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by Jehan Perera

The deadlock between the two arms of government, the Executive Presidency and the Parliamentary majority continues placing the peace process and the country's development prospects in acute danger. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe's renewed call to President Chandrika Kumaratunga to take over the peace process, and renegotiate the Ceasefire Agreement with the LTTE has generally been represented as signaling his government's withdrawal from it. But this seems to be an extreme interpretation. The Prime Minister first made this same call to the President shortly after she took over three ministries of his government, including the Defence Ministry, two months ago.

On this occasion the Prime Minister has also said that the Ceasefire Agreement he signed with the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran on February 22, 2002 can no longer be implemented by his government. However, we should not come to an over hasty conclusion about the abrogation of the Ceasefire Agreement, which is the cornerstone of the present peace that the country enjoys.

The Ceasefire Agreement has provided for an orderly withdrawal from it. A party that wishes to withdraw from the Ceasefire Agreement has to give two weeks notice by informing the Norwegian government of their intention to withdraw. So far the Prime Minister has not taken that extreme step.

The Prime Minister's dilemma appears to be that following the President's take over of the three ministries on November 4, 2003, the country has in fact settled down to a new equilibrium, but one that is unfavourable to his own government. Just as much as President Kumaratunga, on November 4, destabilized the prevailing equilibrium and changed the balance of power to her advantage, so is the Prime Minister trying to destabilize the presently prevailing equilibrium, and thereby gain a political advantage.

One such possible advantage is to force the President's hand into officially standing by the Ceasefire Agreement. The underlying reality, however, is that while the two leaders plot their high stakes political strategy, the country is getting destabilized.

Both the general population and the international community will be justifiably concerned that the worst could take place and the country descend into another war. The LTTE will also feel itself justified in strengthening its own position in the north east using the non-democratic methods at its disposal.

The tragedy is that all of this is due to the country's political leadership failing to recognize the limits of their political power, and being prepared to work within those limitations.

Consensus

With the prolonging of the deadlock between the President and Prime Minister, and the problems that arise from it, the initial sympathy for the Prime Minister and his government has got to wane. With her superior skills at communicating messages to the general public there is a strong possibility of the President gaining the advantage in a situation of protracted stalemate.

The call of the President is an attractive one to most people. It is that there should either be a national government or, at least, that both leaders should cohabit and work together for unity and peace. This message is a convincing one to people who see the country's problems as stemming from the disunity of the politicians.

So far those who wish to see an end to the political crisis have been urging a successful cohabitation between the President and Prime Minister.

A bipartisan approach to national problem solving is the dream of peacemakers, as it would provide the 2/3 majority in Parliament to amend the Constitution, and also provide reassurance to the people that the country's interests are not being undermined by a weak government. Accordingly they have called for power sharing between the two leaders, including a joint defence council, presidential representation at the peace talks with the LTTE and an agreement that there should be no political criticism on agreed matters. The President's own proposals to end the crisis have been on these lines.

However, the evidence from these past two months is that it is unlikely that the President and Prime Minister can cohabit and share power in a constructive spirit of give and take. The imperatives of party politics, and personal ambition, appear to be too powerful for statesmanship on the part of the two leaders. They have each continued to take unilateral actions aimed at destabilising the status quo and disadvantaging their rival, even at the cost of economic development and peace in the country. It appears that only one of them can govern effectively at a time.

Dangers

Despite the dangers that the present vacuum in the peace process poses, the Prime Minister has been sticking to his decision not to resume talks with the LTTE unless the President gives him back the full powers of the Ministry of Defence. There are several reasons that may be given for this stance of the Prime Minister. First and foremost, it is evident that in the ongoing confrontation with the President, the government led by the Prime Minister is increasingly looking impotent, not even able to choose its own administrators such as ministry secretaries, ten of whom the President removed up to now without the government's consent.

There are two important sources of power in the governance of a country. These are moral legitimacy and coercive power. When the UNF won a majority at the last general election, the people's mandate for governance went to them. The constitution states that the President is accountable to Parliament. But moral legitimacy by itself is insufficient to govern a country. There is a need for coercive power. By taking over the ministries of defence and interior the President has deprived the government of the coercive powers it is entitled to, which is power over the military and police. This is bad for the government and bad for the country.

The Prime Minister has made it clear that he wants the Ministry of Defence given back to the government before he can restart the peace process. Since the peace process is intimately related to issues of national security, it is obvious that peace talks cannot take place without issues of national security being discussed and agreements on it being reached. There is also the basic need to have the coercive power of the state at his disposal in order to govern in general. A government without the powers of coercion is like a mahout without a goad to direct the elephant, to use the Prime Minister's own description of his present predicament.

Alternative

For her part the President has been offering the Prime Minister powers with regard to the defence ministry that are relevant to the peace process, while she keeps the balance.

That would certainly be the most desirable state of affairs, and which the vast majority of people in the country would applaud.

But this would mean that the two political leaders, with different visions and patterns of behaviour have to work together very closely for as long as two years or may be even more. So far the Prime Minister has been adamant in refusing this compromise. In some cases, and the relationship and personalities of the President and Prime Minister appear to be such, it may not be possible for rivals to work together continuously for a long period.

The alternative way out of the political crisis is to fashion a solution that satisfies the core interests of both leaders, and yet does not compel them to work together. The appropriate solution would be one that enables them to engage in their rivalries and partisan politics as usual, but within a new structure that both of them agree meets their core interests. In the President's case this would be to ensure her own and her party's political future in the longer term without being relegated to the sidelines of politics, as happened in the past two years. In the Prime Minister's case it would be to obtain appropriate control over the security apparatus of the state in order to take the peace process forward to a successful conclusion.

As one possible option, the President and Prime Minister could agree to consider the main elements of the draft constitution of 2000, with suitable modifications for today's conditions, to be an interim constitution until a final and permanent constitution is worked out with the consent of all parties, including the LTTE. The interim constitution would abolish the executive presidency and vindicate the President's promise made long ago to the people, as presidential candidate in 1994, that she would indeed abolish it. It would lead to the defence ministry and other two ministries being handed back to the Prime Minister so that he can govern effectively. The draft constitution of 2000 also has the added benefit of providing constitutional space for an interim administration in the north east that the LTTE and Tamil people would feel is genuinely on the road to federalism.

Whatever solution they work out, the President and Prime Minister are duty bound to respect the wishes of the people. There is a virtual unanimity in society that the peace process must continue and a solution to the political crisis must be found without holding another election. For the present, the country continues to drift with ethnic-related problem solving stalled, and the attention of the people north and south focused on the political crisis.

It must not be the case that party political rivalry, bolstered by personal differences, takes the country back to an inconclusive election, or still worse, to an actual breakdown of the Ceasefire Agreement.

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