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Map of Asia |
CIAO DATE: 01/03
Fragile Hopes in Sri Lanka
Teresita C. Schaffer
The South Asia Monitor
Number 48
July 1, 2002
The current ceasefire and the Norwegian-brokered peace talks set to start in the coming weeks between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) represent the best hope for peace in Sri Lanka in seven years. The initiative is nonetheless fragile, vulnerable as it is to the usual political upsets in the Sri Lankan mainstream and deep suspicion between the negotiating partners. If the negotiators surmount these obstacles, they will confront more fundamental challenges including the future role of the LTTE’s armed troops and the need for a fundamentally new constitutional design. Success requires an unprecedented multiyear effort with steady nerves on all sides.
They’ve come a long way: Sri Lanka’s government and the LTTE have achieved a good deal thus far. With quiet and skillful support from the Norwegians, they signed a formal ceasefire agreement in February, and promptly deployed a small Norwegian monitoring team. Besides calling for an end to fighting, the agreement set forth a 160-day timetable, extending through August 2, for a series of measures to begin normalizing life in the most combat-prone areas and laying the groundwork for political negotiations. These measures include:
Implementation of these commitments has proceeded, though not necessarily on the agreed timetable. The measures have served as the first crucial tests of both sides’ willingness to honor their promises; both sides have a somewhat spotty record thus far. A couple of naval encounters resulted in mutual accusations. In a still unexplained incident, a plane carrying the chief LTTE negotiator, Anton Balasingham, swooped low over a Sri Lankan vessel, and came close to disaster. The agreement contains no provision banning rearmament. Nonetheless, both see arms shipments as indicative of bad faith. The evacuation of schools and temples has begun but is way behind schedule.
The next step should be a meeting in Bangkok between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government. The delegations have been named. Before the date is set, the LTTE is insisting that all the steps spelled out in the ceasefire agreement be completed, and that the Sri Lankan government reverse its ban on the LTTE. The government has agreed to the “deproscription”-but only after a firm meeting date has been set.
The government — learning the lessons of the past: That the peace effort is moving at all is testimony to the existence of a peace constituency in Sri Lanka. President Chandrika Kumaratunga was the first Sri Lankan leader to tap into this political vein in her first two elections in 1994. Despite her party’s defeat in the December 2001 elections, the fact that a peace initiative is now considered good politics is probably her best political legacy.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe’s government is trying to avoid repeating some of the mistakes the government made during earlier negotiating rounds, especially in 1994-1995, but also during the 1980s. The clearest contrast lies in its much greater attention to detail and to the procedures for implementing any agreements it reaches. This year’s eight-page ceasefire contrasts with the very brief and ambiguously worded one inaugurated in January 1995. The government’s decision not to put forward a comprehensive proposal at this stage is a recognition that its eventual peace plan needs to emerge from a process that gives the LTTE “part ownership” of it, unlike the 1995 proposals, which the LTTE never formally acknowledged or negotiated. The move to set up a peace secretariat, with two of its ablest ministers in charge of the negotiations and the preparatory work, will leave the government much better equipped to carry out a negotiation.
Divided government: Wickremasinghe does not have undisputed command of the government, however. Kumaratunga is still president as well as commander in chief of the armed forces and a formidable political force. This enforced political “cohabitation” could provide a framework for ensuring that both the major political parties are briefed on the peace process, something that did not happen in the last effort. Thus far, however, this has not worked well. Kumaratunga has threatened to challenge the constitutionality of peace moves made without her participation. She has also challenged some of the government’s key tactical decisions, including the issue of what should be on the agenda for the first meeting.
Kumaratunga has two specific weapons that could spell sudden death for the peace efforts if she chose to use them. The first is her power to dissolve parliament after it has sat for one year (i.e., by December 2002). The Wickremasinghe government is trying to introduce a constitutional amendment that would curb this power; its prospects are uncertain. Kumaratunga’s second weapon is the constitutional requirement that the president, rather than the prime minister, submit to parliament any constitutional amendment requiring a referendum. For the moment, this is far down the road.
In addition, both the Sinhala nationalist right and the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), a revolutionary party that nearly brought the country to its knees twice in the past, have challenged the peace initiative. Either could become a potent adversary, especially if they made common cause with Kumaratunga.
For the LTTE, a new image and outreach: The LTTE, meanwhile, has crafted a new image for its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. An autocratic guerrilla supremo who committed his first political murder at age 18 and has been on the run ever since Prabhakaran began in March to appear in the press wearing a smile and a dapper safari suit in place of the familiar scowl and camouflage fatigues. Prabhakaran’s press conference on April 10 was another first, covered by several hundred foreign and Sri Lankan reporters in a dusty town in the LTTE-controlled Wanni jungle. His speech stopped well short of disavowing the LTTE’s traditional separatist goals, but did express his interest in exploring a solution that everyone could live with. More substantively, the LTTE has allowed the full range of ceasefire activities to proceed, in contrast to their refusal to allow the deployment of the tiny team of monitors agreed on in 1995.
The LTTE has also begun to broaden its political base, a movement that began in November 2001 when all the non-Tiger Tamil political parties participating in the parliamentary election then in process agreed to support the Tigers’ position and their preeminence as Tamil spokesmen. They did so more from fear than from conviction, because the LTTE has assassinated a large number of its Tamil rivals. Nonetheless this decision gave the LTTE’s standing as Tamil spokesman a credibility it had not previously had. The more surprising outreach effort has been to the Muslim community, which is Tamil-speaking but often the victim of LTTE terrorist attacks. That is being badly undercut by LTTE-Muslim violence near Batticaloa, on the east coast.
Especially since early May, however, the LTTE’s public communications have put the accent on their suspicion of the Sri Lankan government, and especially of the army. With the support of the Tamil parliamentary parties, they have been building a record, positioning themselves to accuse the government of bad faith. The echoes of the LTTE’s public communications during the waning days of the 1995 negotiations are unmistakable.
The issues ahead: Chances are still good that the parties will meet in the next couple of months. They have agreed in principle that the initial topic of discussions will be the establishment of an interim authority in the north and east of Sri Lanka. If all goes well, this will be the first step on a long and arduous journey.
The list of issues the parties will have to deal with on the road to peace is sobering, beginning with the interim authority itself. The LTTE’s expectation is that it will have a free hand in running northern and eastern Sri Lanka. The LTTE’s stewardship of Jaffna in the early 1990s, like its rule over the Wanni area just south of Jaffna since then, was autocratic, and there is no evidence that the LTTE is prepared to allow free expression, much less a free choice of political office-holders. The coexistence of an autocratic enclave within an otherwise democratic Sri Lanka poses fundamental problems.
Other difficult issues include the future role of LTTE cadres; the role and status of minorities, notably the Muslims in the east; the army’s future presence in the north and east; and division of the country’s finances. Beyond these specifics, consensus has yet to emerge on the basic constitutional shape of the country, the level of power to be devolved to the provinces, and the issue of whether all provinces will have equal powers or whether the north and east will enjoy greater autonomy than the rest of the country.
Perhaps the most fundamental question of all is what, if anything, a settlement offers Prabhakaran personally. Any viable solution will need to go beyond the modified Indian-style constitutional model the government proposed in 1995. It will need to provide more effective mechanisms for the Tamil population to take part ownership of the national government as well as the provincial leadership. Will this be enough to bring a hard-edged guerrilla leader into the world of democratic politics?
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