Opinion - News Analysis   

Requiem for a peace process

Nirupama Subramanian

The assassination of Lakshman Kadirgamar has shattered the last remaining illusions about the peace process in Sri Lanka, about the LTTE, and about Norway's role and abilities as a peace facilitator.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Lakshman Kadirgamar. — File Photo: Sriyantha Walpola.

IN 1995, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam withdrew from a truce and peace process with the Sri Lankan Government by blasting two navy ships in the high security Trincomalee harbour. It was an open declaration of military hostilities, and led to an all-out war between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan Government that lasted until 2002.

This time, the LTTE has employed a different tactic. It has declared war against Sri Lanka but in a way that the Government is unable to respond. By killing Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, the LTTE has not just liquidated an arch enemy, who was responsible for exposing the LTTE's ugliness to the world, and whose very existence was a repudiation of the LTTE's claim of "sole representative of Tamils." It has committed a hostile act against the Government with the full awareness that the State will baulk from punitive reaction that could endanger the "no-war" situation of the three-year-old ceasefire. After all, no accountable politician can ignore the huge constituency for the peace of the truce both in Sinhala-majority southern Sri Lanka and in the North-East.

In a sense, the LTTE never stopped waging the Eelam war. The fighting between the two armies stopped with the ceasefire, but every day since the truce came into existence in February 2002, the LTTE has fought an unconventional war against the Government. And in this, its main weapon is none other than the ceasefire agreement.

Using the truce, the LTTE quickly established de facto administrative control in the North-East. The Government had officials posted in the region, but they took orders from the Tigers who ran a parallel government, collected taxes, had their own police force. The LTTE also turned the ceasefire line into a virtual international boundary, even issuing visitors visas for onward travel. The Tigers have pounced on every opportunity to drive home that they are the masters of the North-East.

Simultaneously, the LTTE has been strengthening itself militarily, rearming itself and building an air wing. It deployed senior cadres in a diplomatic charm offensive, sending them globe-trotting while Velupillai Prabakaran played host in his Mullaithivu jungle hideout to a steady stream of international dignitaries. It did not seem to matter that the LTTE was proscribed by the United States, India, and Britain, that there were Interpol "red corner" notices for Mr. Prabakaran, or that the LTTE was a known recruiter of children, over which the United Nations has repeatedly expressed concern.

The Sri Lankan Government, which in the decade before had gone on a global campaign to squeeze the LTTE's fund-raising and arms smuggling capacities, now found itself facilitating some of these visits by throwing in Air Force helicopters to ferry Mr. Prabakaran's visitors and easing Customs and other procedures for the Tigers when they returned from their jaunts abroad.

But the most significant aspect of this unconventional war for Eelam was the way in which the LTTE swiftly used the ceasefire to set itself up as the "sole representative" of the Tamils. Permitted by the truce to open political offices in areas of the North-East under the control of the Government, and where it previously had only a clandestine presence, the LTTE established itself as the predominant, and soon, the only force.

Tamils targeted

Tamil political parties that did not want to bow to the LTTE withdrew after they were obliged under the agreement to turn in their weapons, because it would leave them unarmed against the LTTE. Those who remained did so at their own risk, and the LTTE started liquidating them, one by one. Among the first to be killed was Thurairajah "Robert" Subathiran of the Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front, picked out long-distance by an LTTE sniper, just as the Foreign Minister was.

The LTTE added to its list of enemies Karuna, its military commander in Batticaloa, who led a rebellion against the top leadership — the first such in the organisation — citing discrimination by it against eastern Tamils. The situation got bloodier as the March 2004 parliamentary elections approached. The LTTE used murder, political intimidation, and plain thuggery to ensure that hand-picked candidates of its proxy, the Tamil National Alliance, were elected.

Norway, the facilitator of the peace process, and the Norwegian-led Scandinavian ceasefire monitors showed little will to rein in the LTTE, although they periodically paid homage to the importance of safeguarding democracy, pluralism, and human rights in the North-East. When an EPRLF activist in Batticaloa recently told a senior SLMM official that he feared for his life from the LTTE, the official advised him to leave the region.

Norway seemed unconcerned even when the LTTE took this covert war to Colombo, taking out political opponents in the streets of the capital in broad daylight. Last year, the LTTE dispatched a suicide bomber to kill Douglas Devananda, the leader of the Eelam People's Democratic Party and a Minister in President Chandrika Kumaratunga's Cabinet. Intercepted by policemen before she reached her target, the human bomb blew herself up killing the policemen.

But the LTTE notched up other successes, killing several other members of the EPDP and People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam.

This year, it also killed a top intelligence official who had been at the forefront of anti-LTTE operations in the pre-ceasefire years. Even the Government, in its eagerness to show the international community that it would do nothing to upset the LTTE or the peace process, did not show strong enough concern at this violence.

The LTTE would not have done any of this had it been an honest negotiator. But to any observer of the drama in Sri Lanka over the years, and especially since February 2002, it has been clear for a while that the LTTE's perception of the peace process is not — as Norway would have us imagine, or as Sri Lankans have desperately wanted to believe — as a means of securing a negotiated federal political settlement to the Tamil question.

From day one of the ceasefire, each act of the LTTE — whether the forcible recruitment of children, violence against Muslims in the region, the battle for control of post-tsunami reconstruction finances in the North-East or the lynching of a senior police official in Jaffna last week — was designed to take it further towards the goal of a separate Eelam, and definitely not towards a federal set-up with Colombo.

It is true that the Sinhala political establishment is itself divided about the nature of a permanent solution to the conflict, but to hold this solely responsible for the intransigence of the LTTE is to miss the point that the Tigers themselves are not interested in such a solution.

For the LTTE, the main advantage of the ceasefire is that it can keep pushing towards its ultimate goal while the Sri Lankan Government, accountable to its people and to the international community, can do nothing to stop it.

With the assassination of Mr. Kadirgamar, the LTTE has pushed the envelope even further. It has struck at the heart of the Sri Lankan state, quite confident that there will be no comeback. The assassination has shattered the last remaining illusions about this peace process, about the LTTE, and about Norway's role and abilities as a peace facilitator.

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