Secret Talks - UNP’s new twist on old theme

The usual progression in politics is from secret talks to open discussions, moving on to agreements, secret or not, and then to implementation. The political strategy of the UNP today is based on upending this process, moving from secret agreements to secret talks.

Caught in the whorl of the coming provincial elections in the NCP and Sabaragamuwa, the UNP gives the impression of a prospector striking gold with its charge that the Government is engaged in secret talks with the LTTE. But it’s fool’s gold at best; not even gold plated bunkum.

It was not long ago that Ranil Wickremesinghe and his fast dwindling chorus of “Yes Sir” types were busy roaming the country with allegations that the UNP leader’s defeat at the November 2005 Presidential poll was due to a secret agreement that Mahinda Rajapaksa had with the LTTE.

There were affidavits waved about, some sections of then media were strident with the allegation, with the entire exercise being called a plot by the Rajapaksa Brothers to fix the election.

It did not need much analysis to find that all this was a poor and shameful attempt not to accept the verdict of the people, who once again told Ranil Wickremesinghe that he was not their choice for the Presidency of Sri Lanka, and also that the UNP, especially under his leadership, and with policies that had no resonance among the people would not be given the reins of power.

The UNP’s relegation to seats in the Opposition for yet another Presidential term, heaped upon its defeat in the Parliamentary General Election in April 2004 was too much for the jumbos desperate to lay their hands on the levers of power once again.

The strategy it adopted was to attempt tarring the Mahinda Rajapaksa with the same brush that it had tarred itself, when it signed the infamous Ceasefire Agreement with the LTTE in 2002 - the result of the infamous Ali - Koti Givisuma of 2001.

It did not need much analysis for the public to realise the UNP’s calculated attempt to mislead the country with this talk of a secret pact with the LTTE, especially with the LTTE not wasting much time after the November election to once again resume in earnest its attacks on civilians and the security forces; leading to tremendous loss of life and limb, while the much vaunted CFA was still in place, the Norwegians were pretending to do their bit to bring the Tigers to smoke the pipe of peace, the Co-Chairs of the Peace Process were not being firm enough in their condemnation of the LTTE’s commitment to terror and violence, and the “international community” was making a mockery of fairplay by insisting that both sides stop their violence, when only one side was busy shedding blood.

If there was the faintest clue to a possible pact between Mahinda Rajapaksa and the LTTE it was not the order it gave to voters in most of the North and East not to poll on November 5, which was a move to win international support in the hope that a candidate who had been deliberately and unfairly branded an uncompromising hawk would be elected, which would justify the LTTE’s continued violence, in its so-called mission to liberate the Tamil people from the alleged yoke of majority Sinhala domination.

The clue, if any, seemed to be in the tremendous patience and fortitude shown by President Rajapaksa in the face of continued provocation by Prabhakaran, which included three attempts to bring the tigers to the negotiating table at Oslo and Geneva.

Although the UNP was trying its best to show that this patience was a result of the pact with the pre-electoral pact with the LTTE, which came strange from a party has been urging restraint in the fight against Tiger terror and with it singing unreal hosannas, together with the “peace at any cost” chorus of NGOs and INGOs, even those in the international community who have a jaundiced view of Sri Lanka’s attempts to rid itself of tiger terror, had to commend the patience and fortitude of Mahinda Rajapaksa.

Patience and fortitude

The outspoken Japanese representative among the Co-Chairs made no secret of the fact that Japan looked at the human rights situation in countries threatened by terror, differently from the great exporters of democracy of from the West.

The absurdity of the UNP’s charge of a secret was not lost on the people, despite the determined efforts of the late Sripathy Sooriarachchy, who with Mangala Samaraweera, became the loudest spokespersons for the UNP’s false propaganda, as events unfurled that would expose the UNP’s canard of a secret pact for the outrageous piece of political chicanery it was.

The political humbugs among the defeated green elephants, were not silenced in their attempts at a Goebbelsian falsehood even after the LTTE attempted to assassinate the Army Commander in a suicide bomb attack within the Army Headquarters, making any pact with the LTTE to win an election, with all that would follow, far more traitorous than the Ranil-Prabhakaran Ceasefire Agreement; and the deliberate exposure of the Aturugiriya safe house of the Army’s Long Rage Reconnaissance Patrol which was done with such glee by John Amaratunga, walking in step with the Ranil Wickremesinghe strategy of strengthening the LTTE with the help of the Norwegian Embassy and some retired civil servants, once the very epitome of rectitude, turning fellow passengers in the overall conspiracy of the UNP to hand over a whole chunk of the country to the LTTE on a platter red with the blood of many intelligence personnel and several Tamil leaders who differed in thinking with the LTTE’s violent ways and its separatist goal.

New twist

The UNP’s claptrap about the so-called secret pact with the LTTE met its own demise, when the Tigers took over the anicut at Mavil Aru, depriving nearly 15,000 families of water for drinking, agriculture and other livelihoods.

This was when the patience of Mahinda Rajapaksa finally gave way to firm action to reopen Mavil Aru, leading to the launch of a major humanitarian action, which was not seen as such by the watchers of human rights here and abroad; and from then on moved till the LTTE was finally evicted from the Eastern Province, after the capture of Vakarai and Thoppigala, with an exceptional show of restrained military operations that saw no civilian casualties - not that it mattered to the “peace lobby”: though.

As the elections to the Provincial Councils in the NCP and Sabaragamuwa draw closer the UNP is back at drawing the LTTE herring against the Government and Mahinda Rajapaksa, for want of any other slogan that might strike a chord of sympathy with the voters in the two provinces. The new twist to the UNP’s old tiger tale is that the Government is having secret talks with the LTTE.

Such allegations can come easily from those such as the Lakshman duo of Kiriella and Seneviratne, and regular jumbo bleaters such as Tissa Attanayake and Ravi Karunanayake, who alleged that the Government’s rejection out of hand of the LTTE’s so-called unilateral ceasefire for the SAARC Summit was in fact untrue, and that the Security Forces had stopped operations against the Tigers during this period.

They were totally oblivious to the fact, or did not wish to see that the security forces were well on the offensive against LTTE terror during the Summit, and even captured several strongholds of the Tigers during this period.

Truth is not something the UNP is strong on today, and it has to keep on repeating ad nauseam that there are secret talks going on between the LTTE and the Government, from the platforms in the NCP and Sabaragamuwa and the regular bunkum briefings at Cambridge Place.

If it be so, the LTTE must be in a hell of a hurry to abandon its strongholds, finding an escape route through these so-called talks, when one sees the speed with which impressively named or numbered bases, whole lines of fortified bunkers and large areas of territory that till recently were under the control of the tigers, keep coming under the wing of the Security Forces today.

Indian advice

There is no doubt in any quarter that the LTTE is taking a heavy beating these days, whatever the UNP may say about the Government having secret talks with it. Even India’s National Security Advisor who was here for the SAARC Summit had to admit the current plight of the Tigers, while also being avuncular in his advice to the Government on how it should win the hearts and minds of the Tamil people, once the LTTE is finally defeated.

It is not difficult for others to also dish out such packaged and convenient advise about certain crises and disputes in India, that have been going on for much longer than the separatist demands of the LTTE.

Requirements of good neighbourliness prevent us from telling the Indians what they should do with restive people in many parts of the country with the myriad demands for separate States, the rise of the Dalits in coalition with Muslims, as well as the terrorism of jihadists who have an easy excise, but not a valid reason, in the atrocities against Muslims in Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Mosque at Ayodhya, to name just two examples of the causes of continued strife in the largest democracy in the world.

Strategic talk

The more the UNP talks of this so-called secret talks with the LTTE shows how much it is fighting with its back to the wall in both the NCP and Sabaragamuwa, even unable to produce chief ministerial candidates from the respective provinces, and having to depend on a ‘One Shot’ film actor of questionable performing capabilities who ran away from Katana for Sabaragamuwa, and a retired soldier who gives cause for shame to the troops in his former military force now continuing the fight against the enemy he once fought against, with a commendable degree of valour that seems lost in his new alliance with the UNP that signed the ignominious CFA with that same enemy, and still laments its necessary abrogation.

Just as it happened at Mavil Aru where the troops began the end of the LTTE’s hold on the East, the last word on these secret talks between the Mahinda Rajapaksa Government and the LTTE will come much sooner than later (not never as hoped by the UNP and its “civil society” cohorts), with the advances that military is making in the Northern, Vanni and Weli Oya fronts each day; the success of which is seen by the return of the Statue of Our Lady of Madhu to its rightful abode in the Mannar District and the fall of key LTTE strongholds, one after the other in rapid succession.

If secret talks can provide such military results, then this particular Sri Lankan example in military strategy - Secret Talks with the Enemy - the MMS or Mahinda Military Strategy if you may, must soon enter the text books of warfare, on how best to beat terrorists who use both conventional warfare and guerilla tactics, and will rank very close to the strategies of Sun Tzu, Napoleon Bonaparte, Clausewitz, Rommel, John Boyd, and Vo Ngyen Giap, to name a few whose military strategies are the subject of deep study at Military Staff Colleges the world over.

The asinine braying about a secret pact with the LTTE will soon boomerang on the UNP as the voters of the NCP an Sabaragamuwa give verdict on how credible the propaganda of the UNP and its so-called camp followers of the “independent media” is among the people who see a Government resolute in its attempts to rid the country of terrorism, and achieving a visible and measurable of success in it, despite the many hardships the people have to face caught in the throes of global crises in food and fuel security, not discounting the issues of bribery and corruption, and maniacal behaviour of some political hotheads that is fast becoming a bane the people will not tolerate for long.

This week saw two demonstrations that turned violent being handed with considerable force by the Police. The first was by unemployed graduates seeking chances for employment, which was moderate in its confrontation with the police than the latter, which was by university students protesting about outstanding and unresolved issues in many universities.

The right to assembly is guaranteed in our Constitution and one cannot find anything wrong in unemployed graduates or university students using that right to make their feelings known, and mark their protests at delay or failure on the part of Government to resolve what they consider pressing issues.

Demo-media axis

Our courts too have often upheld the right to free assembly. This writer is not a stranger to demonstrations for myriad causes from trade union action to media freedom, protection of the environment, against the US presence in Vietnam, and even calling for the release of the symbol of Burmese freedom - Aung San Su Kyi. I have also felt the beat of the police baton and the bother of tear gas.

Yet, last Thursday’s demonstration by university students and the resulting confrontation with the police, which found most sections of the media in a frenzy of support for the protestors, raises many questions about them and nature of demonstrations that take place today.

The JVP led student demonstration sought to deliver a message to the President.

This is not unusual, and others who have sought such access to their views have been accommodated in an orderly manner, with some good publicity for them, too.

However, one cannot ignore the fact that the confrontations between police and demonstrations, happens with more frequency today, take place at the entry to High Security Zones in the city, which the police are bound to defend with greater determination and force than elsewhere.

The media hype for the “plight” of the demonstrators on Thursday evening involved reporters screaming into microphones of FM radio stations and some TV channels about the “attack” of “paharadeema” by the police, and how the tear gas even affected passengers in buses plying nearby and the occupants of buildings in the vicinity; hardly news that gave cause for suspicion of a strange axis between violent demonstrators and some sections of the media.

The strident reports first told of an “attack” by water cannon, and next with tear gas. None of the reports bothered to say why this “police praharaya” took place.

Students or any others are not specially privileged citizens to be allowed to dislodge, break or scale over barriers put up by the police to protect a High Security Zone.

The students who tried this, and their political mentors of the JVP - and its subterranean ally today, the UNP - would have known that such folly - if it be so by the students - will certainly be met with resolute force, that the force would increase with repeated attempts scale the barriers.

One cannot ignore that these same political organisations, and possibly the students involved in Thursday’s clash with the police too, would be the first to be fully supportive the police or armed forces, in preventing any attempts to violate the regulations that govern High Security Zones in the north, and even in the East today. Such sauce is a must for both the northern goose and the southern gander.

What it is seen as more sinister is the manipulative use of university students, no doubt with genuine grievances, to deliberately move towards a serious clash with the police. The political rivalry that is now taking place in the NCP and Sabaragamuwa cannot be considered apart from these demonstrations.

What took place at Kollupitiya on Thursday evening gave every reason to believe that those in the background who were manipulating these students would have been praying hard for the police to shoot live bullets at the demonstrators as they turned increasingly violent, leaving at l4 student dead and many with bullet wounds.

Had that happened, it would have been prize propaganda for the UNP and JVP at NCP and Sabaragamuwa, and in all other political agitations against the Government. The parading of dead bodies of student demonstrators for political gain is not unknown to us, and the organisers of last Thursday’s demonstration of students have been known to have revealed in such macabre politics before this.

With all the criticism that I have for the Police on many issues, I think it is necessary to give them kudos for the manner in which they handled the Thursday demo.

It is also time for the Police to make more public the guidelines for such demonstrations, and be seen escorting and assisting demonstrators, as one sees in the UK and many other countries, where demonstrators make their protest, show their strength if it may be, and then disperse peacefully, instead of trying to be heroes whose cadavers will be carried on the shoulders of ghoulish politicians.