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Dislodge the Lodges or Empower
the Paramilitaries?
Dilrook Kannangara
However desperate the security situation is, the right to live in anywhere
in Sri Lanka cannot be denied to any citizen. This resembles JRJ’s
sending of 1983-riots-affected-people to the North whereas what should
have happened was to pack-off the rioters to the North of no return!
Those people who willingly packed-up and went in the recent clear-up
are definitely not terrorists or abetters of terrorism. Otherwise, they
wouldn’t have budged!! It is as simple as that. Apart from lodges,
there are many other places terrorists can lie dormant till the time
comes. How about the Sinhala LTTE terrorists who are living in Colombo,
etc. in their own houses? There is a need for more practical solutions
to ensure security in the cities. However, deterring unnecessary travel
and stay in Colombo for people from the North is a good thing as it
avoids a lot of mishaps, misunderstandings and arrests.
Due to pressure from various quarters and court rulings the eviction
of lodge-stayers would stop. The government has already clamped down
on paramilitary or like activity. Encouraged by the new found freedom,
the LTTE is hyperactive in Colombo targeting civilians. Unfortunately,
the police is running out of options and soon they will give up active
security provision to the City (which they do at extreme difficulty)
plunging it into chaos. If each and every avenue for civilian protection
fails and the LTTE manages to kill based on race, there is a strong
possibility of sparking riots. This will be for the advantage of the
LTTE.
Sri Lanka is the only country in Asia with enormous security concerns,
yet not enough (or not at all) paramilitary forces. The Indian paramilitaries
comprise of a few million strong cadre second only to China. However,
military analysts rank the Indian paramilitaries as the best and most
ruthless in the world. Paramilitaries around the world are very effectively
engaged in counter-insurgency and anti-terror “warfare”.
The vacuum in the Sri Lankan context must be filled immediately; we
need highly efficient paramilitary forces to guard civilian lives, property
and undisturbed way of life. In fact, we had paramilitaries and our
cities were much more safer for the civilians, politicians, foreign
investors and tourists back then. The Special Task Force (STF) was also
considered a paramilitary force and was not subject to the Army Act
or any other restrictive or obligatory laws. They did a fantastic job
in proving security in Colombo, etc. Dozens of bombs were recovered
by them and the terrorists were properly handled so that there was no
threat to public security and no injuries to prison guards and those
visiting prisons!
Things changed with the CBK administration; more than sixteen highly
destructive terror attacks were launched on civilian targets. The only
parallel to this is 1986 -87 era when a similar number of attacks occurred
in areas completely under the government control.
Human rights concerns are the main drawback of paramilitary engagement;
however, more controlled paramilitary presence can overcome this deficiency.
The suicide bomber and his/her assistants come into civilian areas to
kill and destroy and they got to be squashed at any cost; this is the
reality. Either the regular forces or the paramilitaries got to do this.
Evidence from all over the world suggests that a regular army cannot
handle infiltrators very well. Even the ‘Green Zone” in Iraq
has been attacked repeatedly by terrorists in spite of the world’s
most acclaimed army headquartered therein! Therefore, it is only the
paramilitaries that are capable of doing this and they should be empowered
to do so. Resultant human rights issues should be handled separately.
The best way to put out human rights violations is to speed up the war
and complete it ASAP. If the policy makers want to drag the war for
another so many years, then there cannot be any means to provide civilian
security. As the infamous terror slogan goes, “we need to be lucky
(to kill people) just once, but you need to be lucky (to safeguard civilians)
all the time”. Accordingly, the terrorists rely not only on luck,
but also on time.
Suppose the chance (probability) of LTTE attacking Colombo, etc. is
equal to the chance of avoiding such an attack, there is a 0.5 probability
of an attack on any day. For a week, there is a 0.0078 chance of attacks
on all seven days and an equal chance (0.0078) of avoiding any attack
on all seven days. However, there is a 0.9844 chance of at least one
terror attack during the week! The LTTE has been not so terrible vis-à-vis
their Iraqi cousins! They have been trying approximately 30 times a
year (if you add up all the instances of actual attacks plus many foiled
attempts) to attack 100% civilian targets. This means a 0.08 (30/365)
attempt each day to kill; if there is only a half chance of succeeding,
there is a 0.04 (4%) probability of an attack on any given day (and
a 0.96 chance of no attacks). This means a 0.75 chance (0.96 for 7 days,
0.96^7) of no attacks for 7 days and 0.25 (or 25%) chance of an attack
on at least one day in the week! The larger the time span, the higher
the chances of an attack. True enough if the detection rate increases,
this 25% chance reduces, but the terrorists are also getting increasingly
cunning; who thought that a pregnant woman could kill so many in a suicide
attack? We all understand this without calculations, but do our higher
authorities adequately understand this? If they do, why are they still
dormant about a speedy solution? I don’t understand this bit.
Paramilitaries should be brought back (formed if there aren’t such
groups) to handle tricky security matters in the ‘South’.
Possible human rights violations should be looked into in doing so;
the best way to eliminate all human rights violations is to complete
the extermination of LTTE terrorists. There are no easy way outs. Unable
or unwilling to do so within a reasonable time period is a grave deficiency
of the authorities. Curtailing paramilitary activities in order to prolong
the war is an even more graver act of dishonesty.
In other words, when there is much ado about human rights violations
(allegedly committed by ‘paramilitary’ groups), what the government
should do is not to block the paramilitants but to speed up the war
effort of killing LTTE terrorists (the cause) so that the need for paramilitants
(effect) is exhausted. Trying to suppress one effect while the cause
is still present will only lead to an increase in other effects (possible
attacks like during CBK’s time).
However, the good of the ‘paramilitants’ will always be praised
by the people when they refer back to that one and a half years of intense
warfare (2006-07) when the LTTE couldn’t launch any successful
terror attacks in the ‘South’. Tigers were so desperate that
they took to the skies where the paramilitants cannot catch them!! However,
all their air sorties proved even more disastrous as NONE of their intended
targets was successful and SLAF retaliatory attacks caused very heavy
damage to them also triggering procurement of advanced jets like the
MiG-29 which will surely spell doom for the LTTE in the near future.
Having said that, we would certainly need the services of paramilitary
forces to keep clean the areas surrounding the hangers from vile agents
trying to ground our jets for good.
The government should listen to the majority concerns, especially to
those who vote for them (than those oppose them); the majority airs
concern about the future security of Colombo and other cities in the
‘South’. They basically don’t want another ‘north’
in the ‘south’.
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