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bySumanasiri Liyanage

In April 2000, I presented a draft paper titled "How to Translate Thimpu Principles into the Language of Constitution" for a discussion at a workshop held at the Topaz Hotel, Kandy. If my memory is correct, the workshop was organized by the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs. One of the objectives of the workshop was how to incorporate the Thimpu Principles into the Draft Constitution.

Once again, today, the Thimpu Principles has become a subject of political debate and discussion. Almost all the Tamil parties in spite of rivalries between them accept Thimpu Principles as cardinal principles on which any proposal for resolution is founded. The LTTE supremo, Mr Velupillai Prabhakaran reiterated at the press conference held in Vanni in April 2002 that any solution to Tamil national question should be based on first three principles, namely, (i) the acceptance of Tamils as a separate and distinct nation (I cannot make any difference between nation and nationality.

It sounds to me like kitchen and kitchenette); (ii) recognition of Tamil homeland and guarantee of its territorial integrity; and (iii) the right of Tamils for self-determination. Principles are abstract ideas; but in order to grasp their real meaning, these principles must be located in the context within which they were developed. The Tamil militant organizations went to Thimpu not to find a solution to the Tamil national problem. They went there because of the pressure of the Indian government. Armed struggle had just begun.

The militant organizations shared an opinion that with the support of the Indian government they could win the armed struggle. It was very natural for them to think so at that particular juncture. The way in which the principles were drafted reflects the evasive strategy adopted by the Tamil militants at Thimpu. But the same reason gave those principles certain flexibility of interpretation. Unfortunately, the members of the delegation of the Government failed to recognize this flexibility since they were not able to think beyond their legal boundaries.

The two participants at Thimpu representing two opposing sides, H. L. de Silva and Ketheeswaran Loganathan have recently started a debate on the current validity of Thimpu particularly in the context of new peace initiative of the LTTE and the Government. I attended one dialogue held in Colombo. An American professor of international law attending expressed his surprise asking "why so much talk on Thimpu?"

I am pretty sure that the cardinal principles of Thimpu will once again be cited at the negotiation in Thailand not in an attempt to transform them into concrete agreement; but to keep them as it is, as abstract principles. I personally feel that the Thimpu principles may not help the peace talks. Those principles are good for hair-splitting academic discussions.

The key to the solution is what the LTTE wants and what the Government is prepared to offer. Mr Loganathan's interpretation of homeland may be qualitatively different from Prabhakaran's interpretation. I am confident that de Silva may not find any problem in accepting Loganathan's homeland theory. LTTE may use Thimpu terminology but the interpretation that would be given to it will definitely be different from Loganathan's interpretation.

Negotiation is a game. I sometimes think that I should go back to my economic theory and run a game of two non-cooperative players in order to find where the Nash Equilibrium is located. The LTTE may have done that already; but I doubt if the government or its think tanks have thought of the usefulness of such an exercise.

The Thimpu principles may only be surface issues. The real and fundamental guidelines as far as the LTTE is concerned would be three-fold: (1) the Tamil nationality; (2) An exclusive Tamil territoriality (it may not mean total ethnic exclusivity, but as Sinhalese nationalists argue in the case of Sri Lanka others can live in a Tamil homeland under Tamil hegemony); and (3) the LTTE's hegemony.

The relative importance of the three is probably in the opposite order of priority. A mechanism that ensures overlapping and a fulfillment of these three requirements is what the LTTE is seeking in the forthcoming negotiations.

The issue today is how the Government could cope with the demands grounded on these three elements in the LTTE programme. The Government may respond in four ways. First, it can reject all demands grounded on these three elements depicting them as irrational and as a threat to national sovereignty and territorial integrity. I believe this was the strategy adopted by the Government delegation at Thimpu.

It seems that H. L. de Silva, in his recent articles, supports this stand even today. This is the Sinhalese nationalist response to Tamil demands, not only the demands of the LTTE, but also the demands of moderates like Loganathan. This option can be rejected on moral as well as on political grounds.

The second option is the position of the President, Mrs. Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. She proposes to disregard the LTTE and address the issues related to Tamil national question, the so-called core-issues. The weakness of this position has been that it underestimates the strength of the Tamil nationalism in general and the LTTE in particular. People may argue that the LTTE cannot be considered as the sole representative of Tamils; but Tamils' relationship, in this particular historical conjuncture, with the LTTE is dialectical. It is a love-hate relationship. There has also been a practical consideration that weakens the President's position - i.e. the impossibility of implementation of a solution that would satisfy Tamil aspirations and grievances. This was revealed by the failure of Chandrika's strategy.

The third position seems to be the one popular among the UNF politicians and its liberal civil society allies. They stress the importance and necessity of entering into negotiation with the LTTE in order to find a solution to the conflict. Nevertheless, at the outset they express the view that they are not ready to accept the proposal for Tamil Eelam.

Some liberals accept that there is a Tamil nation, that, for a long period of time, the Tamils inhabited certain areas of the country and that they have the right of self determination. After accepting all these ingredients of Tamil nationalism, liberals try to treat it as a 'minority' question. This is the dilemma of the liberal position. My criticism of this liberal perspective is as follows: if one accepts there is a Tamil national question, it has to be treated as a national question, not as a minority question. Because, individual rights rather than group rights are of more importance in problems concerning a 'minority'. So the liberals want Tamils to live in the dreamland hypothesized by the liberal intellectuals and politicians.

This is the reason why they interpreted Mr. Pirapaharan's interview as a change in the LTTE's position from a separate state to internal self-determination. I believe that the bifurcation of the right of self-determination into internal self-determination and external self-determination may be valid at a different level of analysis, but when it comes to a right of a nation such bifurcation will lead to misunderstanding producing dangerous results. It seems that Loganathan has now fallen into this liberal trap.

I suggest an alternative way of dealing with this problem; and I call it a social democratic approach to a national question. Its focus is not territory but people. The social democratic approach believes that Tamils have the right to determine their own destiny that includes the right of secession. However it does not stop at the Leninist approach to the national question which is based, in the final analysis, on the analysis of class struggle.

At this point I bring in the Habermasian distinction (after Jurgen Habermas) between instrumental reason and communicative reason. Nations in conflict situations, open or tacit, normally ground their action on the instrumental kind of reasoning. It is natural because the modernity project in association with the rise of capitalism and the nation-state has given prominence to that kind of reasoning.

But this is not the only kind of human reason. We develop reason through mutual inter-subjective communication. So Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims and other nations on the island have to reach through negotiation and communication a solution of how they are going to live - together or separately but without harming each other.

In this perspective, territory is not sacrosanct. Ian Lustick in his excellent book, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands, notes that 'the territorial shape of any state reveals itself as contingent on as well as constitutive of political, technological, economic, cultural and social processes'. He further adds that the change of the size and shape of states may not necessarily be a function of armed conflict or use of force notwithstanding the fact that the demand for a small adjustment of state territory has produced most violent and intractable conflicts. He writes:

"But the intricate histories of British, French and Italian state formation show that coercion is usually only a partial explanation, and sometimes no explanation at all, for the changing the size and shape of the states. On-going negotiations over the possible secession of Quebec from Canada, the essentially nonviolent detachment of the non-Russian republics from Russia and Slovakia from Czechoslovakia, and the reunification of Germany clearly demonstrate that peaceful separation of territories from existing states is possible, that conquest of territories does not necessarily mean their political integration, and that acquisition of a territory in war does necessarily mean its permanent separation from rival claimants.

With respect to territorial expansion and contraction as a political problem, it is precisely those cases where force majeure was not decisive in the determination of outcomes, or where it is not expected to be decisive, which are of the greatest interest. So the Government, which is at the moment basically a government representing the Sinhalese majority, should honestly discuss how Tamils want to live in this country. This communication negotiation should not be based on a priori rejection of partition as an option. It is an option.

Hence, the two parties to the talks may discuss the issues of territory, population transfer, reparation, and other relevant issues if one party is keen on forming a separate state of their own. People can be given a chance to decide how their rational and just demands and aspirations can be met.

This will bring to the surface the flaw of the entire logic of nationalism, both the Sinhalese and Tamil, and the instrumental reasoning that goes with it. Leninist strategy was designed in order to weaken the hegemonic nationalism - the nationalism of the Great Russian Empire, but the strategy of the Social Democrats aimed at weakening all kinds of nationalisms.

Let me end this now with a witty remark: The day a Sinhalese leader with the consensus of the two main Sinhalese parties declares that the Government is ready to discuss partition and its modalities would be the last day of Tamil nationalism!

This does not mean that Tamil nationalism is a by-product of Sinhala nationalism; and that it is only a nationalism of a defensive kind. It means the two are dialectically united opposites so that one cannot live without its 'other'.

[The writer is a political scientist and a Director of the Alliance for Peace and Integration (API), Sri Lanka.

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