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| Chandrika’s vendetta When the head of state turns a political battle into a personal confrontation — it will only turn confrontation into anarchy J.S. Tissainayagam The past weeks have seen President Chandrika Kumaratunga transform into Bellona, the god dess of war. Her speeches after the Town Hall bomb blast and her narrow election victory have all had a strident ring. If her swearing-in ceremony was confrontational, her address to the nation in the form of an interview from Temple Trees was hardly the fireside chat that F. D. Roosevelt was famous for. If she was presenting a New Deal, the deal was going to be an all-out, relentless war against the LTTE. Kumaratunga’s address had three targets — the LTTE, the UNP and the media. She tried to demonise them and paint them in diabolical colours as the prime elements that were deterring the government’s (and by extension the country’s) progress. Her aggressive tone and confrontational attitude set the stage for the events that followed. A theme that ran through the speeches and which has been echoed by members of the government and the state-owned media, has been that the President’s defeat at the elections in the Tamil majority areas (except Jaffna) was due to an elaborate conspiracy conceived and executed by the UNP-LTTE combine. By extension, the Tamils who had voted for the UNP were tacit LTTE sympathisers. This allusion throws one’s mind back to the mid-1980s. The political line of coupling of the Tamils and the Tamil militant groups was part of the notoriously short-sighted policy of President J. R. Jayewardene which had disastrous consequences for both the Tamils and the regime. The UNP administration of Jayewardene failed to distinguish between the moderates and the militants. The inability to do that caused immense problems at the social level. It led to distrust between the communities, an inability to see that all Tamils were not necessarily in sympathy with terror and the forced victimisation of innocent Tamils as Tigers. It provoked a series of bomb attacks in Colombo between 1984 and 1986 and led to public hysteria. It also succeeded in evicting the moderate Tamil MPs of the TULF from parliament and the escalation of the fight into a fully-fledged low intensity armed conflict. Kumaratunga’s address last Monday too was the culmination of days of pot-shotting the Tamils. It did not distinguish clearly and unequivocally that all Tamils were not necessarily supporters of terror. It was predicted that this adversarial attitude would only lead the country into further violence. And so it did. Before the week was out, a human bomb had exploded in front of the Prime Minister’s office. Elsewhere in Colombo, Kumar Ponnambalam lay dead. The two incidents are messages about two different processes in operation right now. On the one hand, the LTTE is saying in no uncertain terms that a head–on clash with it will only result in the escalation of violence and mayhem. It has done so before and that is not new. The message in the Ponnambalam killing is different. Once again, it is a product of the attitude that the President now symbolises. Her speech reduced the political process which is the clash of ideas, policies and strategy to a confrontation between herself and other individuals. It reduced everything to personality conflicts. This type of trivialisation breeds violence of the basest kind. It almost encourages the simple–minded that you eliminate the individual and the problem automatically resolves itself. Ponnambalam’s politics was well known. He stood for an agenda that represented Tamil separatism. He made public his views. It did raise mutters of indignation and howls of protest, but nothing else. But today, an organisation which calls itself the National Front Against Tigers has stated that it is responsible for the assassination. We do not know the veracity of the claim — it could be spurious, it could be the truth. But the fact is the political atmosphere has been made so murky by both reducing political conflicts to personal vendetta, as well as painting everyone who did not support the President at the election as a potential terrorist, that such organisations have been emboldened to claim credit for the assassination. This is not to justify the human rights abuses of the LTTE or the violations by the state. But what cannot be forgotten is that one is a state party and the other an organisation with a central command structure that is fighting for a separate state. A state fighting a guerrilla organisation is one thing. It is another thing when the head of state turns a political battle into a personal confrontation — it will only turn confrontation into anarchy. (http://www.lanka.net/sundayleader/2000/jan/09/politics.html) |