Opinion:
Achievement 2008, Challenge 2009
Dayan JAYATILLEKA
Sri Lanka closes out its 60th year of Independence, though in the
strictest sense it lasts till the beginning of next February when we
celebrate our 61st Independence Day. It is a moment to take stock. Due
to all the wrong turnings we took and the right ones we did not and
since our Independence six decades ago, we have spent a quarter century
commemorating our independence in conditions of a separatist civil war.
This will in all probability be so next year too. However, it may not
be so the year after, and from then onwards, because of what we have
achieved this year. And I do mean “we”: the leadership, the Government,
the military, the vast majority of people, the dissident Tamils.
What has been the balance sheet of 2008? It is that we are winning
but have not yet won. Victory is on the horizon but it has not yet been
achieved. 2008 was the year in which the Sri Lankan political leadership
decisively reversed the balance of forces between the State and the LTTE.
It is the year in which the country feels itself on the strategic
offensive while the enemy is on the (admittedly dogged) defensive.
The main achievement of 2008 was the shift in the balance of Forces
between the Sri Lankan State and the LTTE and the maintenance of the
posture of strategic offensive by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces.
The Lankan military has succeeded in squeezing the LTTE into parts of
two contiguous districts and the peninsular neck. The LTTE was unable to
make any territorial gains this year.
Nor was it able to regain any territory it lost. As importantly or
even more importantly, the Tigers lost thousands of valuable fighting
cadres. The corresponding losses by the Sri Lankan Forces are affordable
given the discrepancy in size of the two armed formations as well as the
vaster discrepancy in the population base of recruitment. Voluntary
recruitment to the Sri Lankan Armed Forces kept rising throughout the
year, while forced conscription in the LTTE controlled areas brought in
ill-motivated fighters into the ranks of the enemy.
The main result of 2008, that of the maintenance of the offensive
posture of the Sri Lankan Armed Forces, was a unique one on the part of
the Sri Lankan governing elite over the decades since the conflict
erupted. As Karuna, ex-LTTE rebel commander turned parliamentarian - who
was double-crossed by President Kumaratunga when she allowed
Prabhakaran’s seaborne attackers a landing behind his lines at Verugal -
points out, these achievements would have been impossible if not for the
leadership provided by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Secretary of Defence
Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Army Commander Sarath Fonseka.
I would add the Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickramanayake and the Naval
and Air Service Chiefs Wasantha Karannagoda and Roshan Goonetilleke to
the list. A half a dozen good men. But these men would have been unable
to turn the tables on the Tigers as they have, and no one else before
had done sustained and strategically, if not for the morale of the
officer corps and rank and file of the Armed Forces. This morale itself
is drawn from the supportive population base, whose active support for
the war is manifested in popularity pools which range from a low of a 75
per cent approval to a high of 83 per cent - 93 per cent. Thus it is the
people, chiefly but not exclusively the Sinhala people, who by their
support and sacrifice have provided the foundation for the military
success.
What this reveals is an organic identity between the people, the
Armed Forces and the political leadership; an identity between State and
society, which is a historic rarity. For the first time we have a
leadership that listened to the people on this central issue, that
turned itself into an instrument of the people’s will. This is the
secret of the success of 2008 and one of the main features of this year.
The Tiger’s ‘Police Chief’ has clearly indicated to the BBC last week
that economic targets will be high on the list of terrorist priorities.
What the man and his leaders obviously do not understand from their own
record of destructive achievement is that such attacks only clarify
matters and swell support for a war to a finish. They do not diminish or
erode popular support.
The erroneous thinking is based on the parliamentary elections of
2001 in which Ranil Wickremesinghe won, seemingly on the back of the
economic damage caused by the attack on Katunayake airport and as a
result of the emergence of a lobby of corporate fat cats calling itself
Sri Lanka First.
What this interpretation fails to take into account is that the real
secret of that election is something that has been known since 1952,
namely that if the Forces of the Centre (the SLFP) and the Left (be it
MEP, LSSP, CPSL or JVP) remain disunited, the Right wins. In 2001, the
SLFP and JVP ran against each other. The combined SLFP-JVP vote was
larger than the UNP vote.
Today, the JVP will run against the SLFP, but it is a divided and
diminished party, whose main orator will run with the governing
coalition. If the outstanding achievement of 2008 has been the shift to
and maintenance of the strategic offensive against the LTTE, what is the
main task of 2009? President Rajapaksa has, in his remarks to a civil
society gathering on December 22nd, already identified it correctly in
its historic, military and political dimensions: “The year 2009 will be
the year when our motherland would be finally liberated from the LTTE...There
will be many attempts to stall the forward march of the security Forces.
Malicious elements have already begun to create political unrest by
making many problems for the Government in an attempt to save terrorists
from their imminent defeat. Therefore, I expect that there would be
testing times ahead. For this very reason, I would like to declare 2009
as a year of victory for heroic soldiers”. (Lanka Dissent)
The challenge of 2009 is to conclude the war victoriously and do so
in a manner that precludes to the extent possible, a prolonged guerrilla
war.
This is by decapitating and destroying the LTTE’s fighting forces in
the battles to liberate Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu. The finest military
mind of the post WW2 20th century, Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap
calls this definition of the military goal as “the annihilation of the
living forces of the enemy”.
It is a myth of the misinformed that a powerful irregular force,
especially if based on some collective identity or social constituency,
can never be fully defeated, and that even if conventionally defeated
they revert to or are reborn as guerrilla movements which are impossible
to eradicate. Take three well known examples: Chechnya, Angola’s UNITA
and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. All three were defeated and decapitated,
never to be reborn as guerrillas.
Part of the challenge of 2009 is that the large unit war will have to
be won within a fairly compressed time frame, before the impact of the
world economic crisis manifested in collapsing commodity prices combines
with the burden of military expenditure to damage the economy. A victory
and the restoration of normality will spontaneously generate an economic
upsurge.
Having won the quasi-conventional war, the Sri Lankan Armed Forces
will have to eradicate the infrastructure of a residual or resurgent
terrorist campaign. This cannot be done and must not be attempted by the
Sri Lankan Forces alone.
It will require the legitimate, large scale engagement of Tamil
allies and auxiliaries, and this legitimacy can result only from the
constitutionally ordained devolution of power to the Eastern Provincial
Council and its Northern counterpart. A genuine measure of autonomy and
self-Government, and joint operations with elected local allies has
always been the secret of effective counterinsurgency.
The real challenge of 2009 then is twofold and indissolubly twinned:
the liberation of Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu in such a decisive and
comprehensive manner as to pre-empt to the maximum degree the survival
of the LTTE as a guerrilla/terrorist force, and the redrawing of the Sri
Lankan social contract in so enlightened and reformist a manner that the
Tamil people feel included as fully fledged citizens enjoying equal
rights and genuine provincial autonomy.
2009 must be the year of the full and final liberation and
reunification of Sri Lankan territory and upon that reunified territory,
the beginning of the construction of a truly Sri Lankan identity, an
authentically Sri Lankan nation.
(The opinions expressed are the strictly personal views of the
writer) |