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The Oldest English Newspaper in South Asia
Founded 4.2.1834
P. O. Box 1217,
35, D.R. Wijewardene Mawatha,
Colombo 10, Sri Lanka.
Telephone: Editor - 94-1-429226; Fax: 94-1-429230

Un-banning the LTTE

Every year, LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran gives a speech on November 27, in which he mixes calls for peace with demands for various pre-conditions which are, in effect, attempts to broaden the avenues of activity of the LTTE in its secessionist war. Virtually every year, within weeks or months of his annual lecture, his units carry out either a deadly urban guerrilla attack, an assassination or, a military assault.

In the logic of pragmatic politics, Mr. Prabhakaran, in waging an armed struggle to win his movement's political objectives, has every right to squeeze whatever concession, whatever opportunity, he can get from his enemy, the Sri Lankan State. Likewise, the Sri Lankan State has every right to deny him such opportunities and retain whatever advantages it holds in this life-and-death struggle where hardly a day goes by without people dying.

In this vicious logic of war and politics, the LTTE has no qualms in carrying out assassinations of, or attempts to assassinate, the heads of the very State with which, barely weeks earlier, the LTTE leader had offered to hold peace talks. In accordance with this same logic, there is no necessity whatsoever, for either the State or the LTTE to make any concessions - such as de-proscribing the LTTE or, on the lTTE's part, allowing freer access by Governmental and non-governmental organisations servicing the civilian population in the war zone.

Given the fallible human reality of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, today neither side in the armed conflict can claim the moral high ground. If the Sri Lankan State must bear responsibility for the 'original sin' of ethno-centrism and supremacism, the LTTE must bear responsibility for dictatorial politics and the near-complete emasculation of Sri Lankan political leadership - Tamil, Sinhala, Muslim - by means of deliberate murder. Peace can only come, however, if both sides either begin negotiations without pre-conditions or "pre-requisites" or, if both sides - and not just one - make concessions of equal value as confidence-building measures in the settlement process.

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