Frontline
April 1998
Neighbours

War brings no peace in Lanka

The Sri Lankan government’s ‘war for peace’ has only succeeded in increasing the ordinary Tamilian’s misery and heightened his feeling of alienation

This is my karma. Otherwise how do you explain my misery of being displaced three times? I am so sick and tired of running for safery, I do not care whether Rama rules or Ravana rules but I want peace and I want the Sinhala and Tamil armies out my life.
— A displaced Tamil farmer in Mannar (September 1997)
They say there are only a few Tigers left yet they seem to suspect every Tamil to be a Tiger.
— A religious dignitary in the East (December 1997)

This war is not going to end. I am staying on because I am assigned to this checkpoint. The moment I am ordered to go to the front I will leave and go to my village in Kandy and cultivate the little paddy land we have.
— A young affable soldier in Vavuniya (January 1997) who reminded me of my own 24–year–old son and to whom I said ‘Putha (son), do what you think is right’.

General Patwasse and major Munasinghe have to get their arithmetic right. If one adds up their figures of Tigers dead and wounded and matches the total against their other claim that there were only five thousand Tigers, even Prabakaran and his bodyguards should not be existing today and the war should have been over.

— A retired public servant in Vavuniya (September 1997).

IS it so bad? Well, one’s answer would vary according to one’s view-point and personal experiences. I do not think truth is dead but we have considerable difficulty getting the information to form a total picture of the war–torn North–east. The government has banned any independent, on–the–spot reporting on the on–going ‘war for peace’. It regularly produces its own reports which normally say that the Sri Lankan troops are either advancing or consolidating ‘liberated’ areas and provide statistics about casualties on both sides. It claims that not even 10 percent of the war is left to be fought.

Anyone who has some first–hand knowledge of the situation in the North–east and reliable information on the fighting capacity of the LTTE cannot help dismissing this as foolhardy and cheap propaganda. The UNP, the main opposition party, has consistently rejected the government’s claim. Now the pro–LTTE Tamil Guardian International and Hot Spring published in London, and the Tamil Net News on the internet, are countering the official reports and statistics with their own. They challenge the government to allow international journalists to visit the North–east and freely report on the situation. The government has yet to accept this challenge. If the present war is actually a ‘war for peace’ as claimed by the government, it is its moral duty to permit uncensored reporting by different sources.

As one who has been able to visit several parts of the North–east, except Jaffna, on more than five different occasions since mid–1995, I am reasonably convinced that the ordinary Tamil people do not see this war as a war for peace. Tamils do know that it was the LTTE that broke the ceasefire and opened the way for war again. But how the war started is no longer a big issue for them. The various operations launched by the government with the aim of marginalising the LTTE have only escalated the war, increased civilian suffering and alienated the Tamil people from the government.

The LTTE has suffered major setbacks but it has not been mar-ginalised at all. On the other hand, the losses suffered by the people and the daily hardships they have to endure have shattered their hopes for peace. I have seen for myself the appalling conditions under which people were living in the so– called transit camps in Vavuniya. The people in these camps are treated like suspects of a crime.

These detainees felt cheated by the government because they had trusted its words and moved into Vavuniya with the idea of either settling in there or going to Colombo. Perhaps they believed that since it appeared keen on winning the hearts and minds of the Tamils, the government would assist them to relocate to places of their choice. This was not to be and their experience turned out to be yet another tale of suffering and indignity. When the Tamils overwhelmingly voted for Chandrika Kumartunga in 1994, openly celebrated her victory and affectionately called her their President to the chagrin of the LTTE, they were sending an important message: ‘We are willing to be a part of a united country .if we can live in peace and with dignity’.

To these people, the present war is different from the wars they had experienced in the past only in the sense that it is more intense, more brutal and more widespread. The displace-ments caused by the various operations and the consequent deprivation, destitution and traumatisation of people are unprecedented.

According to a recent (December 1997) report by a group of Christian relief workers, 3,00,000 out of the 4,85,000 people in the Wanni region are displaced. I was told by officials in Mannar that more than 60 per cent of the residents of Mannar district were displaced. Many displaced families in Mannar do not receive even the basic dry ration from the government which, in its concern to prevent food supplies reaching the Tigers, seems to have overlooked the needs of these victims of the war.

When the Tamils overwhelmingly voted
for Chandrika Kumartunga in 1994,
openly celebrated her victory and affectionately called her their President to the chagrin of the LTTE, they were sending an important message: ‘We are willing to be a part of a united country if we can live in peace and with dignity’.

Infant and maternity mortality rates have gone up in the uncleared areas. Malaria and waterborne diseases are taking their toll of the old and the young. The numbers of female-headed households and orphans have increased. I have spoken to several traumatised young poor war widows (18–25 years of age) who are mothers of small children and who do not know how to rebuild their lives. The population of non–school going children is on the increase too. In the Wanni region, some 40,000 children of school going age are not attending school. There is an acute shortage of trained teachers and health workers in the North–east outside the Jaffna district. Currently, not even a sixth of the 590 SLES (Sri Lanka Education Service) officers assigned to the North–east are actually at their posts.

One cannot help harking back to the moment of 1994 — that conjuncture when the forces of peace and reconciliation were at a peak, when people of all comumunities were inspired to believe in the possibility of an end to the war and a lasting solution to the national crisis. The main plank of the peace platform was that instead of uniting the country the war had actually divided it and the only way to reunite it was to make peace on the basis of a political solution that met the aspirations of the Tamil–speaking people. Ms. Chandrika Kumar-tunga’s resounding victory was an affirmation of the people’s will to find a negotiated settlement that would put the war and the dark years of violations and brutalisation behind us.

But this was not to be. That moment of hope vanished in April 1995 and since then the new project of ‘war for peace’ has been unfolding with an ever increasing fury. Now, the government is making a ‘war for peace’ to liberate the Tamils from the LTTE and unite the country! And the LTTE, which unilaterally called off the ceasefire in April 1995, is making war to liberate the Tamil nation from Sinhala rule by creating a separate state!

It would seem that the government finds itself in a political and military impasse. The LTTE has firmly rejected the government’s devolution package. The UNP, the main opposition party, has rejected it, too. More recently, its leader has come out in favour of asymmetrical devolution which is likely to be more appealing than the PA’s package to the Tamil–speaking people. But the UNP does not seem willing to co–operate with the government to work out a solution based on an asymmetric devolution.

The Sinhala extremist fringe has been making the most vociferous opposition to the package thanks to the encouragement it enjoys from the non–government mainstream press. To the credit of the PA, it must be said that its popular campaign for the package has made a significant impact among the Sinhalese in the South. Devolution is no more a totally alien and misunderstood matter in the South although government campaigners have avoided associating it in a principled manner with federalism or Tamil national self–determination. That the Sinhalese people by and large favour a political solution is not surprising since they had voted for it already in 1994. I dare say that they would have given their assent to the original devolution proposals of August 1996 which were more secular and which offered greater regional autonomy. The subsequent whittling down of these proposals to produce the present package was not a response to any mass opposition in the South. It was meant to appease certain groups within and outside the SLFP including the communal sections of Buddhist clergy.

The present package has not raised any visible widespread enthusiasm among the Tamil people, particularly in the North–east for whom it is meant to grant some measure of autonomy on a similar basis as that of the other regions (which are not ethnically defined). The reasons for this are not hard to find. First of all, the Tamil people do not believe that a devolution package that is rejected by the LTTE can ever be implemented in the North–east. Another important factor which operates deeply at a psychological level is their memory that past ‘Sinhalese governments’ have repeatedly failed to honour pacts and promises concerning their basic rights. But the most important reason is the daily reality of life in the war-torn North–east. The war as experienced by the ordinary masses negates any hope for peace the proposed constitutional reforms may contain. That several hundreds of Tamil youths disappeared in Jaffna during the first year after operation riviresa is in itself a sad and telling indictment on the PA. The Amnesty International Report (November 1997) has documented the horrifying case of torture and murder of Tamil youths by the Sri Lankan security forces. About 600 persons had disappeared in a period of six months in 1996 after the so–called liberation of Jaffna. With such a shameful record of violations in such a short time, the government cannot except to win the confidence of Tamil people.

The ‘war for peace’ is the government’s answer to what it sees as the intransigence of the LTTE. Its aim is to weaken and if possible annihilate the LTTE and thereby create the ground for the enforcement of the devolution package. In other words, an irreversible military victory over the LTTE is a necessary condition for the government to enforce its package. However, the ground realities force us to question the wisdom of the choice made by the government. Informed analysts who are critical of general Ratwatte’s military approach and operations say that the government cannot win the present war against the LTTE… An ethnicised war deepens communalisation and promotes the erosion of trust between different communities.

This is why the peace movement of 1994 said that the war had actually divided the country and an end to it was a precondition for reunification. Today the war has further deepened the insecurity and ethnic consciousness of the people. The hundreds of thousands of displaced people in the North–east cannot forget that their humiliation, deprivation and destitution have everything to do with their ethnicity.

At security checkpoints, one is often asked: are you Sinhalese or Tamil? I have faced this question numerous times during my travels from Colombo to the North–east and back and in the North–east. It makes no sense to call yourself a Sri Lankan at a security checkpoint. Such a category does not exist in Sri Lanka’s security lexicon at present. There are only Tamils, Muslims, Sinhalese and foreigners. ‘National identity card’ is a misnomer because it really serves as an ethnic identity card.

The checkpoints are needed because of the war and ethnic identities are checked for security reasons: almost all Tigers are Tamils and therefore all Tamils have to be checked and questioned more thoroughly. This simple circular logic of the procedure generates complex psychological consequences which serve to further deepen the ethnic divide.

While security procedures directly serve the reinforcement of one’s ethnic consciousness in a divisive way, the slogan ‘one country one people’ coined by the government denies our diversity by collapsing all ethnic identities into an amorphous category of ‘one people’ which has an assimilationist ring. Both the war and the official slogan do not allow us to seek unity in diversity and invent a larger common identity. The government has not taken steps to encourage the creation of multi–ethnic symbols. Instead, it expects all non–Sinhala Lankans to accept the Lion flag as the national flag. Is it not a contradiction to grant constitutional privilege to Buddhism (the essence of which is universality of the human being, non–violence, compassion and peace) and at the same time have a lion armed with a sword (an aggressive, violent, ethno-mythical symbol) as the centrepiece of the national flag?

Perhaps, Sinhala–Buddhist nationalists do not see any such contradiction. But, what about the sensitivities of other Lankans? Like the other advocates of a secular state for Sri Lanka, I am opposed to any religion being given a higher status than others in the constitution and I am for a flag which all Lankans can proudly and happily wave without being coerced.

Against the violations and sufferings imposed by the war, what does the government have to show by way of actual positive actions to make the Tamil–speaking people feel that the government is really serious about their rights and security as citizens? Not much, disappointingly little, compared to the promises given and the expectations raised, I am afraid. Take, for instance, the language rights of the Tamil–speaking people. In the past three years, there has been some talk by the government about implementing Tamil as an official language. There were reports that the President had issued a directive to the bureaucracy to take immediate steps towards that end. It appears that the treasury said that it did not have the funds to recruit a sufficient number of personnel proficient in Tamil to the various departments to meet the needs of Tamil–speaking citizens. If this is true, Tamil–speaking Lankans are fully justified in feeling that the government is not sensitive enough to one of their basic rights while it is able to find billions on its military strategy.

The PA government had plenty of time and opportunities to win the confidence of the Tamil–speaking people in the South, particularly in major multi–ethnic areas like Colombo and the upcountry. The least it could have done was to fully enable them to carry out their transactions with state institutions in their own language. But this has yet to happen. By its failure the government missed one of the first opportunities it had to demonstrate to the Tamil–speaking people that it really cared about their rights. The sad reality in our country is that military priorities override everything else when it comes to the rights of the Tamil–speaking people. This again takes us back to the challenge of finding the will and the way to end the war.

N.Shanmugaratnam
The writer is a well-knownSri Lankan economist.This article is excerpted from his piece in the ‘Tamil Times

 


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