Photo courtesy UN

May is the month of the diplomatic success of Sri Lanka and its friends at the Special Session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2009. That battle and victory are now the target of criticism and historical revisionism. It is alleged that Sri Lanka was brought onto the HRC agenda by our success, that the Sri Lankan team in Geneva at the time should have kept the resolution off the agenda as had our counterparts in New York, that the success of 2009 was the progenitor of an inevitable setback of March 2012 in the same arena, and that if we are in a hole today, we dug that hole in 2009.

This criticism, whispered and murmured since 2009 and finally out in the public domain, has the dubious virtue of being entirely ‘home grown’, because nothing remotely along these lines has figured in the voluminous commentary on the May 2009 and March 2012 votes published overseas, be it ‘Wikileaked’ cable traffic between Geneva and Washington DC, critical research monographs or ‘higher’ journalistic analyses. Having recognised its psychological well-springs and domestic political coordinates, one could ignore it except that wrong diagnoses inevitably lead to wrong policy prescriptions and are injurious to the national interest.

In several senses, the battle in the UN HRC on May 26-27^th 2009 was inextricably linked to and a ‘superstructure’ of our military victory on the ground on May 18-19th. It was a run-on of that ‘ground war’. The West planned the resolution in the UN HRC as a means of securing a ‘humanitarian cessation’ of our final drive for victory against the Tigers. It followed through on the resolution, having earlier failed to move it in time to obtain a UN mandate for such a cessation. It failed because we in the UN HRC prevented the obtaining of the requisite sixteen signatures until the war was won. It remained one signature short for a week to ten days. The final signature was obtained shortly after, and the EU supported actively by the USA (as Secretary of State’s explicit instructions in a ‘Wiki leaked’ cable dated May 4th render incontrovertible) moved the Special session on Sri Lanka. Much is made of the fact that the US was not a member at that time, but by the same token, nor was Sri Lanka (having lost its seat at an election held in New York) –which did not mean that we were not active protagonists and players.

That Sri Lanka came on the UN HRC agenda in May 2009 due to its Geneva team at the time as alleged in an article in a well-known business magazine (and amplified in a Sunday column), is demonstrably false, several times over. Firstly there was an EU draft resolution against Sri Lanka as far back as early 2006, which we successfully removed from the agenda after I took over. Secondly, it is the EU backed by the US that sought a Special Session on Sri Lanka and tabled the resolution, thus bringing it on to the agenda.  Personally driven by David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner and carried on the wave of mass demonstrations in almost every Western capital by the Tamil Diaspora (including a self-immolation in front of the Palais de Nations), there was no possibility of  preventing it, though delay it we did. Thirdly, the comparison and contrast with New York is grossly erroneous. Sri Lanka was structurally safe in the UN Security Council, with the Russian and Chinese vetoes (and Russia and Vietnam as the rotating Chairs during the most intense weeks of the crisis), as it never was in the Human Rights Council. This is why, as an International Crisis Group report confirms, New York was never the intended pathway of the West’s move for a cessation of hostilities, while Geneva was. As UN Under Secretary-General Sha Zu Kang, China’s former Ambassador/PR in New York and Geneva, told me “they were looking for nothing less than a UN mandate, and knew it couldn’t come from the Security Council with us and the Russians there, or from the UNGA because the numbers were stacked against them; so they wanted it from Geneva. You not only deprived them of one, you gave them a negative mandate with your counter-resolution.”

What is richly ironic about this exaltation of a (professional) ‘New York model’ over a ‘Geneva model’ is that the issue of accountability entered the agenda and was conceded precisely in New York. Two successive Sri Lankan heads of Mission in New York had, during the final war, and indeed its final months, told me of the need for ‘a diplomatic endgame’ as distinct from a military one. Our current PR in New York, Dr Palitha Kohona, may recall an irate telephone call from me in May 2009 from the Serpentine bar at the UN Palais to Colombo (he was then the Secretary/MFA) to protest that we seemed to have conceded on accountability in New York, going by a communiqué issued after an ‘informal consultation’, which was being used in Geneva to put pressure on us. I told him I would not agree to anything of the sort. Dr Kohona urged me not to dissent on the record as we had to appear to be on the same page in New York, Colombo and Geneva. I am proud that when I left Geneva, I didn’t cut and run, leaving Sri Lanka dangling on an accountability hook.

Fourthly, our victory in the vote in May 2009 did not put or retain Sri Lanka on the agenda of the UN HRC; the EU driven Special Session did, but our diplomatic victory removed it from the agenda and there was no further action mandated, not even the need to report back to the Council. The return of Sri Lanka to the UN HRC agenda has therefore to be sourced in the actions or inactions – the sins of commission and omission– in the years following the success of May 2009, i.e. the post-war years.

Ironies abound in the revisionist critique of our diplomatic success in May 2009. If a 17 vote majority, is a ‘hole’, how may one describe the high-stakes, Sri Lankan bid in late 2005 at the UN in New York which failed to obtain the vote of either China or India, or to put it differently, obtained the support of neither India nor China?  Surely the support of Asia’s two major players, or at least one of them, should have been ascertained before making a move which pathetically crumbled? If ‘preventive’ diplomacy were ever needed, it was to prevent such a fiasco.

Did Sri Lanka have the option of a dignified compromise in Geneva in 2009, a compromise that could either have kept the EU resolution from being placed on the agenda or one that could have led to a consensus? As the Special Session drew near, negotiations between Sri Lanka and the EU-led West were conducted at our behest by a Quartet, comprising our main neighbours India and Pakistan, and the current and incoming Chairs of the Non Aligned Movement, Cuba and Egypt, together with Sri Lanka. This arrangement was designed to reflect the chief concentric circles constituting Sri Lanka’s identity in the world: the South Asian neighbourhood and the global South. Those negotiations included one convened by the President of the Council, the Ambassador/PR of Nigeria, Dr Martin Umohoibhi, just before the vote was taken. The stance  of the West even at those last minute backstage talks, and more clearly and publicly, the amendment moved by Germany in the Council after formal session resumed (successfully forestalled by Cuba), clearly proved the impossibility of a compromise: the EU and its allies were dogmatically insistent that any reference to ‘sovereignty’ should be deleted from the text, that UN Human Rights High Commissioner should engage in a fact-finding mission to the war zone and report to the Council within six months, and that an international accountability mechanism was imperative. It is vital to recall the larger, real-world backdrop against which the issue was being posed: that of the bitter and victorious final battles fought back home. The Quartet, the NAM and I as SL’s PR rejected such a sell out of the Sri Lankan armed forces and citizens, our hard fought and finally won victory over secessionist terrorism, and the principles of the NAM.

My critics depict our stance and strategy of May 2009 as some kind of ultra-left, lone wolf confrontationist adventurism. This defies both logic and fact. Firstly, had it been so, it could not have garnered a near-two third majority of support, from Russia to Nigeria, from India to Indonesia, from the Philippines to Uruguay, from South Africa to Brazil. Secondly, a distinguished professional of the Sri Lankan Foreign Ministry Dr Rohan Perera, whom I always kept in the loop, consulted on draft texts and was invited to crucial meetings in Geneva during those days, is witness that all our strategic and tactical decisions were taken in a collective and collegiate manner, at consultations with our coalition, including crucially, NAM and the BRICs. Not a single decision was taken outside of and other than by our ‘united front’; not a move made without consultation with and concurrence of trained, experienced and accomplished senior diplomats of a diverse array of states who were in touch with their capitals (with Russia represented by a former Deputy Foreign Minister and China by the Ambassador who would go onto be the PR currently on the Security Council). A lesson of Geneva May 2009 was Sri Lanka’s need for –and ability to—‘unite the many, defeat the few’, rally the broadest forces, construct coalitions, build alliances with those who stood for sovereignty and a multi-polar world, neutralise those vacillators in the middle, thus helping us balance off pressures on our national sovereignty from the Diaspora-driven, ‘humanitarian interventionist’ powers.

It is unsurprising though, that the revisionist critics fault me for failing to arrive at a negotiated compromise when the last example they set of successfully negotiated compromise was the post-tsunami ‘joint mechanism’ (PTOMS) of  2005 with the Tamil Tigers, leaving Hon Lakshman Kadirgamar out of the negotiating loop. This mechanism consisted of a top tier in which the legitimate Government of Sri Lanka and the Tigers were accorded equal representation and the more important middle tier in which the Tigers were conceded five seats to the elected government’s three! The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka froze the operation of the P-TOMS’ middle tier and effectively aborted that deadly act of appeasement.

It is amusing that the tactics of the Sri Lankan Geneva team of the 1980s are upheld as a model for the 2009 challenge. It was not, though the performance was skilled and competent.  In the mid–to-late ’80s in Geneva, Sri Lanka was on the defensive, through no fault of its ably led team. In a lesson that may be apposite for March 2012 and beyond, but had no relevance for 2009, the Sri Lankan team of the ’80s found itself on the opposite side of India, while the latter had many allies and proxies. In such a situation Sri Lanka had to play for a draw as it were in Geneva. The crux of the matter, which has been avoided by the revisionist critics of our performance in Geneva 2009 and 2012, is the pivotal strategic significance of India for Sri Lanka’s external relations and those policy measures needed in the ‘intermestic’ realm to retain the support of that most critical of variables. I have been an unflinchingly consistent advocate of precisely such measures, and as a student of geopolitical Realism, have held that given especially the new strategic alliances, the road to Washington lies through Delhi.

• A Realistic Look at the Draft Resolution by the US on Sri Lanka at the UN HRC
• Geneva 2012: The signs missed, lessons unlearnt
• The Curious Case of Diplomats & that ‘Internal Conflict’
• Counter-productive propaganda and human rights in Sri Lanka
• Focus on Human Rights

Image courtesy JDS

Each generation brings its own collective formation and experience to the Left project. Each historical period produces its own Left or mutates the existing Left. An abiding failing of older leftists is to fall prey to two opposite responses to a newly emergent left, or a left born of different experiences at a different time. The older generation of leftists, be they activists or academics, cadres or commentators tend either to hail the new left as a proxy for their fantasies, or wag a finger at them for falling short of their (nostalgically recollected) standards and ideals. Both stances–idealisation or condemnation, romance or remonstrance– reflect the generation gap. Neither stance is realistic or helpful.

The Sri Lankan Left consists of three players, listed here not in any order of importance: the old left within the ruling coalition, the JVP, the breakaway FSP (and sundry leftists grouped around it in the Jana Aragala Vyaparaya).

This categorisation must not be confused with the outgrowths of the JVP which number four not three: the parent party, recent breakaway FSP, the earlier schism named the National Freedom Front (NFF) of Wimal Weerawansa and in a tenuous sense, the JHU of Champika Ranawake.

It is pertinent that the founder-leaders of the JVP, FSP, NFF and the JHU were all members of the JVP during its civil war in the 1980s against the Indo-Lanka Accord, the provincial councils and the pro-devolution left, led by Vijaya Kumaratunga.

Weerawansa’s NFF and Ranawake’s JHU cannot be termed parties of the Left (as the latter would be the first to agree), though they are describable as anti-imperialist. Weerawansa’s is a radical Sinhala nationalist entity while Ranawaka’s is a Sinhala ultranationalist formation of the radical right.

The parties of the Left operating within the ruling coalition seem to have less influence on the progressive of ex-left and potentially progressive sectors of the SLFP, than did the LSSP and CPSL on the SLFP in the 1970s, despite which influence they crashed to electoral extinction with the swing of the pendulum. As always the Left within the coalition today seems to have its foreign policy right, but has not yet mastered the tactic of ‘unity and struggle’ especially on domestic socioeconomic and governance issues as well as the nationalities question.

This year, 2012, is perhaps the best occasion for the traditional left to reflect upon a road that it did not take 40 years ago, in 1972, when leading Communist party personalities Dr SA Wickremesinghe, Sarath Muttetuwegama and the Aththa editorial board made their promising move, which proved short-lived, and the left tendency of the LSSP emerged but stayed within the party while Vasudeva Nanayakkara returned from custody only to return to the fold. Had either of these turned out differently, the history of the Lankan Left would have taken another path.

This leaves the JVP and its recent breakaway, the FSP, as the organisations that should engage the serious student of Lankan left politics. For now the JVP has the more stable, ramified organisational structure and national reach, with an impressive group of young parliamentarians, while the new party has achieved a zestful breakthrough among the educated student youth and some substrata of the working people.

The nonsensical charge that either or both these parties are CIA enterprises is as laughably silly now as it was when the charge was first levelled against the JVP in 1970-71 by the leaders of the old Left. There were other, more serious criticisms to be made, but that is an old story. One hears echoes of that ridiculous charge of being imperialist agents, today, in the context of a denunciation of the Arab Spring. Those who make the charge are oblivious to the fact that no less an opponent of imperialism than Fidel Castro has made a clear differentiation between the upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt, which he has hailed for their ouster by the people of autocrats, and the events in Libya and Syria, in which imperialism intervened and attempts to intervene. There is nothing wrong with the Arab Spring and it must be hailed, not feared—unless one is bent on autocracy; what has to be resisted is the intervention by imperialism to manipulate and manufacture uprisings and to divert and abort their results, as in Libya.

Paris is a place where ex-revolutionaries wind up as ambassadors: my colleagues include several well-educated, cultured, Latin Americans and even a European with backgrounds as revolutionary activists, and include at least two former political prisoners. We have a special camaraderie and a shared intellectual formation and culture, and we each have our stories, our experiences, our lessons learnt. The Latin Americans, for the most part, are lucky, since their movements re-entered democratic politics with the re-openings of space and have wound up in power, engaging in progressive reforms which have made Latin America, together with east Asia ( differently of course) the most energetic and successful experiments on the globe.

My generation witnessed too many leftists die, lives wasted in fratricidal strife; in ideological and political cannibalism. Ranjithan Gunaratnam, more politically literate and cerebral than his rather more ‘hands-on’ brother seems to be, would visit Colombo University in the mid’80s while I was teaching there, and engage in long, quiet, one-on-one disputation in the gymnasium. I never heard that he had engaged personally in any of the savagery towards fellow radical left students that his party the JVP did, but when the ‘blood-dimmed tide’ turned, he was washed away with it. The JVP murdered the brightest of left student leaders of that time, Daya Pathirana, and the latter’s comrades hit back, in understandable and imperative alliance with the state.

It is a different century now, and one hopes the lessons have been learnt. I leave today’s left parties with a few thoughts for their consideration.

1. Always strive to attain and retain the moral-ethical high ground. That is how the Latin American left survived its defeats and near decimation, to recover and achieve victory. The moral high ground is not simply your sense of self righteousness; it must be shared by the general public and conceded (however privately and grudgingly) even by your enemies. In Sri Lanka what does that mean? (a) Understanding that commemoration of the two uprisings- especially the second- and Rohana Wijeweera, evoke memories among the broader masses, of a time of violence and terror for which the JVP is also, even primarily, responsible. Therefore, having an honestly self-critical and dialectical approach to one’s own lineage and traditions, discarding that which should be discarded and preserving that which is valuable, while looking much more to the future than to the past (b) Be exemplary and be the best, not only in Spartan self-sacrifice (which comes easy to our young activists) but in everything you undertake including your studies and professional work. Do not be seen as the protectors of ‘raggers’ in the universities and take the forefront in stamping out the practice.  Just as the radical left faults the establishment for being vulnerable to external interventionism such as by the UN, because of domestic mal-governance, the radical left is vulnerable to social isolation and suppression by the establishment so long as it can be credibly depicted as backing a barbaric practice of ragging in its bastions of strength, the campuses.
2. Left-on-left violence was a crucial factor in the outcomes of the 1980s. More fundamentally, the Sino-Soviet clash was probably the single most important factor in the collapse of global socialism. The reactionary forces tend to manipulate the contradictions between parent party and schismatic formation, engineering clashes, and eventually falsely labelling and suppressing both. Latin America teaches the paramount importance of non-sectarianism on the part of the left; of the crucial necessity of broad united fronts, blocs, platforms, co-ordinating committees and umbrella organisations, all which facilitate a pluralist left space.
3. The national factor cannot be forgotten, especially when there is an authentic threat of imperialist hegemonic encirclement and interventionism, and even more dramatically, a surge in visceral anti-Sri Lankan hostility in Tamil Nadu. This does not mean that the national can be understood in narrow ethnic, religious, monolingual or mono-cultural terms. Such narrow conceptions must be fought against. A primary task of the Lankan Left is to envision a truly Lankan identity, which is also internationalist, and to build a multiethnic Lankan nation.  The national project must be combined with the democratic, the social, the regional, the continental and the global—and each of these dimensions, combined with the national. This is another lesson of the Latin American left, particularly of Brazil and Venezuela, whose project is ‘national-popular’ in the Gramscian sense.
4. The last war, opposition to the LTTE and secessionism – including the overseas LTTE, the pro-separatist Diaspora and a pugnaciously hostile Tamil Nadu–will remain inescapably defining issues over the long term. The bridge to Sri Lanka’s largely Tamil North must pass through a dialogue and fusion with the Tamil Marxists. Wijeweera failed to do this for twenty years. Attempting a dialogue while skipping over this stage, mediation and counterparts, smacks of a lack of respect for the Tamil Left that stood up to the Tigers at terrible human cost; seems patronising towards the Tamils whom the Sinhala radical left is going to bring salvation to, and provides the reactionaries with an opening of accusing the radical left of being either a witting or unwitting proxy for an LTTE revival (a charge that may sound credible in the Sinhala heartland).
5. Going beyond slogans (neoliberal capitalism, socialism) to actual explanation, the people must be given both critique and credible alternative proposals, at micro and macro levels, at enterprise, neighbourhood, local, provincial and national levels, which can demonstrably change things for the better. A better world is indeed possible, but how?

These are the lessons of Brazil’s Worker’s Party, El Salvador’s FMLN and Uruguay’s Frente Amplio; the open secrets of the successes of Lula and Dilma Rousset (Brazil’s President, a former urban guerrilla) and Jose Mujica ( Uruguay’s president, a former leader of the Tupamaros who was imprisoned for over a decade, including two at the bottom of a disused well).

It may be my pedagogical side coming to the fore, but I cannot but conclude by endorsing Slavoj Zizek’s half–joking reminder of Lenin’s almost obsessive injunction: “Learn, Learn, Learn”!

• Progressive Politics & The Right Kind Of Left
• Rebellion, Repression and the Struggle for Justice in Sri Lanka: The Lionel Bopage story
• The subterfuge called All Parties Representatives Committee
• Katunayake Protest as an Invitation to Political Economy
• A response to Kusal Perera on political honesty and questioning Sarath Fonseka

Photo courtesy JDS

Let’s learn the right lessons from the Geneva outcome, not the wrong ones. It is not the case that a small country such as Sri Lanka cannot fight a diplomatic battle with the mighty USA and win.  Minutes after the Sri Lanka vote at the HRC this time, the Cubans moved a resolution on the composition of the staff of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the opacity (code-named independence) of which the West regards as a holy of holies. The USA opposed the resolution. The Cuban resolution won with a massive 33 votes.

Last year the USA invested far more effort and political capital at a far higher political level than in the case of the Sri Lanka resolution in Geneva, to prevent Palestine from being granted full membership of the UNESCO in Paris. The US lost that battle, and besieged Palestine, an embryonic or proto-state (unlike Sri Lanka) won a two thirds majority.  The battle was fought by a core quartet comprising two Palestinian diplomats –the impressive Left Bank intellectual Ambassador Elias Sanbar, his deputy Munir –and the Permanent Delegates of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. (The Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki addressed the Council after the victory to thank the member states). I was privileged to be a participant in that historic struggle.

Even in the case of the Special Session on Sri Lanka in the UNHRC in Geneva in May 2009, we have confirmation from Wikileaks that the USA ‘led from behind’, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton instructing the US Mission thus: “…the USG [US Govt] supports a special session on the human rights situation in Sri Lanka and related aspects of the humanitarian situation. Mission is further requested to provide assistance, as needed…in obtaining others signatures to support holding this session…Mission is also instructed to engage with HRC members to negotiate a resolution as an outcome of this special session, if held. Department believes a special session that does not result in a resolution would be hailed as a victory by the Government of Sri Lanka…”[Cable dated 4th May 2009 from Secretary of State (United States)] Sri Lanka won that battle, of course, with more votes (29) than the sole superpower, the US, managed to secure this time (24) even with that of the regional superpower.

A few weeks after our success in Geneva, Prof Emeritus Miguel Alfonso, the pony-tailed eminence grise who, as co-director, trained generations of Cuban diplomats at the higher Institute of International Relations, Havana’s diplomatic training academy, caught up with me in the Council to say that he had just drawn up a three-hour long training module, the subject of which was Sri Lanka’s fight-back at the Special Session, as a model of how a small country can successfully resist a diplomatic offensive by the global North. Meanwhile Emeritus Professor Richard Falk of Princeton also told me that in the High Commissioner’s Office, it was ruefully said that our counter-offensive was a ‘textbook model’.

The classic example of how to beat the US in a diplomatic battle is Cuba, which moves a resolution against the blockade every year at the UN General Assembly in New York and secures a mammoth victory of 190 votes in favour and 3 against.

The examples of Palestine (2011), Cuba and Sri Lanka (2009) have one thing in common: you can resist the West successfully only if you have built a sufficiently broad cross-regional coalition, a global united front. Such a counter-hegemonic bloc is predicated upon support in one’s own region, from among one’s own neighbours. India’s decision to support the US resolution came as a shock. Yet, it shouldn’t have. There can always be ‘black swan events’ but those are pretty much unpredictable. Other events can be anticipated if preceded by accurate analysis. The Indian turnaround was not only predictable; it was predicted and therefore preventable, and yet it wasn’t. I wrote the following, six months ago, ringing the alarm bell regarding the UN Human Rights Council when there was time enough to do something:

“If one has to identify a single critical or crucial variable for Sri Lanka, it is India, but our strategy cannot be reduced to Indian support…A few weeks after we fought and won our battle in Geneva in May 2009, Myanmar lost in the same forum though it had the votes of India, Russia and China. So the secret of our victory in 2009 was not simply and solely India…We will find it almost impossible to win without India’s support, and we cannot win if India ever turns against us, but we cannot win only with India’s support.   We must always remember that many Asian, Middle Eastern, African and Latin American states will take their cue from India. India has a wide presence and is widely respected among Sri Lanka’s friends. We must rally our neighbourhood in our support. We must have the solid support of our continent, Asia. We must balance the South against hostile sections of the North, and the East against hostile sections of the West. India is pivotal in all these defensive moves and it is difficult to implement any of them if India is against or conspicuously on the sidelines. If, as some critical commentaries assert, India’s position has changed, or is changing, or might possibly change, from that of our May 2009 UN HRC victory, we must seek out the reasons and rectify them jointly.

We must certainly strive to countervail the mounting anti-Lankan opinion in Indian civil society and the media, militant opinion in Tamil Nadu and the lobbying of certain Western elements. We must secure Delhi’s support and swing Indian public and political opinion firmly over to Sri Lanka’s side. This cannot be done by purely verbal means but by policy reforms. As a UN based top official of Sri Lanka’s firmest, most powerful international friend told me once, ‘short of capitulating on or compromising its vital security interests, Sri Lanka must do what it takes to help its friends to help it’.” (‘Defending and Protecting Sri Lanka’, Daily Mirror, September 29^th, 2011, my emphasis, DJ)

My warning six months back was no one-off flash of foresight. The danger of an Indian shift and what should be done to forestall it was set out in cold print by me as long as three years ago. In an article that appeared exactly three months BEFORE the death of Prabhakaran, entitled ‘The Indian Reality in Sri Lanka’s Existence’ I wrote:

“…India cannot afford recrudescent Tamil Nadu separatism which thrives on the charge that New Delhi is insensitive to Tamil Nadu’s feelings for their ethnic kin in Northern Sri Lanka. Tamil Nadu… is an important and influential component of the Indian Union, and when push comes to shove, carries far more weight than Sri Lanka and the Sinhalese, in New Delhi, Washington, Moscow and Beijing. If faced with a serious strategic choice, Delhi will choose Chennai over Colombo. It is up to Sri Lanka to prevent matters coming to that…

Sri Lanka needs to countervail and neutralize the anti-Sinhala extremists in Tamil Nadu and the Diaspora…The balanced solution of fullest autonomy within a unitary framework may be opposed by smaller extremist forces among the Sinhala majority. The grim reality though, is that even at their most disruptive and violent, these forces can do much less harm to the Sri Lankan state than a decision by India, under mounting Tamil Nadu pressure, to tilt against Sri Lanka, and a corresponding decision by India’s partner the USA to mount economic pressure on Sri Lanka through multilateral institutions and agencies. Under the unlamented Bush administration there was daylight between the positions of the US and the EU. Under the new and universally welcomed Obama administration there may be no daylight between the positions of the US, EU and India.” (‘The Indian Reality in Sri Lanka’s Existence’, Groundviews, 16 February 2009)

I had quickly returned to the theme in the next month, again before the war was won, in a piece significantly entitled ‘Winning Locally, Winning Globally’:

“The Sinhalese and Tamils are in a Mexican standoff. Locally, the Sri Lankan armed forces have surrounded the Tigers…Meanwhile, globally, from the US Senate to the UN Security Council, from Ottawa to London, from Brussels to Pretoria, from Delhi to Dili, Sri Lanka is under pressure and scrutiny as never before. Are we being encircled globally just as we have encircled the Tigers locally…The Tigers have no exit from military defeat, but do the State and society have an exit from the crisis?” (‘Winning Locally, Winning Globally’, Groundviews, March 11, 2009)

In June–July 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the military victory and, more topically today, our diplomatic success in Geneva at the UN HRC, I repeatedly stressed the point in what turned out to be a polemical exchange.

“…As the paradigmatic victory in Geneva showed, we can win against the Tiger Diaspora and the Western European bloc influenced by it, when we are supported by our neighbours, our continent and our natural constituency the developing world plus Russia. In this strategy the support of India is critical. Without India’s support, the rest will distance itself from us, leaving us wide open to Western pressure and coercion. China alone cannot carry the weight…” (‘13th Amendment: Why non-implementation is a non-option’, Groundviews, 13^th June, 2009)

“..Sovereignty not only has to be asserted, it has to be defended and defensible. Sri Lanka cannot defend its sovereignty against all comers from all points of the compass, North and South, West and East. It can defend its sovereignty only by power balancing in a multi-polar world…” (‘The 13th Amendment, Indo-Lanka, Sovereignty’ The Island, June 27, 2009)

Sadly, this reality manifested itself in Geneva, on March 22^st 2012.

• A Realistic Look at the Draft Resolution by the US on Sri Lanka at the UN HRC
• 3rd Anniversary Reflections: Geneva, May 2009
• Sri Lanka and the UNHRC: Implications for India and for Human Rights
• The Geneva II debacle
• India’s Volte-Face: Winners and Losers

Image from The Nation

It is almost a crime to lie to the people and mislead them on a matter of vital national interest. When it is committed by politicians it is an act of unconscionable opportunism. When it is perpetrated by so-called intellectuals belonging to civil society, it is a counterfeiting of the currency of the intellect and the function of the educated, which is to educate the public.

One of the rankest untruths in the public domain today is that the US resolution is innocuous and unobjectionable because it only seeks to commit the government of Sri Lanka to implement its own LLRC report within a reasonable time frame. This untruth is perpetrated by the dominant elements of the UNP, the TNA and the civil society commentariat.

The utter falsehood of this assertion is instantly provable by a mere glance at the Resolution itself. Far from limiting itself to the harmless and arguably even constructive pursuit of merely seeking the implementation of the LLRC’s recommendations, the Resolution actually criticises the LLRC. The fifth and final paragraph of the preamble of the US Resolution, immediately preceding its operative clauses, reads: “Noting with concern that the LLRC report does not adequately address serious allegations of violations of international law…”

It is nothing short of disgusting that this sentence, in plain view in the text, is being hidden by pro-US resolution politicians and opinion-makers. It is one thing to be a critic, however harsh, of the government, quite another to be a supporter of the US Resolution and worse still, to brush under the rug that which is quite overt in the Resolution itself.

The Resolution’s criticism of the LLRC report is itself an untruth. That report not only earmarks issues of accountability which it states should be addressed by the government of Sri Lanka, it contains an impressively thick and closely argued chapter precisely on international law issues pertaining to the conflict. Given that one of the LLRC report’s authors is the former Chairperson of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on Terrorism and a former member of the International Law Commission, this assertion by the US Resolution is indeed disingenuous.

Having made this criticism of the LLRC, the US Resolution then goes on to stipulate measures in its operative clauses which range well beyond the LLRC’s recommendations:

“(1). Calls on the Government of Sri Lanka to implement the constructive recommendations in the LLRC report and take all necessary additional steps to fulfill its relevant legal obligations and commitment to initiate credible and independent actions to ensure justice, equity, accountability and reconciliation for all Sri Lankans,

(2) Requests that the Government of Sri Lanka present a comprehensive action plan as expeditiously as possible detailing the steps the Government has taken and will take to implement the LLRC recommendations and also to address alleged violations of international law. (My emphases-DJ)

This plainly gives the lie to the assertion that the US resolution seeks only the (harmless) implementation of the LLRC’s recommendations. It is permissible to argue that the additional measures are good and necessary, but quite another to sweep under the rug, or divert attention from these stipulations which range beyond the LLRC into the domain of international law. That practice of providing a smokescreen for external interventionism is rather like persuading customers, in this case the Sri Lankan citizenry, to participate in a Ponzi scheme.

The third and final operative clause of the US Resolution reads:

(3) “Encourages the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and relevant special procedures to provide, and the Government of Sri Lanka to accept, advice and technical assistance on implementing those steps and requests the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to present a report to the Council on the provision of such assistance at its twenty-second session.”

In other words, the High Commissioner becomes the monitoring authority, with operational functions as well, of the compliance of the elected government of Sri Lanka with the US request to “take all necessary additional steps [beyond the LLRC] to fulfill its relevant legal obligations and commitment to initiate credible and independent actions to ensure justice, equity, accountability and reconciliation for all Sri Lankans…and also to address alleged violations of international law.” This seeks to give the Office of the UN High Commissioner the role of an overseer, in relation to a national process of (national) reconciliation. In the US Resolution, the political and policy implementation process in Sri Lanka changes its circuitry and loops through the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights; an extra-national entity, accountable not to the UN Human Rights Council but primarily to the UN Secretary-General in New York.

• A Realistic Look at the Draft Resolution by the US on Sri Lanka at the UN HRC
• In conversation with Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu: The resolution in Geneva and its discontents
• Who really supports reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka?
• A slumbering LLRC: The image of reconciliation in Sri Lanka?
• What is the bigger lie? US resolution in Geneva or number of people in Vanni in 2009?

Image courtesy South Asia Monitor

I am appreciative of the fact that this is a seminar on geopolitics. I think geopolitics has been underestimated; perhaps overestimated earlier and then there was a reaction, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. I am not a geopolitical determinist. I do not believe that geography is destiny. If we look at the case of Cuba for instance, it is very clearly a dramatic rupture from any notion of geopolitical determinism. However, if we have a notion of long term history as recommended by Braudel, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, then we understand the importance of place. We are materially and psychologically constituted at least in part by where we are. Though I would not say that who we are is determined in a monocausal sense by where we are, it is certainly one of the decisive and perhaps one of the determinant factors.

So Sri Lanka, as most of us know is an island and this itself is a constitutive factor because Sri Lanka is shaped by the fact that it is embedded in the sea. It has no land borders, and this is important.

In the tourist books, in the journal articles, we would say Sri Lanka is that island off the tip of India. That would be the most obvious introduction, the shortest introduction to Sri Lanka. But that again is a fundamental factor in a geopolitical sense, in understanding the history and the trajectory of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka has been defined by India but it has also defined itself, demarcated itself, as against India. So it is this dialectical relationship with India that has been the most important single geopolitical component in Sri Lanka’s evolution.

Now, it is usually the case that we tend to forget the specificities, the concreteness of a society, a nation, and we tend to put them in categories -which is necessary- but without due reference to their concrete specificities. However, there is also the other and opposite phenomenon, and this is true certainly of Sri Lanka but it is also true of the Unites States of America. Specificities are often confused for, or give rise to, notions of exceptionalism and of manifest destinies. It is true of Sri Lanka as well.

If we use the notion of the very long term of blocks of several thousand years of history which historians like William McNeill, theorists like Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein have been using, then we would see that to understand Sri Lanka today you perhaps have to go back to an early version of the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism, the struggle between Hinduism –the Brahminic concept- and Buddhism which did not unlike in the case of the Protestant reformation, result in major clash of arms as such. But there was a Counter-Reformation. I say Counter-Reformation because Buddhism had no notion of and even made a critique of the notion of caste, the sociological hierarchy into which one is born, which the Brahmanic or Hindu faith placed great emphasis on. In India after the zenith of the Emperor Ashoka, who was a Buddhist, there was a counter-reformation, and Buddhism itself was pushed back, pushed downwards to the South. It also migrated to the North and to the East; that is: Nepal, Tibet, China, the Far East and Japan. But in the South there was only one place that it could go and that was Lanka, or Sri Lanka.

So the successful counter-reformation or counter-revolution -ideological, sociological, and not violent in terms of well-known great wars (this is of course interesting) – pushed Buddhism to this little island to the South of India. And there, this philosophy was retained, one might even say contained, because unlike to the North of the subcontinent where there was the Silk Route, this was an island. Buddhism either converged or became an over-lay, on an ethnic community, the Sinhalese, who may have been auto-centrically evolved or who may have come from India -this is open to debate.

The Sinhalese constitute the arithmetical majority of the island, roughly two thirds, living in two thirds of the island. Three factors converged: ethnicity, language (which is Sinhala) and the religion of Buddhism. Buddhism appraised itself as a philosophy rather than a religion, but when it was absorbed and retained by this island it naturally took the sociological coloration and configuration of the pre-existing society. And one might even say that it shifted from a cerebral philosophy to a religion. So you had an amalgam of a religion that no longer dominated or was even no longer existent in the vast landmass of the Indian subcontinent and had no co-religionists anywhere around. In any case there were no neighbors; this is an island with only one neighbor, the Maldives, and nothing to the South of Sri Lanka. The next constellation of Buddhism was far away in what you would know as Indo-China, the Far East (Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar). So a religion on an island, adhered to by an ethno-linguistic community which had no co-ethnics or co-religionists. And the language itself, which had some affinities with one or two other languages in the area but not many, is not spoken by a large collective anywhere else in the world. Though for a language that was isolated in the island it developed considerably. It did not remain an underdeveloped language, and it is said that at least one of the texts is among the oldest pieces of history writing: the Mahavansa. Thus the combination of language, religion and ethnicity became a very strong amalgam.

In a strange inversion the domestic geopolitics of the island of Sri Lanka are the reverse, a camera obscura, an upside down image of its giant neighbor India. In India the Southern most part, contains Tamil Nadu: 70 million people who speak the Tamil language, who consider themselves of the Tamil ethnicity and who are for the most part Hindu. On the island of Sri Lanka, which is separated from India by a very thin strip of water, it is exactly the opposite. It is not the Southern tip but the Northern tip that is pre-eminently Tamil. So, one third, the top of the island, is predominantly Tamil, the Southern two thirds is predominantly Sinhala.

This domestic geopolitical configuration has given rise to a certain narrative. Now I would not call it a history because I do not know whether we are talking about objective facts all the time. At least from Nietzsche we know that interpretation is as important and perhaps more important than fact –though that itself is an interpretation. The interpretation or the pre-eminent narrative, the hegemonic narrative of the history of the island has been one of a southward push from South India by the Tamil kings invading the island and leaving behind a residue from ancient times; of constant waves pushing southward and the Sinhalese pushing back northwards and attempting to rule the entire island. So this is partly a story of dual power, of shifting balances in a bipolar situation and much longer periods of uni-polar hegemony. We can see how the geopolitical configuration gives rise to a kind of a domestic geostrategic narrative of competing centers; of bipolarity and the attempt of one pole in the North to be auto-centric, and the other in the South, which considers that it has no strategic ‘defense in depth’ because it is a small island, to attempt constantly to prevail, to re-impose itself in a project of unification or reunification, reconquista.

The point I made earlier about specificity and exceptionalism comes in at this point. There are more than two major communities in Sri Lanka. In terms of religions you have the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Christians -which is the only religion that has both Sinhalese and Tamils (about 7%) as adherents- and you have Islam, the Muslim community. So, four religions, but two major ethno-lingual communities. Each of these two ethno-linguistic communities has a specific, distinctive kind of a collective psyche where both the Tamils and the Sinhalese consider themselves at one and the same time a minority and a majority. The Tamils feel that they are a minority on the island and therefore discriminated against as a minority and oppose that discrimination, but at the same time they see themselves as a majority because there are 70 millions co-ethnics across the water and of course another million in the Diaspora including in the West. This is possibly why the Tamil armed movements and even the unarmed Tamil Nationalist parliamentary parties will not accept the kind of solution that Northern Ireland’s Catholics, including the Sinn Fein, have accepted. This strange duality is true also for the Sinhalese. The Sinhalese feel that they are the majority on the island and therefore they deserve a certain special status, but this is reinforced by the sense of being a minority in the sub-region and in the larger region and in the global space. So there is a striving to assert itself as a majority but also to defend itself as a minority. And the fact that Buddhism in what is considered in a pure or more rigorous form (Theravada) is the most predominant faith among the Sinhalese, gives them a sense of exceptionalism. They are defending, protecting Buddhism in the area in which Buddhism hardly exists, and a Buddhism which they feel is purer than the variant of the doctrine that you find in Japan or China. If you look at it in terms of the history of Christianity, the parallel is the kind of Catholicism that prevailed on the Iberian Peninsula in Portugal and Spain until a few decades ago, a somewhat rigid orthodoxy. This is part of the matrix of conflict.

I would embed the contemporary violence and history in this matrix that I have set out. It is in this matrix that the war took place, the war of 30 years. We have been an independent State for 64 years and a little under half of this has been in a situation of war. Interestingly these wars have not only been between North and South or the two power centers which are preponderantly Sinhalese and Tamils. There have also been wars, anti-systemic wars, waged by an ultra-left insurgent movement, two insurrections in the South of Sri Lanka. Even in the North while the secessionist war was going on, there was a struggle between the left of the Tamil movement which was drastically weakened and the ultra-nationalist right of the Tamil movement represented by the Tamil Tigers. Now we have testimonies from former founder members of the Tigers, testimonies which say that at the beginning of the movement, the leader of the Tigers, Prabhakaran, was already an admirer of Adolf Hitler and that Mein Kampf had been translated and that even the LTTE’s salute was the fascist salute. As a political scientist, I note that in the 1920s and 30s you had in some parts of Central and Eastern Europe, movements that were ethno-nationalist but also of a fascist character- but this is another discussion all together.

The two power centers on the island, almost naturally, instinctively, tried to play the larger geopolitics of reaching out to allies, in the region and outside the region, over the past thirty years. These attempts of alliance and of blocs of power balancing underwent drastic, radical recomposition. It was not the same set of alliances that prevailed during the period of thirty years. Most dramatic is the role of India, which, because of Tamil Nadu, was originally supportive not of the project of an independent Tamil country but of the armed movement as a kind of counterweight to the central government in Sri Lanka, the power centre in Colombo. For one phase of the war, from the late ’70s through the ’80s, Delhi was dragged in by Tamil Nadu. The role that Tamil Nadu played and still plays is rather like the role of Miami in the USA, in relation to Cuba.

There was a dramatic turning point, when the grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, used coercive diplomacy but played a kind of Bonapartist role and got the Sinhalese government to sign a peace accord which provided provincial autonomy to the Tamil majority areas and sent a peace keeping force of 70 000 Indian troops to police this ceasefire. Now, dramatic as that was, what was more dramatic and illustrative of the specificities of the Tamil ultra-nationalist movement and of the Tamil Tigers, was that the Tigers, far from supporting this reform and making it work and perhaps playing a longer term game of greater autonomy, instead fought a war against the Indian peace-keeping forces, and after the peace-keeping forces were withdrawn not least because of the Tamil Nadu politics, assassinated Rajiv Gandhi by suicide bomber, on the soil of Tamil Nadu, exactly 21 years ago. That caused a dramatic shift in all these alliances, and from that point on, it was not that there was a convergence or an open alliance between Colombo and Delhi but there was a steady rapprochement. When the decisive stage of the war arrived three years ago, the enormous -and now, stronger than ever- geopolitical weight of India was on the side of the Sri Lankan State in determining the final outcome.

From the point of view of geopolitics, it is also interesting that not only India but also China supported the Sri Lankan State in the final phases of the war. This is interesting because as we know the relationship between India and China in Asia is not devoid of an element of competition though there is also great economic cooperation as well. Why did India and China put aside their competition and support the Sri Lankan State in the end game of the war? There we come to the term “Eastphalia” because even Dr. Henry Kissinger in his new book on China has made a point -made by others as well- that the classic Westaphalian notion of State sovereignty which is no longer observed strictly, in the West, certainly in Europe, has migrated to Asia. Why? This is another discussion, though Dr. Kissinger does not go into that in his excellent book on China. I would say that perhaps Asia is at that particular historical stage of State-building -which had been superseded by Europe- where national/State sovereignty becomes of paramount importance.

So it is the convergence of a particular historical moment and particular geopolitical balances on the island, in the region and beyond, between the East and the West, you may even say the global North and the South, which jointly determined the outcome of the Sri Lankan conflict.

Of course the story is not over. It is still being played out, in the aftermath of the war, in the debate and struggle on the kind of peace. While Sri Lanka has won the war could it lose the peace? We have seen this happen in the Middle-East in the decades after the 1967 which Israel so brilliantly won.

There are many questions, but I will conclude by saying that while domestic dynamics and dialectics led to the Sri Lankan war and its outcome, we may, borrowing a term from Lacan and Althusser, say that geopolitics played a role of “over-determination”.

###

On 6^th March 2012, Ambassador Dayan Jayatilleka participated as a special guest lecturer at a seminar organized by Prof. Michel Korinman, professor of geopolitics at Sorbonne University (Paris IV). Prof. Korinman is also the editor of “Outre-Terre” a French periodical on geopolitics. Among the participants present were French officials, journalists and academics.

• Monks of War – Al-Jazeera on the JHU
• Buying Onions From India & China
• Follies and Fantasies in the Sri Lankan Conflict
• THE INDIAN REALITY IN SRI LANKA’S EXISTENCE
• The Agnostics vs. The Believers regarding karma, reincarnation, nirvana as described in Buddhism being real aspects of this world

Photo courtesy The Star

The US resolution at the UN HRC in Geneva has deepened the schisms in Sri Lankan society. That resolution will have the same polarising function as did the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA), in defining each political tendency in the popular mind for a while to come. The dominant elements of the centre-right Opposition, the UNP (apart from its ‘Reformists’, that is) opine that there is nothing wrong, or particularly anti-Sri Lankan, with a resolution that calls on the  state to implement its own LLRC recommendations. The TNA has, after a sporadic show of realism, finally taken the line of the Tamil Diaspora’s pro-Tiger lobby by calling on the member states of the UNHRC to support the resolution. For the most part, the cosmopolitan civil society commentators are cheering the resolution on. On the left, the JVP opposes the resolution but opposes the government still more, on economic issues and terms the government’s anti-resolution mobilisation, a tactic.  The breakaway Movement for People’s Struggle, is strangely silent. The left within the government is firmly against the resolution.

The reasoning of the Opposition’s leading ideologues is suspect. The problem with the resolution is not that it calls for the implementation of the LLRC recommendations. The problems are (a) where the Resolution is coming from, (b) the body of the text that precedes the seemingly innocuous points about the LLRC and (c) the sleight of hand where it expresses disappointment about the LLRC report and goes beyond it to issues of ‘accountability’.

Certainly the implementation of reform recommendations of the LLRC report must be fast-tracked and a compressed time–frame committed to by the government. However, this commitment must be made to the Parliament. The Government of the Republic of Sri Lanka is primarily responsible to the citizens of Sri Lanka. That is what popular sovereignty in a res publica, a republic, is about. The popularly elected government of Sri Lanka is not responsible in the first or last instance to any international forum or intergovernmental body comprised of governments responsible to their respective citizenries. Sri Lanka’s Opposition may do well to move a resolution demanding a time frame and suggesting one for the implementation of the LLRC report. The push or indeed drive for implementation of reform must be from within our society, with the international solidarities and multipliers of our choosing.

I rather doubt that the vast majority of Sri Lankan people want Karunanidhi, Jayalalitha and Vaiko, still less the Tiger flag waving demonstrators who will camp in Geneva from March 5^th to the 23^rd, to help guarantee and hasten the implementation of the LLRC reforms. With support like this, the LLRC does not need enemies.

None in Sri Lanka and India, who were supportive of the war against the LTTE, are on the side of the resolution. Conversely, there is an overlap between those who practised appeasement of the LTTE, were against the war, were fellow travellers of the Tigers (e.g. Vaiko, the TNA) or were lukewarm and vacillating with regard the war and considered Mahinda Rajapaksa a greater enemy than Prabhakaran, are all supportive of the resolution. This congruity and presence of Tiger flag bearing demonstrators outside the UN HRC in Geneva will not be lost on the vast mass of the Sri Lankan people. The people will also remember who in the world community stands with and who stands against a Resolution which has so greatly roused the enthusiasm of the Diaspora Tigers.

As for accountability, the number of civilians killed by the US bombing campaign named Rolling Thunder, commencing February 1965, was 182,000. The number of children who died in the sanctions on Iraq, according to Denis Halliday, the administrator of that programme who resigned in disgust, was 5,000 a month. Guantanamo, the vast prison camp located on the soil of a foreign country against the wishes of that country, still remains open despite a presidential pledge to close it.  The National Defence Authorisation Act has provisions only describable as draconian.

These are the guys whose draft resolution seeks to preach to us about the observance of international law in the fight against terrorism? Of course it must, but who are they to tell us that when they are serially responsible for one of the most egregious violations of international law, ranging from the invasion of sovereign states on false pretexts, to the practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’. Doesn’t the hypocrisy just get to you? And if it does not, what does that say about you?

In my closing remarks at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva after the special session on Sri Lanka in May 2009, I equated the allegation of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Sri Lanka, with the charge that Iraq possessed WMDs and asked whether we should buy a used car from the guys who sold the world the Goebbelsian Big Lie on WMD.

A stable functional piece of furniture usually needs four legs. If it is to rest firmly, it needs these four legs to be even. Politics and political discourses in Sri Lanka remind me of furniture which either doesn’t have four legs or which have one or more legs shorter than the others.

Analogous to the four legs of a piece of furniture, the four pillars that a strong successful state and a good society must rest upon equally, are national sovereignty, popular sovereignty, individual rights and self-determination.

National sovereignty means that a nation-state (or a pluri-national state) is a political unit or community entitled to its unity and territorial integrity, and has the right to determine its own path, regulate its own affairs, without external domination, intervention or interference in its internal affairs.

Popular sovereignty means that the right to rule rests with the people, who decide who rules, how and for how long. If the rulers violate this social contract, this sacred trust, the people have the right to replace, even overthrow them. The Sri Lankan Constitution makes explicit that as a republic, sovereignty is vested in the people, who exercise it through a regularly and periodically elected Executive president and legislature.

Individual rights pertain to the sovereign individual person; to the equality of every citizen, who is inalienably possessed of a stock of rights and freedoms which must not be transgressed upon.

Self-determination refers to the right of a collective to determine its own destiny. The structural coordinates of that collective or community impose limitations upon the degree to which the right of self determination is exercised. The right to set up an independent state belongs to a nation, not a national minority. An established nation-state possesses the right of self determination. The entire nation and not one part of it, is the legitimate agency of self determination. A nation which is under colonial occupation or annexation has the right of self determination (e.g. Occupied Palestine). An ethno-national minority, on the other hand, has a structurally more limited right to self governance and self administration, which may be termed the right to autonomy.

A society must rest on the equal recognition of all four of these principles, rights and fundamental values. Though at different points of history, one or the other may find itself emphasised due to the threats posed and the tasks at hand, all four must be held in equilibrium; never abandoned or counter-posed to one another.

Today the country is tragically dividing between those who accuse the Government of mounting protests against the US resolution at the UN HRC resolution against Sri Lanka as a diversion from issues of the rising cost of living and those who claim that the demonstrations against the rising cost of living are wittingly or not, part of a foreign plot to de-stabilise the government which is defending national sovereignty.

That’s a debate easily resolved. If the government is using protests against the HRC resolution to mask the cost of living, that’s no excuse not to protest against such a resolution. Rather, it is a reason to protest either independently against that intrusive resolution while also protesting against the cost of living, or moving in parallel with the government on this issue while proceeding against it on the domestic front. Any other stance and tactic would only be tantamount to support of a move against one’s country; a move which has doubtless incensed the vast majority of or citizens.

Conversely, if oppositional protests are helping de-stabilise the government and undermine our defence of national sovereignty, then the answer surely is to cease and desist from those policies and actions that generate those protests, and to never meet such protests with responses that can only trigger more protests and international criticism which directly help those who would seek to undermine our sovereignty.

None of this is to say that all is well in Sri Lanka.  Far from it, but that will be settled one way or another, by the sovereign citizens of Sri Lanka at a time and on issues of their choosing and with the solidarity of allies of their choice.

• In conversation with Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu: The resolution in Geneva and its discontents
• THE BIG LIE ABOUT THE US RESOLUTION
• Restoring Government in Sri Lanka
• A Realistic Look at the Draft Resolution by the US on Sri Lanka at the UN HRC
• Sri Lanka and its ‘Geneva-problem’

A prophet spoke at the UNESCO in Paris this week, though he joked that having lived for 90 years, he had written thirty pages and found he had been turned into ‘a rock star’.

Stephane Hessel, born in Germany in the year of the Russian revolution, is 95 years old. Anti-Nazi Resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, diplomat and writer, he was 93 when he wrote a political essay of 13 pages, which grew into a booklet of only thirty pages, called Indignez–vous! In English this means ‘Be Indignant’ while the English language translation has been published under the title ‘Time for Outrage’. Between October and December 2010 it sold more than 600,000 copies. It has since sold a million copies in France alone and has been translated into 30 languages, selling 3.5 million copies worldwide.

The left leaning newspaper Liberation, founded by Jean-Paul Sartre, says the booklet “crystallizes the spirit of the time”. The conservative National Post of Canada says it created “the sort of stir…Emile Zola did when he published J’accuse!” The liberal US periodical The Nation says the text “anticipated the spirit of subsequent student demonstrations in France and Britain as it did a wave of revolt that is challenging dictatorship in the Middle East”. Calling it ‘the Handbook of the Revolution’, TIME.com opined that “Hessel himself is playing the role of instigator and analyst of the rolling wave of protest movements cropping up around the globe”.

In 2011, he was named one of the world’s top thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine.

After Hessel’s booklet, the term ‘indignant’ has become a catchphrase of the nonviolent global movements of resistance against the burdens of the economic crisis which have eroded the welfare and living standards of the people and are widely perceived as un-shared or unfairly shared, and unjust. The Spanish movement which occupied Madrid last year called itself ‘los Indignados’ and the Cuban Minister of Higher Education, the youngest member of ruling Communist party’s Political bureau, opened his address to the high level segment of the UNESCO General Conference of 2011, with the sentence “all over the world the people are indignant about the crisis caused and the burdens imposed by the oligarchic financial system of global capitalism.”

Stephane Hessel was invited to speak at UNESCO by the Working Group on the ‘Culture of Peace’ (a thematic slogan of a former Director General of UNESCO, Frederico Mayor). The meeting chaired by Mohamed El Zahaby, the Permanent Delegate of Egypt who is also the chair of the Non-Aligned (NAM) group at UNESCO, was on the topic ‘Indignez-Vous, An Essential Step towards a World of Peace’.

Stephane Hessel’s father, a German-Jewish writer (who worked with the iconic Marxist intellectual Walter Benjamin on the first German translation of Marcel Proust), and his mother (a Prussian beauty), were the models for the characters in the novel, and later, the famous movie directed by the legendary Francois Truffaut, Jules et Jim.

Stephane Hessel graduated from the University of Paris’ elite Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), joined the French army, was a prisoner of war of the Nazis, escaped from prison and joined the French Resistance led by General Charles de Gaulle, indignant at the collaboration with the Nazis that France’s Marshal Petain engaged in having declared the so-called New Order which replaced the great universalist slogans of the French revolution – Liberty, Equality and Fraternity–with ‘work, family and nation’. Hessel was 23 years old.

As a Resistance fighter he was parachuted into France, captured and tortured by the Germans and incarcerated in the notorious concentration camp Buchenwald. He escaped while being transferred to Bergen-Belsen camp.

He became a diplomat after WW II and at age 31, helped to draft the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, working with Eleanor Roosevelt. At the meeting in Paris on Feb 21^st, Stephane Hessel noted that the Declaration was the first official international document to use the term ‘universal’ in its title.

He has been awarded the Council of Europe’s North-South prize in 2004, the Legion of Honour –the highest honour of France–in 2006, and the UNESCO/Bilbao prize for ‘the promotion of a culture of Human Rights’ in 2008.

A strong supporter of the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, Hessel, of Jewish origin, is renowned for his defence of Palestinians under the Occupation, his opposition to the Gaza war of 2008 and his solidarity with the Israeli movement for peace through dialogue. His wife is the author of a pamphlet entitled ‘Gaza, I Write Your Name’ (in a deliberate echo of the poet Paul Eluard’s famous ‘Liberty, I Write Your Name’). In his remarks at UNESCO on Feb 21^st he stridently exclaimed ‘Bravo!’ and clapped in salute to UNESCO’s admission last year of Palestine as a full member, despite the strong objections of the USA.

Speaking at the UNESCO, Hessel  identified as the three main problems facing the world today, the growing gap between the very rich on the one hand and poor and less rich on the other; the dangerous destruction of the ecology of the planet; and the threat of terrorism. He urged rapid reform as the best solution to all these threats.

Responding to my intervention as Ambassador of Sri Lanka during the discussion, Stephane Hessel set out three interlocking theses as observations:

“We are pleased to hear from that beautiful island, Sri Lanka, which has until recently, and for so long, experienced such great violence; violence originating from the various components of the country.

What is vital is that there must be no return to violence. This can be achieved only through the convergence and dialogue of non-violent youth movements of all the component communities.

Of course, the real guarantee of peace lies in the sphere of education, and as long as education does not promote the values of peace rooted in mutual comprehension, it will accentuate the adversarial element between the components and create the climate in which violence may return.”   

Hessel said that he had followed up his path-breaking booklet ‘Indignez-vous!’ with a sequel, bearing the injunction Engage-vous! (‘Be Engaged’ or simply, ‘Engage!’), co-authored with Edgar Morin, a well-known French philosopher associated with UNESCO. He defined a true intellectual as “one who engages himself with an objective greater than himself; a human objective for progress”. In his slim booklet Hessel reiterates his guiding goal as the establishment of “a true social and economic democracy”. He spoke with enthusiasm about a global colloquium which he hoped to organise, bringing together all of the non-violent resistance movements of ‘the indignant ones’.

When asked by a participant at the seminar for his prognostication concerning the current period of global crisis and instability, he said: “People will increasingly refuse to accept the unacceptable”.  And then, the 95 year old Stephane Hessel skipped nimbly out of the UNESCO hall with the agility and zest of a frolicsome teenager, announcing that he had to give an interview to a radio station.

• People Reading Newspaper At Shop In Jaffna
• World Cup Cricket and Football: Nationalism in France and Sri Lanka
• Interview with Justice C.G. Weeramantry
• The burka ban: Europe and Muslims on collision course?
• Forging a Culture of Mutual Tolerance among Sri Lankans: A Path to Reconciliation?

Photo courtesy Daylife/Reuters

We all know about the 99% and the 1% and most of us know where we are or which we sympathise with. I’m with the 99%. But what about the 97% and the 3%? How many of us know about the 97% anyway? I didn’t until a few days ago, so I wouldn’t blame anyone, but those of you who read this article will know all about it when you’ve finished and you can figure out which side you’re on. I’m with the 97%.

As you read on, it will be tempting to caricature the point and reduce the 97% to a partisan stance, which it is not. To spin it as such would be the most gigantic undeserved compliment one could pay an administration or a political bloc. The 97% is about a perspective on an important theme or cluster of concerns (‘national-popular’ in Gramscian terms) of the enormous majority of the country’s citizenry, which translates itself into partisan support only because a political leadership and formation have decided, for reasons of conviction or convenience, to identify with it and channel that perspective. Nothing prevents the alternative formation or any other from doing the same, which would prevent a single political bloc from tapping and monopolising that collective sentiment.

So, read on, and go look in the mirror: figure out whether you are part of the 97% or with the 3%.

The latest number of Lanka Monthly Digest (LMD) to reach me (belatedly), its December 2011 issue, has Kumar Sangakkara on the cover as the Sri Lankan of the Year, which is an apt pick indeed. The LMD has been a periodical of repute since its appearance in 1994 and is a prominent voice from within the country’s vibrant corporate sector. Regular commentators in its pages include Jehan Perera, hardly an ideologue of the ruling coalition. Therefore I take rather seriously its regular item Talking Point, Voice of the People, presented by the LMD Business Desk, and features this time, the LMD-TNS opinion poll on the issue of international pressure on war crimes, human rights etc. The survey is conducted by TNS Lanka, the local affiliate of TNS which bills itself as the world’s largest customised research agency and is part the WPP group which has offices in 106 countries. The research methodology was a random sample and face to face interviews of respondents between 18 and 55 years of age , with an equal gender divide and covering Colombo and the provinces ( or ‘outstations’ as it quaintly calls them) in equal proportions.

The questions are full-on and the results are dramatic. Are you in favour of the Government’s reaction to allegations of human rights abuses? 97% say YES. Do you feel that certain nations in the West are applying double standards in regard to alleged ‘war crimes’? 85% say YES. Does the Secretary General of the UN have the right to appoint a panel to report on the final stages of the war? 78% say NO. Has the Opposition adopted the right stance as far as Sri Lanka’s defence in the face of these allegations are concerned? 80% say NO. (p45)

Little wonder then that the LMD Business Desk reports that “a staggering 97% of people interviewed by TNS pollsters across the island say they are in favour of the Government’s response to allegations made by the UN panel and some Western nations”. (Ibid)

It goes on to disclose “that the West practices double standards is highlighted, and it is no surprise that 85% of the poll participants believe this is also the case in the present scenario.  ‘The West very frequently publicises false statements’, ‘Western countries only act in their best interests’ and ‘some Western countries support terrorists’ are some of the opinions expressed during the nationwide survey.” (ibid)

Strikingly important as these results are the questions and answers that follow are even more significant to students and practitioners of politics.  These pertain to the political behaviour and prospects of the Opposition, the preferred foreign policy perspective of the public and the commitment of the citizenry to democracy.

What then does the public think Sri Lanka should do, as a counter-hegemonic strategy? “Looking at the bigger picture, poll participants believe that Sri Lanka should seek the support of friendly nations such as China and Russia, who as permanent members of the UN Security Council have veto powers. They say it is also important to set a mechanism in place to counter such allegation s through the international media – with the use of online forums and so on.   Reorganising the country’s foreign diplomatic service ‘to work efficiently and make strong representations against such allegations’ is also recommended by survey respondents.” (ibid)

This criticism or more accurately, defensive counter-criticism of the West is not a manifestation of congenital or culturally conditioned anti-Westernism, unlike in the case of the Southern chauvinist fringe. Almost 30% of those polled called for ‘building and strengthening ties with the Western countries’.

Fascinatingly, the poll results reveal not merely the secret or a secret of the popularity of the government, but of the unpopularity of the opposition.

“Criticism is also levelled at the opposition almost by a similar majority (80%) of respondents who are of the opinion that ‘the opposition is working towards gaining political advantage’ out of the present situation when the government has locked horns with the mighty West.” (p45)

Here lies the deadlock, because the unambiguous diagnosis, obvious prognosis and clear prescription for the Opposition are completely at variance with the stance, ideology, self-image and proclivities of the main opposition party under its current leadership. Bluntly put, the UNP has always been seen as pro-western and soft on sovereignty, with the significant exception of the Premadasa presidency. This perception is indelibly ingrained under Mr Ranil Wickremesinghe and those associated with him. This public perception is a fatal electoral affliction at times of heightened public sensitivity to issues of sovereignty and perceptions of Western bias—times such as these current ones.

Anti-government strategists are probably betting on the oil price shock and economic crisis to generate a meltdown of the administration’s patriotic support, while the Opposition and its existing leadership stand pat and occasionally stir the pot. However, the slightest awareness of comparative politics and contemporary history would show that economic hard times do not cause patriotism to evaporate, only to combine in unusual combinations, generating unorthodox displacements and choices, not all of them predictable or palatable.  As Egypt and Tunisia show, none of the outcomes, especially the electoral endgames, escape the ‘over-determining’ effect of the ‘national-popular’.

The colossal indictment of the Opposition contained in the LMD-TNS opinion poll cannot be countered by ritualistic bows to race, religion and language (a la DB Wijetunga and IMRA Iriyagolla, the UNP’s notion of ‘nationalists’), because that is not what it is about, going by the data—the figures of approval and disapproval far exceed any ethnic, religious or linguistic demographic. Contrary to both the pro-Western opposition and cosmopolitan intellectuals on the one hand and the Sinhala ultra-nationalists on the other, this is manifestly not about Sinhala –Buddhist nationalism or chauvinism; it is about Sri Lankan patriotism.

The figures reveal that this overwhelming and overarching patriotism is by no means part of an authoritarian still less totalitarian mindset. Those critics who contend that the Sinhalese are making today, the same trade-off that the North mistakenly made for thirty years, namely ‘the defence of ethno-national pride for democratic rights and freedoms’, ignore – incredibly—the fact that the Tamil people were under the totalitarian jackboot of the LTTE, unlike the South which had, as does the whole island now, a multiplicity of mass media, civic associations and political parties. Therefore any analogy is ridiculous. Moreover, the polls data shows that the mass of our citizens are unhappy and unwilling to make any trade-offs which affect democracy and identify the strengthening, deepening and widening precisely of democracy (internally), as the ultimate and abiding answer to the (external) threats to sovereignty.

“But if we are to close this chapter once and for all, Sri Lanka’s democracy must be strengthened; law and order must be restored…” A plurality, 51% of those polled recommend as the ultimate solution to the external challenge, that we “strengthen the country’s democracy and be more transparent in all activities”.  (Ibid)

That is a clear indication of a domain in which the people wish to see reform, improvement, and change for the better. For our people then, democracy is the answer, and they will recoil from any attempt to resort to any other measures in defence of sovereignty.

The data of this valuable and credible exercise in public opinion polling shows that Sri Lanka’s people cherish national sovereignty and have a democratic vocation, i.e. they cherish both national and popular sovereignty. They stand firmly for an independent, sovereign democracy; a democracy that is not supine and which stands up to the West, but also a patriotism that is more democratic and transparent. Theirs is a democratic patriotism or a liberal nationalism of the centre; an articulation of the ‘national-popular’ and the democratic. It is a vision of a country that is free from interference from without and  is no less free within: that’s a good description of a sovereign, liberal or social democracy.

• Poll: How do you think we can end the war and attain peace in Sri Lanka?
• Marking The Mahinda Moment In Lankan Politics
• Groundviews Poll: Compared to the situation a year ago, how close do you think Sri Lanka is, at present, in approaching a permanent settlement to the ethnic conflict?
• Is Sri Lanka on the East Asian Path?
• Poll results: How do you think we can end the war and attain peace in Sri Lanka?

“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
• Exclusive video interview with Somawansa Amarasinghe, the Leader of JVP, in English
• Hansard on 18th Amendment debate, 8 September 2010

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.

###

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
• India’s Volte-Face: Winners and Losers
• Is Sri Lanka China’s Georgia?
• Debating sovereignty in Sri Lanka
• Once more into the breach

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.

• Who really supports reconciliation in post-war Sri Lanka?
• A slumbering LLRC: The image of reconciliation in Sri Lanka?
• The official report of the LLRC
• THE BIG LIE ABOUT THE US RESOLUTION
• Archive of Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) submissions and media reports

[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.

• Forging a Culture of Mutual Tolerance among Sri Lankans: A Path to Reconciliation?
• LOOKING INTO THE ABYSS
• Brotherhood Bloodshed Again?
• Fidel’s Ethics of Violence
• Circles of Violence: A Return to Sri Lanka

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.

• A View from the Left Bank
• 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)

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
• Understanding electoral results in Sri Lanka: Beyond winners and losers

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.

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• Violating the Madhu Sancuary – Some brief thoughts
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• Political Opposition in a Nihilistic Sinhala Society: Responses and clarifications

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
• Urgent questions to pose to the Leader of the Opposition
• Presidential hopefuls and escape-routes for the ‘hopeless’
• THE VISION THING: A SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC ALTERNATIVE?
• 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
• TNA MP Suresh Premachandran on the result of the Local Government elections
• Going beyond the 13th Amendment: Newspaper coverage of the Sri Lankan’s President’s assurance to India
• India’s Volte-Face: Winners and Losers
• A difference of 3 days: V. Anandasangaree on the killing of Tamil civilians in the Vanni