POINT OF VIEW:

Sri Lanka - a new peace process needed

by Alan Keenan in open Democracy:

The Sri Lankan peace process has, from its beginning, been a violent affair, especially in the areas of the north and the east that the Tamil Tigers either control or lay claim to as part of their Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam.

Soon after signing the ceasefire agreement, the Tigers took advantage of the access it granted them to government-controlled areas and proceeded to forcibly recruit thousands of children, murder hundreds of their Tamil political rivals, intimidate the Tamil-speaking Muslim minority in the eastern province, and generally clamp down on all forms of independent political activity.

Intensification of violence after Karuna split

Despite the literally thousands of violations recorded by the ceasefire monitors, the Tigers were able with impunity to continue their violent quest for complete political domination of the north and east. Political violence began to grow more complicated, and ultimately much worse, after Colonel Karuna broke with the Tigers in March 2004.

Karuna was soon defeated in a three-day military campaign by the main northern faction of the LTTE, but escaped with many of his fighters and gradually regrouped. With the increasingly obvious support of the Sri Lankan military, Karuna's forces have established camps in or on the edges of government-controlled territory, from which they have been able to launch sporadic but effective attacks on the Tigers.

Assassination of Kadirgamar a payback

All the main sides - the Tigers, the government and Karuna's men - protest their innocence of political killings, but the UN's special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, Philip Alston, has documented these in an incisive and devastating report dated 27 March 2006.

The LTTE's assassination in August 2005 of Sri Lankan foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar - himself a Tamil but one of the fiercest and most effective critics of the Tigers - was in part meant as payback for the government's support of Karuna.

Perhaps intentionally, it also had the effect of strengthening the hardline Sinhalese parties that had been arguing that the Tigers could not be trusted and that the peace process was merely the latest means by which the Tigers were working to establish their separate state.

These sentiments, together with an LTTE-imposed boycott on Tamil voters, led to the election in November 2005 of President Mahinda Rajapakse. Running on a platform critical of the ceasefire agreement and the Norwegian role in facilitating the peace process, Rajapakse also promised to defend the "unitary" state against proposals for a federal solution to the conflict that would grant significant autonomy to the predominantly Tamil north and east.

The Tigers clearly intend their current wave of violence to raise the cost to the government and military of their support for Karuna. . For much of the peace process, as the Tigers acted against their opponents and their "own" people with impunity, the fundamental challenge has seemed to be how to influence them to moderate their predatory and anti-democratic practices. So far, several initiatives have been tried without success:

International community should step in

The paradox that recent events suggests, however, is that effective pressure on the Tigers is possible only if and when the international community first steps in and demands that the Colombo government respect the basic rights of its Tamil citizens.

This will require the government to rein in its death squads and actively prevent reprisal attacks on Tamil civilians. Such attacks, by conflating all Tamils with Tigers, effectively do the Tigers' work for them. Justice, and pragmatism, will also require the government to abandon their attachment to the "unitary" state and to develop a package of constitutional reforms that will offer Tamils real rights and an effective share in power. The rights of Tamils can no longer be held hostage to the Tigers' quest for power.

Pressuring the government to enact such reforms will amount to a fundamental shift in how the road to peace in Sri Lanka has been conceptualised. It means abandoning the idea that peace will come from a sequence of confidence-building measures limited to, and working within the comfort zone of, the government and the LTTE. It requires, instead, challenging the government to begin its long-overdue transformation in more plural and democratic ways, even as it is clear that this isn't what the Tigers themselves want.

This in turn requires that the government and their international donors engage constituencies well beyond the Tigers: that is, the many Muslim, non-Tiger Tamil, and Sinhalese points of view that have been largely excluded from the failed peace process of 2002-2006.

Need for a new peace process

All this amounts to the need for a new peace process - not the mere resuscitation of the old one, which is now (at best) on life-support.

Sadly, due to the combination of militarism and failure of imagination of its political elites on all sides, Sri Lanka may well be forced to go through a period of devastation before a refashioned peace process becomes possible.

In the meantime, international actors of all sorts must start making the paradigm shift necessary for a new peace to be possible, even as they pressure the two sides to minimise the cost of fighting on the hundreds of thousands of civilians who will be caught in the middle.