The morning after the crossovers

Dayan JAYATILLEKA

THE CROSSOVER: The most formidable political mind of the last century, Lenin, once wrote that there are some comrades who think that 'minus three' is greater than 'minus two'.

His point was that they are so blithely optimistic they are unable to note the minus sign affixed before the quantity signified by digit. I would suppose the converse is also true.

There are some who think that 'plus three' is less than 'plus two', in that they are so given to prejudice and pessimism, they are unable to discern the positive in the emerging Sri Lankan situation. There are several significant improvements in the overall picture.

* The East has been partially liberated.

* The UNP dissidents have joined the Government, bringing in their modern reformist views, management and developmental experience, and contacts with the world outside.

If they leave their peacenik "Ranilism" behind (they must not be allowed to smuggle in "Ranilism without Ranil" into the government and weaken the war effort), this new development brings together the largest collection of rational and moderate political elements, and makes this the broadest centrist coalition, in our post-Independence history.

* President Rajapaksa is to leave in late February, on a state visit to China, the rising global superpower. The visit must leave no stone unturned. Its purpose must be the forging of a robust and all-round strategic partnership (military, economic, political, diplomatic) with China; one which makes the relationship with China our strongest and most important.

At the tail-end of his life, Hon. Lakshman Kadirgamar had commenced the reorientation of our external relations, in a direction that shifted priority precisely to China, and away from India with which he had become disappointed.

The speech made by Hon. Kadirgamar at the BMICH, on the occasion of the visit of the Chinese Prime Minister and Foreign Minister - an occasion on which he invited the then PM Mahinda Rajapksa as chief guest, much to the consternation of the Bandaranaike clique - contains the outlines of the new course.

Hopefully President Rajapaksa will build on that move, tapping to the fullest (and that includes party-to-party relations between the CCP and the SLFP), the potentialities of friendship and alliance with the Asian giant. He must follow this up with a parallel visit to Russia.

Wars are won and lost not only by what happens at the frontlines but by what happens behind the lines, in the rear of the armies.

Pundits' post-mortem

The reactions to the victory in Vakarai are revealing of the various facets of the country's crisis. While recruitment to the military continues and desertions are down to a record low, the pundits, local and foreign, have resorted to their customary sneering cynicism.

The Tigers, say the pundits, have merely conceded territory, and retreated in good order to fight another day.

Simon Gardner of Reuters, whose reportage is really quite decent, quotes an anonymous diplomat who virtually recommends that the LTTE does something, in order to restore parity!

The pundits are of course wrong. In warfare it is almost always the attacker who suffers more casualties than the defender. If the LTTE were fighting as successful guerrillas, they should have been able to impose a punishing number of casualties on the Sri Lankan military and then disappear, with few casualties of their own.

Yet in the drawn out Vakarai campaign, the LTTE lost many times more fighters than did the Government: its casualties were in triple digits while the Government's did not exceed double digits.

The Tigers have lost roughly half their fighters and at least half their total strength in the East. The Tigers were once again unable to do in the East what the Hezbollah did to the Israelis.

I underscore "in the East", because they did approximate the Hezbollah performance in Muhamalai on October 11th. And that is the problem: how to fight victoriously in the North.

Eating hot rice

Here again myth must not be allowed to paralyse action, while haste must not precipitate premature action. We have fought in the North before, not just on the defensive but the offensive, and won.

That is how the islands were liberated from the LTTE during Premadasa's administration, and Jaffna, during Chandrika's. Thus we must not be paralysed into inaction.

Yet we must not make the same mistake that the US did in both Afghanistan and Iraq, namely leave behind too few troops to handle the "hold and build" phase, following a successful "clear and take" phase.

We must not withdraw the army prematurely from the East until the job is done and the gains are made irreversible. Worst of all is the slogan of an immediate march, not even in the North, but of all places, on Kilinochchi!

Our hard won military gains, and the almost unprecedentedly high morale of the troops, must not be eroded by throwing them into a meat-grinder.

Those who advocate this should relearn the lesson of how to (and how not to) eat hot rice, taught by the old woman to Dutugemunu who was in hiding. Dutugemunu thereafter understood the principle of systematic, planned consolidation-advance-consolidation.

We shall of course have to go North and then finally into the Wanni heartland. The lessons of the past must be learned and predictable advance along a single axis (the disastrous Daluwatte doctrine) must be eschewed. These tactics possibly result from a lack of manpower.

Prabhakaran must surely be waiting the time we get caught in the classic manpower crunch: too few troops to capture and hold terrain; overstretch which permits him to concentrate his forces for a devastating breakthrough at an unexpected point in space and time.

The way to avoid that would be to generate a surge in recruitment by tapping into the present patriotic mood: the most recent Peace Confidence Index/Social indicators of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) registers a figure of 54% support among the Sinhalese for a policy of ratchetting up the military response right up to all-out war.

At the present stage of our history, there is no such thing as too large a military: we must strive to recruit the maximum number in the minimum time, so as to finish the job.

In his recent and extremely good TV interview with Derana, Karuna drew attention to the crucial factor of the Military Participation Ratio (MPR), which was once running in Prabhakaran's favour but is now working in favour of the Sri Lankan state.

Political commitment

One of the biggest lacunas in Sri Lanka's long conflict has been the absence of a clear declaration of policy objectives.

That gap has been filled by Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa - the best Defence Secretary we have ever had - who quite rightly asserts that Sri Lanka will strive to take out the LTTE's military assets wherever they are located, because as long as they have the capacity, the LTTE will seek to terrorise, destabilise and sunder the country.

Though the foreign media have tried to demonise him for this statement, he is saying nothing more than that which the prominent democracies themselves say.

Sri Lanka is trying to demilitarise the Tigers; decommission their weapons. Since the Tigers do not want to do it the easy way, it has to be done the hard way; and since the international community won't do it, we have to do it ourselves.

After all it is our country that the LTTE seeks to divide, our leaders they kill, our buses they explode suicide bombs in. "If not us, who?" This involuntary demilitarisation still permits the Tigers to convert themselves into a political entity.

Given that the historic task faced by the country is to face Prabhakaran's challenge and defeat it, we have the most committed leadership core that we have had since the conflict began.

In the 1980s and '90s, the Sri Lankan military had a stellar group of officers but not a sufficient critical mass of likeminded political leaders and officials committed to the task.

We had individuals such as Lalith Athulathmudali, Ranjan Wijeratne and Anuruddha Ratwatte (the last named spent 21 days under fire during the post-Elephant Pass siege of Jaffna in 2000), but never a core group such as we have now: President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickremanayake, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, and Defence Spokesman Keheliya Rambukwelle, supporting the General Sarath Fonseka and the two younger service commanders.

AKs and autonomy

There is however, a gap or deficit. There does not seem to be an overall integrated plan - meshing the military, political, economic, social, electoral and diplomatic dimensions - to deal with the Tamil/North and East issue.

While it is laudably understood that the LTTE's military assets have to be taken out, it is insufficiently recognised that the LTTE has political assets which also have to be neutralised, and political assets cannot be neutralised by military means, only by political ones.

The LTTE's main political asset is its narrative of Tamil grievance, its sob-story which it is able to sell to Tamils throughout the world, and through them to the international community, beginning with our powerful neighbour who carries more global weight than ever before in modern history.

The battle against the LTTE's political and ideological assets is a global one, and must be waged by means and in a language that is global.

The counter to the political idea of separatism is not historicism but the idea of a united democratic country in which all citizens have equal rights and treatment and ethno-regional identities have adequate political space.

In short, the LTTE's separatist army and navy have to be destroyed by the Sri Lankan military - by weapons wielded in war - while the LTTE's separatist idea and ideology have to be destroyed by the political weapons of development and devolution.

It takes rifles and regional autonomy; Dvoras and devolution, to defeat the Tiger. Just as we applaud successful military campaigns, we must encourage political campaigns against the Tigers.

Military offensives must be paralleled or swiftly followed by political offensives. A law on enhanced devolution is the equivalent of a successful military offensive and can cause the Tigers as much damage.

Devolution's disastrous friends

Such a policy, which I am convinced is the only Realist one, is thwarted today by two Southern sources.

The JVP, who's Politburo, has just decided to oppose any measures making for devolution, and the peaceniks that link devolution with the Tigers. Both sides conflate devolution with the LTTE.

The JVP is convinced - on the basis of no evidence whatsoever - that the struggle against separatism will be weakened by devolution, and the liberals who are convinced - also on the basis of zero evidence - that an adequate measure of devolution such as those proposed by the Majority report and Dr. Tissa Vitharana, cannot be rejected by the Tigers.

I was probably one of the first commentators - certainly the first Sinhalese - to welcome, on balance, the Majority Report in print.

Now, a group of academics, several of whom are expatriates (plus a garrulous feminist busybody) have issued a statement which is a model of how NOT to defend or advocate devolution.

Their statement in support of the Majority report not only does not contain a solitary word condemnatory of either separatism, terrorism or the LTTE (while it does criticise the JVP and JHU by name!), it opines that the LTTE will be unable to ignore or reject a serious devolution proposal.

One wonders whether these characters are referring to the same LTTE which rejected the Chidambaram proposals on Dec 19th 1986, waged war on the Indo-Lanka accord, scorned the Mangala Moonesinghe proposals of 1992, Chandrika's 1995 and 1997 proposals, and her year 2000 draft bill, resiled from the Oslo agreement to agree federalism within a united Sri Lanka and insisted on negotiating with the UNP of Ranil Wickremesinghe on the basis of the ISGA which Chris Patten described as unlike any federalism of his acquaintance!

If the Tigers were the sort of formation that would or could not reject a generous settlement based upon power sharing, surely they would not have sabotaged Ranil Wickremesinghe's presidential campaign?

If these peaceniks argue that none of these proposals were adequate, then their notion of adequacy goes way beyond anything an elected Sri Lankan government could countenance, and indeed any government anywhere in the world would countenance on its territory!

Answers and solutions

The JVP's threats can be countered quite easily, as can the conspiracies of Ranil and the Chandrika faction, with a general election.

While the nomination process can purge the SLFP of Bandaranaike stooges, there isn't a single issue on which the Sri Lankan, indeed the Sinhala, people cannot be convinced of, if it is advocated by Mahinda Rajapaksa and actively supported by Karu Jayasuriya, the two most popular and credible political personalities in the island.

The electorate can be so convinced, not because it is gullible. The Sri Lankan electorate is among the most practised and sophisticated in the world.

It is that Mahinda Rajapaksa and Karu Jayasuriya happen to be the most representative of Sri Lankan public opinion which never strays too far from the Middle Path.