CIAO DATE: 01/03

Sri Lanka: After Election, No Clear Road Ahead

Teresita C. Schaffer and Karthik Nagarajan

The South Asia Monitor
Number 27
November 1, 2000

The Center for Strategic and International Studies

 

The ruling People’s Alliance (PA) emerged from Sri Lanka’s October 10 parliamentary election as the largest party, but it still depends on smaller parties with their own agendas to form a government. President Chandrika Kumaratunga sees this result as a vindication of her proposals for constitutional change and her more recent emphasis on military defeat of the Tamil insurgents. Mainstream Sri Lankan politics are still deeply divided, and extremists are out-shouting the “peace constituency”. The military struggle is far from a decisive result. It will take both desperation and a bold new look at the country’s political relationships to unfreeze the peace process.

The new parliament: The PA, with 107 seats out of 225, brought two allies into government: the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC, 9 seats), and the Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP, a party controlled by several successive governments, 4 seats). The new parliament will govern with President Kumaratunga, who was re-elected for a six-year term in December 1990, and who holds most executive power. Outgoing Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake was reappointed, together with a jumbo Cabinet of 44 ministers, almost double the size of the 1994 cabinet. Fear that the poisonous relations between the two major parties would make “cohabitation” a disaster no doubt contributed to the PA’s win.

The UNP, with 89 seats, could not attract enough support to challenge the PA’s dominance. The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), the oldest of the Tamil parties and a key Kumaratunga ally in developing her 1995 peace proposals, declined to join the government, as did several smaller Tamil parties. This represents a significant decline in moderate Tamil support for the government.

Elections usually nurture nationalism. In this case, both major political parties stressed that they were best placed to make peace, while at the same time appealing to hard-liners. The election itself did not shift the center of gravity in mainstream politics. The victorious PA’s support for Mr. Anura Bandaranaike, the estranged brother of the President, as Speaker of Parliament is a rare example of bipartisan collaboration. Nonetheless, relations between the two parties remain harshly confrontational. Calls for a national unity government from various quarters, including the powerful Buddhist clergy and the business lobby, received short shrift.

The election was badly marred by allegations of rigging and violence, a trend that has risen in recent Sri Lankan elections. The election commissioner acknowledged serious problems in 23 polling stations. An independent local observer group put the figure far higher. Popular disaffection with the established political parties is rising. An estimated 75% of 12 million eligible Sri Lankan voters cast their ballots – a relatively low turnout by Sri Lankan standards. National vote tallies showed a continuing drop in the percentage of the population who voted for each of the two major parties.

The return of the JVP: The most dramatic electoral result was the rise in the parliamentary position of the JVP, or People’s Liberation Front, from one seat to ten. Best known for its leadership of dramatic armed insurrections in 1970 and again in 1989, the JVP has returned to politics with an entirely new crop of leaders, replacing those killed in 1989. They profess to have given up violent methods, though memories of the brutality that characterized both their 1989 uprising and its suppression by the government are still sharp. Even if they stick to non-violent politics, they are likely to play a spoiler role on both economic and security issues, and to generate considerable popular uneasiness in the process.

The ethnic conflict: The ethnic conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives since 1983, and has held back the country’s economic growth. Following the failure of President’s Kumaratanga’s 1995 attempt at negotiations with the most intransigent of the Tamil militant groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), her government has tried to crush them militarily. At the same time, she has sought support from the Sri Lankan people and opposition parties for constitutional proposals that would grant substantial autonomy to Sri Lankan provinces, including those in the north and east where most of the Tamils live. Amending the constitution requires a two-thirds majority in Parliament. In both the outgoing and the new parliament, this is unattainable without the support of the UNP. A last-minute effort to reach an understanding between the government and the UNP on this issue failed just before the election.

The new government faces two challenges in dealing with the ethnic question. On the political front, Kumaratunga remains committed to her 1995 proposals. She has considered declaring the new parliament to be a Constituent Assembly, which could pass them with a simple majority. She may be spurred on in this direction by the threat of her largest coalition partner, the SLMC, to withdraw from the government if the amendments are not passed within 100 days. But such a move would virtually guarantee the failure of these proposals as a device for building peace. When presented in 1995, the proposals represented a statesmanlike effort to make the Tamil community’s most urgent demands workable. However, they have never been taken as a basis for negotiations by the LTTE. Enacting them would lock the government into an unamendable proposal in which neither the LTTE nor the moderate Tamils had a sense of ownership. Moreover, turning the parliament into a Constituent Assembly for the purpose of circumventing the normal amendment procedures would revive unpleasant memories of previous governments tampering with the constitution.

The military challenge: The LTTE saw its entry into the Jaffna peninsula in April 2000 as a prelude to declaring independence. By June, the fighting had bogged down with both sides controlling parts of the peninsula. The Tigers had apparently lost too many people during their seven-month campaign through the area south of Jaffna to sustain their military pace and take Jaffna town. The army imported new equipment, including some from Israel, but this summer’s fighting on the peninsula made little change in the territory each side holds. The pace of terrorist explosions in Colombo has increased.

The LTTE is a well-organized fighting force, capable of both guerrilla warfare and carefully prepared, targeted conventional operations. Its troop strength has been estimated for the past decade at about 7-8000. It possesses artillery, radios, ships, and other sophisticated weapons, many captured from Sri Lankan army bases. It has an established fundraising and propaganda network composed of sympathetic Tamils in Europe, Australia, and North America. There also allegations that it obtains funds through illegal activities such as drug smuggling and narcotics trafficking. Its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, is passionately committed to an independent state, or “Eelam.” The past twenty-five years testify to his focus on military means and his brutal suppression of anyone opposing his methods, especially Tamils challenging his claim to speak for all Sri Lanka’s Tamils. The LTTE has engaged in discussions with the government on several occasions, but is inherently suspicious of the process and questions the government’s willingness to implement a generous agreement.

The Sri Lankan army, 120,000 strong, has grown fivefold in the past twenty years, since the war against the LTTE took hold. It suffers from high desertion, inconsistent strategy, and frequent low morale. The thrust of government policy has fluctuated between emphasizing negotiations and stressing military victory. They have never come close to eliminating the Tigers as a military threat.

Reviving the economy: The government’s other major challenge is the economy. A liberalized economy, highly literate population, a well-known destination for tourism, and strong textile and tea exports should make this nation prosperous. However, defense spending now tops $850 million a year, or 34% of the annual budget. This year, some $350 in new weapons purchases forced the president to suspend development spending. Inflation has risen from 3.8 % in April to 5.1% in September. Erratic economic policy and security concerns discourage investment, and the stock markets are sluggish. Sri Lankan GDP has grown by 4-6 percent a year for the past decade; growth this year is expected to be a decent 5-5.5 percent. Given the low population growth, this is a respectable record. The cost is in what might have been. Studies have shown that but for the war, the economy could grow at 8% a year, enough to make a real dent in poverty.

Next steps: Six years ago, Chandrika Kumaratunga brought the energy and drive of a newly elected leader to her quest for peace. This time, she is carrying six years’ worth of baggage, and is running on ideas that have been in her kit bag throughout that time. An ugly incident in late October in which a Sinhalese mob burned down a prison housing young LTTE fighters who had surrendered suggests that she will need to work on avoiding a dangerous ethnic backlash outside the principal war zone. To end the stalemate, she has a tougher job. The LTTE remains the force most capable of blocking a peace agreement it does not accept. The government therefore has no option but to deal with it. The accent is likely to be on the military for the time being, for both sides want to claim the Jaffna peninsula.

But without a political settlement, there can be no peace. The negotiations that were interrupted in 1995, and those that the Norwegians tried to broker in early 2000, cannot simply be resumed. Eventually, the process must begin again, and the parties need to start looking for new building blocks. On the government side, demonstrating that it can make devolution work in the territory it now holds and encouraging fresh thinking about a looser national structure that recognizes the Tamil collective identity would be good starting points. On the LTTE side, the soul-searching needs to be very fundamental – about the cost to Tamil society of the death toll from increasingly young LTTE fighters, and about what kind of coexistence would give the community the security and dignity it craves. This will be a long term effort at best.