The choice for Tamils: failed Prabhakaran or peace-winning Anandasangaree?

H. L. D. MAHINDAPALA

Summing up the Washington meeting of the Co-Chairs - US, Norway, Japan and EU - US Under Secretary for Political Affairs, R. Nicholas Burns dealt a body blow at the press conference (Tuesday 22, 2006) that has sent the Tigers reeling.

This is not what they expected. The Tiger lobby went into top gear on A-9 road to convince the international community, particularly the Co-chairs, that they were the victims of a humanitarian crisis caused by an economic blockade imposed by the Government.

Overweight Churchmen and NGO pundits, who have showed no signs of being affected by a food shortage, too weighed in to back the A-9 politics of the Tigers obstructing the flow of food. But the unfolding facts were loaded against the Tigers and it had no impact on the Co-Chairs.

The anticipated economic sanctions against the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) did not materialise and, in keeping with international law, the Co-Chairs defended the right of the state to protect its sovereignty and territorial integrity against Tiger terrorists.

The other propaganda manoeuvre of the Tigers was to accuse the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) of killing non-combatant civilians.

In Vakarai they fired deliberately from civilian centres and moved out quickly to provoke the SLA to fire back at civilians. The Tiger tactics worked: the SLA hit back and when 47 Tamil civilians died the Tigers fed the corpses into their propaganda machine to blame, as usual, the GoSL.

But the Tigers overplayed their hands. They did not anticipate the Tamil eye-witness who told Reuters that the Tigers fired first from guns positioned among the civilians.

The Tigers cranked up the food crisis (caused by their obstructions) and the deaths of civilians (caused by provocative firing of the Tigers and miscalculated retaliation by SLA) to extract the last drop of sympathy from the international community.

But the response of the Co-Chairs went against the Tiger tactics. The Tamil Tigers are now up the proverbial gum tree. They are not only stuck but also getting whacked from all sides.

The unequivocal statement of Nicholas Burns delivered a message that hit the Tigers right between their eyes. He said: "I'd just say on behalf of the United States that we have faith in the Government and faith in the President of Sri Lanka. They do want to make peace.

"We also believe that the Tamil Tigers, the LTTE, is a terrorist group responsible for massive bloodshed in the country and we hold the Tamil Tigers responsible for much of what has gone wrong in the country," said Burns.

Burns added: "We are not neutral in this respect. We support the Government. We have a good relationship with the Government.

"We believe the Government has a right to try to protect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the country. The Government has a right to protect the stability and security in the country.

We meet often with the Government at the highest levels and consider the Government to be a friend to our country." "We are working with Sri Lanka as a partner in counterterrorism as well as counter-proliferation. All that is happening," he said.

The solid backing given by Burns to GoSL comes at a critical time when the Tigers and their hired agents in the NGOs were manipulating to tie the hands and feet of President Mahinda Rajapaksa on partisan accusations of violations of human rights.

But Burns came out to back Rajapaksa as "a friend" of America. Incidentally, this has blown the UNP myth that Ranil Wickremesinghe alone is the political wizard who has king-pins of the West in his pocket to fix Prabhakaran.

Burns' telling words cannot be more explicit: "We are not neutral in this respect. We support the Government." These words have pushed the Tigers into a corner where there is hardly any room to manoeuvre.

These words will be ringing in the ears of Prabhakaran today when he reads the speech prepared for him by his new speech-writer, whoever it maybe, now that Anton Balasingham is afflicted with terminal cancer.

The overall political message from the aid donors is that the GoSL has a right "to protect the territorial integrity, sovereignty, security and stability of the country." Burns, in short, is endorsing Mahinda Rajapaksa's "gahuwoth gahanawa" (hit-me-I'll-hit-you-back) policy.

Burns is crystal clear when he says: "We are working with Sri Lanka as a partner in counterterrorism as well as counter-proliferation. All that is happening." This is also a total rejection of Prabhakaran's Eelamist politics tied to terrorist violence.

The operative word here is "counter-proliferation" of terrorism. This means that the global targets of terrorism, wherever it maybe, are still on the radar screen of USA. It also means that the anti-terrorist thrust of Bush is still alive and kicking despite losing his power base in Capitol Hill.

With or without Bush, America is united against the proliferation of terrorism and, let no one forget, that Prabhakaran is high on their list of banned terrorists. This makes it easy for America to choose between Prabhakaran and Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Against this background only the desperate Tiger strategists could come up with the incredibly stupid idea of changing American policy with a bribe of a million dollars!

The second attack on the Tigers came from V.

Anandasangaree, the award-winning leader of the Tamils in the non-violent democratic stream. He set the tone when he appealed to the international community from his prize-winning podium at UNESCO, Paris to "liberate the Tamils from the Tigers".

The voice of a Tamil leader appealing from a UN platform to liberate the Tamils from their so-called liberator exposes the hypocrisy of the theories, demonstrations and the public postures of the hired NGO peaceniks who bend over backwards to appease the one-man regime in the Vanni.

Besides, the voice of Anandasangaree represents the democratic aspirations of the Tamils exploited by a self-seeking megalomaniac who has no solution except to sacrifice the children of other Tamil parents in the name of an elusive goal which he cannot achieve.

Anandasangaree is alarmed by the negative impact of Tiger violence which has reduced the Tamil population from 12% to a provisional low of 4.3% estimated in the last census. He quite rightly believes that Tamils without Eelam is far better than an Eelam without Tamils.

After being in the Jaffna Tamil movement that devoured its children for nearly three decades he has decidedly taken the non-violent path to save the Tamils. He sees no salvation in Prabhakaran's violence. And he has the courage to articulate it at great risk to his own life.

In comparison to the rising stature of Anandasangaree among all communities - both at home and abroad - the pro-Tiger Lord Haw Haws in academia and in foreign-funded NGO circus can be classified only as a bunch of mendacious hypocrites who thrive, very much like Prabhakaran, on the agony and the misery of the war-weary Sri Lankans.

These hired humbugs parade as heroes by opposing the GoSL as the enemy of peace and not war-mongering Prabhakaran.

On the contrary, Anandasangaree opposes Prabhakaran as the enemy of peace and Tamils without confronting the GoSL not because he is kow-towing to the Government but because he knows that there is no future for the Tamils in Prabhakaran's self-serving, vindictive violence.

Having gone through the peninsular political process he, perhaps more than any other living Tamil political leader, has a better appreciation of what went wrong in the North-South relations and the way out of it.

He knows that there is a better chance of ending the war through a dialogue than by manufacturing excuses for Prabhakaran to wage his personal war against the Tamils and all other communities.

Neither A. T. Ariyaratne's peace marches from Moratuwa to Panadura, nor Jehan (Pacha) Perera's National Peace Council can hold a candle to Anandasangaree's commitment to peace by opposing the ruthless enemy of peace and dissident Tamils.

Their ideologies are poles apart. The Pacha Pereras in the peace industry promote the fiction that they are saving Tamils by backing Prabhakaran -- a leader who has had no compunction in starving the Tamil people with his deliberate obstruction of supplies of food.

He can't give them a piece of bread though he has plentiful stocks of guns, ammunition and land mines. Anandasangaree, who should know the plight of the Tamils better than say Ariyaratne or Pacha Perera, is demanding that Prabhakaran should lay down arms to save the Tamils.

This is the standard model in the peace processes that has worked from Ireland to Nepal. So when will Ariyaratne and his side-kick, Pacha Perera follow the example of peace models in the world and that of a respected Tamil leader like Anandasangaree and insist on Prabhakaran laying down arms as a constructive confidence-building measure to pave the paths to peace?

From another UN platform, Lois Arbour, UN Human Rights Commissioner, dealt another blow to the Tamils in the diaspora.

She bluntly told the Tamil diaspora to hold Velupillai Prabhakaran responsible for human rights violations. This is ominous for Prabhakaran personally because she is virtually putting him on notice that he is liable for prosecution on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The implied warning in this is clear. For the first time a leading UN authority has come out issuing a warning to the Tamil diaspora that they are violating international law contained specifically in Security Council Resolution 1373 - the resolution banning financing, propagating or collaborating with terrorism.

All this portend that the international and national trends going against the Tigers have reached a potentially threatening level.

The failure of the Tigers to win the international community at the time they need it most, even with their partisan Norwegians pushing the Tiger line, has forced them to turn to India as the last resort.

India is making vague noises about the Tamil victims. The Tigers too are manoeuvring to create a climate change in Indian public opinion. In an exclusive interview to India NDTV (November 22, 2006) S. P. Tamilselvan, the head of the Tiger political wing, claimed that the Tigers had nothing to do with the Rajiv Gandhi assassination.

But, Anton Balasingham, realising that the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi was the colossal blunder of Prabhakaran's arrogant and implacable violence, apologised earlier, hoping to win back lost ground. India remained unmoved and Dr. Subramaniam Swamy, leader of Janata Party, branded Balasingham's apology as a mark of "monumental stupidity".

Making a last minute desperate bid to turn the tide Tamilselvan demanded on the privately owned NDTV that the case of Rajiv Gandhi should be further investigated.

But the case was comprehensively investigated by the Jain Commission which concluded its finding by accusing Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman, the Tiger Intelligence Chief, as the master minds behind the killing.

The Jaffna-based churchmen too are ringing their Church bells to whip up Indian support for the Tigers. The Bishop of Jaffna, Dr Thomas Savundranayagam, showing no signs of any food shortage in his diocese, told NDTV: "Certainly by ourselves we can't achieve peace.

We are a very small group of people, a minority. In other countries also peace was achieved by the intervention of international community. For us the best country is India. It's our closest neighbour and culturally we are very much linked and lot of our people have taken refuge there. India must not be simply a spectator but must play an active role in bringing a lasting peace."

India is being pushed by various political constituencies manipulated by the Tigers to intervene on their behalf.

Pro-Tiger lobbyists have reached a dead-end because they invested too much in the mythical equation of Tigers = Tamils. This was valid up to a point in the early days. But the emerging awareness in the Tamil community is heading towards the realisation that saving Tigers is not going to save the Tamils.

The Tamils, like every other community, is sick and tired of violence. Both Anandasangaree and Karuna - the two ends of the anti-Tiger spectrum - concur on this aspect.

Anandasangaree says give up violence. Karuna too insists that Prabhkaran should be disarmed as a prelude to peace because disarming other Tamil groups, as required in the Ceasefire Agreement, has resulted only in the liquidations of the unarmed Tamil rivals of the Tigers.

Karuna argues that for him violence is only a temporary means to end the oppression of Tamils by Prabhakaran and that he will lay down arms once the Tigers are disarmed.

Prabhakaran is the odd man out who survives exclusively on a daily diet of violence. His religion is violence. Tamils seeking peace are trapped inside his rings of violence.

In Vakarai the Tigers have planted a ring of land mines to prevent the Tamils from fleeing into the peaceful areas controlled by the SLA. Where is the glory of Prabhakaran if he has to imprison his people to prevent them running away from him?

Why is he afraid of his own people? Isn't this ring of mines his Berlin Wall? Isn't Vaharai the metaphor for the subhuman past, present and the future of Tamils under Prabhakaran?

The Tamils deserve a better place than a prison enclosed by a ring of menacing land mines. They deserve a better flag than a ring of 33 bullets, two crossed guns fixed with bayonets and a ruthless Tiger snarling at them.

They deserve a better life than the one imposed on them by their "liberators". Karuna's cry for help from all the other parties to lay down their arms and co-exist with other communities in peace demonstrates the utter disillusionment of the growing Tamil dissidents with a regime that has turned against its own people for its survival.

The crisis facing the Tigers is that they have to fight and oppress their own people to survive. They dare not let their people to go where they want.

Anton Balasingham is on record telling the Tamil Times that they cannot let the Tamil people go to Colombo because they accuse the Tigers of persecution to get foreign visas and passports. Anandasangaree's cry to return to the pre-Prabhakaran days when he had the right to protest peacefully in Jaffna against Mrs. Bandaranaike opening the Jaffna University speaks volumes for the loss of dignity, security and liberty of the Tamils not under "chauvinistic, Sinhala-dominated Government" but under "the sole representative of the Tamils".

The choice for the Tamils is simple: either they stick with the narrow, mono-ethnic one-man rule imposed on them by Prabhakaran or they accept the broad multiple realities of a tolerant democracy presented by Anandasangaree. Lois Arbour is right.

The Tamils have a responsibility to tell Prabhakaran that enough is enough. They cannot survive on the myths of blaming the Sinhalese forever and ever.

That is the road to the open prisons of Vakarai. The time has come for them to take responsibility for their past mistakes and actions. They are not the lily-white victims they pretend to be. Their future is in getting out, as fast as they can, from this mental prison.

Anandasangaree is showing the way out of their failed past. But if the Tamils decide to stick with Prabhakaran then they must accept the consequences that come with it: 1) living inside the mined prison of Vakarai and 2) being cut off from the rest of the world, just not A-9 Road. The choice is theirs. This is the only message worth sending in their birthday cards to Prabhakaran.

To be continued