Tamil nationalists never missed an opportunity to miss an
opportunity
DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
By pitching
their political ambitions higher than the Sri Lankan constitution’s
existing provisions on provincial autonomy under the 13th Amendment,
Tamil nationalists have played into the hands of Sinhalese hardliners
A political battle of major proportions, perhaps the most portentous
in years, is looming in Sri Lanka this year and is being preceded by a
debate amounting to a battle of ideas. The matter at hand is the much
delayed and deferred election to the Northern Provincial Council.
Political forces are arrayed in four positions on the battlefield. On
the Tamil side there are those who hold that the existing 13th Amendment
to the Constitution under which the Northern Provincial Council was
established, was inadequate from the start and that therefore,
contesting the election and holding office would be of no positive
consequence, and may even have the negative consequence of legitimising
the institution. The other position occupied within the Tamil political
spectrum is of those who regard the 13th Amendment to be flawed and
deeply unsatisfactory, but grasp the value of contesting and winning the
election, and occupying the political real estate that remains.
On the Sinhala side are those who wish to abolish the system of
provincial autonomy, those who do not and support the system of limited
provincial autonomy, and those who seek to retain the bare bones of the
system for fear of the external repercussions of abolition, while
gutting the provinces of any real measure of autonomy.
Lost opportunity
At the moment, the predominance on the Tamil side is of the more
pragmatic mainstream politicians who would like to occupy whatever
political space that opens up, and on the Sinhala side, of those unhappy
with provincial autonomy but seek to dilute rather than dismantle it in
its entirety.
The major error on the Tamil side was and remains the failure to
grasp that the 13th Amendment was the best that could be achieved even
when the political, or more accurately politico-military, balance was
far less in Colombo’s favour. It proved the best deal achievable even
with a far more overtly, robust Indian role and power projection.
When the liberal administration of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga
sought perhaps imprudently to range well beyond the 13th Amendment in
the form of three political packages in 1995, 1997 and 2000, the efforts
were opposed as expected by Sinhala hardliners, but more fatally by the
conservative United National Party (UNP) Opposition headed by Ranil
Wickremesinghe. Most crucially, President Kumaratunga’s risky,
politically ambitious quasi-federal initiatives did not have the
acceptance, still less the support, of the parties and personalities
(most prominently at the time, the TULF) currently grouped in the Tamil
National Alliance.
Affected talks
In its sporadic and ultimately abortive discussions with the
administration of President Rajapaksa, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA)
urged that these drafts of 1995, 1997 and 2000 be taken up for
discussion, but those deals were no longer on the table, the Tamil
politicians having proved that what was once said so famously by the
liberal intellectual Israeli Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, of the
Palestinian political leaders was also true of them, namely that they
never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
Having failed to put sufficient daylight between themselves and the
LTTE before the war ended with a decisive disaster for the latter, the
Tamil nationalist politicians might have been expected to realise that
the 13th Amendment was the only fall back available, and that it should
be defended doggedly against attempts by the triumphant Sinhala hawks in
Colombo to roll it back. However, the TNA not only declined to take the
13th Amendment as the explicit basis of negotiations, it initially
rejected that structural reform as the starting line. The keynote speech
by R. Sampanthan, the leader of the main Tamil parliamentary party (TNA)
at the 14th Convention of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK) (the
main constituent of the TNA) in May 2012 was in many respects a landmark
event. It played into the hands of the neoconservative hardliners within
Colombo’s power elite and ruling troika, bringing the bilateral talks to
an abrupt halt.
Absolute authority
Mr. Sampanthan’s convention address not only stated clearly that the
political project lay outside the parameters of both the 13th Amendment
as well as the structural form of a unitary state, but also provided
considerable evidence to the Sri Lankan political leadership that the
goal of a sovereign state of and for the Tamils, one in which they enjoy
absolute rather than shared or devolved authority, remained the goal.
The ITAK/TNA leader’s speech said “we must prove to the international
community that we will never be able to realize our rights within a
united Sri Lanka.” Colombo seems to believe that with such a strategic
objective in mind, it is logically inevitable that Tamil nationalism
will reject, discredit and undermine any solution proposed or arrived at
within a united Sri Lanka, especially a solution within a unitary state
such as is the 13th Amendment.
R. Sampanthan |
Abba Eban |
Mr. Sampanthan, the most prominent local leader of the Northern Tamil
community, reiterated at his party’s annual convention its commitment to
achieving with the support of the international community, the same
“soaring aspirations” that could not be achieved through armed struggle.
By the time the TNA collected its collective wits, the government had
commenced the siege and attrition of the 13th Amendment, while the
hardliners within and outside were campaigning for outright abolition.
On the Sinhala side, the drive for rollback of provincial autonomy or
crippling by means of the removal of any powers with regard to land and
its utilisation, fails to grasp the possible blowback of such
unilateralism; a unilateralism based on the assumption that the Tamil
question in Sri Lanka is a purely internal matter for a sovereign state,
and oblivious to the Kissingerian category of “intermestic” issues;
those at the interface of the internal and the international.
Rajapaksa factor
New Delhi, which failed to militarily support an unambiguously
pro-devolution President Kumaratunga during the Tigers’ siege of Jaffna
in 2000, did not extend the requested and requisite degree of military
support to President Mahinda Rajapaksa in an equation that would have
linked such support to political progress in lockstep as it were.
Instead of simply insisting on the implementation of Sri Lanka’s own
constitutional provisions (obviating the need for protracted,
problematic talks with the TNA and the reinvention of the wheel), it was
persuaded into echoing President Rajapaksa’s promise of 13 Plus. No
wonder it finds itself in a dilemma on the next steps.
The anti-Sri Lankan hysteria in Tamil Nadu is reminiscent of the
foaming at the mouth in Florida for decades at any mention of Castro’s
Cuba. What takes Tamil Nadu beyond Florida is the ubiquity of Tiger
symbolism including portraits of Velupillai Prabhakaran, in the
pan-Tamilian agitation. In a rich irony of future history, that wave of
agitation which rises higher during election year and its aftermath in
India may well be exactly what sweeps away his UNP competitor and gifts
President Rajapaksa all he needs for re-election to a third term. Given
that he is increasingly a human shield for the Sinhala hawks in his
ranks or a George Dubya to their Cheney-Rumsfeld, this cannot but have
decisive repercussions on Delhi’s protracted efforts to secure a modest
if authentic measure of provincial self-rule for the Tamils.
(Dayan Jayatilleka was Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the
U.N. in Geneva from 2007-09, and until recently, Ambassador to France.
He is the author of Long War, Cold Peace: Conflict and Crisis in Sri
Lanka, Vijitha Yapa Publishers, 2013.)
Courtesy: The Hindu
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