TNA and LLRC
DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
Whatever one may think of the LLRC and NORAD reports, it is
incontrovertible that two of the three major players in the last stage
of the Sri Lankan conflict have undertaken and undergone a preliminary
audit of sorts - the Sri Lankan state and the Norwegians - while the
third (and the second in importance) has not, and not even thought to.
There has been no equivalent from within the Tamil civil society or the
‘Tamil nationalist movement’.
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Dr. Dayan
Jayatilleka |
While they continue to raise what each side may feel are legitimate
issues and grievances in the soft polemics and manoeuvring between the
TNA and the government over their dialogue and participation in the
Parliamentary Select Committee, the TNA’s increasing strident rejection
of the LLRC report is altogether another matter of a different order.
Distressingly, it permits the discrediting of more moderate and
legitimate issues and concerns that the TNA may be raising. Thus the
TNA’s ‘rejectionism’ may work to permit the rejection of the TNA as
peace partner.
Socio-political grievances
Most sadly it forestalls the possibility of a pro-reform coalition of
a cross-ethnic, cross-party character, which can support the
implementation of the LLRC ‘framework’ (as the report terms it). That
framework is a minimum programme for the reconstruction of Sri Lankan
consciousness and citizenship along the lines of civic republican
nationhood. It is also, arguably, the Sri Lankan reading most congruent
with what we may term the Asian reformist or Asian Realist perspective
of the Lankan situation.
The TNA has seen the LLRC report’s (alleged) negatives as outweighing
the positives. What is particularly noteworthy and lamentable is that
regards the absence in the LLRC report of a call for independent
accountability hearings into the last stage of the war and the corporate
conduct of the Lankan Armed Forces (as distinct from inquiries into
episodes of excess and criminality) as a lapse that outweighs the
Report’s acknowledgement of Tamil grievances, the identification of
policy measures that gave rise to them, and the need to redress those
grievances fairly (as contained in the segments on ‘Grievances of the
Tamil Community’ ‘The Historical Background relating to
Majority-Minority relationships in Sri Lanka’ and ‘The Different Phases
in the Narrative of Tamil Grievances’). Thus, for the TNA today, the
issue of broad-gauge accountability is of a higher priority than the
long standing, deep-rooted socio-political grievances of the Tamils. I
venture to suggest that had Appapillai Amirthalingam and/or Neelan
Tiruchelvam been alive, they would not have rejected but would have
constructively engaged with and leveraged the LLRC report.
International inquiry
I wish there were a more delicately diplomatic way of putting this
but there isn’t. The call for an international investigation into the
last stages of the war by anyone - such the bulk of the Tamil Diaspora,
Tamil civil society and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) - who did not
and still does not condemn the LTTE’s crimes and atrocities, internal
executions and secret prisons, child soldiers and fratricidal murders,
terrorism and totalitarianism, is as if most of German society did not
criticise the Nazis and Auschwitz even after World War II ended, and
called instead for an international inquiry.
No such inquiry will be countenanced by any Sri Lankan
administration, nor would any Asian administration cooperate with any
similar inquiry in their cases. Indeed the advocates of such an inquiry
would be hard put to name a single administration anywhere in the world,
including in the West, which has or would agree to a similar venture, in
the matter of their own wars and Armed Forces.
Sri Lanka remaining quintessentially a democracy in an increasingly
democratic world, it is the untrammelled right of any political party or
individual to reject the LLRC report’s conclusion that individual
instances of probable crimes and human rights violations should be
independently investigated but that there was no evidence of systemic,
systematic traducing of international humanitarian law. However, any
political party that does so must also balance the exigencies of
external or parochial constituency pressure with the larger
de-legitimisation that results from crossing such a thick red line, not
only of national security and core strategic interest, but of the broad
and basic social consensus.
Findings and recommendations
The issue of an international mechanism on accountability for the
last stages of the war is the dividing line that defines the mainstream
from the fringe, and in a more existential sense, the inner from the
outer. It constitutes the perimeter of the polity.
While it is perfectly legitimate to call for such an inquiry, it
would be far more correct and realistic to emulate the example of
Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, who represents that institution which has been
the most successful in history in the matter of combining the universal
with the particular, the global with the national.
His Eminence having just provided an example of ‘soft power’ as
countervailing force, has pointed to the unfinished tasks of building a
durable peace, welcomed the LLRC report and its potential and urged its
expeditious and determined implementation.
The authentically concerned liberal or progressive reformer, whose
motivation is the opening or widening of space and pushing forward of
process, rather than of denunciatory posturing, extends a qualified
support to the LLRC findings and recommendations, urging a compressed,
time bound action plan and monitoring, rather than damning it out of
hand and calling instead for an international inquiry.
Those who adopt a rejectionist stance towards the LLRC report run the
risk of reducing their political capital as serious i.e. responsible,
moderate peace partners. They also risk the heightening of perception or
misperception of themselves as an agency of external, non-Sri Lankan
interests in a cold war against the country.
What this activates is a ‘push factor’, which functions contrary to
the ‘pull factor’ which must necessarily prevail if political dialogue,
ethnic reconciliation and nation-building are to succeed.
Ethnic question
What lies at the heart of the difficult dialogue between the TNA and
the government of Sri Lanka? It is a problem within the ‘collective
unconscious’ (as Carl Jung would have it) of the two undergirding
communities. The Sinhalese for their part must recognise that at least
from the 1980s, the ethnic question has been externalised (as repeatedly
pointed out at the time by Mervyn de Silva in the Lanka Guardian), and
that in the globalised 21st century, which is an Information Age,
insisting on the ‘purely internal’ is pure delusion.
Similarly, the Tamils must realise that there is a contradiction
between on the one hand, their legitimate desire to be treated as equal
citizens with an irreducible minimum of political and cultural space,
and on the other, to be negotiated with as if they were representatives
of another/their own country or a nation recognised by the world
community.
Political unit
It is impossible to urge on the one hand, equal treatment as Sri
Lankan citizens, and moderate autonomy as a socio-culturally and
historically distinct community calling for a reform of the Sri Lankan
state and its policies so as to permit such incorporation, and on the
other hand to regard oneself as a proto-state in equal relationship to
the Sri Lankan state which is a legitimate political unit in the
interstate system.
The Tamils may regard themselves as a nation (hence ‘Tamil National
Alliance’) but this is unshared and unlikely to be shared. It is by no
means recognised as such within the international community.
The Tamils are not even recognised as a non-sovereign nation under
foreign/alien/external annexation and occupation. The TNA does not
represent a separate polity or political unit equal to the Sri Lankan
state. It represents a political sub-unit, a sub-polity, a periphery or
a unit which is striving to engage with - and must certainly be engaged
by - the much larger part so as to constitute and cohere into a better,
more equitable, open and capacious whole.
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