“Our duty is to fight until the last minute for our country, for our planet and for humanity.”

- Fidel Castro, Feb 4, 2012, launching his memoir, ‘Guerrilla of Time’

As world class singers of Sri Lankan Tamil parentage go, MIA isn’t half as good as a new voice, Bhi Bhiman, an American singer of blues–tinged folk music with a voice as clear and mournful as the whistle of a lonesome train coming ’round the bend. MIA’s flair for the theatrical far outstrips her singing talent. Giving the finger at the Super Bowl this month seems however to be politically symptomatic, because Mr. MA Sumanthiran, a sophisticated lawyer-politician, has just done that to the 13th amendment and prospects of a moderate yet substantive degree of power sharing. In an interview given to Namini Wijedasa, ‘MAS’ (as the newspaper bills him) says:

“…The 13th is not a proper scheme. We have rejected it…The 13th Amendment was passed in 1987. If it was sufficient, we would not have had all this bloodletting…We have engaged with Global Tamil Forum… You have to ask the Tamil people whether they want to stay in the country or be separate. Everywhere it’s like that…A distinct people in international law have certain rights called self-determination. The right to self determination international law now says must be exercised internally in the first instance. But if that is consistently denied, then according to the Canadian Supreme Court judgment on Quebec, they might even become entitled to a unilateral secession. So, if Sri Lanka should remain as one country, and we think it should remain as one country, then to preserve it as one country you must grant that right to self-determination and have it exercised in an arrangement within one country. That must be given, that must be recognized. It’s not at the wish of the majority that it’s given. That is as a matter of right in international law…” (‘Sunday Lakbimanews’ & DBSJeyaraj.com, Feb 5th 2012)

If I didn’t know that this was Mr. Sumanthiran of the TNA speaking last week, I swear I would have identified it as Anton Balasingham speaking at Prabhakaran’s press conference in the Wanni in 2002 or during the rounds of negotiations in Oslo and Sattahip, during the wretched CFA years of appeasement. I am not exaggerating for effect, and any Internet search would confirm that this was indeed Mr. Balasingham’s argument. So we are currently in a strange place, a time-warp, in which the TNA’s most sophisticated spokesperson is echoing the argumentation of the LTTE’s most sophisticated spokesperson. What makes the TNA or anyone else think that the Sri Lankan state and citizenry, which resisted and rejected this nonsense and went on to fight and decisively win a war, will treat it with anything other than a combination of acute suspicion and scant disregard?

Mr. Sumanthiran must enlighten us as to how a judgment of the Canadian Supreme Court becomes ‘international law’. He must then tell us how ‘soft’ international law – even if one were to concede for the sake of argument  that this postulate has entered the realm of ‘ soft international law — takes precedence over national Constitutions and state sovereignty. He should also be so kind as to tell us how Canada – or Scotland, for that matter– becomes ‘everywhere’. Can he tell us where precisely it is — outside of a militarily defeated, failed, fractured state (Mengistu’s Ethiopia, ex-Yugoslavia, Southern Sudan) — that ethnic groups preponderating in identifiable geographic areas are entitled to referenda as to whether they shall or shall not remain within existing state boundaries, and where it is recognized that if ‘internal self determination’ is not exercised, ‘external self determination’ i.e. secession is recognized as an option?

What would the planet look like if every ethnic group which numbered a few percentage of the total population of a state were able to exit that state at will, sundering the country and wrenching away part of its territory? This would not only mean the outright violation of a principle of democracy by privileging the wishes of a majority within a minority over the overwhelming majority of the citizenry as a whole, but also bloody disintegration, civil war, and the diminution of the size and strength of independent states thereby making them vulnerable to predatory neo-imperialist overlords.

The principle of sovereignty of the overall state and the right of self determination of the nation as a whole, the citizenry as a totality, i.e. national and popular sovereignty, cannot be subordinated to the right of self determination of an ethnic minority, national minority or minority nationality.

Mr. Sumanthiran does so much travelling that he is clearly unaware of which continent of the planet Sri Lanka is located. No state in Asia, including quasi-federal, democratic, secular India and liberal democratic Philippines, regards the judgment of the Canadian Supreme Court as having the slightest bearing on its domestic affairs or even gives it a second thought as constituting some norm in international law. One wonders if the Hon Member of Parliament has heard of Kashmir or Mindanao.

The TNA MP has flipped the bird in the direction of the 13th amendment, which was the best that India was able to obtain for the Tamil people at a time when the Tamil insurgency had not been crushed by the Sri Lankan state. Mr. Sumanthiran does not explain by which logic he expects it to be qualitatively superseded in the aftermath of a stunning military victory by the State. When the provincial devolution enshrined by the 13th amendment is being called into question as excessive, Mr. Sumanthiran’s rejection of it – as distinct from urging its upgrading and/or speedy implementation—is hardly helpful.

Mr. Sumanthiran’s argumentative assertion that “if it [the 13th amendment] was sufficient, we would not have had all this bloodletting…” is demonstrably nonsensical. If it was the insufficiency of the 13th amendment was responsible for continued bloodletting, how did that bloodletting stop in May 2009 without an improvement upon the 13th amendment in place or even the 13th amendment being implemented? It was not the insufficiency of the 13th amendment that led to the continuation of the bloodletting in 1987, it was the bloodthirstiness of the LTTE, which rejected that reform and spurned the space it opened up.

The TNA has yet to express regret or proffer an explanation over its rejection at the time, of those very proposals it is now bringing back to the table, namely the Mangala Moonesinghe formula, the CBK proposals of 1995, 1997 and 2000, and the APRC (which it boycotted). If its behavior was attributable to the LTTE’s threats it should come clean and say so now. Then again, the TNA has yet to criticize the LTTE for murdering Rajiv Gandhi– and its own leaders such as Appapillai Amirthalingam and Neelan Tiruchelvam. The failure to do so can no longer be attributed to understandable physical fear but to moral and ethical failure.

There seems to be an inability to grasp what it means to give the finger to all reform proposals, wage a war for three decades including against a peacekeeping force, and lose that war utterly. When you wager all and lose that kind of bloody wager, there is a political price to be paid for a considerable period. Your capacity to make demands is impaired. You cannot simply dust off proposals you rejected when you thought the going was good, brandish them and expect to be taken seriously.

Least logical and reasonable is the call for a referendum among only the Tamil people as to whether or not they wish to live within Sri Lanka. Contrary to Mr. Sumanthiran’s assertion, ‘internal self determination’ is not ascertained by a referendum which raises the issue of whether or not a people wish to live within a given state. If that question is on the agenda there is nothing ‘internal’ about such self-determination. What if the answer at the referendum is ‘no, we do not wish to be part of the existing state’? What, pray, is ‘internal’ about that?

Let’s think this issue through to its conclusion. Why should any administration take the risk of sharing power at a sensitive periphery of a state, a mere two and half years after a 30 year war, with a party that rejects the constitutional basis of that power sharing, i.e. the 13th amendment, and stands for a referendum on self-determination? Is it unreasonable to assume that such a party would use the territorially based council as a platform to call immediately for more powers and move on to hold or agitate for the holding of a referendum on whether to remain within or exit the state and its boundaries? Is this the TNA’s game-plan, or rather, is it the game-plan of the TNA-GTF? Isn’t this strangely similar to the playbook of Prof Steven Ratner (of the infamous Darusman panel), whose scholarly specialization is the study of the break-up of existing states along lines of pre-existing internal administrative boundaries? Is this not an alternative pathway to achieving that which the Tigers attempted through terrorism?  Does the project of exit remain the same, except that it is now going to be in a two step sequence?

Every progressive or liberal minded party, political personality and commentator in the South welcomed the LLRC report and urged its expeditious implementation, while the TNA rejected it at quite considerable length.  The gap between the reform-minded moderate centrists and progressives in the South, on the one hand, and the demands of the TNA on the other, do not seem to faze the latter, any more than this same chasm was of concern to its precursor, the Federal party, in previous decades.

Mr. Sumanthiran must now ask himself which Sri Lankan political party of any note, in or outside of government, be it the SLFP, UNP (‘Ranilist Royalists’ or Reformists), JVP or the radical breakaway Movement for Peoples Struggle, would consent to devolution that went qualitatively beyond the 13th amendment to the next level, countenance ‘self determination’ ascertained by a plebiscite purely of the Tamil people, and accept dismemberment of the country by ballot where bomb and bullet have failed. Where is the proposal that can act as a bridge? Is the TNA not interested in a bridge to the Southern majority? Is it uninterested in Southern partnership within the mainstream and unwilling to do what it takes to secure such partnerships? Where will you find takers outside of the Tamil polity, Mr. Sumanthiran, and if you do not have takers among the Sinhala majority, where do you expect to find them? Certainly not in the region or on our continent—so where might they be? Surely this is the wrong era and continent to await a Balfour Declaration?  Mr. Sumanthiran must not make the standard error of ‘cosmopolitan’ Tamil nationalists, of taking the Sinhalese for fools.

Sherlock Holmes used to say that once the impossible has been ruled out, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. If elements within the TNA are making it strategically imprudent to risk the transfer a provincial council and its powers to them, then the answer must surely lie in hoping for an evolutionary re-composition of Tamil politics, through which may emerge responsible, pragmatic partners in power-sharing at the periphery. The speedy implementation of the LLRC Report’s recommendations may create the conditions for such evolution.

• Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka on history of power-sharing in Sri Lanka and the 13th Amendment
• Final text of TNA MP M.A. Sumanthiran’s speech in Parliament opposing the 18th Amendment
• “Sound is no substitute for argument”: Exclusive video of TNA MP M.A. Sumanthiran’s speech in parliament against 18th Amendment
• Hansard on 18th Amendment debate, 8 September 2010
• Exclusive video interview with Somawansa Amarasinghe, the Leader of JVP, in English

Photo courtesy Daylife. Activists of Sri Lanka’s opposition Marxist People’s Liberation Front, wearing masks that represent President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brothers, walk in a protest against the government in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Wednesday, Dec. 2011.

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Michael Colin Cooke titles his response to my response “Once more into the breach”. If I may be permitted a quibble at the commencement, shouldn’t that read “unto” the breach?

As Rooney Mara playing Lisbeth Salander in ‘Millennium’ says by way of greeting, “hey hey!” Let’s see what we have here. Having accused me of “idealisation of the current government of Sri Lanka” and in response to my challenge to come up with any evidence, MCC’s devastating riposte is that “By idealisation I mean Dr Jayatilleka’s exalting of President Rajapaksa above the normal run of Sri Lankan politicians.”  So, that’s MCC’s definition of idealisation. Now I just don’t have the time to ask him for examples of ‘exalting’ because he is bound to repeat the exercise.  His evidence encompasses the title of an article by me, and the accompanying photograph. MCC obviously has the strangest idea of how the media work. I couldn’t have cared less if my article had been illustrated by an Andy Warhol print, a Calvin cartoon or a photograph of Amy Winehouse. That choice is made by the editor or one of the editors. As for the title of my article, MCC’s theoretical literacy does not obviously extend to the category of ‘moment’, in contradistinction to a more durable and protracted slice of history such as stage or phase. A ‘moment’ is conjunctural, and the echo was of the ‘uni-polar moment’ in post-cold war world politics, which proved to be just that, a moment, and not a long, durable stage of history. Such is the nature of ‘exaltation’ in MCC’s lexicon.

What I have said of Mahinda Rajapaksa is no more or less than this. He inherited a serious challenge that he did not create. It was the main challenge to the Sri Lankan state and its citizenry taken as a whole. Several previous leaders, strong personalities all had failed to overcome that challenge. Mahinda Rajapksa did. In respect of the most serious challenge—of defeating a formidable terrorist army, restoring territorial unity and integrity and national sovereignty – that puts him ahead of JR Jayewardene, Ranasinghe Premadasa, DB Wijetunga, Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickremesinghe. That does not put him ahead of any of them in any other respect. Now if this is ‘idealisation’ or ‘exaltation’, all of us university teachers do it every time we grade a student higher than the others in the class, in one or another subject.

What I have also said is that when a leader wins a protracted war against a hated enemy, is felt to have liberated the great multitude of people from the threat of weekly terror bombings, and has reunified the territory of a country and a state, he or she dominates the political history of that country for a period.  Sri Lanka still inhabits that slice of historical time. Whether that time will be long or short depends on whether the masses of people perceive that some variant of the threat remains or a new yet similar one has appeared; whether it is the pre-eminent concern; and crucially, whether the existing leadership is the best of the actually available choices to deal with it. The arc of the ‘Mahinda moment’, defined as the moment of Mahinda’s hegemony, is past its asymptote or zenith, but has far from hit the ground and flat-lined.

The passage that MCC flourishes with a triumphant air, as would a conjurer who has pulled a rabbit out of a hat, is clear in its intent, which is transparently not that which MCC attributes to it. If anything it has manifestly the opposite intent since it warns of pressures “resulting in a more hawkish, less flexible, less intuitively smart, more brittle and therefore more vulnerable Sri Lankan state.”   Plainly, I refer here to neoconservative or radical Rightwing pressures, including those emanating from the ‘deep state’.  I see nothing in such a warning that is contrary to a left perspective. Currently we see that several caucuses are openly critical of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s re-stated commitment to 13^th amendment plus. Whatever one thinks of that reported reiteration, it is more significant that there is criticism of it from the radical Right and the social chauvinist Left.

What I have gone on to suggest is that from a political analyst’s perspective, it is exceedingly unlikely that Mahinda can be superseded, and from a Left or progressive perspective, it is undesirable that Mahinda be superseded, by any project or personality who would roll back the positive achievements of Mahinda Rajapaksa, which are those associated with the classic tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution. To illustrate: I do not think that Vladimir Putin could or should be replaced by a project that would take Russia back to the Yelstin era, which is where imperialism wants it to go. I would prefer a coalition between Putin and Zyuganov’s Communists, and/or an eventual electoral succession by that Communist party, but certainly not by the pro-western liberals.

In short, it is my understanding of the left and progressive project in the post Cold war era, that a strong state is necessary and worthy of defence as is a strong reassertion of state sovereignty. This alone is not enough, and in many places it is not even the primary task, but it is an essential factor and condition. It must be fused with a pro-people socioeconomic programme and advanced forms of democratic representation and participation. Concretely, my understanding of a progressive model, a model for the Left, is Lula’s Brazil. However, in many cases, such a ‘new social democracy’ is unfortunately not an option or not yet one. Sri Lanka is one such place. In cases such as this, a ‘national-popular’ option, or a close nationalist–populist approximation, with a commitment to a strong state and state sovereignty, is as good as it gets, and that which any leftist must support, though far from unconditionally or uncritically, and often on an issue-by-issue basis.

MCC says that “Dr Jayatilleka’s support of the Rajapaksa government is not selective; it is touchingly uncritical”. He contradicts himself in a plain, simple and quite un-dialectical fashion when he precedes that with “in fairness I must say he is kinder to the son of his former political patron Premadasa” and quotes me as writing that “Today President Rajapaksa is the best representative of National Democracy and the UNP reformists identified with young Premadasa, the best bet for (pluralist) Social democracy.” Now, given that the government has tilted explicitly against Mr Premadasa’s Reformist faction and in favour of Mr Wickremesinghe who MCC correctly identifies as “part of the status quo”, an ‘uncritical’ support of the government on my part could not possibly be compatible with a long standing and quite public critique of Mr Wickremesinghe and equally undisguised support for young Mr Premadasa.  This stance, taken together with my open support of provincial level devolution, comprises precisely a stance of selective support.

MCC says that “The most important issue, and one on which the good doctor is silent, is how to best harvest the peace dividend. The government and its charismatic President should use the euphoria of victory to enlarge the democratic space instead of closing it.” He (Michael, that is, not Mahinda) should read GV more. That is precisely that which I have argued in this and other forums. The rest of what MCC suggests I should do is already done by opposition parties of the right and Left. My main focus at the moment is the struggle to protect Sri Lanka’s sovereignty as that of other states of the global South, and to fight for a multi-polar world. As for his long digression on Serbia and Kosovo, he will forgive me if I prefer Fidel’s unambiguous interpretation over his, as exemplifying the correct Left reading.

“The heart of Dr Jayatilleka’s polemic concerns the alignment of Lanka with the countries he deems anti-imperialist” writes MCC. The countries I “deem anti-imperialist”? C’mon Michel, how else would you deem, or suggest I deem, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Uruguay, Bolivia and Iran?

MCC also gets things a little confused. I did lecture by invitation every year round, at the joint training programme of Sri Lankan and US Special Forces, but these were in Sri Lanka — never the USA — with my host, the iconic special operations warrior and gentlemen-soldier, Gen Gamini Hettiaarachchi, insisting on sending Commandos of the VIP protection group to escort me, to my mild embarrassment, because, in his words, “we have our own assessment of the LTTE’s assessment of you”.  Now MCC thinks that this somehow does not befit someone who considers himself on the left, but my strong settled conviction – and I was hardly alone in this internationally– of the LTTE as a fascist force, dictated the broadest possible cross-class, cross-ideological alliance of forces, local, regional and global, to defeat the main enemy and resolve the principal contradiction. (This rested on my reading of Dmitrov, Togliatti, Mao and Ho).

I note that MCC uses the term radical within inverted commas, when he refers to Cuba. If Cuba’s is not a radical regime, whose is? If Cuba isn’t radical enough for MCC, what about the other, newer radical regimes of the ALBA group in Latin America, all of which support Sri Lanka in its defence of its sovereignty? If Fidel and Raul Castro, Daniel Ortega and Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Rafael Correa are not radical in MCC’s book, who is, apart from Lionel Bopage?

MCC then goes on to an exposition of economics. My point is that these anti-imperialist states support Sri Lanka because they rightly privilege the defence of national/state sovereignty, territorial unity and integrity, deriving both from their political ideologies and projects (which they are well aware, are not the same as Mahinda Rajapaksa’s) as well as their reading of the post-Cold war world. They take sovereignty seriously, resist notions of ‘humanitarian interventionism’ and formulae of ‘international inquiry mechanisms’, and strive for a multi-polar world.  Their authentic leftism takes politics and the political resistance to imperialist hegemony seriously, while MCC’s vulgar ‘economistic’ deviation is pre-Gramscian, pre-Leninist and fits snugly into the category that Lenin termed ‘imperialist economism’.

I support Mahinda Rajapaksa for the same reason and to the same extent that these regimes do and I urge all progressives in Sri Lanka to do so too, while not implying for a moment that such support should not be supplemented or even superseded by trenchant criticism from a more advanced standpoint– hence my advocacy of a social democratic alternative with a national democratic dimension.

MCC exclaims that “Lanka’s proper title is: The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, but very clearly its economy is capitalist and its parliamentary system bourgeois”. Yeah, so, this is news? Who contested that? Have I ever made a claim that it was something other or more than that? Is Brazil’s economy other than capitalist? The progressive objective today should be to transform Sri Lanka’s economy into one more closely resembling Brazil’s social democratic capitalism, and I remain proud that I was part of a project which antedated and anticipated Lula’s, to achieve this—that of President Premadasa, martyred by the fascist Tigers. That achievement proved ephemeral, and the episodic character of the Premadasa experiment demonstrated that any real social advance in Sri Lanka required as prerequisite the decisive defeat of the LTTE. Mahinda Rajapaksa’s achievement was a necessary but insufficient condition for building a multiethnic nation at peace with itself. His achievement can be surpassed only by a project that is a synthesis between that which is positive in what he has achieved by way of national unification, and that which he has not and probably cannot.

MCC’s finale is touching indeed.  He cautions that “Dr Jayatilleka would do well to remember that his idealisation of his paymaster compromises his ambition to be an independent public commentator and intellectual. His many articles and comments in Groundviews show his position all too clearly: he is visibly damned by his history.”  Oh, no, we’re back to “idealisation”. His words of wisdom are a trifle ill-timed anyway. I have just been sent a fascinating theoretical essay by Colin Wright, entitled ‘The violence of the new: Badiou’s subtractive destruction and Gandhi’s Satyagraha’, published in the journal Subjectivity Vol 4, 1 (2011, Palgrave journals, Macmillan). The essay includes a passage on my work and lists at the end of the text the following authors as references: Agamben, Badiou, Balibar, Fanon, Feltham, Gandhi, Godard, Hallward, Jayatilleka, Lenin, May, Sartre, Weber, Wright, Zizek. And that’s the full list.

So it looks like my intellectual ‘ambitions’, such as they are, are doing ok for now. As for ‘history’, I don’t claim to be clairvoyant as does MCC, so it perfectly possible that history will treat someone who wrote a book on Fidel Castro, reviewed in Radical Philosophy as in the journal of the Royal Institute of international Affairs (Chatham House), far less kindly than one who wrote a book on Lionel Bopage. Oh by the way, the Bibliography on Ethics of the US Army War College also lists my book on Fidel. All seasons, eh, Michael?

• Once more into the breach
• Marking The Mahinda Moment In Lankan Politics
• Defending Sri Lanka: Response to Michael Colin Cooke
• PRABAKARAN MUST BE LAUGHING
• HAS MAHINDA RAJAPAKSA BEEN A TRAITOR TO SRI LANKA?

Image taken from ‘Interrogating a public intellectual: Noted bloggers and youth activists engage Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka‘, published on Groundviews

The phrase ‘a man for all seasons’ being a compliment -which is clearly not the writer’s intent- I find Mr Michael Colin Cooke’s sense of irony rather leaden (read A Man for all political Seasons: Dr Dayan Jayatilleka). No matter. I have two options in responding. One is to enter a slugfest of quotations and ideological polemic, for which I simply do not have the time, and nor I suspect, do most readers. The other route is to address the substance, with a view to advancing clarity and political discussion.

MCC accuses me of “idealisation of the current government of Sri Lanka”. That’s plain silly, and he would find it impossible to back it up with a single quotation or example, while none of those he has furnished amount to anything remotely approaching idealisation.

I do defend the Sri Lankan state, its elected leadership and its elected government, in that order, but selectively and hardly uncritically. I have never urged anything but a policy of qualified and critical support, of ‘unity and struggle’ towards these entities.

It should strike Mr Cooke that the 90% approval rating that Mahinda Rajapaksa enjoys, going by the last Gallup poll, is not an indication of “idealisation” of either his leadership or the role and functioning of his government.

Mr Cooke should also examine the possibility that one may support and defend because the object of that support is a bulwark or counterweight against a far greater threat or threats. Still more clearly, one extends support because the object of that support is the only or best available alternative against a greater, more insidious danger. It is a matter of the hierarchy of contradictions; of judging which one is primary and which is secondary in a given stage or phase of history, or a given conjuncture.

At the time he was elected to office and until the successful completion of the war, Mahinda Rajapaksa was far more solution than problem, and was by no means the main danger to the interests of Sri Lanka, its peoples and the anti-imperialist cause as a whole. Though the case is less clear and more complex in the post-war period, this remains so, perhaps to a far lesser extent, as long as (a) Diaspora and Tamil Nadu based pro-Tiger secessionism and external hegemonic interventionism remain a threat and (b) Ranil Wickremasinghe and his UNP remain the only real alternative in terms of the electoral endgame. (Whatever upheavals and however radical, the endgame in Sri Lankan politics at the centre, is always electoral). Were both or indeed either condition to be absent, the entire analysis would be subject to change.

Now, is this my convenient reconstruction or is it the structure of real choices that prevailed when I supported Mahinda Rajapaksa? Let us turn to a scholar whose perspective is almost totally at variance with my own. In a recent Routledge publication, Bradford University’s David Lewis reassesses the war and the diplomatic battle from a perspective that is sharply hostile to the final war and the Rajapaksa administration. (See David Lewis, 2010: The failure of a liberal peace: Sri Lanka’s counterinsurgency in global perspective, Conflict, Security & Development, 10:5, 647-671) Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Co-operation and Security in the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, Lewis headed the International Crisis Group’s Sri Lanka programme in 2006-7. 

“…From 2005 onwards the new government led by President Rajapaksa rejected all of the explicit or implicit premises that were associated with the conflict resolution mechanisms of the peace process: that the government and LTTE had parity; that there was no privileged status for the sovereign state; that changes to territorial integrity—either through federalism or forms of confederation—were possible avenues towards conflict resolution; and that only external mediation and oversight could enable a settlement to be achieved”. (p 652)

The choice was clear: either these ‘premises’ or their rejection.  I criticised and rejected them from the outset, as did the majority of Sri Lankan people later. My support for Mahinda Rajapaksa as presidential candidate and president was because he stood opposed to or was the only candidate critical of these premises, while the other candidate was their co-architect and agent. I continue that basic support for Mahinda Rajapaksa today, although in a far more nuanced manner, because those who stand against him (except for those forces to the left of him) are those who supported these ‘premises’ or did not oppose them, and who wish to punish him and Sri Lanka’s military for rejecting those premises. That basic support will continue as long as those conditions exist and preponderate.

David Lewis sets out Rajapaksa’s response: “Rajapakse rejected any notion that the LTTE was an equal partner in negotiations; he refused to acknowledge its claim to be the ‘sole representative of the Tamil people’, and instead labelled it as ‘the demonic forces of terror’. The state was declared ‘indivisible’ and no concessions either in territory or political power would be ceded to the LTTE; instead Rajapakse aimed for a ‘single country unified under a single standard’.  Finally, external mediation would no longer be required…” (Ibid)

I not only supported and defended this response; I had been advocating it for years. My stand did not derive from any variant of Sinhala nationalism. If it did, it should have been limited to the Sinhalese and not proved capable of obtaining broad support including from progressive and anti-imperialist global forces.

Again, David Lewis coming as he does from a contrary standpoint, provides objective confirmation of the global stakes.

“…This shift—if it develops more broadly—will be the result primarily of a reassertion of sovereignty norms against the liberal norms and conflict resolution practices which have made up the international peace-building agenda of the past two decades…The various elements of this approach to peace-building, which was institutionalised in a range of interventions from Bosnia to East Timor, came to be labelled (primarily by its critics) as the ‘liberal peace’, a set of policies and programmes that often prescribed liberal political and economic policies in conflict-affected areas as part of a broader international effort to bring an end to civil conflict…” (p649)

“This shift in approaches to conflict resolution was also encouraged by a change in attitudes and norms related to state sovereignty. In the Cold War period sovereign states had a special status, and governments held a privileged position in any conflict resolution process, relegating opposition movements to the subordinate position of “rebels”’. The maintenance of existing state structures and their territorial integrity took precedence over claims of self-determination and movements for secession. Only in specific circumstances, such as that of an anti-colonial liberation movement, could ‘rebel groups’ claim a special status that conferred international legitimacy. In other circumstances, such as the Biafra conflict in Nigeria, or Katanga in the Congo, international support was primarily provided to the central government; the norms of sovereignty became increasingly embedded. In the early 1990s, the break-up of the USSR and Yugoslavia and the growth of supranational organisations, such as the EU, helped to undermine sovereignty norms, assisted also by the growth of non-governmental organisations and the ‘Third Wave’ democratisation processes…Nicholas Wheeler and others have argued that a new norm of ‘humanitarian intervention’, with obvious implications for sovereignty norms, began to gain ground in the UN in the 1990s.

These changes in norms related to sovereignty had a significant impact on the way governments dealt with armed rebellion and civil wars. In these new approaches to resolving conflict, states and non-state actors were often given effective parity in peace negotiations, and secession or significant levels of autonomy were considered a possible avenue for conflict resolution. The inviolability of state sovereignty came under attack, fuelled by a new privileging of democratic values and universal understandings of human rights, which gave new status to groups claiming to be the victims of state repression. The emergence of new states such as Kosovo and East Timor were the logical, if controversial, outcome of these new approaches…” (Ibid p 650-1)

“The Sri Lankan peace process included many of the elements and approaches that had become familiar during the 1990s. The peace process was heavily internationalised…” (p 651)

What Michael Colin Cooke cannot understand, but David Lewis does, is what this meant from the point of view of contemporary global dynamics. I might disclose with some modest degree of satisfaction, that the latter devotes considerable attention to the battles in the UN HRC, their embedding in the world context and their implications, citing me (in GV!) a few times:

“However, it was not merely this direct bilateral financial and strategic support that assisted Sri Lanka nor the military hardware that it could access from China and from other countries such as Pakistan or Ukraine. Sri Lanka also ably took advantage of shifts in the international geopolitical balance to promote and benefit from changes in the understanding of international norms …related to international responses to internal conflicts.Two normative areas were of particular relevance: those norms that reinforce or undermine particular understandings of state sovereignty; and those norms that propose limitations on the use of force in internal conflicts or advocate peaceful resolution rather than the use of force. In both areas, key influencing states in international forums (such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, Indonesia and South Africa) have tended to support a reversion to pre-1991 norms, supporting maximalist understandings of state sovereignty and resisting norms that constrain particular ways in which force is used inside state borders. 

Many of the battles over conflict-related norms between Sri Lanka and Europe took place in UN institutions, primarily the Human Rights Council (HRC), of which Sri Lanka was a member until 2008…it was Sri Lanka which generally had the best of these diplomatic battles. On 27May 2009 a HRC resolution congratulated Sri Lanka on defeating the LTTE… Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa were notable supporters of the Sri Lankan resolution…During the conflict China and Russia—backed by some other states, such as Vietnam and Libya—made it clear that they would block any efforts to place the Sri Lankan crisis formally on the Security Council agenda. Under pressure from the UK and France, in particular, Security Council members finally agreed a compromise statement in May 2009, expressing ‘grave concern over the worsening humanitarian crisis in north-east Sri Lanka’, although this too was produced without a formal discussion in the Security Council chamber. Similarly, a move to produce an investigation into war crimes in Sri Lanka came directly from the office of the Secretary-General, and did not require a Security Council vote, much to the displeasure of Russia.

These successful alliance-building efforts by Sri Lanka in the HRC and the Security Council reflect broader trends…

There is also evidence of growing resistance to other controversial conflict-related norms, such as the Responsibility to Protect concept. Although most major powers, including China and India, formally adopted the concept in 2005, they have resisted its application in a number of conflict environments, and there have been attempts to dilute its application and scope…” (ibid pp. 658-9)

“…Although this process of contestation reflects shifting power relations, and the increasing influence of China, Russia and other ‘Rising Powers’, it does not mean that small states are simply the passive recipients of norms created and contested by others. In fact, Sri Lankan diplomats have been active norm entrepreneurs in their own right, making significant efforts to develop alternative norms of conflict management, linking for example Chechnya and Sri Lanka in a discourse of state-centric peace enforcement. They have played a leading role in UN forums such as the UN HRC, where Sri Lankan delegates have helped ensure that the HRC has become an arena, not so much for the promotion of the liberal norms around which it was designed, but as a space in which such norms are contested, rejected or adapted in unexpected ways. 

….As a member of the UN HRC Sri Lanka has played an important role in asserting new, adapted norms opposing both secession and autonomy as possible elements in peacebuilding—trends that are convergent with views expressed by China, Russia and India…The Sri Lankan conflict may be seen as the beginning of a new international consensus about conflict management, in which sovereignty and non-interference norms are reasserted, backed not only by Russia and China but also by democratic states such as Brazil.

If the international normative environment begins to fracture further as non-liberal states gain greater influence over international governance structures, there may be a break-down in common understandings of normative approaches to conflict resolution, reflecting the potentially sharp differences between liberal norms and the influential alternative approaches that …describe as ‘Eastphalia’.” (pp. 658-661)

What was at stake in the Sri Lankan conflict and what continues to some degree (with the raucous calls for an ‘international inquiry’) to be at stake, is conformity or resistance to the post Cold War global order. David Lewis, a supporter of that order, understands this. Michael Colin Cooke’s reliance on Noel Malcolm’s nonsensical narrative about Yugoslavia and Kosovo clearly reveals that he does not. Here is what Fidel Castro had to say just months ago, in the aftermath of the Libya intervention, about Kosovo:

“…NATO assumed this global repressive role as soon as the USSR, which had served as the U.S. pretext for its creation, disappeared. Its criminal purpose became obvious in Serbia, a country of Slavic origin, whose people heroically struggled against the Nazis during World War II. In March of 1999, when the countries of this nefarious organization, in its efforts to break up Yugoslavia after the death of Josip Broz Tito, sent in troops to support the Kosovar secessionists, they met with strong resistance on the part of the country´s experienced forces which remained intact. The Yankee administration, advised by the right-wing Spanish government of José María Aznar, attacked Serbian television stations, bridges over the Danube River and Belgrade, the capital of the country. The embassy of the People’s Republic of China was destroyed by Yankee bombs and several functionaries died. This could not have been any mistake, as those responsible alleged. A great number of Serbian patriots lost their lives. President Slobodan Miloševic, overwhelmed by the power of the aggressors and the disappearance of the USSR, submitted to NATO demands and allowed the presence of troops from this alliance within Kosovo, under United Nations command, which finally led to his political defeat and subsequent prosecution by the less than impartial court of The Hague. He died under mysterious circumstances in prison. Had the Serbian leader resisted a few more days, NATO would have faced a serious crisis which was about to erupt.” (Reflections of Fidel Castro: NATO’s Genocidal Role, Oct 23/24, 2011)

Deriving from Fidel’s re-emphasis in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, on national independence, sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity against attempts at ‘dismembering’ ( his term) countries,  this was precisely my understanding of Kosovo and its implications for Sri Lanka, which David Lewis correctly notes that I linked and deployed in my discourse in Geneva.  Michael Colin Cooke’s failure to comprehend the turning point that was Kosovo is symptomatic of his larger failure to comprehend — especially from the perspective of the South– imperialism, hegemonism and the struggle for global equilibrium today. He also fails to understand why every government or state born of a revolutionary or liberation struggle, as well as governments led by those with a revolutionary project or provenance, ranging from Cuba to Vietnam, from Brazil to China, from Uruguay to Angola, from Venezuela to Laos, from Ecuador to Ethiopia, from Venezuela to Mozambique, defend and support Sri Lanka in the terms, for the reasons of principle, and to the extent that I do (“idealization of the current government” having nothing whatsoever to do with it). Debating Marxism with such a man is a waste of time.

In the face of Western pressure towards the end of the war, Mahinda Rajapaksa did what Fidel thought Milosevic should have but did not. Sri Lanka did not blink. Any project worthy of support (especially by progressives) that seeks to supplant or supersede Mahinda Rajapaksa must defend the gains made by him in matters of national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and unity. It must support what is correct in what he has done and is doing, while being critical of what he should do but is not, and what he shouldn’t but is. So long as there is real pressure and threat from outside, the Sri Lankan people will not opt for anyone who is perceived as a weaker leader than Mahinda on these issues. The Sri Lankan people will only turn to a leadership or project that is more enlightened, pluralist and progressive; that can defend and consolidate his gains using ‘smart power’ while rectifying his errors– never someone who is perceived as a weaker defender of national independence, state sovereignty and the ‘general will’ of the people.

• Poll: Prospects for Peace in Sri Lanka in 2007
• Is Sri Lanka China’s Georgia?
• Debating sovereignty in Sri Lanka
• Once more into the breach
• Is Sri Lanka in danger of being held accountable by the International Criminal Court?

Photo courtesy JDS

The New Year brought a valuable gift in my email. It was a dossier entitled ‘Seeking Space for State Reform’ and carried an even more beguiling subtitle, ‘Consensus and Contradictions in Public Perceptions’.  A publication of the ICES (the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, from and of which I hadn’t heard for quite a while), it was a product of the Politics of State Reform Project. What made it compelling reading was that it was nothing less than a ‘National Survey of Grassroots Perceptions of State Reform’, which, translated, meant that it was a recent survey of public opinion across all communities, about the ethnic conflict and the  various reform proposals to address or resolve it.

Once you’ve dispensed with the layers of very proper titles, you realize what the report contains. It tells you what Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims think, today, over two years after the war, about the most contentious issues that have divided us over the post-independence decades. As if that weren’t important enough, it thereby tells you what the firm (possibly solid) contours of communitarian consciousness are, what the problem is, what the possible options are and which ones are impossible. Thus, the ICES survey gets to the crux of the matter.

The statistics of the survey conducted from June to mid August 2010 reveal the problem, but also indicate the solution.  At its starkest the problem is that a shade over half of Sri Lankan Tamils polled, appear to think that the solution to Sri Lanka’s travails is an independent Tamil state. Simply put, 54% of Sri Lanka’s Tamils (who comprise 14% of the sample) support a separate state, i.e. a Tamil Eelam. Set that against 95% of Sri Lankan Sinhalese (who comprise 72% of the sample) who stand for a unitary – that’s right, unitary, not merely united—form of state, with a stratospheric 96% of the view that the unitary state is “necessary to prevent the disintegration of the country”. This is also the view of the third largest community, which is the second largest minority, namely the Sri Lankan Moors, 90% of whom agree that a unitary state is “necessary to maintain a sense of national unity”. So, the Sri Lankan problem is the probably unbridgeable chasm between a plurality of the minority Tamils who are for a separate state and a near-totality of the Sinhalese majority and the Muslim minority, who are for a unitary state.

The second chasm is between 90% of Sinhala opinion which holds terrorism responsible for the conflict and the much lower 42% of SL Tamil opinion that holds the same view. In political terms, the refusal of the TNA to denounce Tiger terrorism is unlikely to render that party more acceptable to the Sinhala majority which it has to convince or at least ensure the benign neutrality of, if it is to obtain the reforms it seeks.

Is federalism a simple and obvious solution perhaps? No, because here too the gap is as wide as to be unbridgeable, with almost 90% of SL Tamils for it and nearly 80% of Sinhalese opposed. Sinhala opinion may have been more malleable had the Tamil preference for federalism accompanied a Tamil majority option for a single, united Sri Lanka; in other words if a majority of Tamil opinion were for a federal solution and simultaneously against an independent state for the Tamils. Matters are perceived far less sympathetically when the option for federalism lies alongside the option for a separate state. This understandably reinforces Sinhala misgivings that federalism will not be an alternative but an enabler for secession and is therefore far too risky an experiment.

Perhaps this situation in the Tamil consciousness was influenced by the war, but perhaps not. Perhaps it always was the case, and therefore Prabhakaran was not solely mould but also mirror of secessionist Tamil opinion. The contours of Tamil consciousness, which the doyenne of Delhi’s Lankanologists, Prof Urmila Phadnis termed ‘an autonomist-secessionist continuum’– and the gut instinct of the Sinhalese which understands this reality—has put paid to federalism as a possible solution.

Coupled with the low degree of acceptance among the Sinhalese of the Indo-Lanka agreement, regional autonomy and the Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga ‘packages’ of 1995-2000, it would seem at first glance that there is no intermediate solution. Interestingly the CBK proposals are the single most unpopular of all reform proposals among the Sinhalese (with a 67% disapproval rating, higher than that of the Indo-Lanka accord, with 63%).

Happily, there is an intermediate solution; a saddle-point. Going by the ICES figures, the Sinhala people are not dogmatically in favor of an unreformed unitary state. Theirs is not an ironclad conservative or neoconservative mindset. Strikingly, the data reveals that the Sinhalese are sensitive to minority grievances, do not support/are opposed to an unreformed state and are acutely conscious of the dangers of lack of reform.

“Significantly, a majority of the Sinhalese (61.8%) also agree that the legitimate grievances of minority communities and lack of equal treatment for all citizens (61.4%) were causes for the conflict.” (p 8 )

 “However, all the communities…including a majority of the Sinhalese (58.9%) disagreed with the statement that there was no need to reform the state.” (p16)

“A majority of the Sinhalese agree along with the minorities that without state reform the minorities would continue to have grievances (80%), continue to be discriminated against (68.7%), development and economic progress would be hampered (76.5%), the international community would not help the country (62.8%) and significantly that even a return to armed conflict was possible (72.2%). These findings indicate a greater awareness among the majority community about the legitimacy of minority demands and the need to provide a constitutional or political settlement to the ethnic conflict despite the decisive defeat of the LTTE by the Sri Lankan state.” (p18)

The reforms that the Sinhalese support are also not of hyper-centralization, but of measured, re-calibrated opening. The Sinhala consensus is best described as that of moderate, centrist nationalism. This study of public opinion on state reforms shows that the majority of the majority is opposed to reforms that go beyond a unitary framework but are for those reforms that stay within a broadly unitary state. The Sinhalese are not against the reform of the unitary state, and instead are for the reform of that state. Senior Minister  and veteran leftist Prof Tissa Vitharana comes across as an unsung hero in that the APRC proposals issuing from the process he chaired “are the only state reform proposals which the Sinhalese seem to find acceptable with a significant majority of people in the ‘agreed to some extent’ and ‘agree’ categories over the ‘disagree’ categories.” (p 15)

Even if one were to consider the APRC as bypassed by the flow of events, the situation remains hopeful because the Sinhalese, though against “regional autonomy” (North-East merger), are fairly solidly in favor of provincial level devolution and a strengthened, not a weakened, system of provincial councils.

84% of Sinhalese think that Provincial Councils give “fair access to resources”, while 85% think that PCs “give all communities a voice at the provincial level” and 76% believe that “PCs will resolve the problems faced by the minority community”.

When the crucial question “can enhanced devolution of powers to the Provincial Councils solve the ethnic conflict?” is posed the study tells us that “In general, when the Agree and Agree to some extent categories are taken together, the findings indicate more support for, than against for Provincial Councils as a solution to the ethnic conflict among all the communities in the country.” (p26)

This conclusion is sharpened in the next segment entitled ‘The most necessary state reform initiatives to solve the ethnic conflict’, the findings of which tell us that:

“The full implementation of the Provincial Council Act was approved by all the communities. This was also the level of devolution of power which a majority of Sinhalese (60%) and Sri Lankan Moors (92.3%) found the most acceptable…All the communities support the establishment of a second chamber in parliament and greater power sharing at the centre.” (p27)

The Conclusions of the ICES study clearly re-state the only possible answer to the problem:

“The statistics provided above indicate that…Among all the communities, enhanced devolution of power to the provinces is seen as a possible solution to the ethnic conflict. Provincial Councils were the level of devolution of power most acceptable to the Sinhalese and the Sri Lankan Moors. The Sri Lankan and Upcountry Tamils favour greater devolution or a system of federalism like that found in India. What is significant however, is that there is more space for devolution than ever before, because of the Sinhalese support for Provincial Councils, which a significant number of Sri Lankan and Up Country Tamils find acceptable.” (p30)

Every decent opinion survey contains surprises. A big one in the ICES data set is the congruence of opinion among the Sinhalese and Tamils with regard to the West, and more specifically, “a conspiracy by the West to undermine Sri Lanka” as a causative factor of the conflict. Roughly 63% of Sinhalese and 70% of SL Tamils polled – yes, a higher percentage of Tamils than Sinhalese—holds that this is a factor.

To return to our main problem, a solution exists, but it requires a shift in our thinking.  The problem of Tamil political alienation can neither be eradicated by repression nor totally resolved by reform, not least because the slim majority or a sizeable segment of Tamils seem to hold onto a solution that is not a reform but lies outside a united, indivisible state. The problem of the identity claims of the Tamil collectivity can be solved only to a degree. Beyond that, it will have to be managed.

The results of elections after the Arab Spring show that citizens in that region are increasingly opting for a moderate nationalism (and a modern, liberal Islam). The results of the ICES survey show that the great majority of Sri Lanka’s citizens are also moderate nationalists. The country’s tragedy however, has been that the nationalists are not moderate or are insufficiently so, while the moderates are not nationalist or are inadequately so.

According to sophisticated soothsayers interpreting the ancient Mayan prophecy, the year 2012 is not one in which the world will end, but the one in which there is an ending of an old era and a transition to a new age, marked by the  shift to a new paradigm.   In Sri Lanka’s case it may have to entail a move away from two contending paradigms– one of a brittle, unreformed unitary state and another of reconciliation through an unfeasible federalism– to a centrist Realism which combines moderate reform with the ‘containment’ (a la George Kennan) of the ideological and political fundamentalism that is the Tamil separatist sensibility.

• Federalism: Some debates never die
• On “traitors” and federalism: Beyond the hypocrisy, towards collaboration
• TAMIL NADU, THE INDIAN MODEL AND DEVOLUTION
• Responding to Sumanasri Liyanage: On Mahinda bowing down to the ‘differing majority’ and On changing the terminology from ‘federal’ to ‘power sharing’
• A response to Dayan Jayatilleka’s “Mindless emotionalism and absence of thinking in Tamil politics”

Photo, courtesy JDS, is of Sri Lanka’s President reading the LLRC report on a ‘haansi putuwa‘ at his official residence.

Though not without flaws and lacuna, the long awaited LLRC report does not disappoint, and reaches high standards, ranking with the best reports emanating over the decades from official and semi-official/autonomous Sri Lankan commissions, reviews and probes. It is a serious, thoughtful, carefully written and constructed text, striking in its fair-mindedness and balance. It deserves constructive engagement with, by all concerned Sri Lankan citizens and those in the world community who are concerned about and with Sri Lanka.

Let us first dispense with the flaws and gaps, of which there are chiefly two. Firstly, the Report echoes the conventional wisdom, as does the Norwegian (NORAD) post-mortem, that the CFA was the result and in the context of the military weakness of the Sri Lankan state. This is factually incorrect since it ignores the chronology of events, in which the deadly LRP missions which were taking down the Tiger command structure, followed and not preceded the disastrous Agni Kheela operation and the devastating raid on Katunayake airport. Thus the lopsided character of the CFA which heavily favoured the LTTE did not reflect the real balance of forces and was not inevitable. Secondly, the LLRC Report draws a veil of silence over the even more lopsided post-tsunami relief mechanism, the PTOMS, which was negotiated at the tail end of the Chandrika presidency and was frozen in its dangerous middle tier, by the Supreme Court, responding to a petition by the JVP. These errors and omissions should not, however, detract from the essentials merit of the Report.

The Report is Janus-faced in the best, original sense of the term. It looks back at the war and the context of the conflict and provides a perspective of the kind of society we need. It constitutes the only road map so far, to a durable peace and a better future. It does not stop at a vision, sometimes more implicit than explicit, but pinpoints wrongs and shortcomings that require rectification while listing reforms that cry out for urgent implementation.

Responses to the LLRC report have been of two sorts.  One is that it is basically laudable and balanced, containing recommendations which should be promptly acted upon.  This response then subdivides between those who are hopeful of action and others who are pessimistic or cynical.  The second response is that the LLRC report is far from satisfactory, and is a whitewash or to change the metaphor, a sweeping under the carpet of war crimes and accountability issues.

To my mind the first response –with its optimistic and pessimistic subsets– constitutes a reasonable reaction, while the second does not.  I say this because those who dismiss the report as His Master’s Voice make the fundamental mistake of being teleological in their approach. Having concluded a priori, that the Sri Lankan state and armed forces were guilty of war crimes and/or crimes against humanity, they fault the LLRC Report for not having arrived at the same conclusion, and dismiss it out of hand, echoing calls for an international inquiry.

These critics overlook or fail to undertake at least five basic tasks. They fail to grapple or even make reference to the rigorous reconstruction and argumentation that leads the Report to conclude that despite episodic crimes, civilian casualties were not, for the most part, intentional. They ignore the fact that this finding is the same as that which was arrived at by at least two impeccably non-state, independent sources, the oldest civil society think tank in Sri Lanka, the Marga Institute and its respected founder and outstanding liberal thinker Godfrey Gunatilleke, as well as a joint commission of three private sector business confederations. They fail to examine and disprove the extensive and solid argument on international humanitarian law in the LLRC report.  They disregard the listing of specific cases, based on testimony, which require independent investigation. They ignore the chapter on Human rights, which, unlike that on international humanitarian law, is quite critical of the status quo.

The Report also cuts like a surgeon’s knife through the old questions as to what the grievances of the Tamil community are, which of them are genuine and legitimate and how they differ from the grievances of the Sinhala community. This is done in excellent segments entitled ‘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’ (pp291-294, 369-370).

Perhaps the single most important contribution of the LLRC Report is its clear and unambiguous identification of the causes of the Sri Lankan conflict and crisis, the resolution of which remains the central challenge before the country. The LLRC has, in short, undertaken a diagnosis and provided a prescription.

“The Commission takes the view that the root cause of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka lies in the failure of successive Governments to address the genuine grievances of the Tamil people. The country may not have been confronted with a violent separatist agenda, if the political consensus at the time of independence had been sustained and if policies had been implemented to build up and strengthen the confidence of the minorities around the system which had gained a reasonable measure of acceptance. A political solution is imperative to address the causes of the conflict…” (p 291, articles 8.150, 8.151)

The LLRC Report justifies its most ambitious claim, which is to provide a post-war programme and pathway.

“… To this end, the success of ending armed conflict must be invested in an all-inclusive political process of dialogue and accommodation so that the conflict by other means will not continue… However, if these expectations were to become a reality in the form of a multi-ethnic nation at peace with itself in a democratic Sri Lanka, the Government and all political leaders must manifest political will and sincerity of purpose to take the necessary decisions to ensure the good-faith implementation of the Commission’s recommendations... While not being an exhaustive agenda to address, let alone cure, all ills of post conflict Sri Lanka, the recommendations of the Commission could nevertheless constitute a framework for action by all stakeholders, in particular the Government, political parties and community leaders. This framework would go a long way in constructing a platform for consolidating post-conflict peace and security as well as amity and cooperation within and between the diverse communities in Sri Lanka.” (Preamble, pp.1-2)

Overall, perhaps the most vital contribution of the Report is its potential to re-balance the Sri Lankan policy (and political) discourse, re-constituting a tragically vacated middle ground or centre space. Indeed, the LLRC report is that rarity: a welcome example of an enlightened Middle Path, at a time of strident affirmations of dogmatic fundamental positions.

• A slumbering LLRC: The image of reconciliation in Sri Lanka?
• The official report of the LLRC
• Archive of Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) submissions and media reports
• The LLRC report and ‘accountability’ in Sri Lanka
• The Final Report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission: A Response

[World Philosophy Day is a UNESCO initiative to make philosophical reflection and spaces for the stimulation of critical thinking and debate, accessible to all. As part of a series of events organized throughout the day at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on November 17, 2011, the Democracy and Philosophy section of UNESCO, invited Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, Ambassador and Permanent Delegate of Sri Lanka to moderate a discussion at an event designated Café Philo (philosophical café) on the topic of “Political Movements for Change: What Ethics?” and introduce his book “Fidel’s Ethics of Violence” in support of his presentation.  Msgr. Francesco Follo, Professor of the History of Philosophy and Permanent Observer of the Vatican to UNESCO, presented a critical response as co-moderator.]

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The book that I wrote entails reflections on the ethics of violence as part of political transformation. It did not come entirely out of an academic exercise. It came as the result of an attempt to apply ideas and also to reflect on action and the deflection of those ideas by reality. Sri Lanka as you know has been a very violent place and in 1989 when the civil war in El Salvador was at its peak, the prestigious periodical, The Economist (London) referred to Sri Lanka as the bloodiest place in the world. We in Sri Lanka have experienced all possible forms of political violence except — and this is an important exception — for the replacement of elected civilian government by the military; that has never happened. But we have had an ethnic or secessionist civil war for thirty years and we have had two ultra-left or far left insurrections in the southern part of the country which is dominated by the ethnic majority. The latest Norwegian study of the ethno-secessionist war gives the casualty figure of 80,000 and the casualty figures for the other two insurrections vary. So Sri Lanka has been a crucible to test political ideas; all the ideas were thrown into the vessel: the ideas of national liberation, socialism, self-determination, sovereignty, democracy. As somebody who was an observer- participant or participant-observer and an analyst of the crisis, I could not but help try to squeeze something theoretical, something conceptual, out of it. My reflections were informed by my training of choice as a political scientist, a field which I studied and which I teach. I am not, in that sense, a philosopher, unlike Msgr. Follo. But my reflections as a political scientist have brought me back into political philosophy and therefore also to philosophy itself. That is the background.

Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, the author of the famous Indian book on state-craft, the Arthashastra, a very ancient text, says that “Philosophy above all else teaches the correct and incorrect use of force.” Now force is used either by those who want to preserve the status quo and resist change or those who want to change the status quo. Force in the form of violence, legal or illegal, is sometimes used by those who resist repression; by those who visit repression on others; and by those who seek to transform that which exists in one way or the other- either turn the clock back or push it forward (as they see it). So we cannot escape the ubiquity or force, by which I include violence. Does this ubiquity mean, do the horrors of violence mean, that philosophically, ethically, the discussion is inexorably polarized along one of two lines? At one end would be a position that is identified (not entirely correctly) as a realist position or a hard-nosed position, or as Henry James would call it, a tough-minded attitude. This attitude runs along the lines of “well if that is what it takes to get it done, whether it is to put down a rebellion or to take a rebellion to success, whatever it takes is necessary, and if it is necessary it is justifiable”. This is one point of view. The latest incarnation of that was the so-called Global War on Terror on one hand, and on the other, 9/11, the methods and modes of struggle of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the LTTE (the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) of Sri Lanka.

At the other point of the spectrum is the philosophical position of absolute non-violence that is associated mostly with Mahatma Gandhi. There is also an intermediate position, a third position, identified perhaps with the ANC, and that is tactical violence; not violence as a strategy for transformation but selective violence as armed propaganda. These are been the positions that are been available in the field.

But sixty years ago, here in this great city of Paris, the most significant debate on the subject took place between two friends whose friendship would not survive the debate. One was a practicing philosopher, the other a writer, respectively Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Though it was not a part of that debate, precisely in that same year, 1951, and precisely here at UNESCO, Jean-Paul Sartre made the point that what we must object to is “unnecessary violence”, not violence as such, and that if one were to oppose violence as such, one really justifies the violence of the capitalist status quo (i.e. what Slavoj Zizek currently terms “structural violence”). Camus for his part made another vital distinction. His conclusion was that violence is justified when it is part of rebellion, but the moment that its objectives are more globally transformational or revolutionary, the moment it shifts from rebellion to revolution, it entails the widening of the scale and scope of violence and leads to its ‘permanentizing’ in the form of a post-revolutionary regime.

In my book, I have attempted to intervene in that debate to say that there is another position that is possible apart from these three. To recapitulate the three positions are, firstly, the ‘absolutising’ of violence or the refusal to entertain ethical considerations in the use of violence; secondly, the Gandhian counter-position in which the moral high ground is permanently occupied because one does not resort to violence whatever and however violent the provocation; thirdly, the intermediate or sub-position of the tactical, as distinct from strategic, use of violence. I have argued that there is a way to transcend the limitations imposed by Camus who maintained that a revolt or rebellion can remain within the bounds of humanism but that if it moves to the more ambitious objective of revolution it then risks and almost certainly entails a brutalizing violence with no ethical bounds.

Having lived through, and in a way participated peripherally in the Sri Lankan turmoil, and having compared and contrasted the political behavior of the Sri Lankan actors with those in other parts of the world, I have been always brought back to the example of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, the Cuban revolution and to a certain extent, to the Nicaraguan Sandinista revolution.

Today, when you look at Latin America, what you would find is that those movements for transformation which succeeded are ones which have not transgressed the ethical bounds of humanism. Furthermore, even those movements which failed quite utterly in a military sense, such as the Tupamaros in Uruguay, made a tremendous political come-back because they did not violate humanist ethics or made a subsequent self-criticism of any transgressions from the moral high ground.

The moral high ground is the most valuable of political territory and it is possible to hold this territory even if one has to engage in violence as resistance to repression or as a mode of overall transformation. It is an exception, but it is possible. It is possible because the proof exists in the example, the practice, the consistent practice of Fidel Castro, of Che. They demonstrate that it is possible to be, precisely, revolutionaries, and practice a higher ethics be it as guerillas requesting the assistance of ICRC to tend to captive soldiers, or as a State fighting a counter revolution backed by a gigantic power, or as a doomed guerilla force (Che noted in his Diary that in the course of an ambush he could have shot a Bolivian army soldier who was at the back of a truck but desisted because the soldier looked like he was 14 years old) or as a State engaged in a major war, twelve years in Angola, deploying 300,000 troops from 1976 to 1988 without one accusation of an atrocity even by the United States at the Human Rights Commission in Geneva. So it is possible, while deploying all forms of violence as a State and/or an anti-state movement, to remain within the bounds of ethics and a radical humanism. This has been my point: it has been done and therefore it is possible to do it, and if you do it, it is not only correct ethically, but it is also a key to success and survival.

So in that sense one is able to transform or transcend the divide between realism and idealism because Fidel Castro remained in power and the revolution has defended itself from all forms of counter-revolutionary projects. This is consonant with Lenin’s notion of power, especially State power. Therefore it has been possible to transcend the divide between realism –where the central question is the retention or acquisition of power- and idealism, where the central question has been that of right or wrong. If one is able to combine the two, then it is possible, whether as human being or as project, to present a different way of being in the world, a way of being that corresponds in the final analysis, to a notion that has been very important to me, the notion of the Hero.

In one sense, what I have tried to do here is to apply or transpose a particular body of thought which derives from and has been best worked out within Christian theology: the theory or theology of Just War. Of all the religions, perhaps for certain specific reasons, it is Christianity that gave rise to this reflection, the grappling with the question. One the one hand you have a religious founder whose message is taken to be the message of peace and love. This will be questioned by the liberation theologians who would say that justice was as important as peace and love, but the ‘Prince of Peace’ is the way Jesus Christ had been described. On the other hand, the very success of Christianity meant that it had captured from below and inherited the Roman Empire or whatever was left of it. For the message of Christianity to be taken forward, the institutions were necessary. The institutions, the State or a transnational system had to be defended, and that brought up the question of violence. There was another factor, namely the Protestant schism and the intra-Christian wars. So, how to deal with the question of violence which seems to be at variance with the founding doctrine? This led to many rich reflections, and we have what is known as the Just War theory. However, Just War theory remains essentially applicable and applied to the behavior of States, because one of the justifications for a Just War is that it is declared by a legitimate authority, and a legitimate authority was thought to be established rulers or States.

This leaves a huge moral and ethical vacuum.  What of movements for resistance and rebellion? Is their violence therefore unconstrained? Liberation theology did not address this. Though in general I am in sympathy with liberation theology, and have been from the time I was a teenager, I do think that Cardinal Ratzinger, the present Pope Benedict, was correct when he made a brilliant short critique, in thesis form, I think it was in the 1980s. pointing out that the liberation theologians run the risk of opting for Barabbas. We know that Barabbas was an ultra-nationalist resistance fighter, a terrorist who fought against the Roman Empire. There was a choice and the people instigated or supported by the hierarchy of the religious clergy of that society at that time, opted for Barabbas.

Too often, including in my country, liberation theology has been used merely to say that whenever and wherever there is resistance against the status quo it is ok because it is in a just cause and for justice. Now this is just not good enough, because there has been too much barbarism which has been unleashed, not only by States but by movements that purported to transform societies: Pol Pot in Cambodia, the LTTE and JVP in Sri Lanka, Sendero Luminoso in Peru. I argue that you need to develop the doctrine of Just War in order that movements that purport to be for change apply it themselves, practice it, because it is not good enough to base yourself on the apriori notion that since you are fighting against injustice, your cause is just and therefore whatever you do is right.

Just War theory has two moves or moments: just cause or justice of the war itself (‘jus ad bellum’) and ascertaining (certainly with Thomas Aquinas’ developments) the just use of violence in war (‘jus in bello’). Not only must the war be just and fit certain criteria but you must be just in the way you wage it. Today there is a third, tentative, a not very well developed ‘move’ calling for a ‘just outcome’ or ‘just peace’. This is relevant, for instance, in a place like Sri Lanka, but it has not been theoretically worked out very much.

I think that it is very necessary to have a rigorous notion of just war, and this is especially true for movements and projects of transformation. One of the great strengths of movements that resist the status quo, movements for change, is precisely that they are morally and ethically superior to the conservative, reactionary, or elitist status quo. Now if that is to be true, it must be not only because of a self-proclamation, but demonstrably so in the actual, political and military conduct of such movements. Under what circumstances should they take up arms? There are certain structural pre-conditions. Che Guevara said that “if a regime has come into being by electoral means however fraudulent, the outbreak of insurrectional violence cannot be promoted”. But many so called Guevarists, such as the FARC of Colombia and the JVP of Sri Lanka, disregarded this.

There are certain criteria where it is justifiable and certain others where it is not (yet) justifiable to resort to violence. Even if one does resort to violence, how should that violence be practiced? There has to be a code. This is what Christian theology was wrestling with. Violence may be necessary, and if it becomes imperative then it has to be practiced in the right way. Saint Paul said that “it is not true what they say about Christians, that we say that it is permitted to do wrong in the cause of right, so that right may result”. He said that this is not what Christianity is about and I do not think this is what any religion is about, nor do I think it is what any movement for liberation should be about.

If a State crosses the red line of using lethal violence against non violent protests then it undermines its own existence; certainly a regime does. Similarly, if a movement for transformation consciously uses lethal violence against innocents, against the uninvolved, against non combatants, it loses its right to consider itself morally superior and almost inevitably it will lose the struggle it is engaged in.

Msgr. Francesco Follo pointed to the distinctions between ethics and law. I use the Schmitt versus Kelsen debate as a reference point, and my notion of law is perhaps biased by political science. If one believes that law is a superstructure which reflects power relations, then a movement for political change is more likely to respect the notion of ethics rather than the notion of law. So this is why I still take my chances with the ethical rather than the legal.

I must confess here that my own attitude towards philosophy is somewhat ambivalent. That ambivalence derives from a particular exchange during Christ’s Passion. To me there is a philosophical question which is brought up in the Passion of Jesus Christ, and there is a leap to a post-philosophical position. In the exchange, the only classically philosophical issue that is asked is when Pontius Pilate raises the question: ‘what is truth?’ Significantly the Bible says that Jesus remained silent. To me this is a very important rupture in history of thought because a different personality, a philosopher or teacher of philosophy, would have used the opening for a long disquisition into the nature of truth. But the Gospel says that Jesus remained silent. To me, this is in a way, the ‘end of philosophy’ and the silence of Jesus perhaps points to the next level of philosophy which is the importance of a ‘way of being’. This is what I am trying in my humble way to bring into the conversation, in this book. A way of being, whether it is as a rebel or a revolutionary, whether you are fighting for something you believe in or you try to defend something you believe in. Ethically is it possible to do anything and everything that it takes to achieve an objective, or must we also be conscious of a way of being and of our way of being, in the world?

I do not focus on updating the theory of Just War for states because that has been done, particularly in the West by those such as Michael Walzer. What has not happened, where there is a theoretical absence, is in the non-state or anti-systemic space. This is where I have tried to make an intervention.

Is it possible – Nietzsche would say that it is not – to think philosophically in terms other than that of hierarchy? Is not the more important issue what that hierarchy is based on? The crucial question of values was brought up, and here I believe that Nietzsche was correct when he referred repeatedly to the transvaluation of values.

Regarding the debate about universality, I think that a synthesis is possible in this debate. If above all else we are human, then there are certain values deriving from that common, shared, condition of humanity which are universal. But the error that is made is two-fold. On the one hand there are those who deny that there are any kinds of values that are universal and counter-pose ‘Asian values’ or ‘home grown’ values to universality. By doing so, what it really means is that you do not accept the universality of the human condition — that all beings are created or born as equal and equally human, and possess inalienable equal rights. This is one cardinal error. The other is to forget what Lenin called “uneven development”. Mao and Althusser reminded us that absolutely everything develops unevenly. Universality does not manifest itself universally and at the same time! Regis Debray was correct when he said that the historical clock shows different times from Caracas to Paris. I would say that universality is reflected and refracted through the presence of the regional, the local. One may argue in terms of stages of development that certain societies are on the same path but are not at the same point of evolution. Another perspective or a variant is that there are different pathways, different trajectories. Whichever explanation you choose, it is important to understand that the universal acts through the particular.

So the denial of universality is one philosophical and methodological error and the failure to understand uneven development and the dialectic of the universal and the particular, is another. I think we should avoid both. But I remain passionately committed to the notion of universality and universal values which derive from our common human condition. The values of humanism are part of these universal values.

Msgr. Follo evoked Novalis who said that philosophy gives the courage to go on. Martin Heidegger says that the crucial question of philosophy is to find a place to dwell. But in order to find a place to dwell you have to go on. Then again Bob Dylan said there’s “no direction home”. So these are the problems of philosophy, to find the direction home, to find a place to dwell and find the courage to go on.

• LOOKING INTO THE ABYSS
• Brotherhood Bloodshed Again?
• Fidel’s Ethics of Violence
• Circles of Violence: A Return to Sri Lanka
• “I need to move out of this camp and have a place of my own”

The Norwegian (NORAD) commissioned study ‘Pawns of Peace: Evaluation of Norwegian peace efforts in Sri Lanka, 1997-2009’, is useful and good, but analytically flawed at its very core. It is useful because it shows us how the ‘liberal peace’ discourse goes and how that constituency views the conflict in retrospect. This does not mean that this perspective has it all wrong. Indeed the study has quite a few things right. In any case it is crucial that the Sri Lankan readership sees how our contemporary history is perceived and reconstructed. It is useful to look into a mirror, while being conscious as to whether it is a slightly or greatly distorting one. Taken as a whole, the Norwegian study is a valuable and welcome addition to the growing literature on the war and our times—with the strongest part being the analysis of the International Dimension in Chapter 7. In the interest of transparency I should add that I am one of the 84 persons listed as having been interviewed for the study (one of the authors flew over from Europe for a day to the Singaporean think-tank where I was at the time), and have been quoted quite accurately (p 79, fn. 273).

It is however, wrong or empty at its very core. Wrong not only in what it sees and says, but perhaps even more so, in what it does not—in what it fails to or chooses not to see and/or express. The NORAD study is characterised by an absent analytical core. Let us limit ourselves to considering, as a microcosm, a representative sample, these conclusions from the Executive Summary:

“…there was an incommensurable gap between what the South would countenance (a unitary state with limited devolution) and the LTTE demanded (a separate state in all but name)….” (p. xv)

“…The effort led by the United National Front (UNF) government to internationalize the peace process through security guarantees, donor funding and politically sensitive economic reforms sparked a Sinhala-nationalist backlash. This contributed to the emergence of a nationalist-oriented administration, with a commitment to a more hard line position towards the LTTE and greater scepticism towards Western involvement. ” (p. xvi)

This is as inaccurate as it is inadequate. President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was willing to go beyond “a unitary state with limited devolution”.  This neither prevented the Tigers from going to war nor did it induce them to stop the war they re-initiated in April ’95 and talk to her about the quasi-federal ‘union of regions package’ (’95-’97).  Certainly, it didn’t prevent the LTTE from trying to blow her up, leaving her blinded in one eye. Furthermore, why was a unitary state with devolution acceptable to the IRA/Sinn Fein, which debated and negotiated the limits and extent of that devolution, but was not something that the LTTE would even consider (and the TNA is unwilling to explicitly commit to, even today)? Why did it continue to demand and repeatedly initiate war for ‘a separate state in all but name’ even in the wake of reforms such as the Indo-Lanka accord and against a peace-keeping force from a country with a huge Tamil population? What does that say about the LTTE, from a comparative political perspective? What does Norway’s failure to ask itself the question after the Good Friday agreement, tell us? What indeed does the failure of this post-mortem, to raise that question, reveal?

The second assertion quoted from the executive summary is also wrong or only partially true, and misses the essential point. What, exactly, fuelled the ‘Sinhala nationalist backlash’ to the point of the ‘emergence of nationalist oriented administration’? As public opinion polls of that period (some cited in the study) reveal, support for the UNP administration’s CFA was moderately high at the outset but kept dropping as the LTTE’s lethal violence continued, with the killing even of a police officer in the Dehiwela police station, an army officer on a city street and the much respected Foreign Minister as he took a swim.  In sum, was not the real causative factor, the aggressive, deadly behaviour of the Tigers during the CFA, and the pusillanimity of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s UNP, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga during her comeback ( Karuna rebellion, PTOMS), and the Norwegians, in the face of such marked aggression? What does the failure of the NORAD analysis to pose this crucial question tell us?

Running through the entirety of the study is the dual argument about (i) two contending nationalisms (or ultra-nationalisms) and (ii) the failure of the Sri Lankan state to reform/restructure. This argument is supported by and often attributed to a few Lankan social scientists.  Though containing considerable truth, the dual argument fails to grasp the main thing: as Sartre emphasised, what is most crucial is not what is done to you by others, but what you do with, and about, what is done to you. One is free to choose, and the existential choice one makes tells you about yourself and tells us about you– all the more so if it is a choice that is repeatedly made over time. Not many armed movements faced with the phenomenon of a state that refuses to or is agonisingly slow to reform, respond by assassinating neighbouring peacemakers like Rajiv Gandhi or wiping out competing guerrilla movements and intellectuals who were for federal reforms, such as Rajani Tiranagama and Neelan Tiruchelvam.

Aristotle was the first to point out that one size does not fit all, when he embarked on a comparative study of constitutions of the Greek city states and pioneered the classification of regimes, according to their internal arrangements and ‘animating spirit’ or governing ethos. For many long years I have argued emphatically that the same is true of non-state or anti-state actors.

Thus, the Tigers and their leader were of a qualitatively different category from, say, the Guatemalan guerrillas with whom the Norwegians dealt with in the peace process they successfully mediated.

This is not a prejudiced assumption which should have been made apriori by Norway. It is a conclusion that would have flowed had they undertaken a quite basic task of analysis, namely to study the earlier peace efforts that were made by India and Sri Lanka, and have detailed discussions with the Indian and Lankan negotiators. Even if one assumed ideological–cultural bias on the part of the Sri Lankans, searching conversations with the Indian negotiators of the 1980s (such as India’s man currently on the Security Council) should have been an obvious exercise. That this has not been mentioned or undertaken by the Norwegian study reveals that they are still unaware that they attempted to re-invent a wheel.

In an exercise that is pretty standard in the FBI’s Behavioural Science Unit at Quantico, a study of the LTTE’s conduct during all previous ceasefires and efforts at negotiation would have yielded an unmistakable profile of the movement and its leader.

That in turn, would have helped construct a far less frail and foredoomed effort at peace by Norway. Given the character of the LTTE as analytically derived from its patterns of political (more correctly, politico-military) behaviour, a different and far stronger strategy could have been drawn up by Norway. Such a strategy would have had to be based on concepts of containment and deterrence, not of appeasement; a model emphasising conflict management rather than of conflict resolution. The primary object of containment and deterrence should have been of that party which had repeatedly returned to war– even against a non-Sinhala, secular, quasi-federal mediator (India) and a reform-minded President (Chandrika).

That would have been the Realist option. The last war was not solely the ‘realist’ choice of several available (and implicitly free-floating) options, and to present it as such, reveals a feeble capacity for political analysis. The final war was the sole realist (or real) option left open after the Norwegian failure to adopt a realist model of peace-making deriving from a comprehension of the character of one of the belligerents, itself deducible from (a) the political behaviour of that actor and (b) a comparative political analysis of other armed movements (e.g. Guatemala, El Salvador, Northern Ireland).

This study does not pose, still less grapple with the quintessential political question involved in the Norwegian and other efforts at a negotiated peace in Sri Lanka: how does one make peace with a non-state (therefore unconstrained) actor that is fanatical, politico-ideologically fundamentalist and totalitarian? Is peace possible, in the final analysis, with such an entity? If so, is it not only as a product of prolonged containment and firm deterrence, until that entity evolves/mutates, or decomposes/implodes? If not, surely war is necessary, and if we are to invert Machiavelli who said the only just war is a necessary war, is not a necessary war, a just war?

It is also bad political theory verging on ignorance, to posit, as the Norwegian study and its supportive/feeder studies by Sri Lankan Social Scientists have done, a contradiction between the ‘liberal’ and ‘Realist’ approaches. On the contrary, not only have contemporary Realists credibly counterattacked, dismantling the illiberal neoconservative militarist approach as undermining precisely the national interest, the most outstanding thinkers in the modern Realist tradition have themselves been liberals and reformists (even progressives): George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Raymond Aron and Stanley Hoffman to name just those who spring to mind. Moving from such ‘grand strategists’ to contemporary military thinkers, Gen David Petraeus (with whom I had the privilege to dialogue during his presentation in Paris few months back) is a socially liberal Realist.

This is not one-upmanship or hair-splitting. It is the enduring intellectual availability and strong international reassertion of a reformist liberal Realism — ‘post-Neocon Realism’ – that enables a clear understanding of why the Norwegian effort was foredoomed, and why the war had to be fought to win. It sheds light on why, with the domestic abdication or absence of a liberal realist political will to defeat the Tigers and defend sovereignty, leaving the task almost by default to a re-emergent ‘nationalist orientation’,  the aftermath was pretty much inevitable. A liberal realist perspective also informs us no less crucially, what must be done, undone and not done, for the peace too to be won.

• Pawns of Peace: Evaluation of Norwegian Peace Efforts in Sri Lanka
• Norwegian and British Interventions in the Sri Lankan Conflict: A Sorry Tale of Misinformation and Misunderstanding
• Interview with Austin Fernando, a Peacetime Secretary of Defence in Sri Lanka
• Looking at the grid of SL political opinion as a continuum
• Are We Back on Square One?

Bharatha Premachandra’s wife and daughter

Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra’s grieving daughter (and possible political successor) was probably not even born when several of us in the SLMP’s leading ranks rapidly disembarked at his house in Kolonnawa, an hour after he had survived the assassination attempt by the JVP. His aged father, a trade-unionist of the Old Left, had surprised the hit-man by pinioning him, giving Lakshman the chance to grab his weapon and shoot. That evening or the next day, Bharatha Lakshman, clad in shorts, rolled into a conclave of the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party founded by Vijaya Kumaratunga (himself killed by the JVP). His act was a model of resistance to Pol Potist ‘Red fascism’. At the time we were both members of the Political Bureau of the SLMP (I was elected an Asst Secretary of the party).

That the brash young man who had survived a JVP assassin was slain decades later by bullets fired by those on his own side, is suffused with a dark if obvious irony. His death may, however, have not been entirely in vain. Not only was his killing “a flash of lightning that illumined reality” (Lenin), his funeral may be seen by future chroniclers as a turning point or seismic social shift; the point at which hitherto passive civic consent visibly withdrew from the culture of political violence.  The funeral also saw a gathering of the vast moderate centre of the country’s politics and democratic political tradition, signalling a significant dissent against violence and impunity in our society.

The killing of Lakshman and the social mobilisation at his funeral brings to the forefront the issue of ethics, and if the Left in any part of the world stands for anything it must stand for ethics and ethical values. For the Left to be successful it must occupy the moral high ground and be seen to do so. How do the JVP and its breakaway faction, the UDF, fare in that respect?

The failed armed revolutionaries of the Latin American Left were able to be popularly elected into office within thirty years while the JVP remains on the margins, because – among other things– the character of the violence that the Latin American Left engaged in was romantically Quixotic or Robin Hood like, i.e. ethically justifiable, as that of the JVP in its second insurrection of ’86-’89 indubitably was not. Those Latin American Leftists who engaged in violence similar to that of the JVP’s second uprising, such as Peru’s Sendero Luminoso and Colombia’s FARC, have been unable to make a democratic comeback. The JVP, having made such a re-entry, has been stuck somewhere halfway and is in a decline, however temporary or lengthy that may be.  Is the JVP or its breakaway UDF willing to make an honest self-criticism of its past, and if not will it ever overcome the haunting social doubts about its core character?

The competition between the mainstream and dissident JVP, complicated by a four cornered struggle between the JVP, UDF, NFF (ex-JVP) and JHU could trigger, for the militant Southern youth, an unhealthy escalatory dynamic.  While the JVP and UDF are the real competitors for the more serious minded and politically literate youth, it must be recalled that the leaders of all four organisations were in a single party and one side of the barricades: they were all in Rohana Wijeweera’s JVP and were on the violently anti-devolution side of the barricades in 1986-9.

Neither the JVP nor the dissident UDF seems to know how to handle the dimension of anti-imperialism and relations with a government that adopts an independent foreign policy and is manifestly under external pressure, even threat, from the Empire. Then again, that’s not a failing limited to them, that’s an abiding flaw of the Lankan Left, which never adhered to the Marxist-Leninist dictum of ‘unity and struggle’ in relation to a government that is itself threatened by imperialist hegemonism and interventionism.

It is incumbent upon any left formation to identify the basic Marxist-Leninist stand in matters pertaining to a dependent, peripheral capitalist formation such as that of Sri Lanka, in danger of political domination from outside while facing an unresolved nationalities question within. One would reasonably expect the Left perspective in such a situation to consist of the opposition to secession and the defence of national sovereignty, territorial integrity and unity; the opposition to imperialist and neo-colonialist hegemonism, interventionism and the defence of national sovereignty; a solution to the nationalities question based on a degree of political space that accommodates a deep-rooted collective identity (an electoral map of the areas won by the TNA and the TULF at successive post-war, post-LTTE elections reaffirms an irrepressible existential reality); and the opposition to neoliberal economic policies and cutbacks of social entitlements while proposing an attractive and realistic economic policy for growth with equity as in Lula’s Brazil.

A progressive and Left politics must operate on two fronts: state and society. Today, Left politics cannot be about the overthrow of the state, but its remodelling. The state must not be sought to be overthrown not only because of the balance of forces and the danger of anarchy, but because the disintegration of the state will only strengthen the forces of separatism and external intervention/domination. In an era of neoliberal globalisation and neo-colonialism renamed ‘liberal humanitarian interventionism’, the state especially in the global south, must be strong enough to intervene in the market on behalf of the citizens and also defend the nation, i.e. national sovereignty from external hegemonism, and national unity and territorial integrity from secessionism.

However, progressive politics often gets it wrong three times over. Firstly, it confuses a strong state with hyper-centralisation and defends or opposes one while confusing it for the other. Secondly and more importantly, it confuses the state with the status quo. While in some cases the defence of the former requires the defence of the latter, it is not always so, and sometimes the state must be defended against the status quo and at other times, a progressive status quo must be defended against the reactionary elements of the state. Thirdly, it confuses the state with the government or the administration. For a progressive Left formation, it should be perfectly possible to defend the state and its core interests while criticising this or that act or aspect, policy or faction of the government/administration, or indeed while taking its distance from ‘the government’, ‘the administration’ and the governing ethos.   

The victories of the Left in contemporary Latin America have been founded on broad Left and progressive unity, no more so than in Uruguay where the Tupamaros have been at the core of the ‘Frente Amplio’ (Broad Front) which has lasted for decades.  Can the JVP and/or the UDF overcome the Wijeweeraist DNA of vicious sectarianism?  The future of the Lankan Left may depend on it. They could do no better than to diligently read, study, absorb and apply Antonio Gramsci. That’s pretty much what the Latin American Left did.

While the ethical factor of a barbarically violent past unaccounted for honestly, may always remain a ceiling for the JVP’s or UDF’s ascendancy, there is a largely ethical role that these radical Lefts can play in any society. The Left must be the voice of justice and fair-play in every sphere and for everyone. This does not mean ‘levelling down’ in the name of social justice or protesting only about class exploitation. It means standing up for universal fair-play.  An authentic Left should be the party of resistance to all forms of injustice and oppression of anyone. It should be the Ombudsman, the Tribune, of the unfairly treated and downtrodden everywhere in the country. It should be in the vanguard of the struggle against racism and all forms of social discrimination, be it ethnic, linguistic, religious, gender, class or caste. It should unite the exploited, oppressed, marginalised and alienated, overcoming all barriers of language, region and ethnicity. It should campaign for equal rights of all citizens and the actual, active exercise of those rights. It should stand, not so much against globalisation as such, but against neo-liberal globalisation, and for another globalisation, an alternative globalisation. It should not only be a party of resistance but also of radical reform and renovation.

A project for a sustainable Left resurgence depends on whether it can effect a difficult synthesis, of a radical realism, offering a politically mature citizenry a convincing vision of a different, more advanced and better Sri Lanka and the world.  It should stand for and embody a different, more civilised social behaviour. It should represent and incarnate an exemplary citizenship. It should not be mired in traditionalism but be the vanguard of transformation, in the first instance of social consciousness, mentalities and outlook. It should not be imprisoned in history; it must make history, exiting the cycle of conflict and breaking through to the 21^st century.

• THE VISION THING: A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC ALTERNATIVE?
• VIOLENCE AND ITS MORAL DILEMMAS: FIDEL ACCORDING TO DAYAN JAYATILLEKA
• Celebrating a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and questioning Sri Lanka
• The pathetic capitulation of the organised Left in Sri Lanka (Updated with statement from Leftist leaders)
• Mahinda, Marxism and Michael

Is this a functioning democracy or what? The governing coalition’s sweep of the local authorities election, the UNP’s successful resistance in a tough campaign in Colombo, as well as the TNA’s impressive performance at repeated elections in the North, make nonsense of the dark pronouncements and forebodings of dictatorship. Homogenization leads to conformism, which crystallises into a monolith, which translates itself into a dictatorship of discourse and opinion, which straitjackets society and creates a de-facto dictatorship. The results of the local authorities election proves that Sri Lankan society will not allow itself to be straitjacketed into conformity. We are, in short, a democracy.

The extrapolation by some commentators that the Mahinda Rajapaksa administration is somewhere along the trajectory of the recently overthrown Arab regimes is way of the mark because none of them permitted pluralist media (an important feedback loop), subjected their popularity to the test of authentically competitive multiparty elections. As Emeritus Professor of International Law at Princeton, Richard Falk observed to in a recent piece, “…as potent a unifying target as was the grim personage of Hosni Mubarak, cruel autocrat for more than three decades…” Thus, Mubarak can resemble Mahinda Rajapaksa and vice versa, only in the jaundiced eyes of demented Diaspora demagogues.

The election result contains a downside though. That downside is not dictatorship; it is something else, or consists of other things. One is the prevalence of lethal political violence, reflecting a long decline of the country’s political culture into quasi-gangsterism. The other is the clear and almost complete correspondence between the electoral and the ethnic. Sri Lanka’s is an unevenly divided democracy.

The UPFA’s wave which carried the traditional UNP strongholds of Kandy, Negombo, Moratuwa and Colombo’s suburbs reinforce the reality revealed by the statistical survey by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA): 74% of the Sinhalese identify most, with the SLFP. This is an unprecedented degree of identification, significantly surpassing the older congruencies between the SLFP and the rural, Sinhala-Buddhist vote. The UNP which once held most of that vote and later was a powerful contender for it, has now lost most of the Sinhala vote, rural and urban, Buddhist and Christian.

Given that almost 74 % of the country’s citizenry are Sinhalese, this places almost insurmountable obstacles to the UNP unless it switches its leadership, which is unlikely in the aftermath of its victory in Colombo. The SLFP’s electoral advantage in a national election is likely to be durable, though not at such high levels, given three factors: the unalterable demographic preponderance of the Sinhalese, a spike in nationalism due to escalating external pressures, the entrenchment of the UNP’s existing leadership and the party’s chronic inability to change its profile (a Wikileaks cable reveals Mr Wickremesingha’s solid defence of the merger and shrill opposition to its dissolution in conversations with the US Ambassador).

However, the unassailability of the SLFP’s hegemony assumes a steady-state or normal situation, which may not be a safe assumption, given the global economic crisis, which could contract the Sri Lankan economy in a few years unless we have got onto far more solid, modern and ethnically integrated footing as a society.

It is widely known that almost 60% of Colombo consists of ethno-linguistic minorities, and while this does not mean that the winning candidate must be from one of the minorities, it does mean that in order to win, a candidate from a majority community must have a multi-ethnic base and appeal, or his/her party must have such a profile. Dr NM Perera and B. Sirisena Cooray both Sinhalese, won because they did have this factor.

My friend Milinda Moragoda probably failed because the governing coalition has been unable to cultivate a multiethnic image. If Milinda’s campaign assumed that there would be a subterranean pan-Sinhala swing which, together with a split in the UNP’s Muslim vote effected by Mahroof, it was wrong. The visible tendency, or drive, towards cultural homogenisation and conformity, if not domination, was bound to be rejected by a multicultural, cosmopolitan Colombo citizenry.

As Richard Falk concludes, “In the end, we all must hope and engage. The beginnings of hope are rooted in the correctness of analysis…” The results of the recently concluded election have lessons and implications for Sri Lankan politics and politicians, as well as for those in capitals elsewhere who observe the Sri Lankan scene. While congratulating themselves on winding up with more political real estate than they had before the elections, the rulers must understand the contrasting lessons of Colombo and Kalmunai. The latter result shows the viability of an ethnic party which maintains its identity – and is permitted to – while remaining in the coalition. For its part, the Opposition UNP, while doing very well to retain Colombo, must comprehend that this result, if it locks in its present leadership, locks the party out of the Sinhala vote and therefore political power at a national level. Colombo is a-typical, as is the Northern Province. However severe a future economic crisis and however serious a future wave of street unrest, the factor of patriotism, nationalism or the collective perception of the Sinhalese of facing an existential threat, cannot be wished away, and as such, this UNP –as currently led, configured and profiled– will always be hamstrung at a parliamentary election while being batted out of the ballpark in a Presidential one.

The country’s rulers and foreign critics have similar lessons to learn from the election results. The foreign critics must know that Colombo and Jaffna are not the country at large, and the country at large has gone overwhelmingly one way. The rulers must know that the world outside, from Seattle to Singapore, is more like Colombo and Jaffna, only far more so, than it is like any other part of Sri Lanka.

• The Right NOT to Vote
• Where is the democracy in the UNP?
• Outcome of presidential elections in Sri Lanka: Is there anything to analyse?
• Elections in the East
• Surveys with conflicting outcomes

The Pope with Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith

Though my political approval of and personal liking for Mahinda Rajapaksa, (certainly in relation to his competitors and immediate predecessors) are shared by nine out of ten Sri Lankan citizens (according to the Gallup poll), it is not comfortable to be alone in one’s analysis and evaluation, among one’s own social stratum, the intelligentsia, especially the English-speaking and writing urban intelligentsia. It is therefore a good feeling when you discover that your views coincide with someone who stands above the fray, and cannot but evoke respect from all rational people. Nicest of all, is when the public personage with whose views your own coincide, has achieved a status and recognition that is truly global.

My perspectives on Mahinda Rajapaksa, his administration, Sri Lankan politics and the issue of accountability and international pressure have been denounced by political partisans of almost all sides. The Tamil Diaspora accuses me of Sinhala chauvinism or neo-nationalism (as Taraki put it). The Sinhala chauvinists accuse me of being Eelamist because I support provincial devolution. The Left accuses me of having sold out to the Right. The Right accuses me of a dangerous Left radicalism in international affairs.

The liberals who support international calls for boycotts and accountability hearings will never forgive my defense of Sri Lanka’s sovereignty in Geneva, May 2009. The Sinhala hardliners will never forgive me for my advocacy of provincial level devolution.

The dogmatic Left regards Mahinda Rajapaksa as a Rightist. The cosmopolitan liberals and Diaspora Tamil lobbyists consider him the chief representative of the Sinhala Buddhist Right, without whose patronage that Right would not exist. The Human Rights constituency sees Mahinda Rajapaksa as the most authoritarian, autocratic and possibly fascist element in Lankan politics, and the main danger to democracy.  I consider Mahinda Rajapaksa a centrist and a Bonapartist balancer.

It is gratifying, in this context, to note that Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, at the time Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, had arrived at almost the same conclusions, and expressed them way back in 2009 to the US Ambassador.

The Cardinal can hardly be accused of being a Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist. Even if one modifies the charge to one of Sinhala chauvinism, it is hardly credible that the world’s oldest and most far-flung transnational organization, a fount of ‘universality’, would choose a Sinhala chauvinist, representing under 20 million people, as one of the youngest cardinals in the world, and as the only Asian in the electoral college that finally chooses the Pope.

Nor can the Cardinal be accused of being less than intelligent. Lack of intelligence is not a shortcoming that even the worst enemies of the Catholic Church would accuse it of, and with its high premium on training, we may readily conclude that a young Cardinal must be a very smart person indeed, with solid scholarly credentials and considerably wide and diverse experience.

The Catholic Church being the sole social institution that cuts across Sri Lanka’s ethnic divide, or that social institution which transcends it most, it could be said that it is suitably positioned to articulate an inclusive Sri Lankan identity and ideology.

Furthermore, a high ranking official of the Church, the most globalised and multicultural of institutions, is likely to provide a truly global and comparative perspective, and is least likely to provide a parochial one.

Finally, no institution has grappled more with the tough task of combining virtue and power, as has the Catholic Church. No intellectual tradition has attempted to wrestle with and synthesise ethics and Realism as has that of Christian theology (e.g. Just war theory).

It is against this backdrop that we must read Cardinal Ranjith’s reading of Sri Lanka’s politics and the Rajapaksa/s role, or more precisely, the US Ambassador’s reading of Cardinal Ranjith’s reading. Wikileaks tells the tale. According to Ambassador Butenis’ Oct 2009 cable, the perspective of the Archbishop, in summary was as follows:

“SUMMARY: Roman Catholic Archbishop Ranjith told ambassador that pushing the GSL too hard on the war crimes accountability issue now could destabilize Sri Lankan democracy and would set back the cause of human rights.  He reasoned that weakening the Rajapaksas — who despite their public image were relative moderates in the Sri Lankan polity – could backfire.  Moreover, if Sri Lanka were denied GSP-plus or the U.S. were to enact strong economic sanctions, leading to a sharp downturn in the economy, Sri Lanka could suffer revolution from the right or a coup by the military, which now had a very strong position in society.  Ambassador countered that this was an interesting perspective, but if the Rajapaksas were in fact moderates, they needed to show it.  END SUMMARY ».

The cable says that “In a September 30 introductory meeting with Ambassador and PolChief, Roman Catholic Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith recounted the recent political evolution of Sri Lanka, of which he has been both an astute observer and important participant, and described the role of the Church in society. He noted that while he himself was a Singhalese, he was very sympathetic to the plight of Tamils, who had suffered greatly from pogroms and discrimination by the majority and from the disastrous results of LTTE separatist ideology.  He explained that the Church had played a key role in brokering talks between the GSL and the LTTE over the years, including the 2002 cease-fire agreement.  After the war, the church was advocating publicly for the release of IDPs and other controversial positions.  This had led to criticism from the Buddhist right and even death threats against the archbishop himself.  This was the opposite of the leading role in reconciliation the archbishop believed Buddhists should have been playing years ago.

Despite this criticism, the archbishop said he believed President Rajapaksa personally was a good man and in the constellation of Sri Lankan politics was a relative moderate (he reminded us that Rajapaksa used to attend human rights meetings in Europe as an opposition MP).  Rajapaksa and his brothers were under great pressure from the Singhalese Buddhist right, and any show of what would be perceived as weakness before the international community could result in their losing ground to much more extreme elements.  Indeed, he argued that if something happened to the president there would be “chaos” in Sri Lanka.

This led to the archbishop addressing directly the question of war crimes accountability.  He said “my suggestion is, in order to strengthen democracy in Sri Lanka, don’t push accountability now.”  He reasoned that weakening the Rajapaksas could backfire.  Moreover, if Sri Lanka were denied GSP-plus or the U.S. were to enact strong economic sanctions, leading to a sharp downturn in the economy, Sri Lanka — where democracy was not strong now — could suffer revolution from the right or a coup by the military, which currently had a very strong position in society.  The archbishop said this was why he had recently come out publicly in favor of extending GSP-plus to Sri Lanka, despite the GSL’s many human rights problems.  Ambassador countered that this was a very interesting perspective, but if the Rajapaksas were in fact moderates, they needed to show it in at least a few ways.  The archbishop said this was the challenge that he had been working on — how to get the president not to worry only about the “forces lurking beneath him” and to act as a moderate.  He told the president it was important to work with Tamil leaders on reconciliation and to invite the Diaspora to help re-build the economy.  “The Rajapaksas will come and go,” the archbishop opined, “but the Tamils will always be here.” ’ ( Wiki leaks FILE, Oct 2, 2009)

Ambassador Butenis’ concluding comment to her bosses in Washington DC bears repetition:

“Archbishop Ranjith purportedly is respected by the pope and served as papal nuncio in Indonesia.  He also commands considerable authority in Sri Lanka — despite his problems with the Buddhist right — and has a good relationship with the president (whose wife is Catholic).  It is certainly true that the president is under great pressure from the Singhalese Buddhist right.  It is also arguable that the international community’s pushing too hard on accountability could backfire.”

Two things that senior clerics know about are ideologies and to evaluate and judge the character of men. Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith characterises Mahinda Rajapaksa as essentially “a good man” and “a relative moderate in the constellation of Sri Lanka’s politics”. This should surely be taken into account.

• Destroying monuments for those killed & disappeared: The Catholic Church and the Sri Lankan Government
• Violating the Madhu Sancuary – Some brief thoughts
• Sri Lanka’s Libyan Spring
• Political Opposition in a Nihilistic Sinhala Society: Responses and clarifications
• Moving away from democracy in Sri Lanka

Photo courtesy Al Jazeera, Sri Lanka boosts presidential power

Perhaps never before has there been so wide a gap, so clear a contradiction, between the views of our country held by the West and the Western dominated international media on the one hand, and the opinions demonstrably held by the citizens of our country on the other (even according to impeccably Western sources).  The gulf between these views is of a magnitude that pressure from the West will not generate the conditions to close it by influencing domestic opinion; in fact the gulf will widen by driving Sri Lankans further away from the external opinion mounting against the country’s policy stance and its democratically elected leadership.  The country’s citizens are not taking their cue from the leadership, and therefore a regime change or striving for it will not change public opinion. Indeed the leadership is hugely popular precisely because it reflects the strongly held and democratically expressed convictions of the vast mass of the country’s people.

The Gallup poll which reveals a 91% popularity rating for President Mahinda Rajapaksa (down from 94% in 2009) – meaning, as a Western commentator noted, that 9 out of 10 Sri Lankans approve of his performance—is a striking reminder of just how far removed the opposition and pro-opposition commentators are from the society in which they live and work; the public sphere which they inhabit. This degree of popular support cannot be reduced or attributed, as is usually the case with ‘Orientalist’ Western critics and their Sri Lankan ‘spear bearers’, to the grip of ‘Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism’ because the figure of 91% (not to mention 94%) far exceeds the 74% of Sinhalese and 67% of Sinhala Buddhists on the island. What we are looking at, certainly in these figures, seems a truly national popularity. The political challenge to leadership is to channel this and capitalise upon it for constructive effect.

It is not necessary or even helpful for intellectuals to be at one with the sentiments of the people, but as Mao and Gramsci were fond of pointing out, it isn’t good to be too far from them either (the former scornfully dubbed it ‘mountain-top sectarianism’). For these two outstanding thinker-practitioners, popular sentiments are the raw material of consciousness with which political intellectuals have to work in the task of transformation/transcendence. Things are simpler still, in the case of analysts and critical commentators. How can one analyse or comment lucidly on politics in any society, especially a democracy, if one is disdainfully, contemptuously, way out of touch, even impossibly so, with national sentiment and popular opinion?

The alienation of the imbalanced and bitterly hostile critic is not ennobled by the situation of the resistor in Nazi Germany, the dissident in Soviet Russia, or the blogger in Mubarak’s Egypt, because Sri Lanka is not a country in which opposition parties and private media have been suppressed, it is a competitive democracy (made less than competitive by the implosive, continuing, collapse of the Opposition). If one were to be charitably and eschew the psychoanalytic explanations, the purely negativist and wholly denunciatory current critique of the Rajapaksa Presidency and its track record could be said to congruent with those of the bitterly hostile elements of the Tamil Diaspora. Thus the local nihilists are the domestic Diaspora.

Whatever else may be said about President Rajapaksa as a political leader in the future, or even today, it is fairly safe bet that he will be held by the history of this country and the consciousness of future generations for a very long time to come, to have been a great leader in that he presided over a historic victory against a historic foe.

The secret of Rajapaksa’s popularity is that the people instinctively trust him to stand up for, protect and defend the country — and one of the reasons that the Sri Lankan people trust Mahinda Rajapaksa is the consistency of his stand. This stand is not simply the public posture of a politician. The latest batch of Wikileaks cables contain a report dated August 23^rd 2002, of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s remarks to US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on the previous day ( Aug 22, 2002),  in what is called a ‘pull aside’ meeting. This means that the meeting was private, though on an official social occasion. The cable, signed by US Ambassador Ashley Wills says:

“Opposition Leader Mahinda Rajapakse: People’s Alliance (PA) Leader Mahinda Rajapakse began by saying that everyone, PA included, wants peace, but that most people in the South have reservations about the sincerity of LTTE leader Prabhakaran. Rajapakse noted that previous peace efforts had failed, and many believe that Prabhakaran, leader of the LTTE, is using this ceasefire interval to build up his strength, and will eventually take over the disputed areas.”

This was at the height of the false consciousness of the Colombo establishment; the period of Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s appeasement of the Tigers and the Western Embassies and NGOs starry eyed honeymoon with them. Mahinda proved lucid, balanced and in touch with the people’s accurate perception of the enemy.

The same cable by Ambassador Wills summarises Mr Sambandan’s notion as expressed on the same occasion to Richard Armitage, regarding a settlement of the Tamil ethnic question within a united Sri Lanka as one in which the Sri Lankan Government must retain only the powers of  ‘defence, foreign affairs and currency’.

Arguably, President Rajapaksa’s stratospheric and sustained popularity renders his political achievement as a political leader similar to the popular consent, national-popular appeal and moment of ‘hegemony’ enjoyed in the Gramscian sense, by Charles de Gaulle, Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, Lula and Putin in the politics of their countries in their time in office. This popularity (certainly at this level) cannot be permanent but President Rajapaksa’s mark has been indelible and like these leaders variously of Centre-Right, Right, Left and Centre, he has caused or symbolised a tectonic shift in the politics, society, identity and collective mentality of his country.

What is that shift? It is the entrenchment of patriotism, or if you will, statist-nationalism, at the centre-space and as the centrepiece of the Sri Lankan polity and political discourse and culture.  There have been similar shifts in Sri Lankan politics and society before–President Jayewardene’s combination of the Open economy and a strong, directly elected executive being the most obvious.  As Madam Bandaranaike found out, no candidate who hoped to win could be associated with the bad old days of the closed economy and consumer scarcities, in the minds of the voters. Her daughter Chandrika had to re-invent herself as a modernising votary of the Open economy in order to be elected.  Whatever the modifications and mutations, there is no going back in terms of the framework of macro-economic policy, or as they say the broader macroeconomic policy regime.

So also with politics: there is no space for the UNP as it has been for the last 15 years. There is no space for a leader or personalities associated with that image of neo-comprador appeasement of the LTTE and a West biased towards the Tamil Diaspora. Any viable post-Mahinda Project will have to reassure the voter that the national interests, national sovereignty will be as safe as it was in the hands of Mahinda Rajapaksa. It will have to acknowledge – actually salute—and build upon the achievement of Mahinda; that of restoring a strong Sri Lankan state. There cannot be a swing back to a less patriotic profile. The country would not take a risk with a leader less patriotic than Mahinda Rajapaksa. This is not to say that the country needs a project which is (supposedly) more patriotic than President Rajapaksa. Such an ultranationalist (as distinct from patriotic) neoconservative project is neither internally desirable nor externally viable. Any attempt to contain, divert, pressurise, outflank or exceed President Rajapaksa’s quintessential if protean centrism, would only be socially suffocating, choking the pores of free expression, resulting in a more hawkish, less flexible, less intuitively smart, more brittle and therefore more vulnerable Sri Lankan state.

Nor would an alternative or a post-Mahinda project have to be an imitation or impersonation of President Rajapaksa and his current stance. That would be an inauthentic, unconvincing caricature.

The space is not for a project that is less patriotic but one that is more liberal and social democratic. It cannot be ruled out that the best person to attempt this may be Mahinda Rajapaksa himself: after all, what is a more liberal and social democratic Mahinda Rajapaksa than a fusion of Mahinda Rajapaksa as President and Mahinda Rajapaksa as youthful, dissenting, rather rebellious left-of-centre Parliamentarian, in government and Opposition, backbench and Cabinet, in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s?

• 10 reasons why you should celebrate Mahinda Rajapaksa’s victory
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• Presidential hopefuls and escape-routes for the ‘hopeless’
• Reading the results of the municipal elections in Sri Lanka

A visit to the Mayan exhibition in Paris tells the tale of a splendid ancient civilization with an advanced mathematics, now reduced to marginality by colonial conquest. It also reminds one that the civilization of the Sinhalese, whose language is distinctive, whose collective existence is not far flung and whose state is in a strategically hostile situation or environment, can be reduced to an exhibit in an ethnographic museum, if it is not collectively strong, adaptable and very smart indeed. This must not be taken as a chauvinist, racist or ethnocentric sentiment: for example, I am neither Mayan nor Guatemalan, yet I am anguished by their fate.

An American witticism attributed variously to Dr Henry Kissinger and film director Oliver Stone says “just because you are paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you”. It increasingly seems that Tamil Nadu is to Sri Lanka what Florida is to Cuba. The voices raised in three intersecting, interactive circles, Tamil Nadu, the Tamil Diaspora and Sri Lankan Tamil politics, against the carrying out of the sentence on the killers of Rajiv Gandhi, Nehru’s grandson and Indira Gandhi’s son, tell a story. These voices include the Tamil Nadu State Assembly, the TNA, and the Global Tamil Forum (GTF). It would be only the naïve who regard these protests as stemming from a principled opposition to the death penalty. There seems to be a touch of solidarity in these protests and certainly a sense of impunity, by which I mean, a sense of entitlement which assumes that even the murder of the grandson of the iconic founding Prime Minister of India, should not be treated as a heinous atrocity punishable by death, but should be somehow overlooked; allowed almost to slide. These protests and petitions must surely alert the Sri Lankan people to the dangerous neighborhood in which we inevitably exist.

A notable event took place recently in Delhi. It was attended by all parties claiming to represent Sri Lanka’s Tamils of the North and East barring the EPDP of Douglas Devananda. The meeting was therefore a largely representative one. A report by the Conference Coordinator Selliah Nagarajah, posted on August 28 from New Delhi, on the website Sri Lanka Guardian says that:

“The conference of the Sri Lankan Tamil Parties organised by the Parliamentary Forum for Human Rights for Global Development (PFHRGD) was held on 22 & 23 August 2011 at the Constitution Club Hall, New Delhi. It was to serve as a forum to discuss all the issues relating to the Sri Lankan Tamil problem and to ascertain the opinion of the Sri Lankan Tamil leaders on how the Indian government could facilitate an early resolution. It was further aimed at providing an opportunity for the Sri Lankan Tamil leaders to present their consensual views to the Indian Parliamentarians in helping them set out a framework of action required to be taken by the Indian government in its continued endeavour to find a lasting resolution to the Sri Lankan Tamil problem…

Nine registered political parties were invited for the conference and eight parties attended the two day meeting. The following represented the eight political parties: Akila Ilankai Thamil Congress: Gajendrakumar G Ponnambalam, Selvarajah Kajendran; Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi : Mavai Senathirajah, M.A. Sumanthiran; Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front: Suresh Premachandran, Nadesu Sivasakthi; Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front: G.Gnanasekaran, S.Raveendran; Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation: Selvam Adaikalanathan; Tamil United Liberation Front: V.Anandasangari; Pathmanabha Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front: T.Sritharan , Thurairetnam; Democratic People’s Liberation Front: Kandiah Sivanesan, Benedict Thanabalasingam.

…Delegates expressed their serious concerns on the present situation of the Tamils in North Eastern Sri Lanka and unanimously decided to approve the following resolution on matters of immediate concern. Therefore we request the following must be done as a matter of urgency…” (‘What They Talked About Tamils’, Sri Lanka Guardian)

There was no endorsement in the text, of the 13^th amendment, even as the base line for a settlement. There was no criticism of the Tigers for having murdered leaders and members of every one of these organisations. There was no denunciation of the murder of Rajiv Gandhi though the meeting took place in India in the 20^th anniversary year of that heinous assassination. Among the multi-point resolution passed, Point 2 not merely stands out but leaps out at the reader: “…The army must be withdrawn from the North and East immediately.” (ibid) 

In case this is regarded as a one-off reference, we have clear confirmation of its import from Mr Suresh Premachandran as quoted by the Daily Mirror:

‘The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has with the help of some Lok Sabha members had submitted a memorandum to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh requesting him to prevail upon the Sri Lankan government to remove the military camps in the North, TNA parliamentarian Suresh Premachandran said today… “We interacted with a number of Lok Sabha MPs from the ruling party and the opposition and submitted this memorandum to Dr. Singh through them”, he said and added that the dismantling of High Security Zones was another key demand highlighted in the memorandum.’ (‘TNA Submits Memo to Manmohan’, Kelum Bandara, Daily Mirror, Wednesday Aug 31^st, 2011) 

After a decisive and total military defeat of a powerful armed secessionism, and with the Sri Lankan armed forces a strong, determined, legitimate and permanent presence in the Northern and Eastern areas of a re-unified country, it is absurd that the latest expression of a Tamil consensus holds out for ‘the immediate withdrawal of the army from the North and East’. This is beyond anything that JR Jayewardene, Premadasa, CBK or even Ranil would accede to while embattled by the Tigers! More basically, which army anywhere in the world, least of all South Asia, would withdraw from a geo-strategically vital frontier?

What is the guarantee that the TNA, with Provincial powers and added legitimacy in hand, would not launch an agitation for the removal of the Sri Lankan armed forces, as it has called for in this memorandum, and seek Tamil Nadu or Central Government support for such agitation, whether or not it succeeds in drawing them in? Do we want the North converted into another Kashmir?

Of no little significance is the discussion of the ‘war crimes/international inquiry’ issue, as reported by the conference convenor in the article on the SLG website.

“…At this stage, Mr Kagendran and Mr Ponnambalam, delegates of the Akila Ilankai Thamil Congress, wanted the conference to pass a resolution calling for an international investigation into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Chairperson objected to the inclusion of a new item in the agenda at this late stage as he had no mandate to deviate from the agenda. Several delegates suggested that it could be taken up as an added issue under matters discussed under the topic “Immediate Concerns” earlier. The conference reopened the agenda on “Immediate Concerns” and agreed to include the following as item 7 of the matters requiring urgent action:

“An independent international inquiry into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity should be conducted.”

Now, what is one to make of the fact that no tendency or powerful single party was willing or able to take a moderate stand and put the brakes on these two calls, i.e., for the immediate withdrawal of the army and the holding of an international inquiry?

If the immediate withdrawal of the Army from the country’s North and East and the conducting of an ‘independent’ international inquiry into allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity are two planks of the Tamil consensus, or rather, the Northern and Eastern Tamil consensus—with the EPDP as an honourable exception—what does this say about the degree of militancy or radicalism of Tamil sub-nationalism? Perhaps more pertinently what does it say about the total divorce from reality of those who subscribe to these views? These are two issues on which no Sri Lankan government or Southern political party will, should or can concede or compromise on, because they lie at the core of vital national interests.  They are ‘red lines’ and non-negotiable.

The drift apart in political discourse between the dominant Southern and Northern blocs may make for a cold peace. The lack of a commitment on the part of the Tamil parties to a mutually agreed upon ceiling on devolution feeds the Southern centralist apprehension that any large unit devolution would be a jumping off point for centrifugal demands. A noteworthy interview given by the TNA’s Premachandran, to Shakuntala Perera of the Daily Mirror a few days ago, provides ample evidence that these apprehensions are not entirely paranoid in nature. 

“Q: You often speak of the Indian example. How much is India a model for you on these issues?

A: Even though India is a federal system the provinces are still asking for greater power. So on these grounds there are various Chief Ministers fighting for more. There is no real power devolution in that sense. While Jammu and Kashmir has one system, somewhere else the system is different, depending on the people and the language etc. They even want to divide Andrapradesh.”

Mr. Premachandran is a plain-spoken man. It is exceedingly obvious from his answer that even Indian model federalism or more correctly quasi-federalism, is not enough for him, though (i) the Tamil people of Northern Sri Lanka are far less numerous and a far smaller fraction of this country’s population than those of the regions he names and (ii) the provisional IRA and the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland have accepted power sharing/devolution within a unitary state. One can only guess at his commitment to the 13th amendment and the role he and his co-thinkers within the TNA will play in the likely event that they control the Northern Provincial council. Given the strategic location of the area, its interactivity with and susceptibility to politico-ideological osmosis from Tamil Nadu, any Sri Lankan government would be given pause by the prospect.

Still, matters are by no means hopeless. As President Rajapaksa informed Parliament in his address which signaled the termination of the Emergency, elections to the Northern Provincial Council will be held next year, which will bridge the political deficit between that province and all the others. This is an exercise in devolved power through basic electoral democracy. Who can deny that democracy is either the best solution or the best pathway to a solution? And who can deny that the likeliest chance to make peace would be an understanding based on a deliberative dialogue, between President Rajapaksa and Mr. Sambandan? There is obviously a deficit to be bridged. And this is where the non-state, social sector can contribute towards greater understanding between communities and regions.  The Sri Lankan corporate sector, the professionals, and most significant of all, a concerted multi-faith effort, in particular by those religions that cut across the ethnic divide (providing an example of unity in diversity and a transcendent identity), can deepen and develop the positive yet modest role that they already play to bridge those gaps. In fact it may be an urgent imperative to prevent a cold peace from degenerating into an externally provoked and catalysed civic conflict.

• EXCLUSIVE: Interview with TNA MP Suresh Premachandran on the LG elections, Parliamentary Select Committee and Political Solution
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• Eelam War and the Long Arm of the Indian Rearguard Across the Palk Straits
• A difference of 3 days: V. Anandasangaree on the killing of Tamil civilians in the Vanni

Libya is the model of the new interventionism and is the latest, successful mode of application of the doctrine of R2P says Paddy Ashdown, writing in The Times.

“…This is what the future probably looks like. Better get used to it” according to Mr Ashdown, who posits it as “a new way of intervening and giving strength to a new strand of international law… Many of us thought R2P would never be more than a piece of well-meaning rhetoric. But Libya has given R2P both form and precedent… Now Libya has offered us a third option. Support R2P with force where it’s possible. Find other means where it isn’t. Assemble a coalition wider than the West. Obtain the backing of international law.” (‘Ray-Bans and pick-ups: this is the future; Iraq-style intervention is over. The messy Libyan version will be our model from now on’, The Times, August 26, 2011).

Influential individuals in the West have begun to refer to Sri Lanka in the same texts, indeed the same paragraphs as Libya. Take for instance, an article in perhaps one of the two most influential publications of world affairs, the Foreign Affairs Quarterly, published by the Council on Foreign Relations. The essay dated August 26, 2011, is by Stewart Patrick, a former Policy Planning Staffer of the US State Department, currently a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Program on International Institutions and Global Governance at the Council itself. Entitled ‘Libya and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention’, the article deals, as the subtitle indicates, with ‘How Qaddafi’s Fall Vindicated R to P’. In a particularly ludicrous but pernicious passage, he writes: “…To be sure, the atrocities Qaddafi orchestrated in Libya prior to the intervention pale in comparison to those committed during the course of other recent violent conflicts. In Sri Lanka, for example, the government killed thousands of civilians while finishing off the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 2009”.

Stewart Patrick provides a valuable service by drawing our attention to a brand new policy document of cardinal importance that takes the doctrine of R2P to the next level. He discloses that ‘Lest one imagine that the Libyan case is a one-off, on August 4 the Obama administration released the Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities (PSD-10). The directive defines the prevention of mass atrocities as both “a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States.” PSD-10 is a groundbreaking document and represents a huge victory for NSS Senior Director Samantha Power, a leading administration hawk on Libya. The PSD-10 recognizes a simple truth: the United States will inevitably confront atrocities that cannot be ignored. The directive expands the menu of policy options available in such cases, which should range from complete inaction to sending in the marines. This escalatory ladder is meant to encompass preventive diplomacy, economic and financial sanctions, arms embargoes, and ultimately coercive action. Realist critics have bemoaned it as a blueprint for interventionism run amok, anticipating meddling in foreign conflicts on a grand Wilsonian scale.’

What are the lessons of Libya for Lanka? The main lesson derives from the very essay that makes the ludicrous and dangerous mention of Sri Lanka. Listing the reasons for the success of the Libyan intervention as a case of R2P, author Stewart Patrick reminds us that “…Qaddafi…had managed to alienate…his erstwhile Arab and African allies…the members of the Arab League, Organization of the Islamic Conference, and Gulf Cooperation Council all endorsed the UN’s declaration of a no-fly zone over Libya, including the use of “all necessary means” to prevent mass atrocities.”

Fareed Zakaria makes quite the same point in his August 23^rd essay on Libya, captioned ‘A New Era in US Foreign Policy’. He lists as the second most crucial factor in the success of the Libyan intervention, “Locally recognized legitimacy in the form of the Arab League’s request for intervention”.

The lesson here is manifestly clear, especially when viewed against the success of Zimbabwe, which had the support of its influential large neighbour South Africa. De-stabilisation, hegemonic intervention and regime change are possible only if there is a breach in the wall of neighbourhood solidarity. Already in the sub-region, comprising Sri Lanka’s ‘greater Northern’ neighbourhood, voices redolent of ancient animosity are being raised.

Is there a place for deterrence in Sri Lanka’s strategic options? Our Northern borders are acutely vulnerable for two reasons and from two types of threat, which may interact: a disaffected minority adjacent to a historically hostile and intervention prone area, and exposure of our assets and dispositions to stand-off weapons and aerial strikes. Our advantages lie in a large, patriotic population, a tough armed forces and a proven capacity to fight even in the demographically inhospitable North. A credible deterrent or ‘second strike’ capacity would entail the possibility of protracted asymmetric warfare along a long ‘border’.

This must involve the offsetting of our Northern vulnerability with a strategic reconfiguration of the adjacent Eastern province, in a manner that makes it solidly defensible or a credible jumping off base for Northern operations.

Our deterrent capacity cannot depend upon a vastly expanded army of almost half a million, as a former commander mistakenly called for, because the economic costs would sink the country. Nor should anyone envisage compulsory national service in the form of a draft because the USA itself learnt to its bitter social cost that the best army is an all-volunteer army. However, a recent successful experiment has been conducted in Sri Lanka with the armed forces’ support, for an orientation course of university entrants. In preparation for a worst case scenario, that model could be expanded to provide a huge youth/student populace, including women, trained in the use of weapons, and which could make any invader, secessionist or irredentist puppet regime (and its ‘rebel army’) bleed from death by a thousand cuts. As Fidel Castro once said when Cuba was under threat of intervention, “we shall arm even the cats!”

Sri Lanka must protect itself against two erroneous schools of thought, both of which sin against Realism. One fails to comprehend the basic conflict of interest between Sri Lanka’s national interests and those states that call for so-called accountability hearings. These states are driven by Tamil Diaspora lobbies, contempt for national sovereignty (except for their own) and an emerging Cold War competition with China. The pseudo-pragmatic school of ‘professional’ capitulationists and appeasers fails to perceive the threat from this quarter and the requirement of global resistance. The other school of thought is that of those who fail to understand the imperative need for compromises and concessions on the secondary and the tactical, so that a strong protective ring can be reconstructed on our perimeter, i.e., our neighbourhood, thereby protecting that which is essential: Sri Lanka’s sovereignty, unity, territorial integrity and the gains of the historic military victory.

The most durable defence against interventionism is by simultaneously changing our ‘target profile’ and ‘target hardening’. This can be done only by repairing our internal fragility; removing the discontent and disaffection of the minority at our strategically sensitive Northern periphery. But can that be done and how can it be done? The best answer is in The Fear of Barbarians by Tzventan Todorov, Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique (CNRS), Paris. In this book, described by the great scholar of international relations, Prof Stanley Hoffman of Harvard and Science Po, as “more than a masterpiece, [it is] a treasure”,  Prof Todorov speaks of the need to replace or transform an ethnocracy into a modern democracy: “a modern democracy is to be distinguished from an ethnocracy, i.e., a state in which belonging to a particular ethnic group ensures you of privileges over the other inhabitants of a country; in a democracy, all citizens, whatever their origin, language, religion or customs enjoy the same rights.” (p 67)

Could any imperative be more patriotic? Could any patriotic task be more urgently imperative?

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“Seek truth from facts” (Deng Xiaoping)

It is ironic, is it not, that those Western voices and Lankan liberals who believe that there is a democracy wave sweeping the world, that democracy is dying if not dead in Sri Lanka and is in dire need of regime change, do not, for the most part, pause to review or objectively ascertain public opinion in the country? They may not believe that ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’ –‘the voice of the people is the voice of God’ — but surely, any adherent or advocate of democracy must know and display some respect for public opinion in what remains a multiparty democracy?

There is an extensive survey of public opinion, the results of which will up-end all conventional assumptions about what the Sri Lankan people think and therefore how they are likely to act or react.

This is the Survey on Democracy in Post-War Sri Lanka, Topline Report July 2011, conducted and published by the Social Indicators unit of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), in association with the Friedrich Neumann Stiftung of Germany. Headed by Dr Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, a well-known civil society critic of the administration, the CPA is and has been a trenchant critic of government policy. Therefore, its findings cannot be tainted by association with government. Those findings will, to put it colloquially, blow your socks off.

The media release issued by the CPA with the Report notes that the results reveal a divided society, which is however only one way of looking at it. Given that one of the ethnic communities happens to comprise virtually two thirds of the island’s population, the division is quite uneven, and with uneven consequence. Even more significantly, the statistics show a remarkable degree of congruence between Sinhalese and Tamils on key issues, and a surprisingly positive opinion being held by a fairly large percentage of Tamils on the most contentious and polarising issues.

“On the subject of the general security situation in the country, majority of Sri Lankans think that it has got better in the last two years. 68.2% said it has got a lot better while 23.1% said it has got a little better. When comparing the opinions of respondents across the four communities, it is mostly the Sinhala community (77.5%) and Up country Tamil community (57.8%) who said that the security situation has got a lot better. ”

What is interesting is that the results belie a general assumption about Tamil opinion as a whole. Most critics of the Sri Lankan state and/or the government cherish the belief that the vast majority of Sri Lankan Tamils feel that the security situation has worsened with the heavy presence of the military. However, only “13.2% of the Tamil community said that it has got a lot worse”.

While, understandably, “an overwhelming majority from the Southern Province (98.1%) believe that the general security situation in the country has got better in the last two years, with 75.6% saying that it has got a lot better”, a large percentage of respondents from the Northern Province, as large as 63.9% said “the general security situation …has got better”, though only 10.3% in that Province said “it has got a lot better”. “A majority of Sri Lankans are hopeful about the security situation in the future as 56.4% think that it will get a lot better…”

The solid commitment of the Sri Lankan citizenry to democracy as a system, and rejection of any suggestion of military rule as a form of government, comes through unambiguously in the Survey data.  Furthermore, the commitment to democracy is one major issue on which there is NO significant ethnic differentiation, let alone polarisation. In sum, there is a solid nationwide consensus on democracy as a form of rule.  “A majority from all four communities (Sinhala – 68.2%, Tamil – 70.3%, Up country Tamil – 70.8%, Muslim 87.8%) stated that democracy is preferable to any other kind of government. 52.7% of Sinhala respondents, 76.3% of Tamil respondents, 71.1% of Up country Tamil respondents and 70.1% of Muslim respondents strongly disagreed with the suggestion of having the army rule a country.”

Interestingly it is the Sinhalese who disagreed most with the notion of a strong, yet undemocratic leader, even if the situation necessitated it. This gives the lie to the Western or Colombo cosmopolitan critique of the Sinhalese, namely that their propensity for authoritarianism and failure to internalise liberal enlightenment values give them a propensity for authoritarian patriarchal leaders , al la Germany in the 1930s, and that this explains the high degree of support for Mahinda Rajapaksa. On the contrary, the statistics show that the Sinhala majority have a strong propensity verging on a vocation, for democracy.

“Having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections – Respondents from all four communities mostly disagreed with this statement with 50.7% of the Sinhala community, 44.2% of the Tamil community, 41.7% of Up country Tamil community and 40.3% of the Muslim community strongly disagreeing… Having a democratically elected political leader – Around 80% of those from Sinhala and Tamil communities and around 85% from the Up country Tamil and Muslim communities agreed with this type of leader governing a country. 72.7% of urban respondents and 70.5% of rural respondents said that they strongly agreed with having a democratically elected political leader.” (pp 21-22)

Crucially, there is no support for anything remotely akin to a theocracy, or de-facto quasi theocracy, in which religious leaders would play an overriding, hegemonic or determinant role. This too gives the lie to the Western liberal caricature of Sinhalese and Muslims in political thrall to their respective clergies. Politics, decision making and policy making are a largely secular matter for the majority of the Sri Lankan people.

“Having religious leaders rather than politicians make all major decisions about the country – Around 55% – 60% of respondents from the Sinhala, Tamil and Up Country Tamil communities disagreed with this while disagreement for having religious leaders making all major decisions about the country was lowest among the Muslim respondents with around 40% agreeing (out of which includes 10% who strongly agreed) that they should.” (pp. 21-22)

The advanced character of the civic consciousness of the Sri Lankan people is demonstrated by their preference for a non-military, non-theocratic, civilian, elected democratic leadership, with a more meritocratic, expert driven decision making /policy process.

“Having experts, not government, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country – Agreement was high for this form of governance, with more than 62% of respondents from all four communities agreeing with this statement.” (pp 21-22)

The bulk of the citizenry seem to have no issues with a constructive civilian role of a distributive-development sort, for the military. “Since the end of war, the role of the forces has expanded to include civilian tasks, such as selling vegetables and other economic and recreation activities. More than 55% of the Sinhala, Up country Tamil and Muslim communities approve of this, with 25.3% of the Sinhala community, 28.1% of the Up country Tamil community and 10% of the Muslim community stating their strong approval.” As will be mentioned later, the statistics show a high level of trust among the majority, for the armed forces as an institution.

Contrary to the opinion of critics of Sri Lanka, the people, irrespective of ethnic identities, feel that Sri Lanka is more, not less democratic in the post war period. “Most respondents from all four communities believe that Sri Lanka is now more democratic, with 31.2% of Sinhala, 20.8% of Tamil, 32.8% of Up country Tamil and 33.8% of Muslim respondents stating that Sri Lanka is much more democratic.” Furthermore, the people of all ethnic communities believe that their vote counts, irrespective of all propaganda about vote rigging and stolen elections. The Survey says that “It is noteworthy that most respondents from all four communities believe that their vote has an impact on the outcome of an election.”

Notwithstanding a noteworthy degree of alienation among the Tamil citizens of the Hill Country — most respondents in the Up Country Tamil community (41.2%) believe that they have no say in what the government does—“most in the Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim communities disagreed and believe that they do have a say in what the government does”.

What about the freedom of expression, which most critics yell is being throttled as we speak, or in this case, write? “When asked if in Sri Lanka they are free to express their feelings about politics, irrespective of where they are and who they are with, most of those from the Sinhala community (50%) and Up country Tamil community (38.8%) believe that they are completely free to do so, while a much smaller percentage of the Tamil and Muslim communities believe the same.”

Now, here’s the kicker folks. What do the majority of our citizens say about democracy during the administration of President Mahinda Rajapaksa? Do they believe the view of the local liberals and dissidents that democracy died with the introduction of the 18^th amendment which abolished the two term limit? Hardly: “58.8% of Sri Lankans think that the country has been the most democratic under President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s period. This view is shared by 69.9% of Sinhalese respondents. On the other hand, only 23.6% of Tamil respondents, 13.1% of Up country Tamil respondents and 21.9% of Muslim respondents concur.”

A fairly significant portion of the citizens seemed not to have a problem with the abolition of the two term limit either. “42.4% of Sinhalese respondents said that there should be no constitutional limit on how many terms the President can serve – in order to allow strong Presidents to serve the country. 15.2% of Tamil, 21.4% of Up country Tamil and 26.6% of Muslim respondents agreed with the same.”

Let’s get to perhaps the most newsworthy part. Which political party do most Sri Lankans feel closest to? What are the respective strengths of the parties, especially the ruling party and the main Opposition? What are the chances in the foreseeable future of the Opposition? What is the picture in the South and north respectively? The results are striking, stark and massive. There is only one game in town, when it comes to state power, and only one in terms of a North-South dialogue.

“Respondents were asked about which political party (specific party, not alliance) they felt that they are close to. 74% of Sinhalese respondents said the Sri Lanka Freedom Party while 19.8% said the United National Party. 53.9% of Tamil respondents said they felt close to the Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi party while 22.4% said the United National Party.”

Thus the inescapable conclusion is that the SLFP under Mahinda Rajapaksa has an unassailable position of support from two thirds of the community that comprises two thirds of the country’s populace, while the UNP under Ranil Wickremasinghe has plummeted to 20% of that community which constitutes the overwhelmingly preponderant majority.

Meanwhile the TNA is not as hegemonic among the Tamils as the SLFP is among the Sinhalese, but it has emerged clearly ahead, and is far more popular among the Tamils than the UNP is among the Sinhalese.

On the problem of a political solution and reconciliation, social opinion does seem divided.  “On the topic of a political solution for Sri Lanka’s ethnic problem, 29.7% of Sinhala, 59.1% of Tamil, 30.8% of Up country Tamil and 53.5% of Muslim communities agreed that the Constitution should be changed based on recommendations made by an all party committee to produce a political solution to the country’s ethnic problem. However, 17.6% Sinhala, 4% Tamil, 11.1% Up country Tamil and 14.2% Muslim communities said that there is no need for a political solution as the LTTE was completely defeated militarily. Most respondents from the Tamil (40.9%), Up country Tamil (32.5%) and Muslim (42.9%) communities agree that power needs to be devolved to the Provincial Councils while reducing the power of the central government. Only 15.3% of the Sinhala community concur…On the topic of reconciliation, 32.3% of people from the Tamil community are of the opinion that the government has done nothing with regard to addressing the root causes of the conflict which resulted in thirty years of war. On the other hand, 41.1% of people from the Sinhala community believe that the government has done a lot.”

Though this is an extract from the CPA’s ‘Key Points’ summary, the body of the main text provides the real ‘key’ to the solution: “…On the other hand, 31.3% of Sinhala and around 20% of Tamil, Up country Tamil and Muslim communities stated that it is alright to decentralise certain powers but powers of the central government should not be reduced. Once again, 37% of Sinhala and around 20% of Tamil, Up country Tamil and Muslim respondents said that they have no opinion regarding this.” (pp.23-24)

Paradoxically, the CPA statistics make it easier to formulate a political settlement, because the parameters of the possible are brought into sharp relief. Given the statistics of Sinhala opinion, it is evident that any solution, even one that emanates from a Parliamentary Select Committee, cannot stand the test of public opinion at a national referendum. Such a referendum will become imperative if a proposed solution exceeds the framework of the Constitution. Almost equally clearly, a majority of the majority either support or do not oppose a decentralisation of powers provided those of the central government remain undiminished.

The cold, hard facts revealed by the CPA Survey prescribe the avoidance of Constitutional change drastic enough to reduce, or be credibly perceived (before the Supreme Court, in the first instance) as reducing the powers of the centre and therefore necessitating a referendum. Logic and reality combine to dictate that any political settlement must be limited to that which averts a Sinhala veto at a referendum, i.e. it must remain within the overall framework of the Constitution and must be limited to the actual implementation of its existing provisions for devolution of power to the provinces with perhaps a degree of ‘stretching’ by way of re-adjustment in the list of powers shared concurrently between centre and provinces.

In another surprising development, there is a broad consensus cross cutting ethnic fault lines, and belying the critique by oppositional economists, that the Rajapaksa administration is doing a good job on the macro economy. This of course narrows the political space for the UNP, whose strong suit has been economic growth and development. The Survey states that “Looking at the assessment of the economy, most of the respondents from all four communities believe that the government is doing a good job…50.4% of Sinhala, 49.2% of Tamil, 54.4% of Up country Tamil and 60.6% of Muslim communities agree that the government is doing a good job in managing public services. 71.7% of Sinhala, 74.4% of Tamil, 55.9% of Up country Tamil and 64% of Tamil respondents who said that the Government is doing a good job in managing public services also stated that this favourable opinion increased since the end of war. 5.5% of Sinhala, 2.3 of Tamil, 20.3% of Up country Tamil and 7.9% of Muslim respondents said that it has decreased.”

What of the civic consciousness of the citizenry? What of the levels of social/public trust in institutions? Despite three decades of war, the atrophy of some institutions and the hypertrophy of others, the Survey reveals that “With regard to the level of trust that they have in key institutions, most people from all four communities have some trust in the Central/ National government, their Provincial government, their Local government, civil service, police, parliament and political parties. Most Sinhalese people have a great deal of trust in the army while most of those from the other three communities have some trust. However, 32.8% of people from the Tamil community stated that they have no trust in the army.”

This does not however, mean that the people, including the Sinhala people have no clearly identifiable problems, criticism and grievances. The big issues are those of Human Development or Physical Quality of Life including unemployment, inflation and poverty. The big three are the Cost of living, corruption and unemployment. “65% of Sri Lankans, mostly from the Sinhala community, do not think that corruption can be ignored…According to a majority of the respondents, the most important area the Government needs to pay attention to is the cost of living. When it comes to the second most important area, respondents in the Tamil and Up country Tamil communities said it should be reducing poverty while the Sinhala community said agriculture and the Muslim community said unemployment. When asked about the main results that people would like to see from the current development process, once again cost of living ranks as the top priority for respondents in all four communities. For the Sinhala community, improved infrastructure is the second result they would like to see while for the other three communities it is addressing unemployment and the creation of more jobs. ”

Public opinion is enlightened, across the ethnic communities on the need to prioritise the development of the former conflict areas. “Most respondents from all four communities believe that priority should be given to rebuilding conflict affected areas, with the Tamil (73.6%) and Up country Tamil (65.2%) being the highest among the four communities who think so when compared to the 49.6% of Sinhala respondents and 46.1% of Muslim respondents who believe the same.”The Sri Lankan citizenry displays the same pragmatic enlightenment on two important civic issues, namely women’s representation and the role of the news media. “72.6% said that the news media should constantly investigate and report on corruption and the mistakes made by the government while only 5.6% said that too much reporting on negative events, like corruption, only harms the country… Support for the idea of allocating a fixed quota for women candidates per district at the elections was high among respondents from all four communities.”

Lenin once said that “serious politics begins where tens of millions of people are”. It is therefore very difficult to take seriously, those who try to do serious politics or urge serious political change with no awareness of or respect for the opinions of tens of millions of Sri Lankan people. Perhaps things are simpler still. The best known injunction of the man who launched China’s economic miracle, Chairman Deng Xiaoping, was ‘seek truth from facts’.

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With the solitary, honourable exception of Sunday Times columnist Lasanda Kurukulasuriya, (‘Give a dog a bad name and hang him’, From the Sidelines, Sunday Times, Colombo, August 14, 2011), the Lankan media and Colombo’s commentariat completely missed the most important intellectual event in civil society in this post-war phase of our contemporary history.

A media accustomed to lionising the less distinguished among our retired senior professionals and intelligentsia, was either ignorant of or chose to ignore a symposium held by the oldest among our independent think tanks, the MARGA Institute, precisely on the most pressing subject of the day, the Darusman report or more accurately the UNSG’s Advisory Panel Report. Worse, the media and our commentators seem unaware of the extended analysis of the Darusman Report by the doyen of Sri Lanka’s intelligentsia, one of our most refined literary critics, most distinguished civil servant, and among a handful of our globally most respected minds, Godfrey Gunatilleke. Entitled ‘Truth and Accountability: The Last Stages of the War in Sri Lanka’, and subtitled ‘An Analysis and Evaluation of the Report of the UN Secretary General’s (UNSG’s) Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka’, it is a Working Paper prepared by him for the MARGA seminar on ‘Accountability, Restorative Justice and Reconciliation’ (21/07/2011).

Let us assume the media simply missed the story. I eagerly await the reportage, and more crucially, the commentaries over the coming weeks, as that would give sufficient lead time for the texts to be sought out, digested and reflected upon. I await such developments especially keenly because Godfrey Gunatilleke’s evaluation of the Darusman Report’s critique of the Sri Lankan government and the armed forces, while a demonstrative deployment of and in perfect consonance with his own diamantine critical intelligence, refined methodology and liberal humanistic ethics, cuts completely against the grain of the neoliberal humanitarian/human rights discourse on Sri Lanka in the West, INGO-based ‘global civil society’, the Tamil émigré community and Colombo’s cosmopolitan ‘social networks’.

It strikes me that an encyclopaedically literate Lankan and towering intellectual figure such as Godfrey Gunatilleke, whose integrity, values and reasoned judgement have never been in question, has an evaluation of the war which is quite at variance with that of the intellectually dwarfish (by comparison) moralising denouncers of the Sri Lankan state. His, notably, is a penetratingly objective perspective that extends selective, critical support to the legitimate, democratic state authority on the historically defining, core complex of problems of the war, allegations of war crimes and accountability. Here is a microcosmic excerpt from Godfrey’s conclusion:

“[…] The root of the problems in the report lie in their outrageous interpretation of the government’s military strategy as designed at the extermination of Tamils without any humanitarian intention or effort at rescuing hostages. With this interpretation the panel puts on the blinkers that distort all their perceptions of the government’s actions. The report also gives a deliberately truncated view of the government’s action by excluding what would have provided a different and more positive explanation of these actions. This deficiency is seen in every part of the report that deals with government actions.” (Conclusions, pp.28-29)

“…The LTTE had deliberately integrated the civilian population into their military effort and turned the NFZs to battle fields. By the mass conscription of civilians for military activity in the NFZ the building of fortifications with civilian conscripts and the use of all means available for military purposes, the LTTE had effectively blurred the distinction between civilians and combatants. How is intentionality and proportionality of army actions to be judged in such a situation? The LTTE was refusing to surrender. It was becoming clear that the defeat of the LTTE and the rescue of the hostages would entail heavy human cost- deaths of the LTTE combatants, conscripted civilians, soldiers and non combatant civilians. At this point the army after weighing the options available and their likely consequences had apparently decided that it could not halt the offensive and had to go ahead and put a speedy end to the resistance of the LTTE. It has to be noted that the government would have had to take into account that the LTTE in their desperation might resort to acts of the utmost brutality that might involve deaths of civilians on a massive scale.”(Conclusions, p 33)

Let me make a prediction. Godfrey Gunatilleke’s brilliant disquisition will be pretty much ignored. The foreign press corps, including those of the neighbourhood, will not pick it up. The media will not run it. The social media will black it out. The Embassies will turn a blind eye and a deaf ear. The pundits will not engage with it or even refer to it. Other luminaries, more pontifical but of lesser independence of mind and intellectual standing, will continue to be depicted with a halo. This is because it is ‘politically correct’ to adopt a pseudo-sophisticated sneer at state sovereignty, while it is ‘politically incorrect’ to fail to ooze rancour towards Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, and the conduct of the Sri Lankan military. An objective perspective such Godfrey’s will not help position any aspirant as a possible element in a successor or transitional government in the currently faddish scenario of West-induced regime change. It will not bring in any funds or secure applause from the sections of the Tamil émigré community that nurses an abiding sense of singular victimhood.

Godfrey’s text cannot be frontally critiqued either conceptually or concretely, because it is argumentatively impregnable and because the civil society critics just are not good enough. It cannot be dismissed as Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism or neo-conservative militarism because Godfrey is neither Buddhist (still less a ‘Sinhala-Buddhist’) nor a neo-conservative. It cannot be brushed aside as resulting from regime patronage or a wish for such, because Godfrey was never one for such patronage and at the age of 85 it is difficult to imagine he has picked up the habit.

Ironically, the chief contributors to the MARGA seminar, Godfrey Gunatilleke and David Blacker (a war veteran and award winning writer of English prose), who are neither Sinhala-Buddhist nor subscribe to such fundamentalist notions of Sri Lanka’s identity, have produced a far more serious and sophisticated critique of the Darusman report and a credible, analytically solid, alternative interpretative framework of the war’s last stages, than have any ideologue or spokesperson for narrow nationalism.

Having left the Darusman report in rubble, Godfrey Gunatilleke’s and David Blacker’s critical interventions delegitimize, by implicit extension, the even more tendentious Channel 4 productions by a realistic re-framing of context and events. For example, David Blacker says of Channel 4:

“…footage of identifiable Sri Lankan soldiers committing shocking but non-criminal activities is shown alongside footage of unidentified persons committing obviously criminal acts, thereby implying that all the acts shown are criminal ones committed by identifiable SL Army personnel.” (Holes in the UN Secretary General’s Panel of Experts Report: Examining the Probable Alternate Events)

This is intellectually all the more valuable and praiseworthy at a time when commentators pronounce judgment upon the counter-documentary of the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence, ‘Lies Agreed Upon’ (ably narrated and presented by Minoli Ratnayake), without a single critical reference to the WMD-esque Channel 4 programmes, and while, in fact, parroting their more lurid nonsense.

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Osama Bin Laden. Dark avenging hero, Arabian knight, Arabic Lawrence of Arabia. Osama versus the USA: David versus Goliath, a hijacked airliner the stone from his slingshot. Not quite. David didn’t murder Goliath’s family in their tents, leaving Goliath only hobbling. Not every leader or dramatic figure is a hero, and not every force that takes on a much bigger foe is heroic. Not even when that foe has been guilty, as has the USA, of horrible crimes such as the sanctions which were responsible for the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqi infants.

This is not an argument for pacifism. Or moderation. Heroes are almost always extremists in one way or the other. They seem to seek out or get drawn into ‘extreme situations’ – in which they really come alive. They also ‘take it to the limit/one more time’. (The Eagles). They are not ‘one of ‘and do not comfortably ‘dwell among’. They are different from the rest. Like eagles, lighthouse-keepers or sentinels in a watchtower, they rise ‘above’ or range ‘beyond’ the average, the norm, the ordinary and everyday. They are often martyrs but are almost never angels or saints – purer, more decent than others in any conventionally comprehended sense. Being a-typical, they are not cosseted by and comfortably ensconced in the surrounding society, though there are moments of celebration and felicitation. They bear marks of a certain isolation caused by being out there in the vanguard, since being in the vanguard is a lonely, singular situation. The hero is worn, even misshapen by the wear and tear of going against the grain, of swimming against the tide, of being a voice in the wilderness. Thus he slips, commits mistakes, even crimes. Often his very achievements, including that of sheer survival and outstanding performance against tremendous odds, give him the sin of hubris. A hero is not a safe, regular person. He is dangerously destabilizing to others and dangerous to himself. He lives on the edge; walks the high wire. A creature of conjunctures, at other times he dwells in exile, often ‘internal’ or ‘spiritual’ exile. The hero is also almost always in danger, often of an unspecified yet permanent sort. He has made so many enemies in his odyssey that the danger inheres in the environment in which he exists – and he is so exhausted that he hardly retains his robust capacity to resist and prevail.

Somewhere on Mount Olympus, the Gods compensate for the exceptional strengths and abilities of a hero by giving him blind spots and (fatal) weaknesses. Like Achilles’ Heel. Without these he would be impossible. The hero isn’t a better human being than everyone else. He doesn’t have more endearing qualities. He just has those qualities – or those qualities in greater measure – that are needed to fight evil; for the survival of the community when it is in danger from Evil. In thought and/or in deed, he goes further and faster than most, he’s willing to take more risks. He isn’t good – he’s just better than the rest and morally superior to the enemy he finds himself opposed to and who opposes him. The hero may be horribly flawed; indeed this is almost a structural trait of the heroic profile. Take Othello, Oedipus, Ajax. He may hesitate, vacillate: Gary Cooper in High Noon. Christ at Gethsemane. He may have reprehensible insensitive, even self-serving behavior: Jason. But Jason got the Argonauts through, and it took him to do so. The hero is singular, almost unique. His exceptional qualities – those that enable the community to survive in times of mortal danger – alienate him from the community, sometimes leading to exile or self-exile, and often to his undoing. Hence the tragic hero: the Greek and the Shakespearean audiences knew that the hero must fall, and yet is redeemed in some ultimate moral or cosmic sense by his exceptional virtues.

DEATH SURPLUS
What then is the difference between a hero and Osama Bin Laden or Prabhakaran? Osama believes in a cause, he is deeply committed, is brave, takes enormous risks, has sacrificed himself, is decisive, is a rebel, is at the vanguard of the struggle against the rich and powerful global Establishment. Why then is he not my hero? Because each and every one of these characteristics could have easily described Adolph Hitler and Mussolini. These alone are not what define a hero. These are not enough. This realization on my part didn’t come easy. I had to think it through, re-think it, and wrestle with contradictory thoughts, feelings. But whatever the initial rush that came with the unforgettable, once-in-lifetime spectacle of the plane flinging itself into the Twin Towers, Old Testament retribution reaching out from the remote Afghan hills right into Babylon/Wall Street, I reached out for and tried to hold fast to a moral-ethical compass. It is evil to deliberately target innocent civilians. If you lose that moral compass in the struggle for change, the struggle against the status- quo, you lose direction and wind up in the same hell as Pol Pot and Hitler. You lose your soul.

The hero has a code. A code that is noble – and in the final analysis he lives or dies by it. Osama Bin Laden’s code is not a noble one. That is why he is not a hero. True a hero is an extremist and is often unbending, relentless, driving. But he is never a fanatic. A hero is intrepid, but struggles to steer, as did Ulysses between Scylla and Charybdis: between a capitulationist conformism which passively accepts the things that are, and ethical anarcho-nihilism which suspends all moral considerations in fighting against things as they are. What is the defining difference between an extremist and a fanatic? I submit that it is a question of ‘surplus violence’, ‘surplus death’. A hero never dispenses or causes wittingly to be dispensed, and indeed strives not to cause to be dispensed, a greater sum of violent death than is necessary. The violence is targeted against the forces of the enemy. The hero observes the distinction between the innocent and the guilty, the armed and the unarmed, combatants and non-combatants, armed men and unarmed women and children. A hero observes these distinctions and is able to make these discriminations, so difficult to do in the heat of passion – and the hero is nothing if not passionate.

There is an intimate connection between a hero and action, often between a hero and violent action. But what guides that action? A hero never engages wittingly, intentionally, in avoidable cruelty – and if he has done so he agonizes in repentance. That is a defining aspect of his heroism. A fanatic is characterized by the untroubled use of ‘surplus death’ i.e. an unwarranted excess of lethal violence. Indeed excess is celebrated. Bigger bangs. More deaths. He does not observe vital moral distinctions. The Vietnamese, who had four times more bombs dropped on them by the US than were dropped in the whole Second World War, never set off a single bomb in the USA. Fidel Castro who had more assassination plots against him hatched or backed by the CIA than any world leader, never conspired to kill an American leader. The ICRC has in its archives a letter from Fidel and Che, written while fighting in the Sierra Maestra, requesting aid that would enable them to continue treating captured Batista soldiers according to the Geneva Convention. Japanese soldiers, belonging to an army that had perpetrated the Rape of Nanking, found themselves treated scrupulously by Mao’s Liberation Army. That is heroic sensibility in action – as opposed to the ferocity of fanaticism.

HEROISM, FANATICISM
Che Guevara was an extremist, but never a fanatic, while Osama bin Laden and Velupillai Prabhakaran are fanatics. This is also why Fidel Castro is a real hero, while bin Laden and Prabhakaran, though leaders – and ones of great military accomplishment – are not. And it is also why those communities (ethno-religious, ethno-national) and individuals who regard the latter as heroes, should take a long hard look at themselves.

Che, who loved puppies, once had to order the strangling of a puppy that latched onto his guerrilla column on an ambush, because the puppy’s barks were betraying the hiding place of the guerrillas and would have resulted in them being wiped out. Che obviously felt so lacerated by the experience that he confessed the incident in a short story. In Talequan, Northern Afghanistan, the Taliban herded the population into the main town square. Then they paraded a number of dogs, on whose foreheads had been stenciled the names of their enemies – including King Zahir Shah and George W. Bush. They poured petrol on the dogs and burnt them alive. It was meant as a warning, said eyewitnesses (identities given in the news report) who arrived at a refugee camp. (The Telegraph Group, London/The Island Tues 2nd Oct, 2001 p6). When the Taliban took power in 1995, they dragged former Afghan ruler and Communist Najibullah out of the UN compound in which he was sheltered in accordance with the negotiated settlement, castrated him while alive, dragged him through the streets tied to a jeep and finally hanged him in public. A report in France’s Le Point somewhere in the year 2000 (I think it was April-May) quoted an LTTE cadre code-named Marianna, as disclosing that captive Sri Lankan soldiers are bled to death. The report went uncontradicted by the Tigers. This is barbarism of a very Dark Age.

The choice posed by History is no longer ‘Socialism or Barbarism?’ but ‘Democracy or Barbarism?’ Neither from the objective point of view of social progress nor from the subjective point of view of ethics and morality, can Osama Bin Laden nor the Taliban, Prabhakaran and the LTTE, or fanatics and fundamentalists anywhere, be humanity’s heroes.

• Osama Bin Laden and Sri Lanka’s WMD Moment
• The Destroyed Temple
• The killing of Osama Bin Laden
• Heroes of our ages
• Fidel’s Ethics of Violence

President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga always wrote well and spoke eloquently when she resisted a propensity to be overly loquacious. While her recent peroration contains many intelligent and valid points, her credibility and their validity comes into serious question because she is not an independent observer or a reformist leader –in-waiting, but precisely a two term president who won by record majorities, and was indeed the immediate predecessor of the present incumbent.  Most ironic is the fact that many of the ills she identifies or attributes to present day Sri Lanka stem directly from her political sins of omission and commission. What is conspicuously lacking in her discourse, is any sign of reflexivity; of self-criticism.

My criticism pertains to four vital spheres (including those of her current concern), namely viable devolution, a less discriminatory society, the role of radical Sinhala nationalism/ultra-nationalism and of course defeating terrorism and reunifying the Sri Lankan state.

Having been elected by an unprecedented majority, CBK could have easily pushed through reforms making for moderate power-sharing if she had activated one of five options feasible at the time: the 13^th amendment, the Mangala Moonesinghe Select Committee Report (to which one of the signatories was her mother, Madam Sirimavo Bandaranaike), the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact, promulgate an Interim Administration as per the 13^th amendment or improve modestly on the 13^th amendment through majorities in the provincial councils.  She did none of these. Instead she headed off on a wild goose chase of an overly ambitious ‘union of regions’ package. And having done so, what is her credibility and ethical standing in criticising the government of the day?

CBK is concerned about a more inclusive, non-discriminatory society. I believe this to be sincere. However why she did not move in this direction by implementing her own Equal Opportunities Bill? Why did she withdraw it? Having done so, what is the credibility of her contemporary social critique?

President Kumaratunga laments the role of the Sinhala hawks. Fair enough, but who empowered them? By picking Justice Sarath N Silva over Justice Mark Fernando, CBK surely helped tilt the balance.

During the dark days of appeasement under the CFA, I was invited by her as the main discussant at a meeting of the SLFP parliamentary group, held at the President’s Pavilion in Kandy and chaired by her.  I articulated the perspective that a united front of the centre-Left with the JVP was necessary but that the centrist SLFP must be firmly hegemonic and that the JVP really had nowhere else to go. I also recall Mahinda Rajapaksa as being most critical and pessimistic about a bloc with the JVP. In the event the SLFP under President Kumaratunga’s leadership conceded a massive slice of forty seats to the JVP! It is this parliamentary bloc that President Rajapaksa inherited and had to keep together while fighting the war. It is precisely the JVP that threatened to withdraw or actually withdrew from the APRC after its Experts Committee which had produced a constructive report on devolution. Apprehensive that his parliamentary majority may be in jeopardy, the President hit the brakes on the entire exercise.

Sinhala extremism was re-legitimised by her insistence that Vijaya Kumaratunga had been killed by Premadasa, rather than the JVP and the JVP alone. It fed off her erroneous choice of a peace mediator, at the wrong time too. She chose Norway, with its strong Tamil lobby, and did so in the late 1990s when the Sri Lankan military could have gone on the counter offensive , and persevered with the ‘ peace process’ after the assassination attempt on her  and the events of 9/11, which taken together would have provided her the external conditions to smash the Tigers.  She crippled her own military’s capacity to go for the kill by continuing with the Sudu Nelum movement, an anti-war movement which could and did conduct its campaign only in the Sinhala majority areas, thereby cutting into recruitment for the military in such a manner that it could not hold the territory it liberated and go onto liberate more.

Southern extremism and fundamentalism were fuelled by the Sudu Nelum phenomenon and the role of Norway, both CBK inputs.

The Sinhala ultras received a major, if unintended contribution from President Kumaratunga in the shape of her PTOMS proposals, which were challenged by the JVP and frozen by the Supreme Court—and quite rightly too, as its crucial middle tier gave the Sri Lankan state 3 slots and the LTTE 5!

As to the core issues of defeating terrorism and reuniting the territory of Sri Lanka, President Kumaratunga made some signal contributions but failed to capitalise on them and went onto partially reverse some of them.  She could have continued the offensive following the admirable liberation of Jaffna by her, and  her no less admirable defence of Jaffna in year 2000.  Yet, she did not. Furthermore, at the time of the strategically critical Karuna split, she permitted Prabhakaran’s forces to make a sea-borne landing in his rear area, passing through Sri Lankan navy lines.

Sartre once said that what matters is not what is done to us but what we do with what is done to us. Mahinda Rajapaksa inherited a divided territory and a military whose spirit was debilitated.  With these, he achieved that which no leader achieved for three decades. He defeated the Tigers, reunited the island’s territory and reopened the electoral political space for the revival of democratic Tamil politics including Tamil nationalist politics.

The TNA’s Northern success, running against the ruling coalition in an area with a heavy military ‘footprint’ means one thing above all else:  Sri Lanka remains a functioning, competitive, multiparty democracy. All thinking and policy within Sri Lanka and about Sri Lanka must stem from recognition of that basic fact. Yet, will the critics of the incumbent administration and of this country grant us that much? Knowing them as I do, I shan’t be holding my breath.

All those who wrote that democracy had died in Sri Lanka with the 18^th amendment, not to mention those who cannot write a paragraph about Mahinda Rajapaksa without an obligatory reference to Nazi Germany, should tender apologies to the reading public or at the least wriggle in shame in private, at the TNA’s performance in the Northern and portions of the Eastern province. But again, knowing them as I do, I shan’t be holding my breath.

An emerging ‘pivotal power’, Turkey, much admired for its secularism, moderate Islamic political party and independent foreign policy, has faced a long standing problem of secessionism from its Kurds. Today Turkey is in a better place, not only because of its admirable leadership, but because there is unprecedented space for the Kurds. Since Turkey hardly has a federal state or regional autonomy for the Kurds, what exactly is that space? It consists of several Kurdish language radio and TV channels, over 30 members of parliament, and many mayors in the Kurdish majority areas.

All this the Tamil people and the TNA have now. This should not be scoffed at, nor should Sri Lanka’s post-war achievement in opening that space and keeping it open.

The election results confirm that which I had told the Archbishop of Canterbury, in the presence of President Rajapaksa, in 2006 or early 2007, when he asked me how sure I was that what I had defined as a Just War, would result in a Just Outcome. I answered that with the North and East liberated by the military from the Tigers’ totalitarianism, electoral and political space would re-open and the Tamil people would be re-enfranchised, enabling them to democratically re-inscribe their grievances and aspirations in the political agenda, albeit within a united Sri Lanka.

Today the domestic geopolitics of the island are clear: the UPFA is the pre-eminent force among the vast majority inhabiting two thirds of the island while the TNA is the pre-eminent entity among of the Tamil people. The UPFA preponderates at the centre, the TNA at the Northern periphery.

This reality is the antechamber to another reality. The TNA cannot dream of another political negotiating partner other than the UPFA. An alliance with the UNP makes no sense because that party lags so far behind, it cannot deliver anything in the foreseeable future, and furthermore, any alliance with the TNA will hurt the UNP’s electoral chances, not enhance them, as candidate Fonseka found out to his cost. The UPFA is the only real game in town among the Sinhalese. Similarly, no dialogue with the Tamils is possible without the TNA or bypassing it. Any consequential political dialogue must have as its main axis, the UPFA and the TNA.

That second reality results from a third, or bottom line reality. Neither the Sinhalese nor the Tamils can prevail over one another. The Sinhalese could not be pushed beyond a point and they proved it with the victory in war. The Sinhalese will keep the country as a united territory and the single state, however long it takes, whatever the odds, and whoever the foe, internal or external or any combination thereof. Those located or having regrouped overseas who, having lost the war for Tamil Eelam are trying to regain what they lost by enlisting the support of erstwhile colonial patrons, will learn that what the Sri Lanka state has liberated and reunified, it shall hold, under whichever leader, flag or generation and “by whatever means necessary” (Malcolm X). The Tamils for their part will not relinquish their collective identity and search for dignity.

A sustainable peace is not possible exclusively on the terms of either one or the other community. There will neither be a Tamil state (separate or federal) nor a Sinhala peace over the Tamils. There will have to be a modus vivendi. And such a modus vivendi can only be found along the Buddha’s Middle Path or the Aristotelian Golden Mean between what Sinhala and Tamil nationalism wish.

With the election results we have a new balance of forces; a new conjuncture. It is not and cannot be an equivalence or perfect equilibrium, given abiding demographic realities and the decisive results of a thirty years war. However, it provides a chance for a fresh look and a new realism.

Have we been here before? In 1977 the electoral map was fairly similar, with the UNP enjoying more than a two thirds majority while the TULF dominated the North and pockets of the East. The difference is that the War of Secession has been fought over a prolonged period, and lost. Yet there are lessons to be learnt from the avoidable tragedy that resulted from delay on the one side and delusion on the other. Let us not make the same mistakes again.

Of course, today we are in another place. Any illusions of a separate state as inspired by the Vadukkodai resolution have been burnt or buried at Nandikadal. Any illusions of imposing silence on the Tamils and eliminating their cultural and political resolve have been dispelled by the electoral map that has unrolled with the parliamentary and local government elections. Both communities have thrown their best or worst at each other and both are still standing. What resilience and resolve! Both the Sinhalese and Tamils should not only be proud of themselves but of each other, because we are inhabitants of one island, and share the same DNA: we are brothers and sisters. What we could achieve together! I am glad we won the war, but sorry we ever had to fight one. Now, we have attained some kind of balance. If the TNA pushes too hard or overshoots the mark, opinion will harden in the bulk of the island, and vice versa. There can be no solution to Tamil grievances which are unacceptable to the majority of Sinhalese, just as there can be no deep-rooted, peace without Tamil consent. Now is the time to reach out to each other in mutual respect and realism, and establish a durable peace.

In the face of external threat and pressure, we must erect and maintain a rampart of granite and steel, but in domestic politics, including or most especially ethno-politics, we must make a paradigm shift from the politics of confrontation to the politics of peaceful coexistence.

• THE DEEPEST DIVISION IN SRI LANKA
• PRABAKARAN MUST BE LAUGHING
• Politics of Sinhala Nationalism: Underpinning of the UPFA Victory and Undermining of the Sri Lankan Nationhood
• In defense of the JVP campaign to support Sarath Fonseka
• Picking up the Tamil Tigers’ scent

In his most famous and controversial work, Prof Samuel Huntington listed Sri Lanka’s armed conflict as an example of his key category of ‘fault line wars’. The war is over but the fault lines perhaps remain. Are the fault lines staying static, widening, narrowing, or in a dialectical sense, both widening and narrowing? Is it still too early to tell?

Ours is an uneven peace, but it is not unusual, two years after a war, especially a decades-long one. The crucial questions are whether things are better than in wartime or worse, and whether the rate of improvement is on par with the global and historical average or far below.

The answers require a comparative and evolutionary perspective.

• Compare the post-conflict phase with wartime and remember that no lethal violence on any significant scale is taking place now.
• Compare the fascist LTTE’s control of the North then with that of the Sri Lankan armed forces now and decide which is better from the vantage point of the whole country as well as that of parents of the area whose children are not being forcefully conscripted anymore and citizens who aren’t being illegally taxed as then.
• Compare the gradual economic, administrative, informational, international and social connectivity and osmosis of prosperity today, with the isolation and malign neglect of the wartime decades.

What then of the phenomenon described as militarisation, and the corresponding call for de-militarisation?

Here too an evolutionary and comparative-historical approach is imperative. The prolonged hosting of a brutal hostile militia and the extension of a degree of social support to them, especially in a civil war context, does not usually result in sweetness and light on the morning after. Following the US Civil war against secession, the victorious Union (i.e. Northern) armies remained in the South for twelve years and withdrew only as a result of an electoral deal.

Even under the most liberal administrations, security considerations sometimes result in policy practices that focus on certain sociological categories and geographic areas in a manner that could be perceived as discriminatory.  A recent issue of International Herald Tribune carried photographs and a story of US troops obtaining biometric data (‘eyeball printing’) of an enormous number of men of ‘fighting age’ in Afghanistan.

The call for the de-militarization of the North must be seen in the correct, gradualistic perspective. The North is strategically vital for the security of the island. It has been the passage for invasions from across the waters over millennia. As such there can be no question of the withdrawal of the Sri Lankan military or even its downsizing and redeployment on anything other than strictly military criteria. There obviously has to be a permanent and adequate military presence in the North. What can be legitimately debated and subjected to change is the military ‘footprint’ in everyday social and civilian life. Currently this seems a function of the weakness of the machinery of civil administration in the area, and the resultant vacuum. That needs to be addressed; filled.

The critics ask why President Rajapaksa, who has a historic military victory and a two-thirds majority in Parliament, does not swiftly solve the problem by striking a deal with the TNA. Matters are not quite as unproblematic as they seem. The TNA rejects or at best (and more recently) is utterly ambivalent about the existing Constitutional provisions for devolution. This leaves the Sinhala majority quizzical about the ceiling of TNA aspirations: what would be the ‘final status’ agreement? Where is the firebreak between autonomy and creeping secessionism? The suspicions of the Sinhalese and the security establishment are fuelled by memories of Chief Minister Vardarajaperumal’s abortive putschism of 1989-90, the far more recent memories of the TNA’s role and rhetoric as fellow-traveller of the Tigers, the inflammation of anti-Lankan sentiment in Tamil Nadu, the TNA’s refusal to make any criticism whatsoever of the Tigers and their war, that party’s intemperate charges against the armed forces (“tens of thousands of Tamil civilians killed by deep penetration units”) in the course of its prolonged applause of the Darusman Report, and the increasing overlap between the more strident elements of the Tamil émigrés and the TNA.

In sum, President Rajapaksa is hardly blessed with a moderate, pragmatic peace partner.  Therefore, in a highly partisan, competitive democracy, he has to exercise political prudence, while avoiding political paralysis.

Whatever the problems and rough edges of the ongoing election campaign in the North, what is more important is that the TNA is among the legal choices open to the voters. In liberal Spain, NATO and EU member, a corresponding party, Herri Batasuna, the parliamentary representative of Basque nationalism, has been proscribed as having links with violent separatism, namely the ETA.

Is this grim realism unrelieved by any prospect of opening and reform? Hardly. There are three reform projects either running or in the offing: the LLRC report, the ongoing dialogue between the Government and the TNA and the proposed Parliamentary Select Committee.

The criticism that the Select Committee idea is dilatory ignores the reported suggestion by President Rajapaksa that it be strictly time bound and limited to three to six months. Why not build that into the terms of the committee?

There is more than a little hypocrisy involved in the Opposition’s political responses. The TNA has called the Select Committee a waste of time. However, these potential peace partners had wasted time over the years, by refusing to accept the existing Constitutional arrangements on devolution even as a starting point for discussion, backing out at the last minute of signing potential agreements (with the Muslim Congress) negotiated by President, Premadasa, rejecting the Mangala Moonesinghe Select Committee Report, and GL Peiris/Sirisena Cooray compromise proposal of linkage through an Apex Council.

Having thus wasted no less than 20 years indulging in the rhetoric of rejectionism, the TNA is oblivious to the irony of currently complaining that the proposed a PSC would be a waste of time.

As for the UNP General Secretary Mr Tissa Attanayake who makes a similar complaint of a prospective waste of time, he has doubtless forgotten—the burning by the UNP in parliament, of President Kumaratunga’s draft Constitution of August 2000 ( a draft which was strongly argued for on the floor of the House by Messrs Kadirgamar and Ashraff).

The jaded cynicism which greets the reform initiatives and ideas also overlooks two other factors. Firstly, the GoSL-TNA dialogue, if successful, requires a safety net of broad consensus and anchorage in the legislature –which should therefore not feel by-passed, reduced to a mere rubber stamp. Secondly, the PSC provides the drawing together of the UPFA and UNP in a moderate consensus which would permit a healthy enhancement of public consciousness and render the reforms far less susceptible to radical or extremist nationalism.

Sri Lanka’s critics expect a ‘big bang’ of post-war improvement. This is the same advice they urged on post-socialist Russia, which under Yeltsin, paid a heavy price for going along with this Western wisdom 20 years ago. It took President Putin’s strongly statist leadership and Sergei Lavrov’s stewardship of foreign policy for Russia to recover from that adventurist experiment.

An accurate appreciation of post-war Sri Lankan prospects for peace-building requires a gradualist, evolutionary perspective in which the reform openings (LLRC, talks with the TNA, the PSC) are not seen as isolated initiatives. When taken together, they are capable of cumulatively catalysing constructive change.

• Suggestion to the Select Committee on Electoral Reform
• On the government’s political solution and ‘Southern Suaveness’
• Thus Spake Gothabaya
• Triple ‘S’ & failed TNA presence in Vanni rehabilitation
• EXCLUSIVE: Interview with TNA MP Suresh Premachandran on the LG elections, Parliamentary Select Committee and Political Solution

“Revolution is not a dinner party, not an essay, nor a painting, nor a piece of embroidery; it cannot be advanced softly, gradually, carefully, considerately, respectfully, politely, plainly and modestly”. – Mao Ze Dong

The matter is rather simple really. What do you do, or more correctly, what does a state do, and what does a leader at the helm of state affairs do, when faced with a situation of a heavily armed movement dedicated to dismembering the country through secession; a movement which has repeatedly resorted to terrorism; has repeatedly returned to war after episodes of ceasefires and negotiations with successive governments of two countries, has finally been outmanoeuvred and is cornered, trapped? What does a state do when such a movement, its cadres back in civilian clothes, has surrounded itself with and embedded itself in a population of civilians, many of whom had chosen to follow the secessionist army when it retreated from its citadel over a decade before and has been touted as a weapons trained militia? What does a state do when such an armed force has placed heavy guns and command centres amidst that populace and is firing those guns and mortars at the surrounding army? What does a state do when the strategy of the cornered terrorist army is to catalyse an externally induced ceasefire and live to fight another day? What does a state, especially a democratic republican state, do when the vast majority of its citizenry are urging a decisive finish to a decades-long plague of terrorism and when its armed forces are straining at the leash to defeat and destroy the beast which has been tormenting the state and generations of its citizenry?

Agree to yet another ceasefire and yet another round of talks, not based upon unconditional surrender – the only realistic option in the situation – but contingent on or resulting in the evacuation of the secessionist terrorist leadership? Or go in, as the Allies crashed into Berlin or Paul Kagame’s troops went into the civilian camps across the border?

When you go in, do you do so flailing about blindly, or while making the risky effort to breach the enemy defences and facilitate the exit of as many of the civilians as possible?

And once you’ve done so to the fullest extent possible, what do you do?  How do you deal with the efforts to breakout by the enemy; efforts which include the tactic of embedded suicide bombers in civilian clothes?

And when the final battles take place in the dark pre-dawn hours; a battle which does not entail a surgical strike by commandos against a lone enemy leader but with the elite praetorian guard of the cruellest of enemies; a battle which is fought not with pilotless Predator drones and Hellfire missiles but by foot soldiers who probably come from villages where night raids have left bodies and memories of huddled infants and breastfeeding mothers, against the backcloth of a long struggle which has reawakened historical anxieties of an existential sort, do you expect the final scene to be pretty? Revolution, said Mao, is not a dinner party. Still less is a secessionist war a dinner party. The Russian Bolsheviks led by those epitomes of Reason and modernity Lenin and Trotsky, sanctioned the physical elimination of the Tzar and his family (a ghastly act which Trotsky, the epitome of Western reason and modernity, justified and Bolshevism’s original sin, according to Reggie Siriwardena in the Lanka Guardian), the Italian partisans hanged Mussolini and his woman friend upon capture, elements of the Sri Lankan armed forces fed their co-ethnic and generational peer Rohana Wijeweera into the fire.  Not my idea of the ethics of violence, but who practised those ethics anyway, apart from Fidel, Che, the Cubans, the Nicaraguan Sandinistas and perhaps some Lusophone African liberation movements? These were exceptions and veritable saints by comparison with the normal practices and practitioners of war in History– History described by Hegel as a “slaughter bench”.

So what now?

Does anybody seriously expect a state, especially one that is sufficiently democratic at base to be responsive to public opinion, to open up the war and its closing stages, which are felt to be a liberating triumph by the overwhelmingly greater number of its citizens, to international scrutiny? Which state has done so, where and when, two years after a victorious war? Why should Sri Lanka be the first in line of a questionable doctrine, when it should be at the back of the queue if there is one?

This is not a matter of a nasty regime defending itself. Liberal democratic Spain, a member of the EU and NATO, filed a case against its most celebrated judge, Balthazar Garzon, who started universal jurisdiction rolling with his admirable decision of Augusto Pinochet, because Garzon sought to open up for possible accountability the crimes committed during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

Each state and society decides on how, when and who by, the issues of accountability and impunity are settled. How can the UK, which let Augusto Pinochet go, and which took 38 years to issue its report into Bloody Sunday with no prosecutions having yet taken place, wag its finger at Sri Lanka on impunity?

Are those who argue that accountability is a pre-requisite for reconciliation and that an international or independent national inquiry is a prerequisite for accountability, seriously hold that an inquisition into the Sri Lankan armed forces will assist rather than wreck reconciliation? Who then will reconcile the rather large armed forces (with the stress on the adjective) with those who seek to or permit them to be placed in the dock for having risked life and limb to  liberate the country from one of the most violent militias the contemporary world has seen?

Who will reconcile the vast Sinhala peasantry with that element of urban society and its expatriate cousins, which wishes to put their sons in the dock at the behest of some foreigners or liberal legal doctrines? Who will reconcile an ancient nation which constitutes the vast mass of the island, with the former colonial powers that issue deadlines and ultimatums and a neighbouring landmass from which incursions took place throughout history, and now passes resolutions calling for economic blockades?

Did the pressure from the anti-Castro Cubans in Florida and the economic embargo by the USA lead to a softening within Cuba? Where in the world does a combination of such external pressures and outrageous demands, from historic invaders and occupiers, not lead to an internal hardening?

By which logic does anyone call for a risky lacerating inquiry in the name of reconciliation with a minority, when it the idea of penalising, persecuting and prosecuting a loved and socially rooted, army will incense the vast majority?  Who or which is more organic to the country: the armed forces or those who are calling for accountability hearings, so loudly, so aggressively and so soon after the war? Will Sri Lanka’s citizens heed the threatening calls of an ex-colonizer and occupier or the resolutions of the assembly of a neighbouring site of ancient incursions, or protect its elected government, a leadership of its democratic choice and a military consisting of its children?

What makes any intelligent person think that the people of this country will not defend from those deemed intervening outsiders and their local lackeys, those who defended the country—and do so ‘by any means necessary’? What could make an intelligent person think that the majority of Sri Lanka’s citizens do not see the Tiger flags and Tamil Eelam graphics (the map of the island with the North East differently coloured) in the photographs of the demonstrations and events taking place among the re-mobilised and revengeful elements of the Tamil Diaspora in the West? A literate people know that the Tiger is not a self-serving embellishment of the incumbent administration, but the old enemy propelling its front organisations and fellow travellers; its ‘useful idiots’, while straining to leverage the ex-colonial states against Sri Lanka and waiting to leap from beyond the oceans.

How can anyone seriously believe that inter-ethnic reconciliation will be possible, still less accelerated, by or in the aftermath of anything that smacks of victimising the popular armed forces? Accountability hearings AND devolution? Devolution AFTER accountability hearings? Is not the choice one of devolution OR accountability, under this or any other administration? Can any administration that accedes to a full-on accountability hearings, this present one or a successor, follow it up with liberal measures of ethnic compromise and reconciliation and hope to avoid a ferocious backlash? How long would a Wickramasinghe- Karunanayake-Samaraweera administration that moves on ‘accountability’ AND devolution (not to mention neoliberal economic reform) last? Is not an ‘accountability hearing into the closing stages of the war’ – as distinct from domestic inquiry into concrete instances of crimes involving aberrant armed forces personnel—precisely the single measure that will render radioactive any liberal interethnic compromise whatsoever?

How can any serious analyst draw parallels with South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process, when that was in the context of a negotiated transition from minority rule to majority rule and entailed for the most part, a re-telling of coercive transgressions by the minority against the majority? What would have been the mechanism and practice had the South African outcome been one of outright military victory by the majority forces?

How could a serious commentator draw parallels with the Serbian government handing over Milosevic and Mladic to The Hague? Serbia lost the war as conspicuously as Sri Lanka won it. Yugoslavia broke up or was broken up. Serbia was attracted by the EU option. Sri Lanka is in Asia, and in Asia, as the President of Slovenia (and political science scholar) Danilo Turk put it at a UNESCO Roundtable in Paris a few weeks ago, Westphalian sovereignty prevails. Henry Kissinger emphasised the same point in his new book ‘On China’.

An ancient nation, possibly one of the oldest on earth, with a long chronicled history, a unique language, specific religious denominational adherence and strong identity and consciousness, demographically well-positioned on an island in Asia; a nation which has beaten back a thirty year old ferocious suicide–terrorism and survived an external intervention, a nation with a fairly sizeable population and tough armed forces: does this look like a pushover, or a collective that’s going to bend over for six of the best from a former colonial schoolmaster?

Those doing the pushing see only the target, the incumbent regime, and perhaps the endgame, regime termination, but are poor students of history and politics and therefore do not have foresight or sense of direction. They are oblivious to pattern, process and trajectory, which is one of polarisation and radicalisation: of hardening. Instead of polarisation they may get regime shift or displacement, which ranges from intra regime displacement of the regime’s ‘centre of gravity’, to radical regime transformation.

Under extreme siege, or the collective perception of such, regimes recompose and mutate into or are displaced  and succeeded, not a by a neoliberal or liberal one so beloved by the West, the émigrés and urban civil society, but precisely by one that will be widely mandated to resist more resolutely: an organic, probably elected, Praetorianism or Caesarism. Is it inevitably, axiomatically, unsustainable and therefore bound to be but an interlude, however horribly Hobbesian? I don’t know, but one may ask Myanmar or Pakistan or imagine a fusion.

Sri Lanka’s cities were hit hardest by terrorist suicide bombings but its civil society is the least grateful to those who saved it. We didn’t save ourselves; we were saved by the Sinhala peasantry which sent its boys into the armed forces and bloody battle.

The best portrait of the Sinhalese peasant as protagonist came from the pen of Leonard Woolf, in The Village in the Jungle. Silindu –unforgettably portrayed by Joe Abeywickrema in Lester’s movie — slow, superstitious, is repeatedly pushed, prodded and pilfered by the slick Fernando and Ratemahattaya, until, like the water-buffalo, he finally perceives process and enemy and turns, game-changer in his grasp: a double-barrelled shotgun. This is what happened after the years of the CFA, the PTOMS and unilateral appeasement and national humiliation, facilitated by the intermediaries, the compradors, represented by Ranil’s UNP. The Silindu streak in the collective Sinhala spirit and psyche took it to the next level, pushing back right up to ‘the Day of the Guns’ (to quote a favourite American thinker, Mickey Spillane) at Nandikadal. Today, the ‘social media’ savvy civil society sympathisers of the Darusman Report and the Channel 4 spin are the inheritors and continuators of role of the Fernandos and the Ratemahayttayas, connected to the same colonial overlords.

It makes little sense to push such a nation into a corner – to the point of crystallisation of a determination to resist and recoil in the face of an existential threat of incursion into the inviolable and irreducible sovereign space.

True, the physical fate of Silindu and his family was a tragic one, but as the thirty year old Mervyn de Silva, my father, concluded in his Introduction to Leonard Woolf’s Diaries (1961), these poor rural Sinhala folk had “a far greater moral worth than the Fernandos and Ratemahattayas of this world”.

• Searching for Sri Lanka’s Anna Hazare
• The continuing disinformation campaigns in Sri Lanka: Is mainstream media complicit?
• Peace and Reconciliation in Sri Lanka
• Sri Lanka: the waning of Liberalism?
• History is Irreversible – A ‘Postmortem’ on the Seminar, “Defeating Terrorism: Sri Lankan Experience”

It is truly a pity that the Sri Lankan media did not feature the photographs of the demonstrations by sections of the Tamil Diaspora staged over the week of May 12-19 in variety of western capitals, as protest and in mourning for the final week of the war which was also the last week of Mr Prabhakaran’s destructive life.

I saw the demonstration in Paris and the subsequent gathering in the Trocadero which was at a vantage point in line with the Eiffel Tower.

A few phone calls that came in told me that the demonstrations in New York, London, Geneva and Toronto were the same, and that Paris was no anomaly.

The demonstrations were revelatory, and only those who do not wish to see, for whatever reason, can doubt the visual evidence.

The most visible flag, and the only one apart from black flags and the standard of the host country or continent (e.g. the EU), was that of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), with its roaring Tiger, 33 bullets and crossed rifles with bayonets affixed.

That was the only political flag; the only known, recognisable flag of political or organisational identity.

A half truck bearing a man dressed or rather, partially dressed/undressed, as the late Mr Prabhakaran was part of the parade.

In London, there were red and yellow flags, but the most manifest was the Tiger standard borne by the ranks of demonstrators.  One Tiger flag had even been hoisted on a high corner of the National Gallery which faces Trafalgar Square.

Those who claim that the Tiger flag is “the Tamil national flag” (and that Prabhakaran is ‘the national leader of the Tamils’) do the Tamil community a profound disservice by identifying that ethnic collective with a banner of a terrorist, secessionist and fascistic movement that assassinated, among others, Nehru’s grandson with a suicide bomber at an election rally.

That is of course if the claim is spurious. If not, matters are even worse.

The photos from New York show the Tiger flags waving among placards which read ‘Libya and Ivory Coast Today; Why Not Sri Lanka tomorrow?’

For the Sri Lankan state and the majority of its citizens, matters should be as clear as they were to me last week in Europe. The game is beginning to turn zero-sum, once again.

I could have well understood had the date for mourning the dead and protesting the Tamil situation had been July 23rd or 29^th which would have marked the anti-Tamil violence of July ’83. May 18-19 marks the end of a war that tormented the majority of citizenry. Those who mourn pick May 18-19 over July 23-29, because what they mourn above all is the defeat in the war, the destruction of the Tiger armed forces and the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran.

I could well have understood if the banners had been those of the Tamil National Alliance, the TNA, the major parliamentary party of the Tamils of the North, or of a coalition of Tamil political parties. The sheer ubiquity and monopoly of the Tiger flag however, shows us where these protestors are coming from and what their aims and ambitions are.

In some countries, the demonstrations were organised by the TGTE, the so-called Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam. In Paris it was by the Tamil Coordinating Committee (TCC) but brought together all LTTE factions. In London the organisers were the British Tamil Forum (BTF), whose Mr Suren Surendiran has been getting around quite a bit lately, even to important addresses across the Atlantic. Doesn’t the clear dominance of the Tiger flag show us that the TGTE and BTF are increasingly serving as front organizations for and fellow travellers of the Tigers?

The pictures of politicians of various parties in some countries addressing the Tiger flag waving demonstrators reveal that there are political elements in some Western democracies who are either in sympathy with or do not care about the character of the Tigers.

They may not. But we Sri Lankans must. Some or even most in the West may turn a Nelsonian eye to the real identity and character of the phenomenon. We Sri Lankans cannot afford to.

This is not a movement of a marginalised minority seeking justice and autonomy. This is the same old fascist separatist enemy we have faced and fought for decades: the Tigers. This is the same terrorist movement and its supporters, sympathisers and fellow travellers, who waged a shooting war against us and lost. They are now waging a Cold War against us, for the same old objectives, but with new allies or allies who, with the Darusman panel Report, are coming out of the closet.  Their model is evident from their slogans last week: Libya and the Ivory Coast; meaning foreign military intervention by countries in which they form influential communities.

There has been no abandonment of aims, only a tactical suspension of methods or their abandonment due to inability.  There has been no self-criticism. There has been no rejection by the Tamil Diaspora market, of the Tiger brand.

The Trafalgar Square stage had, amidst the surrounding LTTE flags, a mock up of a prison cell with a life-size effigy of President Mahinda Rajapaksa behind bars, labelled ‘War Criminal’, while a young lady dressed in black read from the Darusman panel Report. The Report serves as a loaded weapon handed to the pro-Tiger Tamil Diaspora. It also serves as an ‘enabler’; a passport and password to access many political and governmental circles mainly but not exclusively in the West.

If the Tigers are on that side, I must and shall stay on this side.

So long as – and precisely because– the anti-Sri Lankan demonstrators outside the country support the Tigers, the vast majority of Sri Lankan citizens within the country must, will, and do support the State; their State.

Standing firm is however, not good enough– and ideological regression is not good at all. We have to get it right. This Cold War cannot be won by ‘hard power’ but by that which Prof Joe Nye (perhaps unwittingly dumbing down and popularising Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemony) famously called ‘smart power’, i.e. the combination of soft power and hard power.

No country and no leadership provides a more complete lesson—a textbook example one may say—of the  fusion of Realism and Reason in successfully responding to  multiple, deadly external threats than post-revolutionary Russia under Lenin.

Lenin was characteristically lucid about what was to be done: to preserve, defend and consolidate the hard won gains, the victory of the revolution. Having departed from the classic progression and used the opening provided by the First World War to make a successful leap for power, going against the textbook wisdom of the traditional European Left, he was no less clear that to consolidate the historic victory in the face of a hostile external environment, compromises and concessions were necessary, and a step had to be taken backward if needed, to take two steps forward.

Having fought off the interventionist armies of over a dozen imperialist nations and fought and won a bloody Civil war, Lenin recognised by 1920 that the international balance of forces was unfavourable and would remain so for a period. He reversed course in terms of the radical programme of the Revolution and pushed through the New Economic Policy (NEP), seen by the far left as nothing less than a betrayal of the Revolution and a restoration of capitalism. He knew that after WW I and the Civil War, yet another violent conflict would ruin Russia’s economy and place at risk, the gains of the revolutionary victory.

The extensive compromises that Lenin made in 1920-1923 – both internal and external- were precisely to defend and preserve the essential thing and therefore to win for the Russian revolution, the time and space to consolidate its historic politico-military victory in an unpropitious international context over which it had no control.

Lenin was fond of saying that “nothing is more radical than Reality”. He never let false consciousness or old traditions and habits of thinking, blind or blinker him by obscuring the challenge of existing, emerging Reality. And he never lacked the audacity for reform; the clarity and courage for course correction and change.

How about us?

• Big Game
• Enigma of Prabhakaran and the Tamil Tigers
• National flags and the symbolism of accomodating minorities
• Picking up the Tamil Tigers’ scent
• Get your humanitarian paws off my country