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| Sunday, 29 September 2002 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Hakeem's balancing act : Maintaining the truce in the East Observations by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA
'He (the king) is not content with not committing violence, but he must see that no injustice is done within his realm," wrote Abu'l Fazl Allami, the brilliant court scholar of Moghal Emperor Akbar in describing the virtues of royalty in his political treatise, A'in-i-Akbari (The Institutes of Akbar). If Abu'l Fazl had been in this country today, in our post-Ceasefire situation, he would have reiterated that injunction: it is not enough that there is no strife in the kingdom or that the ruler refrains from using force. Governance must ensure justice among the governed. The absence of war does not mean that there is peace in the country. The incident of 'accidental' shooting near Muttur, in the Trincomalee district and, the communally threatening pamphlets in Mannar are an ominous reminder of the truth of this maxim even as we mark the seventh month free of war. The outer trappings of battle that adorned even civilian areas have disappeared. Those ubiquitous barrel-fortifications that inspired painter Chandragupta Thenuwara's now internationally famous 'barrelism' art are now only to be seen in a few remote corners of the capital city and at the remaining checkpoints and military installations in the once-embattled North-East. Even if the portents of this hostilities-free period seem more bountiful than previous ceasefires, all Sri Lankans old enough to remember will keep in mind the hard fact that such ceasefires have previously become mere, all-too-brief, respites from war. And ceasefires collapsed only because no progress was made in resolving the larger problems that caused the war. When, despite the ceasefire, the basic socio-political tensions remain, then, the slightest spark can re-kindle the fires of violence and war. This is no mere theory as far as this country is concerned. Sri Lanka is a living "laboratory of war" as one Indian defence studies journal described it during the time of the Indian military intervention here in the 1980s. That is why United States special warfare forces now regularly arrive here for "training" programmes which are not simply a one-way process benefiting the Sri Lankan forces but also enable the Americans to experience 'for real' what they only learn in theory about tropical jungle warfare and guerrilla war. Of course, the time factor works both ways. It is true that the only way to avoid a re-kindling of military hostilities is to evolve, through negotiation, new political structures that will meet the conflicting socio-political group interests and, to do so as quickly as possible before tensions boil over into violence again. But the conditions of peace have also to mature objectively as the history of the conflict has shown us. After all, Sri Lankans have been warning of the potential for rebellion long before any insurgency broke out - at the moments in our past when legislative and political actions occurred that served to strengthen Sinhala ethnic supremacy and humiliate and marginalise the other ethnic groups. Organisations with membership from all ethnic communities formed in the 1970s to warn against the failure to restore equal rights and reform the State into an ethno-plural one. Organisations such as the Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality (many leading peace activists and experts in ethnic reconciliation today were founders of MIRJE in 1979) and later groups such as the National Peace Council have long campaigned against ethno-supremacist aspects of our political system and politico-social practice (like the continuing failure, on national TV and radio, to give Tamil language cricket commentaries) but to no avail. dominant political forces Even as these early prophets predicted, war broke out. Even after the war began, those who warned that a political settlement was essential for peace - even proposed devolution formulae - were ignored or politically defamed and harassed while the dominant political forces proceeded with 'military solutions' against "a handful of cowardly terrorists". Two decades proceeded in this manner, characterised only by, at first, complete disdain for power-sharing proposals and, later, by grudging, half-hearted efforts at devolution. Popular mindsets were not ready for such "concessions" to the ethnic "minorities" and the dominant political forces merely capitalised on these mindsets. It took two decades of blood-letting and economic and ecological devastation before radical steps were taken for peace. It is precisely that bloodletting and that devastation that are the objective conditions of the current peace initiative. The objective conditions have now matured generally to bring about new subjective conditions. It is this vast societal suffering that has transformed mindsets to a degree that the Sinhala "majority" is prepared to "concede" to the "minority" just about anything so that they, the Sinhalas, may live in peace and prosperity. But what this "anything" might turn out to be has to be negotiated between several contending socio-political forces: Tamil, Muslim, the Sinhala-dominated Government and the Sinhala-dominated Opposition. And this negotiation is complex and slow. The current United National Front has adopted a relatively sophisticated strategy that combines both rapid initiatives as well as slow processes that create new conditions for those initiatives to bear fruit. The UNF has the advantage of learning from a whole succession of past failures by previous regimes as well as reaping the benefits (if one could call death and destruction "benefits") of the traumatic experience of war and its impact on the Sri Lankan psyche. With an electoral victory last December, the UNF moved very quickly to cement a ceasefire whose success is unquestionable today. And the UNF Government has lost no time taking advantage of the environment created by Ceasefire 2002 to create new social and economic conditions throughout the country, especially in the war-torn areas and for the war-affected Tamil population that will enable further moves toward a political settlement. The ceasefire was a rapid step, but the political settlement process must necessarily be slow. In fact the actual negotiations have to be stretched out to give time for the new social and economic recovery moves to begin to take effect so that all sections of the people can experience and treasure the value of peace and normalcy. There is also the hope that an economic re-integration of the North-East with rest of the country will create the conditions for its political re-integration under whatever new system of devolved power that is finally negotiated. But all this, however, still runs the risk of that little spark that can set things aflame. In politics, timetables don't work like clockwork. Like life in general, politics is full of uncertainties - of cruel twists of fate like the mysterious helicopter crash that removed M.H.M. Ashraff, leader of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, from a political arena where he had moved to centre-stage at dramatic speed. It was Ashraff who placed the Muslim cause, both the political relevance of the Muslim community as well as the security concerns of the North-East Muslims, squarely on the negotiating table. And it is his one-time deputy, now SLMC leader and 'sole representative' (to borrow a phrase popular these days) of the Muslims, Rauf Hakeem, the man with the greatest number of ministerial portfolios, who must now continue the task. Unlike Ashraff, Mr. Hakeem does not hail from the East and thereby lacks that authenticity that gave the SLMC founder's politics a legitimacy crucial for the consolidation of the new East-based political force that quickly replaced the venerable, but somewhat furtive All Ceylon Muslim League (ACML) as the principal Muslim political formation. Hakeem's punch I call the ACML "furtive" because, throughout it long political history, the League has insisted on remaining in the background, in the shadow of the UNP, and has never projected itself on the political stage as a political party representing an ethnic interest. In doing so, however, the ACML tended to cater to the interests of its principal constituency, the Western Muslim community dominated by commercial interest groups to the detriment of the vast majority of Muslims living in the central regions and the North-East who comprise primarily agricultural communities and, with the outbreak of the civil war, faced serious threats to their physical survival. Mr. Hakeem's punch in Colombo to some considerable extent depends on his punch in the East and that legitimacy depends on how far he is prepared to go to fight for the Eastern Muslims cause. He has to win his legitimacy in the North-East with concrete political initiatives that meet the socio-political and economic needs of the North-East Muslims. Hence his manoeuvres, during the latter stages of the PA government, to obtain a separate Muslim district in the East. It was this manoeuvre that ultimately led to President Chandrika Kumaratunga's disastrous move to sack him from the Cabinet. The lack of any new political personality to emerge from the volatile East has kept safe Hakeem's political legitimacy as the overall leader of Sri Lankan Muslims, but the Eastern community, now having to bear the brunt of a newly arrogant (post-Cease-fire) Eastern Tamil community, is increasingly restive and searching for radical solutions to its problem of insecurity in a Tamil-dominated region. The LTTE has shrewdly helped Hakeem retain his 'national' legitimacy by recognising him as the 'sole representative' of the Muslims and even supported his demand to be a parallel negotiator in Sattahip rather than a mere member of the Government delegation. Since Hakeem also depends on the goodwill of Colombo for his ministerial power, the LTTE is calculating that the SLMC leader would be constrained from pursuing too far any demand for a separate Muslim polity in the East. Thus, the very same Mr. Hakeem who, just over a year ago, was demanding a separate Muslim administrative district in the East, is now saying that such plans could be shelved for the foreseeable future. How this will go down with the Eastern Muslims remains to be seen. Although the Ceasefire is in full sway islandwide, it is in the North-East Muslim areas where the truce is most brittle as last week's incidents and June's riots indicate. Given the very uncertain nature of their political future as an inevitable ethnic minority in a Tamil-dominated region, the Eastern Muslims need reassurance that their political and security concerns are being attended to and are not being shelved according to the timetable of the SLMC's non-Eastern leadership. There is the danger that independent Muslim groups may coalesce around extremist Muslim exclusivist organisations already active in the East that are inspired by a narrow Islamic fundamentalism that will neither be a fount of inter-communal harmony nor of harmony within the Muslim community. The LTTE, which has already shown readiness to share power within the single North-East political structure as opposed to an Eastern Muslim secession, must therefore balance its dealings with a Colombo-centred SLMC with dealings with East-based Muslim political forces that are amenable to power-sharing. In the long term such a multilateral approach will ensure a non-dependence on a single political force that must look to its own power interests and may not be able to single-handedly juggle diverse community interests. |
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