Thou shall not ignore the Americans anymore
 

The Rajpal Abeynayake Column

The Americans pushed the Europeans again. Since they pushed the British Navy - bloodied their noses and all - at the Boston Tea Party, this is the most invigorating thing that the Americans have done for themselves to regain their civilisational instincts from the Europeans. Europe had art, culture and Shakespeare, and the Americans had instant coffee. The dice was heavily loaded against them.

Until, last week when Donald Camp said in Colombo that the LTTE had earned the terrorist label. It almost made me feel proud that there are Americans on this planet. It needs be said that the Americans have been the only real Sri Lankan ally in the last two years. This give us cause for more than a tea party. Here are the reasons why.

American opinion may have well tipped the balance, and moved the centre of gravity away from the gaining tendency of worldwide LTTE appeasementitis.

It's not just that the Americans have said it - but consistently the Americans have said it well, with the authority and gravitas that behooves a superpower. "Sri Lanka has always known that it has the moral support, the diplomatic support of the United States, and that will continue to be true. Certainly, the LTTE is a terrorist group of the first order," said Donald Camp, a U.S Principal under-Secretary of State.

The European Union resolution banning the LTTE is comprehensive, as it is purposeful.

But nothing beats "a terrorist group of the first order." There is no manoeuver space within those seven words. There was no manoeuver space for the European Union, which had no option perhaps other than to ban the LTTE outright in the face of the world's superpower putting its foot down with this order of deliberation.

So in many ways the Boston Tea Party is off again. It was Ceylon tea that went down at the Boston tea party, when the rebels dunked tea shipped from London in the harbour brine.

It was also in Boston that the first inglorious moves for LTTE recognition were made when the legislature of Massachusetts passed an ill-advised, utterly provocative and interfering resolution about the LTTE 'representing the aggrieved Sri Lankan Tamils.' That second tea party is now over, more than twenty years after it began. Camp provoked the EU to do better in the department of moral responsibility. He said 'the LTTE earned the terrorist label', and the EU went one better to say that the 'LTTE is not the sole representative of the Tamil people'. Good, but the Americans provided the trigger.

Those who went out of their habitat to find cause and reason for the Sri Lankan conflict came up with the novel and sometimes the utterly eccentric and offbeat. Prabhakaran was particularly fond of one of these explanations. He said that the Sri Lankans suffer from the Mahawamsa complex, a historical weight which cannot be borne gracefully by this island's people.

But, its not two thousand years of history that's working against the LTTE, but twenty. Twenty years of a history of fiendish human rights violations earned the LTTE the terrorist epaulettes. It helped without a doubt that the Americans had a war on terror on their hands.

But, the Americans have been far less mealy mouthed than the British, or the rest of the Europeans on making statements on the generality of the terrorist threat, from the time this business of war on terror began.

The EU had the Scandinavians within their fold, and that's a tremendous ultra-liberal weight to bear. The sole European claim to any kind of global advantage in any match - up with the Americans rested upon the European claim of being more tolerant than the Americans.

But, when bombs started hitting London, Tony Blair couldn't be tart tongued any more about freedom fighters, and Blair's terrorists suddenly became our terrorists and vice versa.

But the American's arrived at this position much earlier, which is an easier thing for the US to accomplish perhaps, as America has the authority of incumbency as the superpower. Europe is the superpower to be, which is a status that carried with it a certain degree of vagueness that comes necessarily from being second fiddle and Blair endowed.

But, Americans arrived at an early decision and followed up with the most consistent and unequivocal succession of statements ever to emanate from any quarter against the LTTE, and this includes the Sri Lankan government.

Americans certainly learnt about the nature of terrorism the hard way, and true it is, that this learning curve was not resultant from its own volition. US State Department elite learnt of terrorism under threat of annihilation.

But, having said that, it takes a certain degree of acid resolve to consistently come down harder on the LTTE than the Sri Lankan government. This last statement of course can give way to various interpretations and extrapolations.

One is that the Sri Lankan government has not been sent home without a bum-rap. The other is the inevitable one, which is that the Americans are angling for something, and when they come and get it, we will be sold down the entire length of the river and not the quarter of it that the LTTE has led us down, with the aid of its own international cohorts and chums.

On the first count, Camp said "... we also hold democratic governments to high standards. And when there are killings in areas controlled by the government, it is certainly the government's responsibility to uphold law and order'' . Certainly Sri Lanka's first goal against itself, would be to ignore the dimension of unchecked collateral damage due to a need for urgent retaliation.

Incidentally, if the world collateral sounds abstracted and phoney with reference to the deaths of people caught up in conflict, we say that the Americans invented it for us.

But, the state has to be more sensitive to collateral damage, and roll back any failures in the line of command which may have led to civilian casualties.

The first process is to be credible, and in that effort the Sri Lankan state could acknowledge its own lapses. We publish the UTHR report elsewhere in this newspaper with a view to placing this problem on the crosshairs.

But America is grown up enough and has bombed enough to know that retaliation is sequential to provocation, and that sometimes the intent of provocation is precisely one of securing maximum collateral damage.

Sri Lankans need not be baited into playing into the LTTE hands, and its not bad acknowledging some mistakes have been made, and some 'collateral damage' has been sustained. (Ugh, bad word.) One reason such an acknowledgment could be made is that the we have one solid understanding partner in this business - the Americans who choose better words these days to articulate exactly our own backyard malaise.