External challenges to Sri Lanka
Dr Dayan JAYATILLEKA
Behind its splendid stone facade, the Acadamie Diplomatique
Internationale has been in existence from the early decades of the last
century, and according to its head, was discussing western military
intervention in the Middle East then as it was that very day when a team
from the National University of Singapore’s Institute of South Asian
Studies (ISAS), on a Paris-London visit, presented on ‘Developments in
the Arab World and the Impact on Asia: an Asian Perspective’. I attended
eagerly, not only because of the subject’s salience but because these
were my recent colleagues and friends.
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Dr Dayan
Jayatilleka |
The team’s presentation bracketed out the domestically driven
developments, most importantly but not exclusively in Tunisia and Egypt,
from external military intervention in Libya’s armed civil conflict or
civil war.
Domestic struggles
Prof Tan Tai Yong, the Vice Provost of the National University of
Singapore (with which Yale has just signed a deal to establish a liberal
arts college) and Executive Director of the Institute pointed out that
while Asian opinion agreed that the intentional killing of unarmed
civilian protestors de-legitimised any regime and constituted a new ‘red
line’ for the international community which if crossed would trigger
R2P, Asia with its organically evolved societies and states of long
historicity (contrasting with many an Arab state such as Libya carved
out as a patchwork of tribes, clans and ethnicities mere decades ago by
colonial fiat, with Egypt a monumental exception), its functioning
political parties and use of universal suffrage, its familiarity with
and history of street protests, and its better shared prosperity in an
era of economic upswing, has states of an entirely different formation
and type from those of the Arab world, and does not suffer the same
structural vulnerabilities of legitimacy. Having made much the same
point in the Sri Lankan press prior to events in Libya, I was gratified
to hear such expert scholarly confirmation.
Having made much the same point in the Sri Lankan press prior to
events in Libya, I was gratified to hear such expert scholarly
confirmation.
By contrast, the dramatic external dimension of the developments in
Libya and the resultant deflection/distortion of domestic struggles of
democratisation and reform were seen by the delegation to have a marked
impact on Asia.
The team pointed to the role played by the most dogmatic adherents of
the doctrine of ‘liberal humanitarian interventionism’ and their
distortion of the Responsibility to Protect endorsed by the UN Security
Council.
I had discovered on a recent visit to the USA to present a paper by
invitation at a Workshop on Global Leadership at Yale (at which the
keynote speaker was Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s former deputy Prime
Minister), that these were the same trinity of personalities who had
been pushing the case of Sri Lanka’s ‘accountability’ for the closing
stages of the war.
The most incisive comments at the Paris dialogue were by the former
Foreign Minister of Bangladesh, Dr Ifthikar Ahmed Chowdhury, who had
been among those in the Security Council who negotiated the consensus on
R2P. Quipping that R2P should not be used in a manner that made for its
interpretation not as the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ but the ‘Rush to
Plunder’ he cautioned that the most important impact of the intervention
in Libya was that it would halt progress in efforts at nuclear
non-proliferation.
States would note that Libya had given up its nuclear programme and
was being bombed, while that would not have been the case had it still
possessed a nuclear capacity. Thus, those states that had ongoing
nuclear programmes would be even more reluctant than before to give them
up, while others would seek to embark on such programmes.
On this point, Dr Chowdhury was supported by Emeritus Professor SD
Muni of the JNU.
External military invention
While the most stridently unambiguous criticism of external military
invention in Libya has come from the leftwing leaderships, governments
and movements of Latin America, which know a thing or two about
revolution, counterrevolution, imperialism and national sovereignty,
Prof Muni drew attention to the abstention by the BRICs (Brazil, Russia,
India, China) and the dissenting remarks by India during the Security
Council debate on Libya.
Echoing the more recent criticisms made by the BRICs, he ventured the
suggestion that these would emerge as the moral, ethical and Realist
centre of the world community, not engaged in warlike activism and
risking overstretch, but in peaceful economic expansion and cooperation.
The most direct impact of the events in the Arab world on Asia were
seen to be economic: the hike in oil prices and the possible diminution
of remittances from migrant labour, which could constitute a shock
effect on Asian economies and living standards, thereby triggering
social unrest.
Incumbent administration
It is against the backdrop of these developments that the current
commentary on the external challenges to Sri Lanka must be embedded.
Governments the world over certainly do point to external threats to
shore up domestic power and legitimacy. Sometimes these threats are
real, sometimes not.
Sometimes they are real but exaggerated. Sometimes the threats could
have been better met with a different government or existing governments
could themselves have better met the threats had they conducted
themselves differently. One would expect oppositional or dissenting
political discourse to differentiate between real and unreal threat,
accurately depicted and exaggerated threat, and treated and untreated
external problems. That, however, is not the case in Sri Lanka.
Here, criticism of the government with regard to external challenges
falls into two equally absurd categories. One is that there is no such
threat and that all mention of such external foes or challenges is but a
ploy of the Rajapaksa regime which must be exposed and rejected as fake
by all brave and discerning souls.
Another argument is that yes, there are challenges looming but those
external forces are not a threat to Sri Lanka and its people — only to
the ruling elite, and liberation through ‘regime termination’ will
someday be at hand by the blessed intercession of these external factors
and forces.
Taken together, the anti-government discourse is that there is no
external threat to Sri Lanka as a country, a state, and if there is, it
is to be welcomed as a lever to prise out the incumbent administration.
A dissenting discourse less irrational than this would have yielded a
different line of argument, namely that there is an external threat
which should be combated but that there are better and worse ways of so
doing; choices between projects of defending national sovereignty and
defeating the secessionist and pro-secessionist forces in the Cold War
being waged against Sri Lanka.
Yet, this is not the case made by the local oppositional ideologues.
The decisive and virtually complete decimation of the military apparatus
of the LTTE is used as argument that there cannot be any external threat
because there is no LTTE to constitute that threat. This argument is
absurd on two counts.
Firstly, it is manifestly the case that while the Tiger armed force
was wiped out, or to put it differently, the Tigers were wiped out as an
armed force, the Tiger movement or network based overseas could not be
wiped out and remained intact, simply because it was out of the physical
reach of the Sri Lankan state. Secondly, winning a hot war in no way
precludes a Cold War.
Global arena
Recent developments in the global arena demonstrate the truth of the
old cliche that lies at the heart of the Realist discourse from
Thucydides onwards: the world is a dangerous place.
In such a dangerous environment, states must be watchful of their
independence, interests and power. Our old enemies, the secessionists,
seek to resume the struggle by other means, and win by them. These
enemies are manipulating the dangerous trends in the world arena which
threaten national independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
The overseas-based secessionists hope to leverage these external trends
and factors so as to isolate Sri Lanka.
While the Rajapaksa administration may be accused of many a sin of
omission and commission, it did not create the Global Tamil Forum, the
British Tamil Forum, the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam and the
pro-Tamil secessionist tendency in Tamil Nadu. Nor is it responsible for
Tamil nationalism’s imprudent refusal to regard the existing
constitutional provisions for provincial autonomy and power sharing as
the point of departure for political dialogue.
There is an inherent contradiction between the call for a so-called
independent international inquiry into the conduct of the legitimate Sri
Lankan armed forces in the closing months of the war, and the imperative
to defend a popular war of national liberation and reunification and the
armed forces that waged it on behalf of the nation.
There is also an inherent contradiction between those who claim to
stand for greater democratisation and post-war ethnic reconciliation and
the call for an inquiry, with its inevitably attendant lacerating and
polarising implications.
Developments in the Middle East highlight the crucial role of the
armed forces, and those with the armed forces 'on side', enjoyed a
peaceful denouement or development.
It is an impossibility to retain the support or neutrality of the
armed forces, itself a bulwark of peaceful democratisation, and
simultaneously advocate an external or externally induced wide-ranging
inquiry into its conduct in recently concluded, necessary and nationally
popular war.
In conclusion I confess a certain perspective: my paper at Yale was
classified by the senior professor who organized the event as 'post
Neo-con Realism'.
To my mind, the more valuable debate in the Sri Lankan media would be
over how external threats should realistically be countered, the armed
forces best defended, national sovereignty best protected in the
inclement international weather, and the historic military victory made
permanent. This debate is not taking place.
Instead there is a three way split between those who acknowledge a
threat but see it as emanating from every quarter and are unwilling to
display the pragmatic flexibility to counter these threats, those who
assert that the threats are imaginary and denounce the country's elected
leadership for attempting to alert and resist, and those who, with
little hope of electoral legitimacy, are awaiting the landfall of those
inimical external trends onto Sri Lanka's shores.
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