To talk, or not to talk: What are the issues?

by Rajan Philips

While assailing the LTTE at the UN General Assembly, President Mahinda Rajapakse acknowledged that the Tamil people of his country have "legitimate grievances." I would like to hope that he would provide the leadership required to address these legitimate grievances within a framework of justice, equality and fairness.

If they had been so addressed before 1983, the LTTE would not have had a reason to come into being.

Perhaps the first order of business is for the government to ensure that at least a semblance of normalcy is restored to the lives of the Tamils, Muslims and the Sinhalese in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. Equally, the Tamils in Colombo need to be protected from the daily scourges of kidnapping and targeted killing. Those with money have left the country and those who do not are dreading the 'white van' showing up.

The second order of business for the President is to set about the task of addressing the legitimate grievances of not only the Tamils but also the Muslims. To his credit he made a commitment before the world assembly to seek a negotiated settlement with the LTTE.

Even as he was addressing the UN in New York and the NAM in Havana, his ministers, officials and consultants were laying down conditions for the forthcoming talks with the LTTE.

The latter for its part has come up with its own conditions. Regardless of the mutual tone of intransigence, the issues raised by the two sides have implications for a final political solution.

These issues need to be looked at in the light of reason, while giving priority to the interests and needs of the people rather than the military needs of the army and the LTTE, and with a view to what is possible and practicable. Under these broad criteria, I will look at some of the main issues one by one.

Political Solution and the State Structure:

Some advisers have asked the Sri Lankan government not to enter into talks with the LTTE until the latter avows by the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Sri Lankan State.

This is only one half of the requirement, the missing half is that the government and the main opposition party in parliament should simultaneously commit themselves to restructure the state and provide territorial autonomy to the Tamils and Muslims in the North and East.

Such a mutual commitment in Sri Lanka would be analogous to the declaration of mutual recognition in Israel-Palestine: the recognition of the right of Israel to exist by the Palestinians, and the corresponding agreement by Israel to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Oslo declaration by the then (UNP) government and LTTE spokesmen in December 2002, to "explore a solution founded on the principle of internal self-determination in areas of historical habitation of the Tamil-speaking peoples, based on a federal structure within a united Sri Lanka", enshrines this principle of mutual recognition and is inclusive of the Muslims in the Northern and Eastern Provinces.

What is now needed is a reaffirmation of this declaration by the present (PA) government and the main (UNP) opposition party in parliament. Equally, the LTTE has to formally recommit itself to the Oslo declaration and accept the right of the Muslims to determine their own status in a future federal structure.

Devolution and North & East Merger ?

Agreement in principle about federalism is one thing, but working out its details is where the devil comes in. The Experts Panel advising the All Party Committee should devote its energies to working out these details and come up with ideas for their gradual implementation.

The merger of the Northern and Eastern Provinces has unfortunately been turned into a legal issue. It is primarily a political question and should be settled politically. The legal framework can then follow the political settlement and not the other - carting the horse - way around.

In contrast to the circumstances of the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement that created the merger, the question today has to be formulated not in terms of North-East merger but as identifying the appropriate units of devolution.

This will be the Experts Panel's most important task, but one whose parameters have already been identified.

First, what form of devolution is to be provided in the seven southern provinces? Would it be the current system of Provincial Councils, or substantive administrative decentralization and a reinvigorated Local Government? Given the prevailing apathy and lack of support for the Provincial Councils, is there any purpose in continuing with them in the South?

Seen against this background, the pettifogging insistence on de-merging the North and East becomes premature in that it implicitly presupposes that the South wants to retain the current system of Provincial Councils.

On the other hand, if the Provincial Council system in the South were to be dissolved, there should be a special arrangement to address the political needs of the Upcountry Tamils.

Second, the fundamental difference between political devolution and administrative decentralization has to be recognized. The apathy for Provincial Councils in the South has to be contrasted with the legitimate rights and claims of the Tamils and of the Muslims for their respective territorial autonomies in the North and East.

The LTTE and a majority of Tamils will insist on a contiguous territorial unit for the exercise of their autonomy. Spatially this could include the whole of the Northern Province and the Tamil majority districts of the Eastern Province. A contiguous Muslim unit could be demarcated within the Eastern Province.

The new units will be open to any and all Sri Lankans - Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims - who are now living there and who may choose to live there in the future.

The federal or central government will continue to exercise its jurisdiction over institutions and properties - such as ports and airports - that are located within these units in accordance with the agreed upon distribution of powers and functions.

Enough background work has been done in Sri Lanka and enough examples are available from elsewhere and it should not take long for the Experts Panel to devise a scheme of devolution identifying the devolved units, the distribution of powers and functions between the centre and the coordinate units, and the institutional changes that will be required for their implementation.

Conditions and Counter-conditions:

There have been conflicting suggestions about who in the LTTE should the government recognize or talk with. According to the most loquacious of government spokesmen, the government will only undertake talks directly with the LTTE leader and no one else. Further, the LTTE leader should personally underwrite the organization's commitment to a renewed ceasefire before any talk could commence.

On the other hand, some of the many government consultants have publicly advised the government that it should not enter into talks with the LTTE so long as V. Prabhakaran remains the leader of the organization, and even then the government should only talk with an alternate leader who is elected by the people.

Yet another condition is that the LTTE must agree at the outset to decommission its weapons as part of a final settlement. It will be many moons before these issues can even be considered for an agenda.

The LTTE, for its part, has insisted that the government must respect the pre-CFA defense lines and withdraw from Sampur in the East that the army captured in the recent fighting. They might as well ask for the separate state.

None of these conditions is reasonable as a pre-condition to talks, nor are they practicable in the short time frame in which the Co-Chairs want the talks to commence initially for the purpose of bringing the current phase of violence and lawlessness to a speedy end.

Worse, the articulation of these conditions shows an elitist disregard for the plight of the hundreds of thousands of people who are the victims of the current fighting. Perhaps the international community is more concerned about ordinary Sri Lankans caught in the crossfire than the Sinhala and Tamil nationalist leaders.

The first objective of the talks should be to agree on a mutual cessation of violence and to arrive at a supplementary agreement to the current ceasefire agreement that addresses its many shortcomings based on the recent experiences.

The second objective should be to develop an interim arrangement involving the UN and other international agencies to address the needs of the one million displaced people in the North and East. It is a crime against humanity not to have put in place an alternative arrangement after burying P-TOMS in legal quagmire.

When these objectives are sufficiently addressed, the government and the LTTE negotiation teams and the facilitators could turn to the more political questions - concerning the state structure and the details of devolution.

It would be a welcome omen, however, if the government, the UNP opposition, and the LTTE declare at the very outset of the talks their recommitment to the 2002 Oslo declaration.