The Hindu : Peace and the peace dividend

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Thursday, Mar 25, 2004

Opinion

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Peace and the peace dividend

By Nirupama Subramanian

KURUNEGALA (SRI LANKA), MARCH 24. Every morning, Mayura Attapattu pedals through the small, crowded town of Melsiripura, near here, hawking lottery tickets on her bicycle.

Many flock to her out of curiosity because a woman selling lottery tickets is an unusual sight. But Mayura also gets a lot of buyers for whom winning a lottery remains the main hope for getting on in life.

"People would rather buy a lottery with their last 10 rupees than something else," she said.

These days Mayura sells between 300 and 350 tickets daily. Affected by a severe drought for the last seven months, the people of this paddy farming district are praying for either rain or a big stroke of luck to bail them out of their current misery.

The drought here, just 80 km from the capital Colombo, and in some other parts of the country, has tightened a tough situation for the Ranil Wickremesinghe-led ruling United National Front, which is fighting for re-election in Sri Lanka's parliamentary election on April 2.

The election, the country's third in under four years, came after a four-month deadlock in the co-habitation government between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and the UNF, to end which Ms. Kumaratunga dissolved Parliament ahead of time.

Essentially a battle for the Sinhala heartland, the election centres around two main themes — the ceasefire with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the peace it has brought, and the peace dividend.

The UNF, which signed the ceasefire with the LTTE in February 2002, is defending itself from the allegation that the truce has helped the rich grow richer but brought no benefit to Sri Lanka's poor during its two-year rule.

Leading the charge is the new coalition of Ms. Kumaratunga's Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) known as the Freedom Alliance (FA) and some smaller parties.

Economy, the burning issue

"The economy has surfaced as the most burning issue in this election because most people are worse off than they were two years ago," said Mangala Samaraweera, a spokesman of the FA and one of its key candidates.

Drought-hit villagers complained of the high cost of living, which has rapidly outstripped their earning capacity.

"I sell a kilogram of paddy for 12 or 13 rupees. It used to be just enough to make ends meet two or three years ago. But now, I need to make at least 20 rupees a bag to break even with just my production cost," said Premadasa, a 50-year-old farmer in Ussawa, a village near here.

A common complaint is that the UNF government removed subsidies on fertilizers. Premadasa said a bag of urea fertilizer that cost him 350 rupees earlier was now selling at between 850 to 930 rupees, making it difficult for him to cultivate his two-and-a-half acres sharecropping land even before the drought set in.

`Ceasefire, the main achievement'

In its defence, the UNF projects the ceasefire as its main achievement, arguing that with its six-year-term abruptly reduced to just two, it did not have the time to take the benefits of peace to the Sri Lankan hinterland.

"We laid the foundation for peace, we were building a strong economy on it but President Chandrika decided to play her hand just then by dissolving Parliament," said Milinda Moragoda, Minister for Economic Reforms in the UNF Government and one of its key candidates for the coming elections.

"In many places, young people ask me, `What has your government done for the youth?'," Mr. Moragoda said.

"My reply to them is that we have stopped them from dying on the battlefield. That is the main thing. The next stage is to think about their future," he said.

The UNF gets full marks for the ceasefire but the FA — specifically its JVP constituent — is aggressively projecting it as a threat to national security.

Not permanent peace: JVP

Bimal Ratnayake, one of the JVP candidates in Kurunegala district, said that while peace was vitally important to people, they were fearful the LTTE would strike back with renewed force despite the recent split in its ranks.

"People know a ceasefire is not the same thing as permanent peace," said Mr. Rathnayake.

Last year, 68 residents of Ussawa visited Jaffna, Batticaloa and other areas in the North-East as part of a "peace education" programme sponsored by an NGO. Their visit was returned by 38 people from the North-East. But the exchange appears to have made little dent in the villagers' perception of the LTTE.

"We have nothing against the Tamil people but we fear and distrust their leadership," said Kamalani, who took part in the programme.

More immediately, many houses in the village including Kamalani's, do not have electricity. Of 25 recent graduates in Ussawa, 10 are unemployed and the rest are daily-wagers.

The ceasefire helped push growth from below the red line in 2001 to an estimated 5.5 per cent in 2003. Sri Lanka has spent around Rs. 50 billion annually on defence since 2002, and while the number has increased nominally, it has decreased as a percentage of GDP from before the ceasefire.

But according to Dushini Weerakoon, an economist at the Institute of Policy Studies in Colombo, the benefits are apparent only in the big cities and on the south-western coast where tourists have begun returning in large numbers.

In the capital, developers are building plush apartment blocks where a three-bedroom flat overlooking the Indian Ocean could cost as much as Rs. 140 lakhs (about 70 lakh Indian rupees). International coffee chains and snack-bars have set up shop in Colombo in the last two years. Moneyed youngsters lounge at new night-spots. A spurt in car sales in 2001 has shrunk the city's roads.

The resentment this lop-sided development has created outside Colombo is palpable.

"Our challenge is to make the people believe that the economic benefits of the ceasefire would have reached them had we been given time to build on our foundation," said Mr. Moragoda.

The challenge for the FA is to convince people it has a better plan for the resolution of the Tamil question that will not take people down the path of war once again and that will make for more equitable economic development.

At the moment, neither side seems to have convinced voters entirely.

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