need to be complemented by victories in the north in order to make it 100 percent. As these declarations were made at a nationally televised event in Trincomalee and in the presence of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, this could be considered to be government policy.

However, the Defence Secretary’s statements in Trincomalee may not constitute the whole of government policy. A few days after his speech, the Defence Secretary made clarifications to a media agency that the government continued to stand for a political solution, was ready to negotiate with the LTTE and did not seek to impose a solution upon the Tamil people. This has been the general government line, articulated most eloquently by Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama to the international community. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has also frequently adopted this position which attributes the present war to the LTTE’s intransigence and aggressive military posture and the government’s own readiness to negotiate with the LTTE providing it makes no recourse to its arms.

The advantage of the government speaking in multiple voices to multiple audiences is that it enables multiple strategies to be followed to deal with the ethnic conflict, which is a multi faceted problem. The ethnic conflict is not only a domestic issue, but has an international dimension. It is not only a political problem, but has a crucial military aspect as well. The government’s multi pronged strategy has enabled it to counter the LTTE with considerable success. At present it appears that the LTTE’s fortunes are at a low ebb, and it has suffered a series of severe reversals at the hand of the government, losing territory, ships and its reputation as an invincible fighting force.

Whether the LTTE will be able to stage a military come back in the end of the year with the onset of the monsoon rains that are favourable to its guerilla strategies remains an open question. On the other hand, most people are left wondering at the LTTE’s apparent inability to fight back effectively at the present time. A significant part of the credit for the remarkable change of fortunes goes to the Defence Secretary who has stated that the LTTE needs to be defeated before a political solution can be implemented. A military crushing of the LTTE would enable a political solution to be offered on terms that are acceptable to the government.

Mutual intransigence

However, the resistance to a political solution that is acceptable to the Tamil people goes back to the 1950s much before the LTTE was formed. Time and again, enlightened Sri Lankan government leaders of the caliber of S W R D Bandaranaike, Dudley Senanayake, J R Jayewardene and Chandrika Kumaratunga tried to offer political solutions that they believed were fair by the different ethnic communities, and good for the country, but they were thwarted by racist elements in the country.

On the other hand, the LTTE has been at the forefront of dealing death blows to democratic institutions and leaders on all sides. The LTTE has physically eliminated the democratic leadership of the Tamil people. The failure of successive governments to address the grievances of the Tamil people served to weaken and discredit Tamil leaders such as A Amirthalingam and Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam who placed their trust in democratic values and in the Sri Lankan political system. But it was the LTTE’s assassins who eliminated them from the political system that they tried so hard to reform and transform.

The LTTE remains an intransigent organization to this date. Their political postures over the past three decades fail to give concrete evidence of their willingness to become a democratic party and accept a political solution within a united Sri Lanka. The only time that the LTTE presented a concrete proposal was in October 2003, when they put forward their proposal for an Interim Self Governing Authority. But their proposal for an ISGA made no specific mention of their plan for self transformation to an organization that respects democratic values or their willingness to function within the framework of a united country.

Today, the LTTE also needs to take responsibility for escalating the military confrontation with the government of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, and for taking the war with it to the point of irreversibility. The LTTE’s repeated ambushes of government troops in the early days of the President’s assumption of office and the closure of the Mavil Aru irrigation canal in the east provided the government with ample justification for its counter attack. The government has now felt empowered by its military successes to take its response beyond a defensive posture to one of full scale military assault.

Incorrect analysis

Apart from the ethnic conflict, Sri Lanka has gone through two attempts to overthrow democratically elected governments by means of revolutionary political violence. These failed revolutions were undertaken in 1971 and 1988-89 by the JVP who sought to establish a socialist state and sever the country’s dependence on the world capitalist system. The JVP utilized a strategy of political assassination and armed insurrection to achieve its objectives, quite like the LTTE in the ethnic conflict. The periods of the insurgencies were considered as periods of national terror. The failure of the insurrection of 1971 to fundamentally change the injustices that gave rise to it, led to the follow up insurrection of 1988-89.

It is often the case that military personnel overemphasise the potential of the armed forces as problem solving agencies. This has happened in other countries as well, such as in the United States, which saw the sacking of General Douglas MacArthur after his great victory over the North Korean army in 1951. The renowned General advocated that the US should invade China to prevent any future Chinese threats to American interests in South Korea. Mr Rajapaksa’s statement that a political solution is only possible after sending in the Sri Lankan army to recapture the Wanni does not accord with Sri Lanka’s own post conflict experience. Sri Lanka’s past experience of military solutions indicates that the impetus for political reform ends once the government defeats its opponent. An example would be the JVP insurrection of 1987-89. At the height of the insurrection, President Ranasinghe Premadasa pleaded with the JVP to talk with him and share power with his government. But once the government militarily defeated the JVP there was no more talk of power sharing or of fundamental political reform. Today the richest 10 percent in the country continue to get more than 40 percent of the national income, and the Western Province gets over 50 percent of the national income, keeping alive the truth of the JVP slogan that the rich milk is for Colombo while the watery cucumber is for the rural areas.

Accordingly, the best time to come up with a political solution to the ethnic conflict is now, when the government has an incentive to come up with such a solution and is pledging to do so. If the government is able to come up with a political solution that is acceptable to the moderate majorities in the ethnic communities, there will be immense pressure on the LTTE from both the Tamil people and the international community to decommission their weapons and end the ethnic war for all time. On the other hand, if the past is to be any guide to the future, the defeat of the LTTE by itself is unlikely to lead to a just and negotiated political solution which has been resisted by racist elements in the polity for the past fifty years.

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