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Sri Lanka post-CFA

Over the past year, with the rout of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the Eastern Province and the serious losses inflicted by an increasingly aggressive Sri Lankan army and air force in the North, the military balance in Sri Lanka has shifted significantly in favour of the state. The Tigers have lost territory, ships carrying arms, and a large number of fighters. They have scored some terrorist hits in the South, including a dramatic ground-and-air attack on the An uradhapura air base and the assassination of the Minister for Nation Building in the vicinity of Colombo. But the military offensive is on and relentless. According to the Army Commander, Lieutenant General Sarath Fonseka, the LTTE has been “weakened…by 50 per cent or more” and is left with merely 3,000 trained fighting cadres. The head of the LTTE’s political wing, Suppiah Thamilselvan, has been eliminated; and there has been official talk of taking out Velupillai Prabakaran, who reportedly had a narrow escape in November 2007 when an air force bomb penetrated a bunker in a suburb of Kilinochchi. By then the LTTE, which had outscored the Sri Lankan government nine to one (3086 to 345) in monitored ceasefire violations up to November 30, 2006, had declared the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) “defunct.”

Under these circumstances, the question on the minds of Sri Lanka watchers was not whether but when the CFA, brokered by Norway in February 2002, would be formally ended. Nevertheless, the decision of the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration to withdraw from the CFA has met with uniformly negative responses from the international community — which is clear, as the Indian official response puts it, that “there is no military solution to the issue.” The widely shared concern is that the ending of the ceasefire will trigger an escalation of hostilities — with the armed forces launching a major offensive in the Wanni and the Tigers resorting to guerrilla warfare and terrorist strikes in the South — and take a fresh toll of civilian lives and welfare. U.N. estimates in the East put the number of people who have fled their homes and are in transitional camps at 220,000. There are no reliable estimates of the displaced in the North. The immediate critical task before the Sri Lankan government is to put in place an effective mechanism to protect and provide relief to hundreds of thousands of people caught in a humanitarian crisis of growing intensity. The other and more arduous challenge is to come up with a substantive devolution package that can lead to what the Indian official statement flags as “a settlement of political, constitutional and other issues within the framework of a united Sri Lanka, with which all communities in Sri Lanka are comfortable.” India and the world await such a far-sighted initiative from the Sri Lankan President in the New Year.

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