The SAARC Summit and myth of Lanka’s international isolation
Dayan JAYATILLEKA
Sri Lanka is the Chairman of SAARC, the world’s most populous region.
The importance of SAARC today is also evidenced by the presence of
powerful observer states, ranging from the USA to China and Iran.
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President
Mahinda Rajapaksa with Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan
Singh at the 15th SAARC Summit in Colombo. |
The successful holding of SAARC under the chairmanship of President
Rajapaksa is no small deal when one recalls that under President
Premadasa - and I would say, due to no fault of his- a previous SAARC
summit (in the early ‘90s) was subject to absenteeism, in effect a soft
boycott, by a single crucial player, leaving the rest of the region to
turn up in solidarity.
No such thing happened this time. It was a spectacle of a broadly
united South Asia under Sri Lanka’s leadership.
The fastest growing, most confident region of the world is Asia— and
Sri Lanka is an organic component of it.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s first act in the international arena
after assuming the chairmanship of SAARC was to attend the opening
ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, showcase of China’s wonderful
synthesis of ultra-modern transformation and millennia-old tradition,
and great gateway for East-West interaction.
At the WTO talks in Geneva India and China simply refused to blink in
the face of Western pressure to agree to terms which the Asian powers
and developing countries perceived as unbalanced. At the Security
Council, South Africa and Vietnam supported Russia and China in blocking
attempts to shift the global goal posts in the cases of Zimbabwe and
Sudan.
At the NAM meeting in Tehran the Foreign Ministers of 115 countries
reaffirmed the inalienable right of all countries to peaceful nuclear
energy, prompting the Iranian President and the Foreign Minister to urge
certain countries to “get the message”.
An adventuristic return to the Cold War in Europe could lead Russia
to understand that its defensive geo-strategic interests in the face of
encirclement are best served by realizing its destiny as a Euro-Asian
power and strengthening its strategic ties with the East. In any event
this unfortunate New Cold War with its short sighted overstretching of a
West already caught up in two shooting wars and an economic crisis
cannot but enhance the position and prospects of Asia.
Problem Areas
Sri Lanka’s international relations have problematic zones, of
course. The relations with the EU are troubled. One does not know
whether the EU renews GSP Plus or not.
But the EU is not the international community, and it is sad when Sri
Lankans are psychologically dependent as to think so. It is not even all
of Europe, as Russia readily reminds it.
I’ve heard the same story so many times. It’s the narrative of the
nationalist government in the Third World - left wing, centrist or right
wing nationalist-that started out with the blessings of the benign West,
but soon blew it due to its own extremism, petulance or personality
cult. The tale is retold from post-revolutionary Cuba through Mahathir’s
Malaysia up to contemporary Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.
The story has Right and Left variants: in the former version the
nationalist government in the Third World was disguising its malign
intentions initially, taking the gullible West for a ride, but soon
unmasked itself and revealed its true character.
In its left wing version, the nasty West drove the innocent
nationalists into the arms of the West’s competitors. Establishment
social scientists use a model derived from the study of the French
Revolution to posit a series of stages, in which the so-called rational
moderates (a Prime Minister, Finance Minister or Foreign Minister) is
replaced by the so-called irrational radicals (in the case of Cuba, the
landmark was supposedly the resignation of President Urrutia), and the
West awaits or works towards the next stage in which there is a backlash
against the radicals (who have inevitably messed up the economy) and
sanity is restored, with all being well once again, in the world.
What is most depressing is when the country’s own puppet politicians
and commentators begin to echo these versions of the story.
The truth of the story is of course very different. Superficially it
is usually true that the nationalist government/regime in question
started out with a seemingly positive relationship with the West. But
the deeper truth is that underlying this frail truce, are real
contradictions between the interests or perceived interests of the two
sides, the nationalists and this or that Western power. In that sense
the distancing or clash is inevitable.
Anti-Sri Lankan Spin
According to one reading the EU ban on the LTTE is evidence of the
goodwill that the West had for Sri Lanka even under the Rajapaksa
administration, which was later squandered by the latter.
While a superficial reading would appear to support this, a deeper
one would not. The crucial question remain unasked: what was the West’s
policy towards Sri Lanka at the time the Rajapaksa administration came
to office? And what was the policy of the Rajapaksa administration
towards the West ?
The West’s policy framework for Sri Lanka was rather simple: the CFA
as it was operating in other words, peace at any cost with the Tigers.
Whatever they did, the Sri Lankan state should not go to war, and if it
did slip into war, it should pull back as soon as possible to
negotiations.
If Sri Lanka is winning the war it should negotiate with a weakened
LTTE, eschewing a drive for complete and final defeat of the enemy. In
short, Sri Lanka was expected to desist from the policy the West adopts
towards terrorism and adopt a policy which is the exact opposite.
Throughout the years of cold blooded murder and expansionism, the
West did nothing to actively deter the Tigers. The so-called safety net
did not exist. On the other hand President Rajapaksa came to office on a
nationalist ticket, representing public sentiment against appeasement
and national humiliation.
The dominant Western approach was predicated on an assumption that
President Rajapaksa explicitly and repeatedly rejected: that of “good
terrorists” and “bad terrorists”, with the former being non-Islamic and
non-Marxist while the latter are those who claim to be Islamic.
This was the objective contradiction complicating the relationship
between the West and the new administration in Colombo.
The EU ban on the LTTE was the result of two intersecting factors:
the murder of Foreign Minister Kadirgamar and the West’s need to
reprimand the Tigers for sabotaging the Tamil vote that could have
accrued to its favourite son, former PM Ranil Wickremesinghe.
The muted nature of the West’s response to the Kadirgamar murder and
the opposition even within the EU to the ban, were telling evidence of
the real attitude.
When the Tigers went to war, launching claymore attacks which
consumed dozens of soldiers and sailors, including off-duty ones, the
West did nothing. During the Mavilaru crisis, when the Tigers finally
bit off more than they could chew, cutting of the water supply of tens
of thousands of peasants, the West was determined that Sri Lanka should
not counter attack and that the desultory Norwegian mediation was the
only way to go.
The End of Appeasement
The LTTE’s planning for The Final War which took the form of the
LTTE’s withdrawal from talks in April 2003 and its subsequent sabotage
of the Wickremesinghe candidacy, sank the policy of appeasement.
The LTTE’s aggression produced its dialectical result: the resurgent
patriotism which brought President Rajapaksa to power. The contradiction
was sharpened by the Tigers’ military attacks on a fledgling Rajapaksa
administration. With Mavil Aru, the policy of appeasement died, as the
Sri Lankan armed forces counterattacked. That counterattack turned
uninterruptedly into an operation to liberate the vital Trincomalee
area.
The Final War for Tamil Eelam had become the final war for the
reunification of Sri Lanka. This contradiction between the West’s policy
of the continuation of or return to its pacifistic policy of appeasement
of the Tigers as represented by the CFA, came up against the Sri Lankan
peoples’ nationalist, patriotic and anti-fascist determination to defeat
LTTE fascism and liberate their country once and for all.
Whether the West was motivated by the pressure of the Tamil Diaspora,
or a bias towards the minority Tamils (a hangover from colonial days
when the only armed rebellions against British colonialism came from the
Sinhalese), or a soft corner for the Tigers who were neither Islamic nor
Marxist but a possible instrumentality, or a determination to replace a
nationalist government with a pro-Western puppet, one does not know.
What we do know is that the majority of the Sri Lankan people had
reached the end of their tolerance for the West’s preference and support
for appeasement of the aggressive LTTE, and was determined to reassert
their sovereignty and territorial unity.
Relative Standing, Comparative Performance
The golden age of Sri Lanka’s international relations was the two
decade long period 1956-1976. The ten years that followed were a period
of deviation from our natural Non Aligned vocation and constituency; a
period of illusion and real isolation-unlike today’s imaginary one. When
Sri Lanka’s airspace and sovereignty were violated, none came to our
defense.
A retrospective glance at the periods that followed disproves the
propaganda claim that the Rajapaksa administration’s supposedly
unenlightened view on the ethnic issue is responsible for a crisis in
our external relations.
Both President Premadasa and Kumaratunga maintained a discourse that
was explicitly multiethnic, multilingual and multi-religious, which did
not prevent the then UK High Commissioner from intruding in our internal
affairs to a degree that he was declared persona non grata, and our
neighbour from absenting itself from the SAARC summit.
President Kumaratunga’s projects for devolution (excessive in 1995
and 1997, appropriate in its year 2000 version) did not generate
assistance from our neighbour in our greatest hour of need, during the
Tiger offensive on Jaffna in 2000. President Kumaratunga was to express
her dismay in an interview given to Nirupama Subramanian of the Hindu.
The recent disclosures by former UK High Commissioner David Gladstone
to the BBC’s Sinhala Service give us a clue as to the reality. The
report says that: Mr. Gladstone was expelled from Sri Lanka in 1991 by
then President Ranasinghe Premadasa accusing him of interfering in Sri
Lanka’s internal affairs.
The former British High Commissioner did not deny the accusation. The
clear instructions by the British government to interfere to help
protect human rights in Sri Lanka marked a new chapter in very long
tradition of international diplomacy whereby diplomats did not openly
criticise their host countries, according to Mr. Gladstone.
“Rules of diplomacy have actually changed. I was thrust into the
situation to pioneer (in 1991) a new approach to international diplomacy
while I was in Sri Lanka,” he said.
This is the reality: a new approach which marked a departure in a
very long tradition of international diplomacy; an approach specific to
the post-Cold war period, politely referred to as Public Diplomacy. The
failure to obtain help from our closest neighbour under the CBK
Presidency in our hour of need sheds light on a hard dual reality of Sri
Lanka in the world, which has to be grasped by any lucid politician or
analyst.
Though the absence of a political reform package does have a
significance negative effect on external perceptions of the conflict and
resultant behaviour, the presence of such a package is no guarantee of
support.
The inner core of that reality is that there is a contradiction
between Sri Lanka’s imperative need, and desire to win the war, on the
one hand, and the perceived interests of certain sectors of the global
system (and sub-regional subsystem) on the other.
We must observe universal standards of human rights because that is
the right thing to do, is beneficial to the country and is
counterproductive to do otherwise.
But we must not swallow Western propaganda to the degree that we
mistake the excuse for the reason. Human rights violations are not the
reason for the gap between certain Western countries and Sri Lanka.
Those who do not wish us to win the war commit far more horrendous
violations of human rights and tolerate far more horrific violations on
the part of their allies. They also take punitive measures against those
countries such as Cuba, which have never committed atrocities in their
military operations.
We have been given no choice: if we wish to carry the war forward to
the victory that the country requires and so richly deserves; the
victory that we have all sacrificed for, then we have to accept a
certain gap, a certain degree of disconnect, a contradiction not of our
making, with those who oppose that victory and this war.
We must ally with those who not merely preach, but who support us or
have no problem with our striving for the reunification of our country-a
goal which is now on the horizon.
(This article represents the writer’s personal opinions).
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