|
|
|
| Services |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
 |
| |
 |
|
|
|
| Analysis |
|
| You are here:orfonline.org » Publications » Analysis |
| |
|
Sri Lanka: One year after the war
|
N Sathiya Moorthy
29 May 2010
Not many analysts have noticed it, but in the first year after the exit of the dreaded LTTE and the consequent conclusion of the ethnic war, the Sri Lankan Government has facilitated greater legitimacy on the Tamil polity and the presidency than in earlier decades. If the advanced presidential polls of January 26 meant that the Tamils in the war-torn regions of the North and the East got to vote in the same, unlike in the earlier round of 2005, the scheduled parliamentary elections less than three months later on April 8 meant that MPs from these parts got elected without the LTTE gun pointing either at them, or at Tamil voters.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s desire to advance the presidential polls by more than a year, to ensure a comfortable re-election with the ‘war victory’ cannot be gainsaid. Yet, his desire to have early presidential polls with the Tamils having a say in the ‘national affairs’ had been known months before the war had reached that conclusive stage. As may be recalled, the LTTE had barred the Tamils from voting in the presidential polls of 2005. Speculation at the time was that candidate Rajapaksa’s UNP challenger, Ranil Wickremesinghe, would have won if the LTTE had allowed the Tamils to vote. As incumbent, Rajapaksa may have wanted to prove a point — but more importantly, wanted re-election in a poll in which the Tamils could participate voluntarily.
Post-polls, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), the one-time LTTE-centric, four-party combine propped up by the militant outfit in its heyday, has acquired a certain credibility and legitimacy that it may have lacked earlier, particularly in the eyes of the Sri Lankan State, for negotiating the Tamils’ fate and future with. Here again, President Rajapaksa had expressed a certain desire for ‘inclusive negotiations’ involving the TNA in particular but not excluding other political parties of the Tamil-speaking people, including those already in the government and continue to do so after the twin-polls.
If it is about legitimacy and credibility of the Tamil polity as the government and the President had sought to project in the days immediately preceding and following the conclusion of the war and the exit of the LTTE, today, they have the added responsibility to make that credibility work on the ground. The government needs to revive the peace process that it had to suspend in mid-2006 after the LTTE walked out of Geneva
Talks-II, but by engaging the post-polls TNA. It can, and would necessarily have to involve other political parties representing various denominational Tamil groups. Having set the ball rolling through the acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment after President Rajapaksa took over and having revived the power-devolution process through the All-Party Representative Committee (APRC), the government and President Rajapaksa have to shed the sluggishness from the war years, to give it all a new start.
The Tamils’ side has a greater responsibility than the government is generally acknowledged. The new Parliament, like its predecessor, has 45 members representing Tamil-speaking people. They comprise those from the North and the Indian origin, or Indian Origin Tamils (IOTs) and Muslims. Personalities, rather than policy issues have dominated their internal politics and dynamics, so much so there may be as many parties for the Tamil-speaking people as there are MPs representing them in the 225-member House. Only that there are not every party has been able to obtain parliamentary representation in an election that could be as fair and free as could have been expected under the circumstances.
Clearly, those Tamil parties which had extended outright support to the ‘Sinhala majority government’ without attending to the daily needs of their suffering people did not make the grade — so too did parties still within the TNA and continuing to cling on to the LTTE’s ‘separatist agenda’ make the grade. While the TNA still stuck to the devolution-based political agenda of the larger Tamil community, those like minister Douglas Devananda’s EPDP and Arumugan Thondaman’s CWC, the latter in the upcountry, won on the ‘developmental agenda’ of President Rajapaksa. Included in the first list is the TMVP of one-time LTTE child soldier and at present Eastern Province chief minister, S Chandrakanthan, alias Pillaiyan.
There is an urgent need for political parties and their leaders in India arguing the case of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka to attempt and understand the nuances of the community-based politics in the island-nation. Sri Lankan intellectuals and academics, speaking at an international conference on Sri Lanka organised by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) at New Delhi in the second week of May, enumerated the denominational differences and concerns from which there is no escaping if a negotiated settlement with the Sri Lankan government is to bear fruit. This is, assuming that the Sri Lankan government and the ‘majority Sinhala community’ are also keen about a political settlement, thus paving the way for permanent peace and prosperity for the nation and its people, the Tamils included.
Unless there is unanimity of purpose among the parties and leaders representing the Tamil-speaking people, not to mention their thought processes and agendas, there is little that India or any other section of the international community could do, to impress upon the Sri Lankan Government to deliver on its war-time promises on finding a political solution to the ethnic issue. LTTE’s claims to being the ‘sole representative’ was flawed more for this reason than for the democratic content that it lacked. Incidentally, it was on a promise of delivering on the political solution front that the international community, India included, had extended moral, political and material support to the Sri Lankan Government to crush the LTTE.
The Sri Lankan government has effectively facilitated a smooth transition from militancy and terrorism in the Tamil areas and politics in the country, to democracy and development. Yet, devolution is as much at the heart of the ethnic issue, and hence the solution. So is the rehabilitation of the IDPs in their thousands and the reconstruction of war-ravaged areas in the Tamil localities — and the overall restoration of the war-affected economy of the past decades. One is not a substitute for the other, as some sections within the Sri Lankan Government seem to have concluded. One is a facilitator for the other, and vice versa.
The UN and sections of the international community is not satisfied — but so has been the Sri Lankan government on the pressure that pro-LTTE sections of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora have brought to bear upon the international community ever since ‘Eelam War IV’ commenced. The war has now ended, but not the pan-Tamil campaign on the issue, whose validity can neither be fully accepted, nor wholly denied.
And thereby hangs a tale.
The writer is Director, Chennai chapter, ORF
Courtesy: The Pioneer
|
|
|
|
|
|
