H. L. D, Mahindapala

In the history of wars Sri Lanka alone stands out as the nation that is charged with the crime of restoring peace and democracy. Of course, as in any other war, peace came at a price. Restoring peace in a time of war inevitably cost lives. No peace has come out of wars without sacrificing lives, particularly in the last stages where the desperate enemies facing defeat go to extremes to save their lives and political fortunes. That is the inescapable nature of war and peace. However, the Vadukoddai War launched by the Tamil leadership was ended by GOSL with far less loss of lives compared to the colossal costs of ending wars fought by the accusing nations. Though figures ranging from 40,000 to 140,000 are quoted as the number of civilians killed in the last stages of the war no one has come forward to claim that he/she had counted the bodies. Obviously, the wide gap in the quoted figures lead to the conclusion that these are guesstimates based on speculation linked to selected political agendas.

As opposed to these questionable figures the one precise statistic known at the end of the war was the rescue of nearly 296,387 Tamil civilians held as a human shield by the retreating LTTE. They had no food, water, shelter, medicine or a future. When they were running away from the LTTE they were shot at point blank range. When they were in the queue waiting for their first meal a suicide bomber sneaked in and blew himself up killing the Tamil escapees. They had nowhere to go except into the arms of the Security Forces who were in the field. The rescue operation to save them from the LTTE and restore some dignity and respect to their lives, however meagre it may have been, was the biggest humanitarian operation undertaken by the Security Forces.

But within days of rescuing the Tamil civilians Sri Lanka was hauled up before the UNHRC on charges of not ending the war according to international humanitarian law. This bizarre move was spear-headed by leading war-mongers of the West whose record of observing international humanitarian law (IHL) in combating terrorists threatening their national interests stinks to high heaven.

There is another oddity in this anti-Sri Lankan campaign led by US : it focused exclusively on the last few months — from January to May 2009 — of the longest running war in Asia. To be exact, the war ran for 33 years starting from declaration of Vadukoddai War in the Vadukoddai Resolution of May 14, 1976 to May 19, 2009. India, “the strategic partner” of US, too joined in, focusing on the last months, to accuse Sri Lanka of violating “in particular international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law” as stated in the US-sponsored resolution passed by the 19th session of UNHCR, on March 22, 2012 in Geneva. The morality of focusing only on the last five months of a 33-year-old war defies all known logic and even commonsense.

For 32 years and 7 months the international community tried every trick in the book, throwing in regional (Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement), international (Ceasefire Agreement) and national (P-TOMS) formulas, to end the war. They failed. Velupillai Prabhakaran successfully destroyed every major move to restore peace by either assassinating the peace-makers (Rajiv Gandhi) or by violating all the terms and conditions signed by him in the peace agreements (Ceasefire Agreement). Like all the other preceding Tamil leaders Prabhakaran thought that he had the power to force the world to accept his will as the final solution. But his intransigence and arrogance led not only to the loss of all the gains he achieved in the Vadukoddai War but also to his own death. Finally, when Erik Solheim, acting on behalf of the international community (including India in particular), realised that the Tamil Tigers were doomed he proposed an “organised end” to the war. He told a book launch in London last week:

“In Sri Lanka, the government was winning the war and victory was at hand. They had no intention of stopping. In January 2009, the government declared war. The call for the LTTE to accept an organized end to the war which included the LTTE handing over weapons, registering LTTE cadres and every single Tamil civilian supervised by international authorities ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢¢”š¬‚ the UN, US, India, etc. was not heeded”, he recalled.

The initial offer to surrender was made to the LTTE in November 2011 and, though talks were going back and forth on the terms and conditions, the LTTE eventually refused to “accept an organized end” (read: surrender) which would have saved tens of thousands of lives, as stated by Solheim. After the rejection of surrender it was clear to any sensible analyst that the LTTE was determined to fight to the bitter end even though it meant sacrificing the lives of innocent Tamil civilians caught in the cross-fire. This places the entire responsibility of the deaths of the Tamil civilians, from the time the Tamil leadership declared war in the Vadukoddai Resolution to its end in Nandikadal Lagoon, entirely on the Tamil leadership that relied primarily on a military solution. They painted themselves into a corner when they deliberately stepped into the military framework they institutionalised and legitimized in Vadukoddai. It was meant to liberate them but from day one to the end in Nandikadal they were imprisoned inside the Vadukoddai military trap which they laid for the Sinhalese.

Even at the last stage they had an escape route to get out of the military hole in which they were if the LTTE accepted Solheim’s offer of an “organized end”. But their arrogance, intransigence and false hopes blinded them the realities facing them. This has been a chronic and incurable failure of Jaffna Tamil leadership. Had Prabhakaran accepted Solheim’s offer it is the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) that would have been cornered. The international community would have put unbearable pressure on GOSL to accept the surrender on the terms that would have been favourable to Prabhakaran. An “organized end” would have undoubtedly saved not only civilian lives but also the lives of LTTE hierarchy. This would have tied the hands of the GOSL and given ample breathing space for the LTTE to regain its lost power not only to survive as an organized political force in Sri Lankan politics but also to come back and fight another day. The Tamil leadership, as per usual, committed hara kiri by refusing to accept “the organized end”. The hopes that came up with the military solution embedded in the Vadukoddai Resolution went down unceremoniously with the Jaffna Tamil leadership trapped in their military arrogance and intransigence.

Prabhakaran “who knew nothing about the way the international community worked” (Solheim) was made to believe by the equally dumb Tamil expatriates, that the West would come, with boots and all, to save him at the eleventh hour. But no one came to rescue him. He was left to stew in his own juices in the waters of Nandikadal Lagoon. The situation had been escalating into critical proportions by March-April of 2009. The inevitability of the fate awaiting the LTTE was felt even in Western capitals. David Milliband, the UK Foreign Minister, is on record saying in the last days of the war that he spent 60% of his time on the Sri Lankan issue. He and his French counterpart, Bernard Kouchner, rushed to Colombo in April, 2012 to put maximum pressure on the GOSL to stop the war, all in the name of humanitarian grounds of saving lives of Tamil civilians. Pakiasothy Saravanamuttu, the desperate double – agent of Prabhakaran and the West, was running from one Western capital to another lobbying frantically to stop the war. Echoing his paymaster he was also blaming the GOSL for not stopping the war.

As in the past, the Tamil leadership, intoxicated by their arrogance and intransigence, fell on their sword when they rejected out of hand the best offers they received from national, regional and the international communities. It was when the GOSL forces were on the verge of closing in on the rag-tag cadres of the LTTE, that the international community decided to intervene directly and forcefully to save the LTTE. But it was too late. Nor did they have a card to play short of putting boots on the ground. That was going to be too costly, both in terms of financial and human costs. Besides, the West was running out of body bags in the Middle East to spare any for another military adventure in Sri Lanka.

Nevertheless, the West which did not bother about the civilian deaths for 32 years and 7months suddenly woke up to civilian casualties only when they realised that the defeat of Prabhakaran would also mean the defeat of their interventionist role in Sri Lanka. Death of Prabhakaran also meant the death of Co-chairs and Erik Solheim. Collapse of Prabhakaran also spelt the collapse of the imperial role of the West. When Solheim was running the show for the West and India he did not exert the kind of pressure on the Tamil Tigers that was required to stop the war. Relying on the highly inflated capacity of the LTTE to win the war he took their side at every turn and pressured GOSL to concede the ever-increasing demands of the LTTE. Each time the Tamil Tigers walked out of negotiations on the flimsiest excuse Solheim and the I/NGOs backed the demands of the LTTE to pressure the GOSL to give into the next level of demands claimed by the LTTE with no guarantees of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Solheim too was happy to use Prabhakaran’s gun powder to force GOSL to concede more and more at formal and informal negotiations in Geneva, Colombo, Sattahip, Delhi, Oslo etc.

Meanwhile, negotiations were not going anywhere because the attitude of the Tamil Tigers was that they do not need talks, negotiations, mediators, Co-chairs, peace deals as long as they had the guns to dictate terms to GOSL. Solheim too was happy to go along with Prabhakaran’s because the only way by which he could consolidate his position as an interventionist dictating terms to GOSL was by keeping the gun powder of the LTTE dry. Enhancing the political, legal, international and military powers of Prabhakaran was a deliberate policy of the Norwegians to gain credibility and acceptability with the LTTE. For instance, in the first round of talks in Sattahip, the delegation sent by Ranil Wickremesinghe was forced to address Anton Balasingham as “Your Excellency” conceding that he was a representative of a sovereign state having equal status with GOSL. Solheim even told the President Mahinda Rajapakse that Prabhakaran was a great strategist and the Sri Lankan forces would be defeated if the war was not stopped. The West was sold on the myth of the invincible superiority of the Tamil Tigers. Western diplomats were queuing up at the gates of Prabhakaran in Killinochchi to pay their homage as if he was the head of a state.

The diplomats were queuing up not to save the lives of Tamils but to endorse and entrench the power of a mass killer of Tamils — a fact which was known to them. They knew that Tamil leaders like V. Anandasangaree and S. C. Chandrahasan had exposed Prabhakaran as the tyrant who had killed more Tamils than all the others put together. They did not threaten him with punitive action even after he had torn up the Ceasefire Agreement signed with the international community. Instead they, their hired hacks in I/NGOs, the so-called defence correspondents in the local media, academics and assorted pundits were praising the might of Prabhakaran’s power that can be satiated only by appeasing him.

Each visit of Western diplomats was read as an endorsement of the power of Prabhakaran to kill, destroy and dictate terms to GOSL. He knew that he derived his power from the gun. He and his Tamil agents domiciled in the West also knew that he would have no power to bargain the day he lost the power of the gun. The Tamil agents abroad lobbied, demonstrated, financed and propagandized to vindicate and justify his killings. Each killing was a shot of adrenalin pumped into his veins. And each visit of Western diplomats proved to him that he was justified in his killing. Not a single diplomat went to him with threats of hauling him up before a criminal court even though they knew that he had turned the Vanni into a fascist gulag.

The West began to raise the stakes only when Prabhakaran was losing. It was only in the last days and in the post-war period that the West and their agents used human rights as a political tool forcefully to tie the hands of the GOSL. Of course, there were lukewarm moves earlier to rap him on the knuckles with a wet rag. The former Under Secretary General of the United Nations/Special Representative for Children in Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy, for instance, named and shamed him in the Security Council. But like all other responses to Ms. Coomaraswamy moves in conflict zones, Prabhakaran did not care two hoots about her routine theatrical act. In this battle over the fate of Tamil children Prabhakaran won and Ms.Coomaraswamy, had nothing to offer the Tamil mothers, her own kind, grieving for the loss of their children except a useless bit of UN paper. She is typical of the international bureaucrats wringing their hands in public with no substantial solutions to the problems faced by humanity in contemporary times, except to mouth vacuous phrases and theses to make them seem important in global affairs.

Consequently, Prabhakaran had a field day until the GOSL forces crushed the LTTE outfit comprehensively. That put an end to the violations of international humanitarian law once and for all. President Mahinda Rajapakse achieved what all the forces of the West and India could not achieve for 33 years. But who gets the prize? Radhika Coomaraswamy is awarded the Chirac Foundation prize for writing some 17 plans on a paper whereas President Rajapakse who ended a 33-year-old war and gave durable protection to the Tamil children is accused of violating human rights. The news item on Coomaraswamy said: “During her mandate as Special Representative she put in place 17 action plans for the eradication of the use of child soldiers around the world. She also contributed to the recognition, at the International Criminal Court, of individual criminal responsibility of those recruiting or using child soldiers.” We can congratulate her for putting down on paper “17 action plans for the eradication (emphasis mine) of the use of child soldiers around the world”. But can she tell us which one of the ” 17 action plans ” stopped Prabhakaran from grabbing Tamil children on their way to or from school? Has any of her action plans “eradicated” the use of child soldiers, as she claims? If she has “eradicated” the use of child soldiers with her paper plans shouldn’t she be given the Nobel Prize and not the low-grade Chirac Foundation prize?

Let alone the rest of the world, her “action plans” have not even impacted on her fellow-Tamils to reject Prabhakaran as the criminal who took away the irreplaceable the childhood of Tamil children. On the contrary, they have glorified the Tamil mass murderer as their greatest “liberator”. Where does this leave her “17 action plans”? If she is genuinely committed to save peace and save the Tamil children will she at least now speak out openly against Tamil violence and the political agenda of her fellow-Tamils which was initially promoted by her and her hired hacks at the ICES? The ICES was her first pro-Jaffna Tamil ideological base that justified in devious ways Vadukoddai violence which, consequently, led to the recruitment of Tamil children. Despite her direct and indirect ideological contributions to Prabhkaran’s violence, demonizing the Sinhala-Buddhists and exonerating the Vellahla Vadukoddians, she posed as the mother of all children at the UN. Knowing full well to what ends her ideological research took the Jaffna Tamils will she, at least from now on, direct her operations at the ICES to end the hypochondriac Vadukoddians hyperbolic litany of complaints of not having dignity, equality and self-respect — the latest slogans raised for whipping up mono-ethnic extremism in the post-Prabhakaran north — and work for reconciliation and peace?

In fairness to Ms. Coomaraswamy it must be mentioned that she is not alone in this gallery of political prize winners. The European Union, a collective of war-mongers who send troops and fly planes over conflict zones killing innocent civilians in the Middle East, is the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Then there is President Obama, the Commander-in-Chief of the mightiest power on earth who has killed more civilians than George Bush, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for his rhetoric. Just rhetoric, mind you. There is nothing on the ground to back up their contributions for peace, or protection of children. American Presidents, EU and UN panjandrums have only to utter platitudes or write airy-fairy plans to get awards. But those who restore peace on the ground, however costly it may be — peace is invariably won at great costs (example: World War II) — are threatened with punitive action. As time goes by it will be necessary to track how the values expounded by Ms. Coomaraswamy gets translated into action now that she has left the UN ivory tower and entered the Main Street in Jaffna.

Prabhakaran , of course, dismissed Coomaraswamy summarily because she was no threat to him. Even the ban imposed on him by the international community and the UN agreements he endorsed pledging not to recruit children were dismissed as laughable and irrelevant episodes compared to the deadly power of his gun. And when the Western diplomats began to hobnob with him he was convinced that his gun was more powerful than their agreements or principles. Besides, the subservient role played by Erik Solheim confirmed, more than anything else, that the LTTE could take the West for a ride. Which, in fact, they did. It took post-war contemplation for Erik Solheim to realize that he was taken for a ride by his boozing buddy Anton Balasingham. Solheim’s partisan role made the LTTE feel that the West too had no choice but to back them. It was the backing given by Solheim that made them arrogantly walk out of negotiations,or thumb their noses at offers made by the West.

The West went along with Prabhakaran like the way they went along with the fascist dictators of the world, some of whom they were unwilling to dislodge and some of whom they were unable to dislodge. Anyway, as pious proponents of democracy and global peace their clear option was to help GOSL to eliminate Prabhakaran at whatever cost it may take. Example: Saddam Hussein. But when Sri Lanka ended the Vadukoddai War the West decided to nail Sri Lanka for doing exactly what the West did in Iraq: eliminating a cruel dictator. But there is a difference. The West attacked Iraq on trumped up charges to grab oil. Sri Lanka launched its final offensive, saying enough is enough, when Prabhakaran cut off the flow of Mavil Aru water to the Muslim and Sinhalese farmers living downstream.

Besides, war-weary Sri Lankans were seeking an end to the longest war in Asia. The failure of national, regional and international agreements with Prabhakaran to end the war too justified the final assault that ended the war. To argue that the human cost was too heavy in the last stages — based, mark you, on contested figures — is like saying that the wars of the West were concluded by saintly human right activists who went down on their knees to offer flowers at the feet of Hitler and Tojo who threatened their national interests.

World War II ended formally when Gen. MacArthur signed the terms of surrender on board battleship Missouri on September 2, (Sunday) 1945. In succinct speech outlining the terms of surrender he said: “The issues involving divergent ideas and ideologies have been determined in the battlefields of the world and henceforth not for discussion or debate.”

So if it was good enough for the mightiest democracy in the world to end the war on that note — no debate, no discussion on defeated ideologies — and continue to maintain a military base in Okinawa even now, 67 years after WWII, why is Sri Lanka continuing discussions and debates on issues that were settled in Nandikadal Lagoon in 2009?