60th year of Independence
PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE: MAKE 2008 THE YEAR OF VICTORY!
DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
“…You can’t make the mistake of being
weak. If you’re weak with security, you are defeated.” -
Fidel Castro: My Life (2007: 321)
We are about to step into 2008, the 60th year of Sri Lanka’s Independence.
It shows every sign of being a decisive year. Indeed it must be made
so. Sixty years after independence is the right historical and psychological
moment to resolve the major problem facing Sri Lanka. That is the reunification
of this small island. Sri Lanka’s natural borders must be its political
boundaries. Its armed forces must enjoy the sole monopoly of violence
throughout its territory. Whatever its internal arrangements, the country
must be one, single, indivisible political entity.
What does this mean in concrete terms? It means that the LTTE must be
eliminated as a military challenge to Sri Lanka’s unity and territorial
integrity. This in turn means that the Tigers must no longer be an armed
force capable of rivalling Sri Lanka’s armed forces. The LTTE must
no longer exist as a parallel army. This entails the destruction of
the LTTE as a fighting force; the elimination of its leadership, its
armed cadre and military assets. This would create the opportunity for
the LTTE to convert itself into a democratic political formation, provided
it accepts that any solution to Tamil political grievances and identity
issues must be pursued peacefully and democratically within the parameters
of a single, united Sri Lanka.
This objective is both imperative and feasible. It is imperative because
any sustainable progress requires the elimination of the enemy armed
force and its capacity for instant destabilisation. The varied futures
envisaged for the country by leaders as diverse as Presidents Jayewardene,
Premadasa and Kumaratunga were thwarted by one factor: Prabhakaran.
Sri Lanka can move forward only if it eliminates the obstacle in its
path. Its economy can grow in a sustainable manner only if military
expenditure levels off and is progressively reduced, and more fundamentally,
if the national market is reunified, which means the reunification of
the national territory as a single space. After decades of armed conflict
punctuated by ceasefires and internationally mediated negotiations,
the elimination of Jonas Savimbi was the key to peace and prosperity
in resource rich Angola.
The war can be won. We are at a rare moment in our country’s history
in which we enjoy a favourable confluence of factors: a President (and
Defence Secretary) with political will and determination; an experienced
and respected military leadership; massive popular support; high military
morale; increased recruitment; high performance on the part of all three
armed services. Those who make the most facile parallels with the Bush
administration, Iraq, Afghanistan and all points of geography and history
would do well to ponder the statistical fact that after a quarter century
of military conflict, the Sri Lankan people are not about to throw in
the towel and bring the boys back home, for the simple reason that the
boys are fighting precisely for their home, and therefore a massive
84 % percent of a huge 75% of the island’s people, a massive majority
of the majority, support the President’s war effort. So too does
a significant (under the circumstances) segment (20%) of the main Tamil
minority. The war is now a People’s War.
That is also the secret of the Govt’s success in defeating the
Budget conspiracy: no party or formation which bases itself at least
in part, on a nationalist or patriotic appeal, can afford to be seen
to topple the Government at the expense of the war effort and to the
benefit of the LTTE. This is also why the Govt does not have to succumb
to every slogan of the more extremist or radical nationalist forces
but can negotiate if not from strength, certainly not from inferiority.
2008 must then be designated as our Year of Victory. Certainly the war
cannot be won by solely military means, but let there be no illusions:
a war can be won only by primarily military means. The main, central
and decisive effort in the coming year must of necessity be military:
in a war, the armed struggle is the main axis and ‘motor force
of development’ of the historical process. All else is utopianism.
However the war effort must be supported by politics and diplomacy.
Prabhakaran will attempt a replay of 1987, when he successfully leveraged
the external factor (at the time, sub-regional, i.e. Tamil Nadu). Today
it will be pressure from those countries which have a large, electorally
significant Tamil Diaspora, which plays a role more like the notorious
Miami mafia than the Jewish lobby. These Western states seem determined
to prevent the military victory of the Sri Lankan state over the Tigers,
and seem to prefer the survival/existence of the Tigers as a military
entity. Sri Lanka cannot afford to be deterred by these pressures, and
sacrifice its future. Any student of the Cold War would recognise the
use of the instrument of Human Rights and so-called ‘dissident
civil society’ by the West, to penetrate and undermine regimes
and states. Sri Lanka cannot make the mistakes of Gorbachev (the latter
years) and Yeltsin, be tranquilised, have its sovereignty penetrated,
be weakened and dismantled as countries. Sri Lanka cannot be oblivious
to the use of the slogan of “humanitarian crisis” to dismantle
the former Yugoslavia. Today the West stands ready to ignore the UN
resolution that reiterates that Kosovo is a part of Serbia, and to recognise
Kosovo as an independent state.
The anti-Sri Lanka campaign will accelerate next year as Sri Lanka makes
headway in the struggle to overcome the Tigers. The West, preceded by
the Western-dominated media, will howl about a “humanitarian crisis”,
and brandish the policy of R2P (‘Responsibility to Protect’)
at us as we close in on Prabhakaran’s bunker. However, in our case
R2P is ultimately something of a paper tiger. It works in a context
such as the former Yugoslavia, a country put together in the post-war
years from the most diverse components (in bold, laudable experiment
by Tito). Sri Lanka is not a failed or failing state. It is a continent
too far for an imposed R2P to be sustained. It is located in Asia, has
a distinct cultural identity and a decisive homogeneous majority, a
consciousness of a continuous existence as a state entity, an educated
and militant youth population. And no part of Sri Lanka hankers after
EU membership!
The coming anti-Sri Lanka campaign must be blunted by three counter-thrusts.
We must rebuild our national defences by rejuvenating our National Human
Rights Commission and/or creating new and credible institutions headed
by internationally respected Sri Lankans. It must be recognised however,
that human rights violations will drop off drastically when the war
is over, when the enemy has been defeated – just as human rights
violations in the South of Sri Lanka dropped off sharply when the JVP
had been militarily defeated. The re-enfranchised Tamil people will
swiftly recover their rights in a peaceful environment where the highly
competitive politics of Sri Lanka’s proportional representation
come into play.
We must devolve power to the North and East, swiftly and sustainably.
This means, as a first step, reactivating the 13th amendment, as proposed
by Douglas Devananda. The weight of the Indian state upon the Sri Lankan
and the reluctant cooperation of a Government with a 5/6ths majority
in parliament, could not secure in 1987, the “Indian Model”
so beloved by certain Tamil moderates. The 13th amendment is as good
as it gets, and any improvement will have to await a more favourable
parliamentary balance of power, with a drastically altered mass consciousness.
(Faced with the stark choice at a referendum of deleting the term “unitary”
from the Constitution, I do not see the majority of Sri Lankans, voting
“yes”). A realist solution would aim to protect the 13th amendment
from further roll-back as was threatened earlier this year.
Mr Devananada’s Tamil rivals may depict themselves
as more pro-Indian than he, but it does not suit India’s interest
to have a pro-Indian Tamil politician who is so unacceptable to the
Sinhalese that he winds up in India, a la Vardarajahperumal! Devananda
is a Tamil politician who is loyal to Sri Lanka and close to India;
therefore able to act as a bridge. He is the only Tamil politician who
will accept a solution within the existing Constitution, and is also
the only Tamil politician trusted sufficiently by the Sinhala South,
to be permitted to hold a significant measure of power in the strategically
sensitive North. Like the 13th amendment, Mr Devananda is also as good
as it gets. Reactivating the 13th amendment in the present day translates
itself into an interim administration in the Northern Province and early
Provincial elections in the East.
Our foreign relations must be consciously reoriented, and foreign policy
must turn for inspiration to “Kadirgamar Chinthanaya”. Those
Sri Lankans whose natural tendency is to ask “ how high?”
when the West says “jump”, as well as those whose knees knock
at the thought of Western cutbacks, neither recall the history of Sri
Lanka’s own foreign policy nor understand contemporary international
relations. It was in the 1950s, in response to the Rubber-Rice Pact
between China and Sri Lanka (under a UNP administration!) that US Congress
passed the Hickenlooper Amendment cutting aid to our country- yet we
did not waver, still less wilt.
As for those who would counter that the Socialist camp
existed at the time as an option, it is to be recalled that the “moment
of uni-polar hegemony” has passed its zenith or is in crisis, and
we live in the period of the Iraqi debacle, the revitalisation of Russia,
the rise of China and tendencies towards multi-polarity. Under President
Rajapakse, Sri Lanka has already embarked upon a diversification of
its dependence. To avoid a tedious debate on foreign policy, for which
I have no time, working as I am at one of Sri Lanka’s global FDLs
here in Geneva, I would only remind the incorrigibly negativist and
the defeatist that Sri Lanka’s finest foreign policy thinker the
late Lakshman Kadirgamar had already, in the last stage of his tenure
and life, publicly signalled the geopolitical/geo-strategic reorientation
of Sri Lanka’s external relations. I advocate a return to that
emergent thrust, within an overall Realist policy of power balancing,
especially multi-polar power balancing.
Until this war is over and won, our foreign policy has to be the handmaiden
of strategy, an overall strategy whose primary goal and objective must
be the unification of the state through the military defeat and destruction
of the secessionist-terrorist enemy, the LTTE. Foreign policy must be
defence-driven, rather than the other way about. It cannot be oriented
towards those states that have large Tamil lobbies and which instrumentalize
human rights hypocritically to prevent our victory. It must be oriented
towards precisely those states, blocs and tendencies which are uninfluenced
by such lobbies, and are in favour of combating that which China refer
to as “the Three Evils: Separatism, Terrorism and Extremism”.
In our 60th anniversary year Sri Lankans would do well to be inspired
by the words of Fidel Castro, a product of another small island nation
in the tropical sun. In his 700 plus page autobiography My Life (2007)
Fidel Castro says “Those who don’t respond, those who don’t
fight, those who don’t combat, those people are lost from the beginning,
and in us, you’ll never find that kind of person.”
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