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by Jayadeva Uyangoda

In the second round of talks between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, the issue of forming a Joint Task Force (JTF) is at the top of negotiation agenda. In a statement made before his departure to Thailand, Minister G. L. Peiris, head of the government negotiation team, stated that the talks would focus on the structure, composition, and functions of the JTF.

The idea of the JTF emerged in the first round of talks in Thailand held in September. It was reported that the JTF would be formed and begin to function before the second round of negotiations. However, it appears that the Government and the LTTE have not been able to finalize the details of its structure and functioning. The issue of the JTF was also a major theme in the consultations held by Norwegian Deputy Foreign Minister when he met Government and LTTE leaders in his facilitatory discussions held last week.

The question of JTF has become important for two reasons. Firstly, the JTF is the first initiative for new institution building jointly launched by the government and the LTTE as an outcome of their political engagement.

Secondly, the opposition to the Government-LTTE negotiations seems now to concentrate on the question of JTF. In this context, the JTF is emerging as the focal site where the success as well as legitimacy of the present negotiation process is most likely to be tested.

The UNF government, it appears, has been approaching the JTF as a process of institution building the final shape of which would evolve over time.

For them, the JTF is a transitional institutional building measure aimed at addressing the immediate needs of reconstruction and development in the North and East. According to the government's thinking, the JTF's immediate tasks would center on developing projects as well as their implementation and the delivery of services. It therefore would not be bogged down in bureaucratic details. As a government spokesperson put it, 'speed, alacrity and effectiveness' should be its most important elements. Concerning the composition of the JTF, the LTTE wants a direct role in it as a full and equal partner. There is also a demand from Muslim political leaders that the Muslim interests should be directly represented at the JTF.

One of the challenging issues for the government to decide concerning the JTF is about its institutional accountability, since it is the main mechanism through which international financial assistance would be channelled to the North and East. What should be the fiscal and monetary procedures governing its functioning? What would be the role of the Auditor General, External Resources Dept, and of course Parliament with regard to the JTF and its functioning? Can the 'speed, alacrity and effectiveness' be ensured once the JTF is turned into a regular government bureaucratic entity with usual delays in decision - making, fund disbursement and management? It appears that the government is still debating these issues.

Meanwhile, it is precisely on these issues that the criticism as well as opposition to JTF is also crystallizing. The questions being raised by critics are of the following nature: Isn't the government stealthily institutionalizing a mechanism outside the constitutional and legal framework of the country? Would the JTF be an entity that has no mechanisms for transparency and accountability? Is there a link between the JTF and the idea of interim administration? Would the JTF be a stepping - stone to an LTTE-controlled interim administration, a precursor for a 'provisional government'?

While these controversies may be viewed as signs of a healthy debate on issues of great public significance, they also represent the uncertainties that define and govern the politics and the political debate in a period of transition from civil war. Meanwhile, institution-building for Sri Lanka's civil war transition is intimately linked to negotiation stability, because the JTF is a test case of how the government implements decisions jointly made at negotiations with the LTTE.

The JTF is the first, and presently the only, institutional framework that the protagonists of Sri Lanka's conflict have decided in principle to establish as a governance initiative in a context where military structures of both the government and the LTTE have dominated public life in the North and East for about two decades. There is no provincial council system functioning there. What exist there at present as institutions of Sri Lanka's state are the military and administrative agencies of the central government that have been components of a war structure. The JTF is an institutional structure that is conceived outside that conflict system and military structures. It is a pity that there is very little appreciation in Colombo of this particular dimension of the JTF.

Will the JTF become a stepping-stone to an interim administration in the North and East? A frank answer to that question is that it ought to be.

Institutional building for the transition from war requires the formation of a new state structure in a region where the Sri Lankan state had been reduced to being a war - machinery. That new state structure cannot and should not be a replica of the existing state which the legal community in Colombo would consider sacrosanct and inviolable. If the entire Sri Lankan state is not subjected to radical reforms, the emerging post-war state structure in the North and East, will have to be a qualitatively new one, will certainly develop a new contradiction of great magnitude. Even if the state in the rest of Sri Lanka remains unreformed, in the North and East, there may not be much room for returning to an unreformed framework of the 1978 constitution.

Against this backdrop, the government's dilemma is a crucial one that requires prudent handling. While new institutions need to be built, they should enjoy constitutionality, legality as well as public legitimacy. But, there is a catch in this proposition. The constitution that is supposed to govern the emerging institutions in the transition from civil war is a rigid and debilitating one when it comes to extensive power sharing as required by the new realities. As the 19th amendment fiasco very clearly demonstrated, it does not facilitate any creative alternative either from its critics or its defenders. The 1978 constitution, with its entrenched clauses as well as outdated public policy framework that has been coming thorough pre-twentieth century British constitutional traditions, can only further institutionalize the practices of the unitary state and truncated administrative structures. It would be an irony if even the advocates of power sharing in Colombo might invoke before the Supreme Court the anachronistic principles of the 1978 constitution to invalidate the emerging institutions like the JTF.

This is where some new constitutional thinking will become extremely necessary after the second round of negotiations. The coming months would be the phase in which institutional building enters the center of agenda in the transition from war to war termination. The new thinking should not be one that revolves around the 1978 constitution. Rather, it should facilitate the emergence of a flexible and devolved state structure in which the administration and management of public finance too is devolved in a shared system of accountability.

How to evolve this shared system of accountability to facilitate the building and functioning of institutions of governance in the North and East? One less attractive, yet readily available, option would be to re-activate the elected provincial council system in the two provinces with LTTE participation. In that case, the JTF would be a transitional, stop-gap arrangement that can be accommodated in a joint framework consisting of the central government and the North-East's elected provincial council.

In the period of transition from war, new institutions built for governance will also take a transitional character. There should indeed be the need and space for regular re-invention of these governance institutions. This is where a less dogmatic approach to institution building can be useful for political imagination.

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