Tough choices: Strategy for Sri Lanka

Dayan JAYATILLEKA

TARGET: The same sort of criticisms of Mahinda Rajapaksa - and from the same sort of sources, right and ‘left’ - are made of presidents Putin and Chavez, and were made of President Premadasa.

A word of advice for Mangala Samaraweera, though: watch out for the Tigers. They killed Lalith Athulathmudali in order to frame Premadasa, create a diversion and kill the latter, their main target. They might try the same move again.

Fascists, not internationalists

It is an obscenity to read of Sinhala fifth columnists of the terrorist Tigers, being defended by some (Trotskyites) as misguided idealistic internationalists.

I was one of an earlier generation of Sinhalese who reached out to and allied with our generational and ideological counterparts among the militant young Tamils.

We spoke a common language, Marxism-Leninism; had the same heroes - Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel and Che Guevara; and were part of the same project, a two front socialist revolution encompassing the island as a totality.

The Eelam Left, which our generation of Sinhalese considered comrades, namely the EPRLF and PLOTE (and NLFT/PLFT), refused even after Black July ‘83, to conduct operations which would kill a single Sinhala civilian, and indeed refrained from killing any unarmed civilians, Sinhala or Tamil.

For their (our) part the militant Sinhala internationalists of the late ‘70s and ‘80s refused to have any relations with the LTTE despite its military prowess, and formed alliances with the Tigers’ ideological rivals (their future targets and victims).

By contrast the Sinhala Koti, their defenders and other Tiger sympathizers in the South are not internationalists. They are treacherous collaborators with Tiger fascism, and must be treated as such.

The difference between the radical left generation of the ‘80s and this lot, (apart from the obvious one of social and intellectual profile) is analogous to that between the internationalists who were in solidarity with their German class comrades in the First World War and the 1920s, and those who collaborated with Hitler fascism in the ‘30s and ‘40s.

Learn from Lincoln

The great liberal historian of ideas, Sir Isaiah Berlin pointed to a stark truth in politics and history. That which is good and desirable in the public realm is often not achievable simultaneously or in combination.

For instance Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the famous slogans of the French Revolution, were not achievable as a package. Berlin asserted that it was usually a choice, or at the least, a prioritisation between public goods.

Abraham Lincoln, the most moral of democratic leaders, was acutely aware of this “necessity for choice” (to borrow the title of one of Dr Kissinger’s early books on nuclear strategy).

During the Civil War, while he was acutely aware of the constraints of democracy, his conscious priority was the preservation of the nation as one and indivisible.

At that moment in history, democracy and the constitution were not absolutes for Lincoln. The highest value - almost an absolute - was the preservation of the unity of the nation that underlay the constitution of which it was but an expression.

Western liberals and westernized Lankan liberals seem ignorant of Lincoln’s tough-mindedness when faced with an armed secessionist insurrection.

Lincoln, however, cannot provide a shield for those on the other end of the spectrum, the Sinhala conservatives, neo-conservatives and pseudo-radicals, who are opposed to the sharing of power between the center and the periphery.

In his war against secession, which laid the basis for the superpower we see today, Lincoln combined hardnosed resoluteness with political shrewdness and a bold progressivism.

The dogged decision to fight back despite the early advances of the Confederacy and the selection of and free hand given to Generals Grant and Sherman, were combined with the enlightenment of the Emancipation proclamation that shattered the social foundations of the separatist Southern states.

The West and most westernized Sri Lankans want the equivalent of Emancipation proclamation without the equivalents of the fight-back against the Confederacy, Generals Ulysses Grant and Sherman and the March to the Sea through Georgia. Conversely, the Sinhala traditionalists, neo-conservatives and ultra-nationalist radicals want the Civil War campaigns against secessionism without the Emancipation proclamation.

In our case the equivalent of the latter cannot but be an enlightened law on devolution along the lines of the Majority and Tissa Vitharana reports with safeguards drawn from the Minority report.

The Sri Lankan tragedy consists in large measure, in the inability so far to arrive at Lincoln-esque ‘Ethical Realism’, with its strategy of repression and reform.

Toughest Choices

Returning to the uncomfortable point made by Sir Isaiah Berlin, such a combination may require tough choices.

The history of Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem (see Prof Nira Wickramasingha’s ‘Ethnic Politics in Colonial Ceylon’, Vikas, Delhi 1995) shows a demonstrable correlation between troughs in ethnic relations and spikes in democratic competition.

The crack-up of the USSR and Yugoslavia are directly related to the unleashing of the competitive democratic centrifuge.

Mine is not an argument for authoritarian management of the ethnic problem, a la Singapore and Malaysia. My point is rather different.

The urgent settlement of the ethnic problem must be buffered and protected, insulated as far as possible, from the passions of democratic electoral politics. This translates into two imperatives:

Any proposed reforms must be of a sort and size that do not constitutionally need exposure to a referendum and Sinhala demagoguery.

The formula “maximum devolution within a unitary state” is the only viable one, though the cosmopolitan liberals and progressives emphasize the first part of the formula (“maximum devolution”) while ignoring the latter, and the Sinhala chauvinists stress the latter (“unitary state”) while ignoring or rejecting the former.

Douglas Devananda, Col. Karuna and Prof Lakshman Marasinghe have in their own ways indicated what is to be done and how it can be done, namely taking 13th Amendment as basis and incrementally enhancing the quantum of devolution by re-jigging the concurrent list.

A simple majority in parliament and the exercise of presidential powers, rather than a two-thirds majority and a referendum, would be the levers for this reform.

Similarly, the re-opening of democratic space in the North and East must not strengthen Tamil demagoguery.

We cannot afford the equivalent of the elections that almost brought the GIA to power in Algeria and catapulted Hamas to the fore in Palestine.

A darling of Western liberal jurists, Justice Baltazar Garzon, declared a ban on Herri Batasuna, the parliamentary voice of the Basque separatist ETA.

I am not arguing for a ban on the TNA, but the prospect of a para-LTTE party winning an election in the North and East and buttressing the separatist cause with electoral legitimacy, is an unaffordable risk.

It is in the interests of both national unity and the success of a devolution plan, that the parties which emerge victorious from a provincial or parliamentary election in these areas must be the relatively moderate Tamil organizations and personalities which have demonstrated a willingness to work within a united Sri Lanka.

My formula that a bloc of the Sri Lankan state (with Armed Forces at its core) and the anti-Tiger Tamil formations (Devananda’s EPDP in the North, Karuna’s TMVP in the East) manage the North and East, has raised a shrill howl from the politically prim and prissy.

That suggestion is intended to forestall both a disastrous Sinhala Only unilateralist ‘solution’ as well as the dangerous strengthening with democratic legitimacy, of the Tiger proxies and cause.

No election in the North East can be free and fair while the LTTE is around. However, this does not mean that elections should not be held. Nor does it mean that such elections would not mean a valuable reopening, albeit partial, of democratic space.

The Provincial Council Elections of 1988, the Presidential Elections of late 1988 (which resulted in the election of President Premadasa), the local authorities election in the Eastern Province in 1994, and in the islands off Jaffna at the Presidential Election of that year, were hardly models of full and peaceful participation by the electorate.

These were instances of “low-intensity democracy” - which they could not but be in the context of civil war. Yet they were precious episodes in the exercise of the franchise and the political rebuffing of the forces of extremism, Sinhala and Tamil.

Global Strategic Thinking

Though the Tamil Diaspora, the ‘international (read Western) community’ and their Sri Lankan fellow-travellers throw their hands up in horror at the very mention of Karuna and Douglas, my slogan of a triad or trident of the Sri Lankan state, the EPDP and TMVP are fully in accordance with the latest strategic consensus out there in the international arena.

Consider the following passages from two high quality Western publications, The Atlantic (USA) and The Economist (UK).

The first pertains to Iraq, and comes not from a neo-conservative evangelist but from a conservative Realist who writes in support of the Iraq Study Group recommendations that President George W Bush brushed aside.

The second is from a critical report on Russia’s highly successful President Putin, who has transformed that country’s fortunes from imploding and failing state to resurgent great power.

FJ “Bing” West, former Marine and Viet vet, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Reagan, writes of Iraq that: “If the insurgents are to be defeated, it will have to be by local tough guys in town after town, as happened in the American West in the 1870s. These guys will likely be more ruthless than we would like.

But if we don’t let them establish some control - and give them help in maintaining it - strategies or grand political bargains or international constabularies will be irrelevant.” (‘Street wise’ The Atlantic, Jan-Feb 2007).

If I may anticipate the argument that the Iraqis are foreigners to the American decision-makers, and that one cannot impose warlords on ones own people, let me shift to the example of Russia’s President Putin who certainly considered Chechnya part of Russia and therefore Chechnyans as other than foreigners; as part of his own people (or else there would have been no need for a civil war):

“The installation of a warlord as Chechnya’s president reflects a wider trend Vladimir Putin, [who] appointed as acting president the 30 year old Ramzan Kadyrov, a volatile former rebel warlord, who is the son of another (deceased) Chechen leader.

Kadyrov’s elevation (to be rubber stamped by the Chechen parliament) is designed to ensure Chechnya’s stability. It formalizes the de-facto power that, with his feared militia, Kadyrov has long wielded anyway.” (The Economist Feb 24th 2007).

The parallels with Karuna and Douglas are obvious, as with my argument of an alliance.

Endgame

While decadent and politically displaced family oligarchies conspire, born-again human rights types carp, and the weak-minded and weak-spirited cavil, the most telling evidence of the character of the current historical moment is the (unprecedented) title of the programme which aired in February on Britain’s high brow Channel 4: “Endgame in Sri Lanka”. Significantly, the title had no question mark.