60th year of Independence
PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE: MAKE 2008 THE YEAR OF VICTORY!.
(By Dayan Jayathilaka)
"...You can't make the mistake of being weak. If
you're weak with security, you are defeated." - Fidel Castro: My Life
(2007: 321)
 We are about to step into 2008, the 60th year of Sri
Lanka's Independence. It shows every sign of being a decisive year.
Indeed it must be made so. Sixty years after independence is the right
historical and psychological moment to resolve the major problem facing
Sri Lanka. That is the reunification of this small island. Sri Lanka's
natural borders must be its political boundaries. Its armed forces must
enjoy the sole monopoly of violence throughout its territory. Whatever
its internal arrangements, the country must be one, single, indivisible
political entity.
What does this mean in concrete terms? It means that
the LTTE must be eliminated as a military challenge to Sri Lanka's unity
and territorial integrity. This in turn means that the Tigers must no
longer be an armed force capable of rivalling Sri Lanka's armed forces.
The LTTE must no longer exist as a parallel army. This entails the
destruction of the LTTE as a fighting force; the elimination of its
leadership, its armed cadre and military assets. This would create the
opportunity for the LTTE to convert itself into a democratic political
formation, provided it accepts that any solution to Tamil political
grievances and identity issues must be pursued peacefully and
democratically within the parameters of a single, united Sri Lanka.
This objective is both imperative and feasible. It is
imperative because any sustainable progress requires the elimination of
the enemy armed force and its capacity for instant destabilisation. The
varied futures envisaged for the country by leaders as diverse as
Presidents Jayewardene, Premadasa and Kumaratunga were thwarted by one
factor: Prabhakaran. Sri Lanka can move forward only if it eliminates
the obstacle in its path. Its economy can grow in a sustainable manner
only if military expenditure levels off and is progressively reduced,
and more fundamentally, if the national market is reunified, which means
the reunification of the national territory as a single space. After
decades of armed conflict punctuated by ceasefires and internationally
mediated negotiations, the elimination of Jonas Savimbi was the key to
peace and prosperity in resource rich Angola.
The war can be won. We are at a rare moment in our
country's history in which we enjoy a favourable confluence of factors:
a President (and Defence Secretary) with political will and
determination; an experienced and respected military leadership; massive
popular support; high military morale; increased recruitment; high
performance on the part of all three armed services. Those who make the
most facile parallels with the Bush administration, Iraq, Afghanistan
and all points of geography and history would do well to ponder the
statistical fact that after a quarter century of military conflict, the
Sri Lankan people are not about to throw in the towel and bring the boys
back home, for the simple reason that the boys are fighting precisely
for their home, and therefore a massive 84 % percent of a huge 75% of
the island's people, a massive majority of the majority, support the
President's war effort. So too does a significant (under the
circumstances) segment (20%) of the main Tamil minority. The war is now
a People's War.
That is also the secret of the Govt's success in
defeating the Budget conspiracy: no party or formation which bases
itself at least in part, on a nationalist or patriotic appeal, can
afford to be seen to topple the Government at the expense of the war
effort and to the benefit of the LTTE. This is also why the Govt does
not have to succumb to every slogan of the more extremist or radical
nationalist forces but can negotiate if not from strength, certainly not
from inferiority.
2008 must then be designated as our Year of Victory.
Certainly the war cannot be won by solely military means, but let there
be no illusions: a war can be won only by primarily military means. The
main, central and decisive effort in the coming year must of necessity
be military: in a war, the armed struggle is the main axis and 'motor
force of development' of the historical process. All else is utopianism.
However the war effort must be supported by politics and diplomacy.
Prabhakaran will attempt a replay of 1987, when he
successfully leveraged the external factor (at the time, sub-regional,
i.e. Tamil Nadu). Today it will be pressure from those countries which
have a large, electorally significant Tamil Diaspora, which plays a role
more like the notorious Miami mafia than the Jewish lobby. These Western
states seem determined to prevent the military victory of the Sri Lankan
state over the Tigers, and seem to prefer the survival/existence of the
Tigers as a military entity. Sri Lanka cannot afford to be deterred by
these pressures, and sacrifice its future. Any student of the Cold War
would recognise the use of the instrument of Human Rights and so-called
'dissident civil society' by the West, to penetrate and undermine
regimes and states. Sri Lanka cannot make the mistakes of Gorbachev (the
latter years) and Yeltsin, be tranquilised, have its sovereignty
penetrated, be weakened and dismantled as countries. Sri Lanka cannot be
oblivious to the use of the slogan of "humanitarian crisis" to dismantle
the former Yugoslavia. Today the West stands ready to ignore the UN
resolution that reiterates that Kosovo is a part of Serbia, and to
recognise Kosovo as an independent state.
The anti-Sri Lanka campaign will accelerate next year
as Sri Lanka makes headway in the struggle to overcome the Tigers. The
West, preceded by the Western-dominated media, will howl about a
"humanitarian crisis", and brandish the policy of R2P ('Responsibility
to Protect') at us as we close in on Prabhakaran's bunker. However, in
our case R2P is ultimately something of a paper tiger. It works in a
context such as the former Yugoslavia, a country put together in the
post-war years from the most diverse components (in bold, laudable
experiment by Tito). Sri Lanka is not a failed or failing state. It is a
continent too far for an imposed R2P to be sustained. It is located in
Asia, has a distinct cultural identity and a decisive homogeneous
majority, a consciousness of a continuous existence as a state entity,
an educated and militant youth population. And no part of Sri Lanka
hankers after EU membership!
The coming anti-Sri Lanka campaign must be blunted by
three counter-thrusts.
We must rebuild our national defences by rejuvenating
our National Human Rights Commission and/or creating new and credible
institutions headed by internationally respected Sri Lankans. It must be
recognised however, that human rights violations will drop off
drastically when the war is over, when the enemy has been defeated -
just as human rights violations in the South of Sri Lanka dropped off
sharply when the JVP had been militarily defeated. The re-enfranchised
Tamil people will swiftly recover their rights in a peaceful environment
where the highly competitive politics of Sri Lanka's proportional
representation come into play.
We must devolve power to the North and East, swiftly
and sustainably. This means, as a first step, reactivating the 13th
amendment, as proposed by Douglas Devananda. The weight of the Indian
state upon the Sri Lankan and the reluctant cooperation of a Government
with a 5/6ths majority in parliament, could not secure in 1987, the
"Indian Model" so beloved by certain Tamil moderates. The 13th amendment
is as good as it gets, and any improvement will have to await a more
favourable parliamentary balance of power, with a drastically altered
mass consciousness.
(Faced with the stark choice at a referendum of
deleting the term "unitary" from the Constitution, I do not see the
majority of Sri Lankans, voting "yes"). A realist solution would aim to
protect the 13th amendment from further roll-back as was threatened
earlier this year. Mr Devananada's Tamil rivals may depict themselves as
more pro-Indian than he, but it does not suit India's interest to have a
pro-Indian Tamil politician who is so unacceptable to the Sinhalese that
he winds up in India, a la Vardarajahperumal! Devananda is a Tamil
politician who is loyal to Sri Lanka and close to India; therefore able
to act as a bridge.
He is the only Tamil politician who will accept a
solution within the existing Constitution, and is also the only Tamil
politician trusted sufficiently by the Sinhala South, to be permitted to
hold a significant measure of power in the strategically sensitive
North. Like the 13th amendment, Mr Devananda is also as good as it gets.
Reactivating the 13th amendment in the present day translates itself
into an interim administration in the Northern Province and early
Provincial elections in the East.
Our foreign relations must be consciously reoriented,
and foreign policy must turn for inspiration to "Kadirgamar Chinthanaya".
Those Sri Lankans whose natural tendency is to ask " how high?" when the
West says "jump", as well as those whose knees knock at the thought of
Western cutbacks, neither recall the history of Sri Lanka's own foreign
policy nor understand contemporary international relations. It was in
the 1950s, in response to the Rubber-Rice Pact between China and Sri
Lanka (under a UNP administration!) that US Congress passed the
Hickenlooper Amendment cutting aid to our country- yet we did not waver,
still less wilt.
As for those who would counter that the Socialist camp
existed at the time as an option, it is to be recalled that the "moment
of uni-polar hegemony" has passed its zenith or is in crisis, and we
live in the period of the Iraqi debacle, the revitalisation of Russia,
the rise of China and tendencies towards multi-polarity. Under President
Rajapakse, Sri Lanka has already embarked upon a diversification of its
dependence. To avoid a tedious debate on foreign policy, for which I
have no time, working as I am at one of Sri Lanka's global FDLs here in
Geneva, I would only remind the incorrigibly negativist and the
defeatist that Sri Lanka's finest foreign policy thinker the late
Lakshman Kadirgamar had already, in the last stage of his tenure and
life, publicly signalled the geopolitical/geo-strategic reorientation of
Sri Lanka's external relations. I advocate a return to that emergent
thrust, within an overall Realist policy of power balancing, especially
multi-polar power balancing.
Until this war is over and won, our foreign policy has
to be the handmaiden of strategy, an overall strategy whose primary goal
and objective must be the unification of the state through the military
defeat and destruction of the secessionist-terrorist enemy, the LTTE.
Foreign policy must be defence-driven, rather than the other way about.
It cannot be oriented towards those states that have large Tamil lobbies
and which instrumentalize human rights hypocritically to prevent our
victory. It must be oriented towards precisely those states, blocs and
tendencies which are uninfluenced by such lobbies, and are in favour of
combating that which China refer to as "the Three Evils: Separatism,
Terrorism and Extremism".
In our 60th anniversary year Sri Lankans would do well
to be inspired by the words of Fidel Castro, a product of another small
island nation in the tropical sun. In his 700 plus page autobiography My
Life (2007) Fidel Castro says "Those who don't respond, those who don't
fight, those who don't combat, those people are lost from the beginning,
and in us, you'll never find that kind of person."
-The Ministry of Defence bears no responsibility for the ideas and opinion expressed by the numerous contributors to the “Opinion Page” of this web site- |
