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War and peace in Sri Lanka

Today we take Anton Balasingham's book, reviewed in the Green Left Weekly Australia. Any views arising from this article are welcome, and perhaps can be published next week alongside the comments.

Reviewed by Chris Slee

On November 17, Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) candidate Mahinda Rajapakse narrowly defeated United National Party (UNP) candidate Ranil Wickremesinghe in Sri Lanka's presidential election. But more significant than the result was the fact that Sri Lanka's Tamil minority boycotted the election.

The boycott was effective throughout the Tamil-inhabited areas of the north and east of the island. According to the November 23 Tamil Guardian, less than 1% of voters in Jaffna voted, while in Kilinochchi only a single individual voted.

The election boycott reflected the alienation of Tamils from the Sri Lankan state, and from the traditional ruling parties - the SLFP and UNP - which draw their electoral support mainly from the island's Sinhalese majority.

Slee is supposed to be reviewing Anton Balasingham's book; but then he set himself up as a reviewer of recent Sri Lankan politics and promptly goes on to make an inaccurate statement of fact by purporting to say that there was a voluntary boycott of voting in the North and the East. The boycott was enforced; buses carrying voters were turned back at polling stations, and the LTTE threat against voting was as strong as the LTTE's threat at the previous election to harm anyone who did not vote. This gaffe (we'll put it mildly) is only for starters.

This alienation was also shown by a series of huge Tamil rallies in the lead-up to the election demanding self-determination for Tamils and the withdrawal of the Sri Lankan army from Tamil areas.

The roots of Tamil alienation lie in a long history of state oppression. Tamil youth responded to this oppression by taking up arms and creating the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an effective fighting force that waged a 20-year war for Tamil self-determination. While large-scale warfare was ended by a ceasefire agreement in February 2002, low-level violence has continued, and has increased since the election.

Anton Balasingham's book gives a useful history of the war, and of several attempts to end it through peace negotiations. Balasingham is an adviser to LTTE leader Velupillai Pirapaharan, and has been the LTTE's chief negotiator in the peace talks.

When Sri Lanka gained its independence from Britain in 1948, one of the new government's first acts was to deprive Tamil plantation workers of citizenship rights. These workers were descended from people brought to Sri Lanka from India by the British in the 19th century to work on coffee and tea plantations. Despite the fact that their families had lived in Sri Lanka for several generations, a million people were defined as "Indians" and denied Sri Lankan citizenship.

Only cursory understanding

Though Slee does not tell what the so called uprising in the North and the East had to do with plantation workers, his glib observations on citizenship rights shows he has only a cursory understanding of the dynamics of the conflict. Plantation workers were brought forcibly by the British; efforts to repatriate them to India by previous governments were in concert with policies of getting rid of the last traces of colonial rule - which was oppressive towards the plantation Tamils. The British brought them - and treated these workers a little better than slaves, but Slee can always excuse the white?

The citizenship law did not directly affect the main group of Tamils, whose ancestors had lived in the North and East of Sri Lanka for thousands of years. But it was soon followed by new laws adversely affecting all Tamils. Sinhalese was declared the sole official language of Sri Lanka, making speakers of the Tamil language second-class citizens. Knowledge of Sinhalese was made a prerequisite for employment in the public service, thereby excluding Tamils from government jobs. Discrimination against Tamils was also applied in education.

For many years, Tamils opposed these discriminatory laws by peaceful means, including demonstrations, sit-ins and participation in elections. But peaceful protests were met with violent repression by the police and army, as well as by racist Sinhalese mobs incited to violence by politicians and Buddhist monks. There was a series of pogroms against Tamils, culminating in the murder of an estimated 3000 people in the government-instigated riots of July 1983.

We know not of Tamils being made second class citizens; often they were super class citizens enjoying the fruits of a divide and rule policy practiced by the British. Years of deliberate oppression of the Sinhala majority by the British had to be redressed; towards this end there was no doubt some overzealous policy. There were riots, and 1983 was certainly a negative. But if Lee is reviewing a book by Anton Balasigham he should say that the terrorist atrocities by the LTTE, the killings of Buddhist monks, the bombing of the Dalada Maligawa, etc., were acts that have earned Anton Balasigham's LTTE international pariah status - a ban in the United States and many other countries. But Lee is not into a review, he is into a diatribe.

The growing repression led to the growth of Tamil nationalist sentiment.

In 1977, the Tamil United Liberation Front won 17 seats in the Sri Lankan parliament on a platform of Tamil self-determination. The repression of peaceful protest led many Tamil youth to turn to violent methods. The LTTE was formed in 1972 and carried out its first major armed action in 1978. After the 1983 pogrom, the LTTE gained increased support and dramatically stepped up its war against the Sri Lankan army.

The government forces were unable to defeat the LTTE. In 1987, the Indian government sent a "peace-keeping force" to Sri Lanka, with the ostensible aim of protecting the Tamils from the violence of the Sri Lankan army. However the Indian government did not want to see the creation of an independent Tamil state, and the Indian army soon began repressing the LTTE.

Indian Government began repressing the LTTE? Those words speak eloquently for the shallowness of this purported book review, but we shall move on out of a need not to engage Mr. Slee on things he patently does not know the first thing about.

In 1988, Ranasinghe Premadasa was elected as president of Sri Lanka. He opposed the continued presence of Indian troops, and started talks with the LTTE. He even secretly gave the LTTE some arms to fight the Indian troops. But he remained opposed to self-determination for the Tamils, and once the Indian army had withdrawn, fighting broke out once again between the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE. There have been a number of attempts to reach a peaceful settlement to the war. The book gives a lot of detail on the LTTE's negotiations with successive Sri Lankan governments.

Chandrika Kumaratunga was elected prime minister in 1994 after campaigning on a peace platform. But Balasingham argues convincingly, based on a detailed analysis of the negotiations and the government's failure to carry out its promises, that Kumaratunga was never serious about peace, and merely wanted time to rebuild the Sri Lankan army for a new war.

Lost chances

Building up its army was precisely what the LTTE wanted to do during the interregnum offered by negotiations, but that's another story that Slee does not know about.

The 2002 ceasefire with the government of Ranil Wickremesinghe has been the longest-lasting attempt to bring peace. But once again the government failed to fully implement the provisions of the agreement, and the ceasefire is looking increasingly shaky.

Balasingham's book exposes the bias of the "international community" against the Tamil struggle for self-determination. In some cases this is blatant, such as when the US proscribed the LTTE as a "terrorist" organisation, while ignoring the state terrorism carried out by the Sri Lankan armed forces and continuing to give military aid to Sri Lanka.

Mr. Slee's idea of a review is to take the facts presented by Balasigham and present them to the reader as gospel truth. If he wrote a review in the night, he will say that the Sun god oppresses the earth by never offering a drop of sunlight to earth dwellers. Seriously folks, doesn't it boggle the mind the kind of sheer incompetence displayed in a book review that does not once attempt to research the facts which indicate abundantly that the LTTE has violated the ceasefire some 4000 times which pales into insignificance the figure of violations that can be attributed to the Sri Lankan army?

In other cases the bias is more subtle, as with the supposedly neutral Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission headed by a Norwegian general, which failed to enforce certain key provisions of the ceasefire agreement - for example, those requiring the Sri Lankan army to vacate public buildings it has occupied and to disarm paramilitary groups allied to the army.

The Norwegian mediators also did not take seriously the LTTE's call for refugees to be allowed to return to their homes in the large areas of land occupied by the Sri Lankan army (the so-called "high-security zones"). As a result, the LTTE eventually suspended its participation in the talks. While Balasingham's book is very informative and definitely worth reading, it has some shortcomings that reflect those of the LTTE itself. The book deals very well with both the armed struggle and the diplomatic efforts to obtain peace. It is less satisfactory in discussing the political dimensions of the struggle.

The book does not seriously analyse the failure of the LTTE to win the support of the Tamil-speaking Muslims of eastern Sri Lanka. Balasingham writes: "Though they embraced Tamil language and shared a common economic existence with the Tamils as a peasant community in the east, it is their religion, Islam, which provides them with the consciousness of collective cultural identity as a distinct ethnic group."

Slee sees the gnat, but doesn't see the whole hog that the gnat feeds on. Failure to win the hearts and minds of the Muslims? How about the failure to win the hearts and minds of Tamils? How about the fact that the LTTE continued to assassinate political opponents, which made the LTTE the number one exterminator of Tamil political leaders, far ahead of the figure that can be attributed on that score to Sri Lankan forces?

Balasingham also notes that the Sri Lankan state has deliberately fostered Tamil/Muslim divisions.

For example, he refers to "the sinister activities of Tamil paramilitary groups working with military intelligence, who harass the Muslims in the name of the Tigers to cause inter-communal violence".

All this may be true, but it would be expected that the government's discrimination against the Tamil language would have provided a basis for a united struggle by all Tamil-speaking people, including Muslims, against this injustice. However the book does not report any efforts by the LTTE to win the support of the Muslim population for its goal of a united homeland for all Tamil-speaking people in the north and east of Sri Lanka.

As a result, when in 1987 the Indian government talked of holding a referendum in ethnically mixed eastern Sri Lanka on whether or not to unite with the overwhelmingly Tamil north, the LTTE was not confident of winning the referendum. It feared that the Muslims would unite with the Sinhalese to oppose the merger. Worse still, there has been a history of ethnic violence between Tamils and Muslims in eastern Sri Lanka.

If Slee did say a few things abut the massacre of Muslims in mosques such as in Kathankudi, he could then be excused for thinking that "not wining the Muslims'' was some transgression by the usually astute LTTE.

The book also gives no indication that the LTTE has made any serious effort to take its case for Tamil self-determination to the Sinhalese workers, peasants and students of southern Sri Lanka.

The US anti-war movement played a key role in forcing the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. The seeming absence of a mass anti-war movement in southern Sri Lanka is a key obstacle to the success of the Tamil self-determination struggle. The LTTE has been willing to negotiate with Sinhalese political leaders whenever the latter showed any signs of wanting to reach a peaceful solution. But the LTTE does not appear to have sought to get its message directly to the Sinhalese masses.

LTTE's militaristic approach

The LTTE's militaristic approach has also led to the repression of dissent among the Tamils themselves.

That's a minor transgression too, see folks? What's a little ritual culling of dissidents, compared to the larger liberation struggle, Mr. Balasingham old chap?

These weaknesses of the LTTE should by no means, however, negate support for the right of Tamils to self-determination, and in particular for the removal of the occupying Sri Lankan army from Tamil areas.

Finally, the reviewer ends up by repeating the LTTE propaganda line, which makes us understand whether his heart bleeds for the Tamil people who are under occupation by the LTTE, both physically and in a psychological sense - considering that Slee himself has tangentially admitted that the LTTE, after all, militarily suppresses dissent. But by this time, the LTTE has fully occupied the reviewers mind that he has lost any pretentious he had towards being either reasonable or credible.

Armed Struggle and Peace Efforts of Liberation Tigers By Anton Balasingham Fairmax Publishing Ltd, 2004.

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Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.