'Liberation' wars:

Myths and half-truths

by Janaka Perera

For decades many people have been clinging to half-truths about successful insurgencies and rebel movements in the world. One myth is that overwhelming public support alone was their springboard to victory.

The Wanni Tigers and their sympathisers have been assiduously fostering this fiction for over two decades to justify LTTE's claim of being the Tamils' sole representatives, while physically eliminating rival groups and never facing elections. This bogus claim of Tiger terrorists is no different from Cambodia's Polpotist monsters or Afghanistan's Taliban morons trying to justify their brutal regimes as having genuine mass approval.

The other myth is that the emergence of terrorism and separatist violence everywhere was always the result of socio-economic injustices and/or failure to devolve power.

Fact and fiction

It is therefore necessary to examine fact and fiction in the context of global events in order to have a proper perspective of the Sri Lankan situation. Looking back dispassionately at even some of the great revolutionary and armed nationalist movements it is quite evident that external factors figured prominently in their successes in addition to popular backing. They include Russia's Bolshevik Party, Eastern Europe's Communist parties, the Chinese Red Army and the Vietnam National Liberation Front (Vietcong).

Czarist Russia's humiliating reverses in World War I and the covert assistance that Imperial Germany gave Lenin greatly helped the Bolsheviks (later the Russian Communist Party) to overthrow the Kerensky regime in November 1917 and establish the Soviet Government.

In most of Eastern Europe communists would have had far less chances of success had it not been for World War II and Soviet military intervention there in the wake of Nazi Germany's defeat.

The Japanese invasion of China and the corrupt Chiang Kai-shek government's failure to organise effective resistance against the invader aroused widespread public anger against the regime. These developments proved a major boost to the Chinese Red Army in its victorious guerilla war against the Japanese and later against Chiang's rule in which even its strongest ally, the USA, had lost confidence by then.

Without the direct military and other assistance the South Vietnamese communists (Vietcong) received from North Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union and the rest of the Soviet Bloc countries as well as strong public opposition in America to U.S. intervention in Vietnam, it is doubtful that the insurgents could have withstood for long the combined military power of the Saigon Government and the United States, despite all the bravery, heroism, dedication and ingenuity of the Vietcong and the mass support it had.

North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) itself was the outcome of World War II that helped the country's popular nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh to defeat the French colonialists after the Japanese surrender.

JVP uprising

The same fate befell Sri Lanka's two JVP uprisings of 1971 and 1988-90, although the issues were not linked to ethnicity. In both instances, the JVP had neither strong material nor moral support from any foreign government or Diaspora. The North Korean connection with the uprising had little impact. The only arms these Sinhala guerillas had were some crude homemade bombs and shotguns and (especially in 1988-90) stolen automatic weapons.

No NGO or foreign power urged the then governments to stop fighting the JVP, come to the negotiating table and conclude ceasefire agreements. There were no calls for foreign peace facilitators and ceasefire monitors. No one urged peace talks in Colombo, Thimpu, Geneva or elsewhere. Instead in 1971, India even sent warships and an Army (Gurkha) unit to help the Government if the need arose.

So it was only a matter of time before the Sri Lankan State crushed the two Southern insurgencies. Few foreign governments (if any) or organizations raised a hue and cry over the horrifying human rights violations that occurred in the process. It was mostly local rights groups that took up the issue.

Contrast this with the endless allegations of human rights violations made against the State every time it uses military defensive actions against the LTTE. Yet simultaneously the global media pays far less attention to the atrocities that the Tigers commit in the course of their so-called liberation war, no matter that among their victims are many Tamils.

Why this duplicity? The only plausible answer is that all this is part of an international double game. On August 20, the television channel TVLanka showed a white skinned foreign NGO woman smiling at the camera and waving a Tiger flag with her right hand while holding Prabhakaran's picture on her left.

These antics repeatedly remind us that in contrast to the `insignificant' Sinhalese the Tamils are a convenient political tool for the dubious `peace' makers to impose their will on a small nation like Sri Lanka. The covert military assistance and training that India gave the LTTE to become the world's most dreaded terrorist organization clearly proves it. Delhi had no other reason to intervene and prevent the Sri Lankan Army from giving a military solution to the LTTE terrorist problem at Vadamarachchi in 1987 when the Tigers were mere cubs.

Military solutions

However, when Sri Lanka twice found military solutions to the Southern rebellion in the short term, the world was least concerned since the insurgents and their sympathisers were belonged to a community that mattered little to the big powers and had virtually no political clout in the international sphere. It is only when the rebels are Tamil Tigers that the call for military solutions really perturbs certain big powers and their NGO lackeys. They are desperate to project the LTTE as politically superior to the JVP. Yet it is the latter that has entered the political mainstream and faced several elections. Obviously Prabhakaran and his thugs have neither confidence nor courage to do so. Their only means of survival is clearly the bullet and not the ballot.

Tiger sympathizers often defend LTTE actions with the hackneyed praise "one man's terrorist is another's hero" or "there's no clear definition of the term terrorism." Whether or not a terrorist is somebody's hero, the fact is that the deliberate and well-calculated killing of non-combatants, civilians and even military personnel (in non-military situations), holding such persons hostage and intentionally depriving a population of their basic needs are without question terrorism. It always thrives on foreign funding and international arms smuggling networks. (The Provisional IRA's terrorism in Northern Ireland was considerably weakened when funds from Irish-Americans dried up).

It is for this very reason that the Wanni LTTE is still desperately trying to be in the good books of India and the West, ignoring the international bans and restrictions imposed on it and the vehement criticism the organisation is subjected to.

Since independence India has devolved administrative power in fair measure while safeguarding its territorial integrity. Yet this devolution did not prevent a section of the Sikh community from trying to create a Khalistan out of the Punjab - one of India's most prosperous states. But Sikh separatists received no foreign backing. So, not surprisingly the Indian armed forces were able to quell the rebellion in a few years, although it cost Prime Minister Indira Gandhi her life. It also proved to the world that federalism based on ethnicity does not necessarily prevent separatist terrorism.

The worst example of this is former Yugoslavia.

Such groups, including the LTTE, can never be pacified with a solution that may sound very reasonable to everyone else. Peace will always have to be on their own terms since they can no longer be part of civilised society. So getting the LTTE mafia to agree to a solution acceptable to the rest of the country is like trying to make a hen hatch a plastic egg!