War and election victory

Leo Samson

I was surprised to see that the electoral victories of the UPFA is linked to war strategy. In fact in 2002 there was a Local Government Election where UNP won most local authorities on account of peace strategy.

Both war strategy and peace strategy are ways of managing LTTE armed struggle and elections in 2002 and 2008/2009 are linked to either strategy.

The peace strategy of 2002 adopted by Ranil Wickremesinghe was backed by international community.

Due to the inherent incompetence of the Defence Ministry at the time, the government at the time was unable to strike a power sharing model acceptable to all parties. In fact the peace strategy was stuck at the confidence building level on the surmise that economic resurgence arising out of peace dividend by itself will take care of the LTTE threat.

There was no forceful strategy to use international pressure to get LTTE to agree to an acceptable power sharing agreement. It looked the Defence Ministry did fail to enter into a meaningful dialogue with LTTE on the Manirasapuram LTTE camp issue. Finally confidence building measures led to a stalemate in negotiations. The Harvard Model of conflict resolution was correctly adopted.

Therefore the first opportunity to use LTTE threat to his political advantage fell on Ranil Wickremesinghe. The impression created by him through his frequent overseas visits was that international community will bring pressure on LTTE to agree to a power sharing agreement in a unified state.

Strategy wise it is foolish to leave the governance of the country in the hands of foreign countries. The facilitator Norway gave the impression that they need to bring a power balance between government and LTTE so that a political solution short of self-determination will emerge. Norway would naturally have benefitted oil exploration in the Gulf of Mannar, if LTTE was successful in obtaining internal self-determination.

If there was a competent defence establishment through peace strategy a political solution which is more acceptable in human cost terms could have been worked out. Having being incompetent to do so, Mr. Wickremesinghe lost the government and then the presidency to UPFA.

The UPFA changed strategy and won the power balance in military terms and now in the process of filling it in political terms. They were brave and showed uncanny competency in strategic warfare. The UNP then tried to weaken the war strategy through economic agitation capitalizing an international escalation of commodity prizes and almost brought down the UPFA government in the budget vote in 2007.

Now the options are for UNP to join the political consolidation process by supporting whatever political structures that will be required to implement APC proposals.

The Tamil people particularly diaspora is not happy with military victories of the government and looking helplessly at international agencies.

Mr. Wickremesinghe’s options are to join the APC, support the government and assist Tamil people to achieve their aspirations. Then he will go down the history as a national leader. For this purpose he need to shed his foolish colleagues around him who alone are responsible for his poor electoral performances.