The Hindu editorial - May 19, 2009:
End of the war
The Sri Lankan Armed Forces have won a comprehensive victory over the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in a military campaign that began in
the Eastern province in August 2006.
With its entire top leadership and thousands of fighting cadres
killed in action, its military structure, assets and capabilities
destroyed, its political organisation decimated, the LTTE no longer
exists as a military force. Belying conventional wisdom, Sri Lanka has
found a military solution to what used to be regarded as an intractable
armed secessionist and terrorist challenge.
There is something poignant about the way in which the low-intensity
conflict - which was waged over a quarter of a century and claimed tens
of thousands of lives - has ended. The images of terrified children,
women and men fleeing the tiny sliver of coastal land in which they were
confined by the Tigers for use as a human shield and of a tractor load
of bodies of senior LTTE leaders who made a final hopeless stand for a
lost cause will continue to haunt the memories of journalists and others
who witnessed these scenes.
It might have been very different had an organisation that started
out, in the 1970s, with some kind of emancipatory political vision and
even idealism not turned Pol Potist in its extremism, cruelty and
horrific disregard for human life and welfare.
As the years went by and numerous proposals for a negotiated
political solution fell by the wayside, the one thing that remained
constant was the LTTE’s uncompromising secessionism and militarism and
the rising graph of its terrorist crimes, which included the
assassination of a former Indian Prime Minister, a Sri Lankan President,
a Foreign Minister, a presidential contender and numerous democratic
Tamil leaders, the massacre of Sinhala and Muslim civilians, ethnic
cleansing, child conscription and economic offences of various kinds.
The ceasefire agreement of February 2002 represented a historic
opportunity to break with the past.
Tragically, the LTTE, seeing it mainly as an opportunity to re-arm
itself and strengthen its parallel State structure in the territory it
controlled, did everything conceivable to make the peace process falter
and fail. “It was worse than a crime, a blunder,” is a Napoleonic era
saying attributed to Talleyrand.
If the May 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur by an
LTTE squad dispatched by V. Prabhakaran made a permanent enemy of India,
the boycott enforced in the LTTE-controlled areas during the November
2005 Presidential election, which facilitated Mahinda Rajapaksa’s
victory over ceasefire-architect Ranil Wickremasinghe in a close
contest, was an akratic act that defied all rational explanation.
President Rajapaksa has achieved what no previous Sri Lankan leader came
close to doing: securing the integrity and sovereignty of Sri Lanka by
freeing it from the malevolent challenge of the LTTE.
Now, in the post-Prabhakaran era, he needs to address two big tasks:
rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of Tamils who have been through
a prolonged nightmare and crafting an enduring political solution based
on far-going devolution of power to the Tamils in their areas of
historical habitation.
India, which has excellent relations with its Southern neighbour, can
make a constructive difference by coming up with a massive
rehabilitation package for the North and encouraging Colombo to
fast-track the political solution.
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