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| Sunday, 3 March 2002 |
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Ceasefire and possibly, re-unification by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA When Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe visited the Army frontlines north of Omanthai on the day the signing of the Ceasefire Agreement was announced, he must surely have wished he could go further. Let alone the Prime Minister, not even the President of the Republic - of whose omnipotence the late J.R. Jayewardene publicly boasted could have gone further than the frontline. Some Sinhala ultra-nationalists would quickly seize on my proposition as evidence of their constant complaint that while the Tamils can travel and live in all parts of the country, the Sinhalas cannot. Whether or not, after all the physical battering and humiliation they have received in all parts of the country in successive anti-Tamil pogroms, the Tamils actually like living in areas outside their region of predominant habitation (traditional homeland?) in the North-East, is a moot point, though. What is not a moot point is that, like the Sri Lankan President and Premier, Mr. Velupillai Prabhakaran too cannot go beyond his frontline. Worse, unlike the President or PM, Mr. Prabhakaran cannot freely go anywhere beyond the frontlines or shores of the small area under his control. I wonder whether those who moan about their inability to go North (those who moan most about it are the least likely to be interested in the culture and scenic beauty of the North) have realised their bete noir's confinement. Perhaps it is that realisation of his own de facto incarceration and isolation that has prompted the LTTE leader to go this far in peace-making. Most certainly, it is the realisation by the Sinhala elite of the de facto existence and persistence of a separate Eelam (separate, that is, from the Hela that once straddled the whole island) that has prompted their wholehearted readiness to make peace. That both major Sinhala-led 'national' political formations as well as the bulk of the electorate want to re-unite the country and end this de-facto situation is now obvious. Or, is it? Perhaps the bulk of the Sinhalas, like the bulk of everybody else, are more concerned about simply ending the war rather than any other de facto situation. Perhaps what most people want is a de facto and de jure peace rather than a de facto or de jure re-unification or separation. After all, the war (at long last) has come to dominate the lives of everyone on this island. For too long it dominated the lives of only the Tamil minority, and then the Muslim minority. It took the de facto and de jure reality of war to hit the Sinhalas, and the majority of them (at first only the border villagers and the kin of military casualties felt the pinch), before the national peace process began to go anywhere. Interestingly, if one looks at the social layers of those who yet oppose peace-making (fortunately a minority), it seems as if both those who are poor enough as well as those who are rich enough to feel the economic pinch are now in agreement on the urgent need for peace. The pro-war sentiment among the Sinhalas seems to come from among those in the middle. They are not too poor to feel the threat of starvation or the loss of their kin in war (it is the very poor who join the armed forces or live in border villages). Nor are they so rich as to be part of the capitalist class that has understood that the stability of capitalism, itself, is threatened by the war. Hence, for these yet insensitive elements of the middle classes, the de facto separation is less of a reality than the fantasy of a hegemonic, de jure unity. LTTE wants out of the isolation and separation That the LTTE wants out of the isolation and separation of its de facto Eelam seems clear from the conditions that its leader has agreed to in the Ceasefire Agreement. Less than a year ago, the LTTE was insisting on de-proscription as a 'pre-requisite' for any ceasefire or talks. Less than a year ago, the Tigers were demanding complete de-regulation of fishing as part of any ceasefire arrangement. In the last failed ceasefire agreement of 1995, they appeared to agree to less but, then, in the process of negotiations began to insist on these measures as conditions for further progress in peace-making. And the peace process foundered on this intransigence. Today, that intransigence seems to have become quite flexible. De-proscription was not made part of the ceasefire conditions and, while the 1995 Ceasefire Agreement made immediate concessions to the LTTE on fishing rights (fisheries de-regulation facilitates freer maritime logistics for the Tigers), Ceasefire 2002 does not provide immediate concessions - only after a three-month period of the ceasefire. If the 1995 Agreement seems terse in comparison with the 2002 Agreement, much of the concessions to the LTTE were granted in a rather ad hoc fashion in the letters exchanged between the Government of the time and LTTE leadership. Thus, while the President may have signed (and legitimised at the highest level) the Agreement document proper, many other things were agreed upon under the signatures of far lesser officials such as military commanders and the Secretary to the President, none of whom are elected representatives of the people. The 2002 Agreement is far more elaborate, and provides for carefully regulated concessions to the LTTE on the one hand while the LTTE, for its part, has refrained from making some of the demands it had made previously like de-proscription. In fact, one of the most strategically significant demands that the LTTE had been making in the negotiations over the latest Ceasefire Agreement, that is, the right to ship in arms and other military supplies, it has dropped. Indeed, Ceasefire 2002 seems quite categorical in its non-recognition of that right. There is no way that Article 1.3, for example, can be interpreted as providing for flexibility in the definition of the military operations that are permitted by either side. Rather, the authorization by 1.3 of the Government forces to safeguard the "sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka" implies the permitting of military action to defend that sovereignty and integrity. And the smuggling of arms into the country is most certainly a violation of that sovereignty and integrity in anybody's book. Thus, action by the Government forces to intercept and interdict arms smuggling attempts by the LTTE could legitimately be defined as 'defensive' rather than 'offensive' operations. Even if direct military interdiction of such smuggling attempts fail - in military terms, that is - it is feasible, as some commentators have already suggested, to have procedures in place under which the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) is alerted regarding such attempts. The Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (as President Chandrika Kumaratunga has pointed out in her letter to the Prime Minister) has a pivotal role to play in this. The Agreement explicitly stipulates that the SLMM "shall be given immediate access to areas where violations of the Agreement are alleged to have taken place". Thus, even if the military fails to successfully interdict an arms smuggling attempt (either through inadequate early warning, tactical failures or simply poor morale) the location of the attempt could be pointed out to the Monitors who could then investigate and take appropriate action. In this, the point of physical detection may be the determinant. It seems that if a Tiger smuggling attempt is detected in Sri Lankan waters, the Government forces will have the legal flexibility to militarily interdict the smugglers. But if the smugglers succeed in landing their shipment on LTTE-held territory and the supplies could be dispersed and cached quickly, the Agreement may not give the Monitors sufficient powers to seek out and confiscate the shipment (even if it could be identified after dispersal). Nevertheless, under the current Agreement, the Government retains its powers to continue to attempt to cut the LTTE's vital maritime umbilical cord. This is an important strategic advantage presuming that the armed forces give it the necessary priority and the active units have morale and technical capability (in terms of surveillance capacity and firepower) to act. One major gain for the LTTE This umbilical cord is something which this column has, for long, harped on as one of the, strategically, most vital aspects of the Sri Lankan war, but which has never ever been given the priority it should have been given by the Sri Lankan State and its military planners (see my 'Fetishism and military strategy' of 10-06-2001). One major gain for the LTTE through the ceasefire will be its ability to infiltrate South taking advantage of the relaxed security measures. Here the Government while observing the requirements of the Agreement, should at the same time refrain from resorting to tactics such as easing upon essential military procedures purely in order to reduce public inconvenience and thereby win popularity. The Government has to realise that such populist tactics, while it may give the ruling party short term electoral gain, at the same time poses tremendous immediate risk to public security. What is required is the ending of ethnically discriminatory security procedures while other procedures that will maintain some guard against the infiltration of cadres and military materials into the cleared areas (especially into strategic target areas in metropolitan zones) are sustained. This will ensure that even if LTTE cadres are free to enter cleared unarmed, except with their propaganda materials, their ability to smuggle in military equipment will be restricted. One of the most worrying aspects of the peace process right now is the state of relations between the two ruling parties - the UNF Government and the PA Presidency. If the UNF is serious about its peace effort, it has absolutely no option than to recognise the fact that the People's Alliance must share in the peace process, in an as organic a manner as possible. The UNF is perhaps the political formation with the greatest capacity to give leadership to the kind of peace process now under way. That is primarily because the United National Party, which leads the UNF, is the quintessential political party of capitalism and today, the capitalist class, at its leadership level, seems to have finally decided that the ethnic conflict must be resolved and resolved in a sustainable manner. Whether the Sri Lankan ruling class has any illusions of a quick de jure re-unification or is content to allow a form of 'creeping confederation' to evolve in the very long term, remains to be seen. At the same time, it seems increasingly doubtful whether the LTTE has any more illusions of a complete, de jure, secession. The Tigers may be busy re-defining as to what 'secession' itself really signifies and that new definition may not necessarily take the traditional form of a discrete 'nation-state'. Given this new conjunction of political tendencies on either side of the frontlines, it is superfluous for the alternative political formation of the ruling class, the PA, to adopt a competitive, hostile posture. In doing so, the PA does not fulfil its politico-historic role. Neither will Chandrika Kumaratunga. However, as the overall political initiator of the current peace process, the onus is on the UNP to make the necessary moves that alleviate the compulsions to compete that seem to be currently driving the PA in its latest manoeuvres in relation to the Ceasefire Agreement. The UNP, with its high level of managerial capacity, should be able to meet this challenge to manage national politics better than it is doing now. In the first instance, the level of intensity of the competition inherent in the capitalist parliamentary democratic process i.e. competitive elections - has to be reduced from the confrontationist actions being perpetrated by either side. Secondly, a mechanism needs to be set up that will ensure that the PA is more actively included - at least in symbolic terms - in the on-going peace process. Lessons could be learnt from the Northern Ireland peace process which members of both the PA as well as the UNP observed at close hand thanks to the work of the National Peace Council and International Alert. What is needed is an inter-party consultative committee (or council or what have you) that will provide for regular, automatic 'consultation'. Being outside the State institutional process, it should, in recognition of political realities, be chaired by the UNP. What the ceasefire exercise has demonstrated is that since both parties see virtually eye-to-eye on issues and their solutions (the 2002 Agreement is almost identical with the 1995, although more elaborate). Hence, little consultation is required. Even on their approach to the substantive issues of devolution and power sharing, both parties have virtually the same perspective. In fact the same people, as epitomised by Minister G.L. Peiris, are involved then and now. Hence, there is really no cause for the PA to disagree with the UNF on this. But it is up to the UNF and its able managers to devise a suitable platform on which the PA can, with dignity (since it easily represents up to 40 per cent of the electorate), demonstrate its concurrence and thereby share in the credit. If such 'management' does not occur, the greater responsibility for the failure of the whole exercise will fall on the UNP. Can Ranil Wickremesinghe and colleagues transcend where J. R. Jayewardene and R. Premadasa failed miserably? Anything is possible in real life, far more than in fiction. |
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