The critical 1%

CBK's final efforts at peace:

by Dr. Ram Manikkalingam

On August 12, 2005, the Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka, Lakshman Kadirgamar, was killed by a sniper's bullet. The sniper had been watching Kadirgamar for weeks. He knew he would have only a second or two to get his shot off and that he would only get one chance.

Former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga with former Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar at a UN Session. File Photo: ANCL Library

After President Kumaratunga, Lakshman Kadirgamar was the most protected person in the country. He travelled in an armour-plated vehicle. He had dozens of commandos protect him. His convoy included motorcycle outriders, point vehicles and back-up cars. His visitors faced a security cordon, almost as stringent as that of the President. The sniper pulled the trigger and struck Minister Kadirgamar down.

It was a sombre day when Lakshman Kadirgamar was cremated. Foreign Ministers from neighbouring countries - India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh and the entire foreign corps were present. President Kumaratunga was devastated. There is a photograph of her at the funeral wearing dark glasses.

Lakshman Kadirgamar's assassination was a doubly devastating blow. It was the death of her foreign minister, her close colleague and friend of 11 years. And it was also the death of peace-something she had worked hard for and believed in during her entire tenure.

Death of peace

In retrospect, Kadirgamar's killing changed everything for President Kumaratunga's efforts and for the prospects of a peaceful end to the conflict in Sri Lanka. Eventually, it led to another period of war in the country. For, the assassination of Lakshman Kadirgamar was not an isolated act; it came as a calculated decision made by the LTTE - an organization that had come to deeply believe in violence.

As a leftist critical of Tamil extremism, I chose differently and was willing to work for President Kumaratunga, who wanted to build a lasting peace through political negotiations. The immediate context of our negotiations was the ceasefire that had been established by Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and signed in 2002. The ceasefire was being mediated by the Norwegian Government.

The ceasefire had initially been fairly effective in holding down the violence between the Tigers and government forces. It helped open access to areas of the North and East that had been closed down for years. But the ceasefire was not leading to any genuine dialogue about a lasting peace.

During the 1990s, both the government and The Tigers had pretended that violence was achieving results. But the illusions of victory created by counting bombs and bodies could not mask the reality that neither the Tigers nor the government was winning. The fighting had reached a stalemate, to which the nominal ceasefire gave formal recognition. Many analysts had come to the conclusion that further military victories on the part of the State would require the use of overwhelming force. But the problem with overwhelming force is that it can succeed militarily and still fail politically. Nobody was sure how to cut this Gordian knot.

With President Kumaratunga's leadership, we decided to try something different. We rejected the easy solutions of hardliners: take on the Tigers with guns, bombs and soldiers; ignore the pain and suffering caused by war; disregard death and destruction; detain thousands of Tamil civilians; restrict the flow of food and medicine; and deny that Tamils were politically disenfranchised.

The UNP Government of the 80s under J.R. Jayewardene had taken exactly this hard-line approach. They enacted draconian laws with the power to detain people indefinitely. They shut the door on participation by the country's largest Tamil party, TULF (Tamil United Liberation Front), by making endorsement of secession a crime. They militarised the Tamil areas, and they 'disappeared' thousands of Tamils. The result was not encouraging. The tenacity of the Tiger-led rebellion only increased.

With the failure of the hard approach, there was always the hope that a soft approach would transform a nasty enemy into a trusted negotiating partner. This was the approach taken by the Wickremesinghe Government with the ceasefire. While it may have been well intentioned, it was also clearly not working.

So, President Kumaratunga began to develop an approach that was hard on hard issues and soft on soft issues. We stopped treating Tamil civilians like Tiger guerrillas. We discouraged the military from committing excesses on the battlefield.

We were going to do everything we could to make life easier for Tamil civilians and make war harder for Tiger fighters. And we developed wide-ranging proposals for a political arrangement that would address the concerns of the Tamil people and help them to live with dignity.

At the same time, President Kumaratunga was tough on the Tigers. When the Tigers sought to land arms by sea in the midst of the ceasefire, she ordered their ship sunk by the Navy. When the Tigers recruited children she raised it with the Norwegian facilitators, demanding that this be stopped. When the Tigers killed agents of the military in the North, she ordered a crackdown on the Tigers and restricted their movement, even though - or especially because - we were in the midst of a ceasefire.

International pressure

The Tigers, however, needed 'men' with guns. Most Tamils had fled the war. Very few adults were left behind to conscript. The Tigers had reached the limit of their recruitment. So they turned to the children. In the face of international pressure, the Tigers feigned cooperation with UNICEF, sending injured children, or those who could not fight, to these rehabilitation camps, still using the healthy children as soldiers.

Despite the clarity of our framework for engagement, everything became a subject for intensive debate. For example, should we criticize Nordic ceasefire monitors when they seemed to allow Tiger abuses? Should we threaten to bring in other monitors? At what point should the government respond and at what level? If the Tigers were to assassinate State military intelligence operatives in Tiger-controlled areas, should the government respond in kind in areas under government control?

On the face of it, the response might seem obvious - halt all Tigers from moving into areas under government control. But if part of the strategy was to get the Tigers more 'comfortable' with doing politics, then shutting off their political wing from doing political work, however rudimentary, undermined this long-term political goal. And without a political unit arguing the case for peace, it was hard to imagine anyone else in the Tigers ever doing so. Ultimately, the Kumaratunga Government felt the best strategy was to covertly move against Tiger intelligence operatives, holding up the Tiger movements between areas they controlled, while continuing to permit Tiger political cadres to engage in non-military activity.

President Kumaratunga knew that the ceasefire on its own was insufficient to maintain peace. In the absence of political talks, we needed something more. That is when we hit upon a soft issue we felt would really make a difference, a reconstruction-oriented peace dividend for both civilians in the North and the Tigers.

Importantly, from the point of view of avoiding hostilities, this work kept military cadres within the Tigers busy with reconstruction instead of waging war. Liaising with a senior official of the Health Ministry or the Road Development Authority required the Tigers to send a relatively senior counterpart -someone who was commanding at least a couple of hundred men.

When engaged in development efforts, this Tiger commander was no longer training and preparing men for war and, simultaneously, he was getting a taste for peace. Indeed, the pride these commanders demonstrated in completing reconstruction projects was palpable.

Reconstruction work

These reconstruction efforts were piecemeal. They served their immediate purpose of delaying any resumption of the war. But they were still not widespread enough to set the stage for making peace.

That was exactly the challenge we grappled with on a daily basis. We had a ceasefire. We had a team to monitor the ceasefire. We had a facilitator. We even had a group of friendly nations - the European Union, Norway, Japan and the United States - to assist in the process. But we still did not have political talks almost two years into the ceasefire.

The lack of any concrete movement toward a more sustainable peace was becoming a problem.

Even in the darkest moments of the ceasefire and the peace talks, there was always that 1% chance for peace. It was something to work with. That was my job, to not give up hope or succumb to pessimism, however 'objectively' justified.

It may sound strange, but from a political or intellectual perspective, going to war is not difficult. It requires denying the others' humanity, buttressing support amongst your own, taxing the people, conscripting soldiers and buying bigger and better guns. The most challenging part is being willing to accept (or alternately deny) the sorrow of war.

Even if in those months and years when it was beginning to feel like the prospects for peace were close to 1%, I saw it as my job to hang onto that 1% and transform it into 5, 10 and 50%. It is not in the job description of a peace-maker to despair, nor to give up. And President Kumaratunga did not expect us to.

But when it came to the Tigers, the very idea of getting beyond 1% was beset with unavoidable stumbling blocks. Here we have a group that resists politics and opts for armed conflict almost by its very nature. Here is a political situation in Sri Lanka where, in a complex historical development that took decades to mature, the ground was almost perfectly prepared for war.

We wanted to get into direct talks with the Tigers. But instead of moving straight to actual talks, the talks immediately got mired down in the question of what the agenda for the talks would be.

The government wanted to talk about a permanent settlement. What would a political solution look like? How much autonomy would the Tamil regions have? What political power would the Tamil majority provincial council have? How much money could they raise through taxes? Would they have their own police force or would the police force be appointed from Colombo? Would a Tamil council be permitted to raise funds overseas? What would happen if such a council raised its own militia? Lurking behind these questions was our ultimate worry. Would all of these developments eventually lead to separation? We wanted some assurances that the country would not be divided before we discussed our next steps.

But the Tigers took the opposite tack. They wanted to talk about an interim solution.

They wanted to know what powers an interim administration would have without clarifying whether this interim entity would be within or without Sri Lanka. For them the goal of a political settlement at the end of the road - even if formalised in an agreement - was too vague a commitment on which to abandon their fight of over three decades. They wanted to know what it was that they would get here and now.

Obtaining interim powers for an interim settlement, allowed them to say to their supporters that this was only a qualified solution that depended on how the Sri Lankan Government would behave. If the Sri Lankan Government failed to deliver, they always had the option of reverting to war. The fears and distrust on both sides were clear. The Norwegian Government tried to overcome this by drafting an agenda for talks that both sides could accept.

The search for the agenda began. First, there were a series of drafts that were meant to toe the line between an interim and a permanent settlement. The Tiger leader and the Sri Lankan President were constantly scratching out and adding phrases. When this failed, we tried an agenda that discussed the permanent solution first, followed by the interim one. The Tigers turned this round - discuss the interim solution first, followed by the permanent one.

We said no. What about interim in the context of the permanent? They said what about permanent in the context of the interim? And so it went, with the poor Norwegians reaching the limits of their language skills, and us our political ones. We could not even agree about what possible talks might look like, let alone the possibility of a future peace.

Proxy battle

We were second-guessing and reworking drafts in our search for the perfect wording, when no amount of wordsmithing could solve the political problem of trust. The political pressure of the process and the polarization caused by the ethnic conflict had become reduced to a proxy battle over the wording of the agenda.

We could stop fighting, but we could not start talking. We needed radical input from outside to shake things up and bring us to the table.

Tragically, this input came from no human actor, but from nature, in the form of the tsunami of December 2004. Like the Hindu god of destruction, Lord Siva, who dances as the world ends, the tsunami - one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history - wreaked havoc on all our communities in equal measure. Suddenly it mattered less what we - Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, and Burghers - were doing to each other, and more what something else, the tsunami, had done to all of us. In the space of a few minutes, we lost the same number of lives that the war had taken from us in three decades.

Post tsunami overture

Sinhala farmers, living in the hinterland of Sri Lanka, loaded lorries and tractor trailers with foodstuffs for Tamils on the coast affected by the tsunami.

They were the first to provide aid and succour to those affected, not the international volunteers who showed up later. Military units known for their harsh measures- not just against the Tigers, but also against the Tamil people - risked their lives to assist Tamil victims.

This enabled us to begin talks that led to an agreement to jointly engage in reconstruction. We were at pains to point out that this mechanism was not political, but only humanitarian. By calling it humanitarian, the Tigers and government were able to create the political space to talk. In the aftermath of such destruction - a million displaced and thirty thousand dead - it was hard for even the hardest of hardliners to oppose working together on rebuilding communities.

We called this a humanitarian issue. But we knew that if it worked, it could create the climate for something more. The talks around the tsunami created hope that we could build on the 1% that we were moving from the realm of dreams about a possible peace into a more concrete reality.

The agreement to set up a joint body between the Tigers and the Government to do reconstruction was eventually signed at the end of June 2005, six months after the tsunami. Unfortunately, this agreement came too late. The political sands were already beginning to shift beneath our feet. As the talks dragged on, the agreement looked less and less solid.

The Muslim representatives wanted to be co-signatories. But the Tigers rejected this. Finally, the build-up of political opposition made it easy for the Supreme Court (traditionally unsympathetic to minority concerns) to block the agreement in a landmark decision for the future of Sri Lanka's war.

When this happened, I knew it meant the end of the politics of talks. But I hoped this would not be a return to the politics of war. I was proved to be wrong. The 1% was not growing in the cooperation that came immediately after the tsunami; it was sinking toward zero. The Tigers communicated their displeasure about the Supreme Court decision in their usual manner. They sent a sniper. And Lakshman Kadirgamar was killed.

At midnight, shortly after the killing, I received a call from the chief of the President's security. I was told to get ready. They were sending a limousine to pick me up. The President wanted to meet with her advisers to discuss how to respond to the killing. As the car sped through the deserted streets of Colombo, I had no idea the decisions we were to take that night would contribute to the inexorable pull of war and lead to the bloody denouement on a sandy strip of beach in Northern Sri Lanka four years later.

I was confounded by the brutality of the Tigers.

Their resort to violence to correct a situation they didn't like was hardly surprising. But that they did this in the midst of a ceasefire under the gaze of the international community, and so soon after the tsunami, seemed extreme even for them. The Tigers were now demonstrating complete disregard for what the world would think. Where was our leverage, other than military, if the Tigers cared naught for what the world thought? The President wanted to respond to this Tiger action in a decisive manner. But she did not want to break off the ceasefire and return to an all-out war.

Making peace

After a brief but intense discussion, she made the decision to declare a state of emergency. This gave the Police and the Armed Forces the powers of search and seizure without judicial authorisation. It also permitted restrictions on assembly, movement and in some cases, even speech. These measures have draconian result on the functioning of civil society when used in a widespread and systematic manner. And they can have negative repercussions, as we were well aware from previous experiences in Sri Lanka. Still, a draconian law seemed a lesser evil than a declaration of war.

The President also wanted to send a clear message to the Tigers internationally. The killing of the Foreign Minister would have severe repercussions for them.

One of these was the ban on the Tigers in Europe, which had a large Tamil diaspora. The Tigers were already banned in India, the United Kingdom and the United States. Going further meant asking the European Union to include the Tigers on their list of terrorist organizations, which until then had refrained from doing.

In the space of one day, we had moved from engaging the Tigers to seek a decent peace into the opposite direction entirely. To our thinking at the time, they had not just killed the Foreign Minister, but also the very idea of peace in Sri Lanka.

My hope in the 1% chance for peace was gone. We had reached 0%. This is a far more radical shift than from 25% to 1%. At 0%, peace is no longer possible.

The balance had shifted from how to pursue peace to how to wage war more effectively. I had given up hope of re-engaging the Tigers. It was an uncomfortable place to be.

Within four months (December 2005), President Kumaratunga was out of office and, as her advisor, I was out of a job - no longer involved in peace negotiations. A new government was in place.

Our failure to keep the chance for peace alive moved rapidly into a period of outright war. By August 2006 the die was cast - both sides had decided to fight first and talk later. This crisis was now going to be resolved by force of arms. War was not only inevitable, but also required before any fresh political process could emerge. By mid May 2009, they had both gotten their wish, though not as the Tigers had expected and with results and costs that are still a matter of controversy today.