Why Sri Lanka's President believes isolation will tame the Tamil Tigers

by Jo Johnson and Khozem Merchant

HAVE the Tamil Tigers finally been cornered? In a diplomatic coup for President Mahinda Rajapakse of Sri Lanka and the Sinhalese nationalist hardliners who elected him last November, the European Union (EU) is now to add the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam to its list of banned terrorist groups.

The EU's decision, which follows similar moves by India, the US, UK and, most recently, Canada, intensifies the diplomatic isolation of a group that has been fighting for an independent Tamil homeland since 1983.

"The LTTE thought the world was with them," says a jubilant Mr Rajapakse in an interview at his residence in Colombo, confident that the EU ban will help force the Tamil Tigers back to the negotiating table. "Their propaganda machine was very effective. Now, with the EU ban coming, they will realise that they can't use these tactics, killing innocent people, murdering. They will have to think twice and be much more careful. They have to think twice about fighting the whole world. Whoever has political sense won't do that."

If he is right, it will consolidate him in a position won with the slenderest of margins. The November election gave the people of Sri Lanka a clear choice between Mr Rajapakse's leftist Sinhala-majority politics versus the liberal reforms and LTTE appeasement proposed by opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe. Most of the Tamils in the north and east of the island did not vote - allowing Mr Rajapakse, who had promised to, renegotiate the ceasefire and preserve the unitary nature of Sri Lanka, to win by 50.3 per cent to 48.4 per cent.

Many expect the EU ban will prompt the Tigers, who control around 10 per cent of Sri Lanka in the north and east, to demonstrate their strength by force of arms. They are redoubtable guerrillas. Pioneers of the tactic of suicide bombings, they boast an elite squad of martyrs, the Black Tigers, as well as their own navy, the Sea Tigers, and a nascent air force. "The LTTE now has no inhibitions," says Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamattu of the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo. "They may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb."

Civil war is arguably now more likely than at any time since the ceasefire agreement of 2002. Tamil Tigers' chief theoretician and lead negotiator, Anton Balasingham, has warned that alienating the Tigers would achieve the opposite result to that intended. "The more the international community alienates the LTTE, the more the LTTE will be compelled to tread a hardline individualist path," he said. "An EU ban is not going to help bring about peace. It will only serve to exacerbate war."

It is a galling prospect for India, the regional power in south Asia. From Afghanistan to Myanmar via Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, India's neighbours form a roll call of Asia's most troubled countries. Another failing state on its borders will do little to boost India's claim to be a force for regional stability worthy of a seat in the United Nations Security Council.

Furthermore, for as long as South Asia remains one of the world's least economically and politically integrated regions, hawks in New Delhi worry that China's growing influence over India's neighbours will be difficult to contain.

The EU decision follows a series of violations of a four-year-old ceasefire agreement that culminated, early last month, in an extraordinary sea battle between the separatists' marine arm and the Sri Lankan navy. After sinking a navy fast boat by ramming it with vessels laden with explosives, the Tigers narrowly missed their main target, a ferry carrying 710 sailors and one European ceasefire monitor.

The move will restrict diplomatic contacts with EU governments, hinder the LTTE in its aggressive fundraising from the large Tamil diaspora freeze the organisation's assets and prevent the Tigers roaming across a bloc of 25 countries. "It delegitimises them," says Jehan Perera, director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, a think-tank. "For the Sinhalese psyche, the fear of a separate Tamil country being recognised by the rest of the world is allayed."

The LTTE also faces dissent within the Tamil community. It is battling to assert its claim to be the sole representative of the Tamil people, a status that the EU specifically denies it, and is embroiled in a bloody inter-Tamil battle in the east with a dissident militant force led by a former LTTE commander known as "Colonel" Karuna. An important factor in the breakdown of peace talks has been the Tigers' belief that Karuna receives support from the army, in contravention of the ceasefire agreement.

The LTTE has in the past indicated that it would accept a federal solution that falls just short of independence, albeit with full control of their own natural resources, sea lanes, airspace, judiciary and police. But Mr Rajapakse has shown no sign of budging from a formula of "maximum devolution within a unitary state". Dr T. Jayasingham, a Tamil academic at Sri Lanka's Eastern University, says: "It's very easy to ban the LTTE but the real question is how you pressure the government to address the Tamil problem."

Mr Rajapakse says he is working to form a consensus among Sri Lanka's mainstream political parties and complains about the caricature of him as a warmonger and Sinhalese chauvinist. "Even when we give [the Tigers] something they want, they say they don't want it," he says. "But I want the LTTE to come and discuss a solution. Without them we won't be able to have a solution to the problem."

That problem is fast spilling over into the politics of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. A rich state with a big voice in New Delhi coalition governments, its 61m population is sensitive to human rights abuses in Sri Lanka and sympathetic to the plight of its Tamil minority.

In recent weeks, following aerial attacks by the Sri Lankan military on LTTE-held areas, the exodus of Sri Lankan Tamils to India has reached worrying levels: 1,300 have crossed the Palk Strait this year to join the 55,000 Tamil refugees living in 102 camps across the state.

"The parameters of Indian policy are to ensure that there's no break-up of Sri Lanka and that the LTTE does not get too big for its boots," says Dr Saravanamattu. "The wisdom has always been that if the Tigers forged a separate state it would have a knock-on effect in India."

New Delhi has at various points been concerned that a breakthrough by the Sri Lankan Tamil minority, a population of 3.6m accounting for 18 per cent of the island's inhabitants, would revive Tamil nationalism in India. A more pressing concern is the message it might send to violent separatist movements in India's north-eastern states.

"We've given a firm 'niet' to Eelam," says one top Indian official. "There's no question of us ever accommodating or recognising any separate entity run by the LTTE in the north. We support maximum devolution within a sovereign and territorially integral Sri Lanka that recognises the country's diversity and plurality." In a delicate balancing act, India provides training to the Sri Lankan army but refuses Colombo a formal defence pact and is cagy about whether it supplies lethal weaponry that could be used to suppress Tamil militants. "We want India to be more involved," Mr Rajapakse.

Memories of its disastrous peacekeeping operation in the late 1980s, however, are so raw that diplomats say India almost has a "Somalia complex".

India never won the trust of the LTTE, which suspected it was trying to force an unfavourable settlement, ended up engaging the Tigers in guerilla warfare and was humiliatingly asked to leave by the Sri Lankan government.

New Delhi's perceived abandonment of the Tamils fuelled a discontent in Tamil Nadu that led to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, then prime minister, by a female suicide bomber in 1991. India has accused the Tigers' current leader, Velupillai Prabakharan, of involvement in the crime.

"India has its own version of the old US Monroe doctrine in its conception of its rightful sphere of influence, but refuses to intervene to back it up," says a senior European diplomat in New Delhi.

Indian foreign policy hawks fear this gives Beijing an opportunity. Growing Chinese influence over Sri Lanka's $20bn economy are a concern in New Delhi, which has recently lost out in a number of other markets where the two emerging powers have competed for control of strategic resources.

China recently pipped India to a contract to build a 500mw coal-based power plant at Norocholai on Sri Lanka's west coast, while also bagging a project to build a road between Colombo and the city's airport. In both cases, Beijing sweetened the deals with soft loans to Colombo totalling about $800m.

More worrying for India is that China is also poised to transform the strategically located harbour of Hambantota, on the island's southern tip, into Sri Lanka's third big port. Nine nautical miles from international shipping lanes linking south and west Asia, it will, worries one Indian official, make an excellent berthing place for Chinese ships: "They are doing what they did with the Gwadar deep-water port in Pakistan.

It's obvious they're trying to counter our influence and secure footholds in the region, creating an arc of influence. They're in Myanmar and Pakistan. Why not Sri Lanka?"

India has not been idle. Sri Lanka receives about half the aid India disburses to countries in the south Asian economic bloc SAARC. A five-year free-trade pact powered bilateral trade past the $2.0bn mark last year: the trade surplus is overwhelmingly in Delhi's favour, making it the largest single source for Colombo's imports. Officials' in Colombo say India's expanding economic interest in Sri Lanka suggests New Delhi "does not intend to let go lightly. India will not watch silently".

"The India-China competitiveness is a new phenomenon in Sri Lanka," says Saman Kelegama, an economist at the Institute of Policy Studies in Colombo, "and it will gain in intensity." Mr Rajapakse is proving adept at playing India and China off against each other. "It's globalisation," he says. "Sri Lanka is an open economy and anyone is free to come and invest." Securing lasting peace, however, will be the best long-term hope for sustainable development in Sri Lanka.

So far, in the first six months of his presidency, Mr Rajapakse has shown himself an astute tactician, but little sign that he has a strategy for reconciling a divided and bitter island.