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LTTE's turn to lay down arms

There is one very simple question that should normally confound all specialists of conflict resolution but it doesn't.

Why is it that if the Basque separatists have laid down arms and the Hamas in Palestine have come forward as candidates for elected office, the LTTE continues to go about its own way stubbornly insisting on its pound of flesh? Basque separatism did not cost a tenth of the lives taken in the Sri Lankan conflict, but the rebels have now given up arms and done it in a way that's not just ceremonial.

This latter aspect is stressed, because one could argue that the LTTE laid down arms too in one remembered interregnum in the past.

Yogi, one of the LTTE's glamorous young men of the moment gave up what looked like a pistol but war broke out soon, and that was the end of that arms-giving.

Basque Eta separatists gave up arms last week in what amounts to a final act of self-destruction for one of the best-known if not best-equipped rebel groups of the last two decades. News reports said that the Eta rebels "gave up arms for good."

The political process however between the separatists and the Spanish political establishment is not at an end. That's where the Basque example is stupendous compared to what's going on in our Asian backwater, where the LTTE has not laid down arms and is not being exhorted in any way by the international community to do so.

It is precisely not the way in which the Eta separatists approached their own end game, or the Irish Republican army approached their relationship with the British government at the end of a painfully long running conflict. What all this means is that the LTTE is out on a limb. But, sometimes that's not the way the world, or the Sri Lankan government sees it.

Its time this paradigm changed, and the Liberation Tigers came around to the realisation that its not tenable being the only loose cannon, the singular problem child among the world's so-called renegade armed groups.

How long can propaganda alone make it viable for the LTTE to continue a campaign that is not tenable, because there is simply no tolerance for separatists groups that have laid a premium on arbitrary violence and terror as a strategy for achieving their ends? Antipathy towards Basque separatism was primarily because the Basque rebels moved beyond revolutionary politics to plain and simple terror.

This is the refrain that's heard from every Spaniard who has been interviewed in market squares and fish-stalls by international wire service correspondents who were seeking to ascertain the pulse of public opinion since the historic decision by the Basque separatists to ''lay down arms for good'' pending a final solution to the political conflict that dogged successive Spanish governments.

Terror tactics negate the romanticism of a ''just struggle'', which is not to say that all armed struggles are based upon legitimate causes for revolt, against legally elected regimes. But, over time, naked-terror established its own dynamic, which is a strong repulsion towards organizations that explain their rejection of civilized behaviour by adopting the attitude 'end justifies the most barbaric means.'

Time ran out long ago for such tactics, and perhaps the LTTE has been able to buy a little more time to tout their own brand of arbitrary aggression, by using some amount of native-cunning to wage a propaganda war that managed for a while to bamboozle world opinion.

LTTE propaganda may have lulled world governments into thinking that Prabhakaran gave leadership to an entity that was somehow a little more important than it in fact was.

But by being its own worst enemy, the LTTE merchandised a brand of enemy-elimination and child recruitment that earned it the stamp of utter incorrigibility. With that as their ensign, it has been a straight route to losing whatever credibility gained through years of strategically carried out image laundering.

Now the veneer of legitimacy that the LTTE built around itself is crumbling with the fragility of a house of cards, with rebel group after rebel group acknowledging current reality and laying down arms in the glare of the international media spotlight. It should be a matter of time before the LTTE and above all its partners in local NGO-fairyland, take cognizance of this utterly inescapable reality.

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