War on principles

I don’t oppose all wars… What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war… A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Speech by Sen. Barack Obama, delivered on 26 October 2002 at an anti-war rally in Chicago

I’m often asked in person and through feedback on the citizen journalism website I edit, Groundviews , whether I am against war. By this most of my interlocutors implicitly wish to ascertain whether I am opposed to the war waged by Mahinda Rajapakse’s administration against the Liberation of Tamil Tigers Eelam (LTTE). Many have their minds already made up that I am a (Sinhala Buddhist) disbeliever in the government’s sincerity to wipe out terrorism from Sri Lanka. This is not kosher particularly in the South of Sri Lanka today.

Partly because of the increasing hate I face online and in person, I have asked myself a simple question – am I wrong in opposing this government? Could it be that what this administration is doing is what is really needed to crush terrorism? How is it the fact that my own family fervently believes that this war can be won, the LTTE defeated and faith in our democracy restored, and I don’t? Could they be right, along with millions of Sinhalese who seem convinced that a military solution is possible and have lost faith in peace negotiations with an armed LTTE.

The question whether I am against war is easy to answer. I am not. As a student of conflict resolution, it is untenable to be opposed to all wars at all times. History is rich in its record of bloody wars waged against injustice, oppression and slavery. I am not a pacifist, though I am deeply partial to non-violent and civil social and political intercourse. I believe wars need to be fought, but they must be fought for and judged by a higher set of principles that shape the actions and sense of purpose of those engaged in it. Therefore, I am vehemently opposed to two wars in Sri Lanka. One, a war I was born into, begun by the LTTE and in turn the out-growth of decades of myopic majoritarian legislation on, among others, language, education and public service. The other a war of attrition conducted against the LTTE by the Rajapakse administration. Both are a mirror image of each other. Both are based on a viciously exclusive, single-minded pursuit of an absolute goal that is all consuming, demanding unquestioned obsequiousness and trucks no dissent whatsoever. I believe that a war fought thus can never be just, or end in a just peace. But I find it a real challenge to be principally opposed to this war and say as much when I am asked the question as to whether I am a patriot or a terrorist, whether I am with the regime or against it.

Nobody really listens, or wants to.

The excesses of the LTTE are legion. However, our arrant disgust of the LTTE is matched and even exceeded by the outrageous behaviour of a government that fully embodies, quite unashamedly and without the slightest sense of irony, the very terrorism it seeks to eradicate. From a President with a marked disdain for constitutional governance (or recalling how Gore Vidal referred to Bush at the recent Galle Literary Festival, he may well be our local dumbo) to the execrable characters related or close to him in his government with a penchant for wanton violence with complete impunity, there is no conceivable way in which this administration can convince me that they hold the key to peace and democracy in Sri Lanka. They are to me as retarded as the LTTE, which is disturbing in that this is after all, a government elected by peoples of Sri Lanka to engender peace, now behaving in the same manner as a terrorist organisation banned in many countries globally. It certainly isn’t Prabhakaran’s sole prerogative any more to call up Editors of newspapers with death threats, beat up journalists, censor the media, abduct, torture and murder civilians, aid and abet the recruitment of children as soldiers and vindictively seek to silence voices of dissent.

So there’s the problem.

This war of attrition by the State and the LTTE against each other is a Sisyphean attempt to secure social and political justice through military means. As genuinely frightening (and dangerous) a prospect it is today, we must oppose this senseless war and the actions of those who perpetuate it for their own benefit. But that’s easier said than done. As I’ve discovered through responses to my own writing, censure one party and the others become your best friends. Censure the other and they scream blue murder for only castigating them. Write on principle against the war writ large and you become ripe pickings for everyone with a vested interest in its perpetuation. National security arguments arbitrarily brought in to protect the significant corruption of government and vilify those who seek to expose it, deportations of foreign nationals branded as undermining our sovereignty, public ridicule and hate campaigns against investigative media tatter our already worn-out fabric of democracy. The point of a principled opposition to this war is simply because it has gone beyond that point of no return when nepotism, corruption and individual agendas in pursuit of absolute power have taken over whatever it is that the war was supposed to be about. It is a war that will not bring peace or democracy to Sri Lanka and because we cannot even question its raison d’être, it is a war that really has no end, for we have become what we are fighting against and to question that is to really look at ourselves and what we have become. The truth is ugly.

These are matters of irrefutable scholastic record. They do not, however, figure in the public imagination. The results of the Peace Confidence Index poll conducted by the Centre for Policy Alternatives in November 2007 clearly indicate millions of voters blissfully ignorant of the significant corruption, gross economic mismanagement and general decay of the Rajapakse regime. For them, the military is winning, our Army are heroes sacrificing their lives for our tomorrows, Rajapakse and Gotabaya are our saviours, Prabharakan is a schmuck, the International Community can go to hell, UN Under-Secretary Generals are in the pay of the LTTE, we Sinhalese, speaking Sinhalese, can manage our own affairs thank you very much and the rest can just put up or shut up.

With all traditional media under unprecedented attack in Sri Lanka, it’s also highly unlikely that the public will ever come to grips with any alternative perspectives and ideas in support of democratic, reconciliation, sustainable development oriented alternatives and ideas.

Deeply resonant of the timbre of war cries in Sri Lanka today, Obama in 2002 spoke of “weekend warriors” in the US Administration who “shoved their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.” This was not, to put it lightly, a popular position for a Black Senator to take in 2002, when the Bush administration’s war cries were at their zenith and its war machinery primed for action against an imagined enemy. It was, however, a principled and a courageous position – morally as well as politically. Sadly though, we have no equivalent of an Obama in any of our political parties today. We possibly never did. Even more depressingly, a civil society in Colombo commandeered by the vicious parochialism of a few and at war with itself offers little hope of any meaningful, principled alternatives to this war.

In all his Heroes Day speeches, Prabhakaran is blind to the fact that he is solely responsible for significantly enervating and viciously destroying a progressive, constructive Tamil nationalism even in the face of an apathetic State. As a columnist on Groundviews noted recently, “ … the LTTE’s own unreconstructed behaviour brought about ridicule on, as well as apprehensions about, the entire Tamil nationalist project.” In his Presidential Election manifesto in 2005 , Mahinda Rajapakse claims he will “respect all ethnic and religious identities, refrain from using force against anyone and build a new society that protects individuals and social freedoms”. However, the sordid record of his actions over the past two years is an incredible and indubitable record of his hypocrisy.

A war conducted by either of these two charlatans is by definition unprincipled.

It is a war doomed to fail.

A version of this article appears in the Daily Mirror of 13th February 2008.

Eastern “elections”

In the backdrop of a country at war and democracy that’s hostage to the whim and fancy of a President and his coterie of murderous brutes, it’s hard to be even cautiously optimistic about the upcoming elections in the East. For the average voters in the South however, the fact that they are being held at all is a marker of the success of this government in eradicating the scourge of the LTTE from the East.

The East is a region of significant ethno-political and cultural complexity and violence where each community harbours grievances against the other. Even during the ceasefire, violent hartals and communal clashes coloured the social and political dynamics in the East (the extremely violent communal clashes in June 2002 in Muttur and Vallachenai is a case in point). There is evidence that youth in the region are alienated and easy pickings for radical, armed extremist groups. The documented emergence of a radicalised, armed Muslim youth in particular poses a serious challenge to the stability of the region, especially in light of the perceived and real threats they will pose to other armed actors in the region as well as State security forces. The Muslims are deeply critical of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, now touted shamelessly once more as the basis of a political settlement to the ethnic conflict by the APRC, since neither the Indian nor the Sri Lankan government consulted the Muslims when signing the Indo Sri Lanka Accord in 1987. Forced evictions, attacks against mosques and a litany of other cultural, social, religious and political issues that affect the Muslims in the East in particular are often perilously ignored by the State and the dominant armed forces in the region (formerly the LTTE and now the TMVP). Problems of land ownership and resettlement are significant. Exacerbated by the war and the imposition of High Security Zones, communal grievances over agricultural and residential land and livelihoods also often spill over into violence.

As Editor of Groundviews, some reports from those who have frequented the region recently I have published indicate that citizens are now more concerned about basic service delivery of local government and largely free from the anxiety they once lived with under the LTTE.

“Friends I met in Batticaloa said that life in the town has become less tense and that there was a feeling of normalcy. They also claimed a drop in abductions and missing people in the town. They stressed that the civilians were tired of the power struggles, and the infighting within factions and among groups.”

“Liberated”- A Personal Account Of Batticaloa And Ampara by mihiriw

Other accounts I’ve published have been more critical about the “liberation” of the East. The essential problem seems to be the prevalence of and the continuing reliance by the Government on armed paramilitary groups to govern the region. It seems to be the case that though the LTTE’s overt presence and diktats in the region have diminished significantly, the human security of civilians remains in question on account of the presence of armed groups with scant regard for human rights and democracy. That this is a concern not shared by the Government is particularly telling. The disturbing allegations made by Alan Rock in 2006 over the State’s complicity in the recruitment of child soldiers by the Karuna group, the damning facts brought to light by the Human Rights Watch report Complicit in Crime: State Collusion in Abductions and Child Recruitment by the Karuna Group in January 2007 and repeatedly by the SLMM, UNICEF and by critical investigative reports by traditional media on the same lines strongly suggests that even though the LTTE is no longer, for the moment, a dominant force in the East, Pilliyan and the TMVP constitute real and significant threats to the threadbare democratic fabric in the region. As noted in a recent article on Groundviews,

“Normalcy and durable and sustainable resettlement cannot happen as long as the Government turns a blind eye to the climate of fear, insecurity and terror created by the different TMVP factions of what was the Karuna Group. They carry arms in public, have offices where they summon, inquire and detain civilians as they wish. They have forcibly taken over private property and set up offices across the district and have even begun setting up more fortified establishments by the main road as in Maavadivaembu. They engage in joint cordon and search operations with the security forces (though this is more prevalent in the Ampara district than in the Batticaloa district) all in broad daylight and in complete cooperation of the Government forces. Given the overwhelming physical evidence in the district, bland denials may not absolve the Government of complicity. The Government must be held accountable for the violations of the TMVP/Karuna/Pillayan group who are roaming freely with arms and are engaged in serious violations including abductions, intimidation and extortion.”

What Liberation? by Bhumi

Not that the Rajapakse administration gives a toss. The pedestrian response by the Government to the fact that the TMVP will contest elections without giving up their arms is that they cannot be disarmed on account of the continuing threat posed by the LTTE to TMVP cadre, who without arms would be powerless to defend themselves. The resulting irony, that elections in a “liberated” East can only be held under the aegis of armed terrorists is lost on the incumbent government, but not on the peoples of the region. It is thus a given that the TMVP will be primus inter pares in the elections. The boycott of the elections by the UNP and TNA in effect guarantees their stranglehold of the region’s fate and no amount of opprobrium by human rights organisations and the international community is going to in any way stop them from doing just as they please in the East.

It is highly unlikely that elections in the East will resolve to any meaningful degree the deeply embedded political and social problems within and between communities in the East. The elections are touted simplistically as evidence of the government’s spoils in its victory against terrorism. They fail to take into account that the LTTE’s absence does not by extension mean that that the East is free from the tyranny of armed groups. Coupled with a Government so manifestly bereft of a political imagination to meaningfully address legitimate grievances of minority communities, it is quite clear that whatever the results of the elections are (and we can safely assume that it won’t be a huge surprise) the problems facing democratic governance in the region will remain largely unaddressed as long as weapons and violence rule. It begs the question as to why these elections are really being held.

The larger tragedy is that we can’t any more see the gross incompatibility of holding elections with terrorists who are armed. The Eastern elections are hailed as a victory against terrorism. In fact, they will be supported by and the results hostage to the violence of armed actors, countenanced by the State, with no real interest in democratic rule or in giving up absolute power in the regions they hold sway.

This article written for an upcoming issue of Montage published by Counterpoint. To get in touch with Montage, please email montagesrilanka [at] gmail.com

Post-CFA politics, war and peace in Sri Lanka

Sunanda Deshapriya and Sanjana Hattotuwa[1]
Article written for Mail Today.

It was a bloody New Year.

The high profile assassination of an Opposition MP and a bomb explosion in the heart of Colombo are tragic markers of what 2008 holds for Sri Lanka. To add to the drama, the Government of Sri Lanka on the 3^rd of January unilaterally withdrew from the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) signed with the LTTE in February 2002.

As we write, the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) has folded its operations, Norway’s continued role and relevance as a peace broker is highly suspect, human rights abuses grow apace within a culture of total impunity and the country is set for total war.

2008 is Sri Lanka’s 60^th year of independence from the British. It will also be one of the country’s most violent and brutal. There is no longer even a vestige of a peace process in Sri Lanka. Statements by those in power and their actions suggest that waging war will be the government’s only priority this year. Upon this bloody altar of violence, fundamental rights, dissent, critical debate, media freedom and democracy itself will be sacrificed. No ifs, ands or buts - the Government’s message is stark and simple. One is either a patriot and for the war against the LTTE, or one is not and with the terrorists.

The annulment of the CFA is significant in this regard. One could well argue that the CFA was in fact redundant for quite some time. Both sides seem to have used the CFA for parochial militaristic ends. As a document that under-girded a peace process, built public confidence and ostensibly facilitated the entrance of the LTTE into the democratic mainstream, the CFA is a dismal failure. While the LTTE itself never gave up its practice of terror and the pursuit of maximalist demands through violence, more disturbing is that significant sections of the Government and the Sri Lankan Army, over the past two years, have actively engaged in or turned a blind eye towards the same methods used by the LTTE in their war against it. This has included the recruitment of child soldiers by Government sponsored para-military groups in the “clearing” of the East, the targeting of civilians, blatant abuse of human rights, an utter disregard of democratic governance and the openly racist en masse arrests, detentions and evictions of the Tamil community in the South. Terror against terror, an eye for an eye.

The CFA had no real mandate or mechanism to deal with this escalation of hostilities between the LTTE and the Government. It was an instrument designed to engender and monitor the opposite. Faced with significant challenges it could not predict, prevent or mitigate, the CFA in the past two years became a laughably tragic anachronism - a document given birth to and sustained by socio-political and military dynamics that no longer even remotely hold true.

Nevertheless, it was the idea of the CFA that was important. Its existence was a yardstick with which to measure just how much the LTTE and Government had deviated from what they had agreed to jointly pursue and peacefully. Its existence was the basis for conditional donor aid from the co-chairs to the peace process - European Union, Japan, the United States, Britain and Norway. The CFA was thus a document that was not an insignificant marker of hope - that somewhere, somehow, its existence could once more rejuvenate a meaningful peace process.

That it is no more is indicative of several things.

Firstly, the Government today cares little for the censure of the Donor Co-Chairs who to a large degree shaped the international community’s engagement in the peace process in Sri Lanka. The statements and policies of the European Union, Japan, the United States, Britain and Norway are today severely vitiated by a new alignment of foreign policy to the likes of Pakistan, Russia, China, Iran and the Czech Republic (corrected after Dayan’s comment below). This poses a significant challenge to civil society and pro-democracy NGOs, whose primary funding base is now their greatest liability and mark them out as being partial to Western, donor driven interest at odds with the violently exclusive Sinhala Buddhist nationalism of the Rajapakse administration. The public perception of unpatriotic and foreign agendas undermining the war against the LTTE, posing a real and palpable threat to “national security” and fuelled by the incitement of hate and harm against I/NGOs by sections of the Government, will invariably result in human rights, media and pro-democracy activists and organizations facing increasing levels of violence directed against them. Some may be killed. Many will face vicious verbal abuse. Others will be forced underground or seek asylum abroad. Concerns articulated by civil society over the demotion of the Human Rights Commission (HRC) in Sri Lanka and enervated mechanisms such as the Commission of Inquiry (COI) and the International Independent Group of Experts (IIGEP) will not even register in the imagination of the voter in the South who will only perceive the LTTE as the greatest violator of and threat to human rights in Sri Lanka. Local and international organizations, including bi-lateral and multi-lateral donors and their foreign and local staff who work to strengthen and safeguard human rights in particular will be blacklisted, deported, banned and thwarted - openly and with total impunity. Field staff in particular will be in the line of fire, literally.

Further, Sri Lanka’s domestic and foreign policy will be increasingly shaped by extreme nationalist forces. The JHU’s (Jathika Hela Urunaya) deeply embedded yet cunningly invisible role in the Rajapakse administration is vital in this regard as it will be their obnoxious totalitarian ideology that will find the greatest expression in the Government’s strategies and policies this year and into the future. This in turn will pose a challenge to the rabid and vocal extremism of the JVP (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna). In withdrawing from the CFA, the Government takes the wind out of the JVP’s populist rhetoric. The party’s political insignificance in 2008 is cemented by a single master-stroke and while it will continue to be more vocal and paint itself in contra-distinction to the JHU’s avowed patriotic leanings, the JVP can only ever exist in relation to the political fortunes of the Rajapakse administration. It is an unholy marriage and one that is unevenly matched in terms of political clout - the President and the SLFP now commands a vote base traditionally of the JVP that the party can do nothing to prevent the further erosion of. Withdrawing from the CFA was necessary and vital in this regard.

The end of the CFA is the end of the SLMM. The end of the SLMM means that a vital mechanism that bore witness to and reported on the gross abuse of human rights by all parties to the conflict in the embattled North and East of Sri Lanka. We can expect human rights violations to not just grow significantly, but disturbingly, for such abuse to go unnoticed and unreported.

The gross economic mismanagement of the Government and rampant corruption will go unnoticed. As a recent poll conducted by the Centre for Policy Alternatives discovered, when asked whether they were aware of the report published by the multi-party Committee on Public Enterprise (COPE) on record levels of corruption in major State institutions in Sri Lanka, majorities in all four communities (Sinhala- 60.4%, Tamil- 61.4%, Up Country Tamil- 87.9%, and Muslim- 67.2%) were unaware of the report. Ignorance, as the adage goes, is bliss especially for an administration that will increasingly viciously and publicly brand anyone who brings to light its corrupt practices, including opposition political parties and journalists, as unpatriotic and those in the pay of the LTTE.

With the CFA out of the way, propaganda on its all out war against the LTTE will capture the imagination of the Sinhala voter in the South, who will in effect legitimize and support the Government’s rampant militarism. The end of the CFA is the dramatic end of yet another lost opportunity in Sri Lanka’s perennially doomed tryst with a just and lasting peace.

2008 began bloody. Sadly, it will end even more so.

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[1] Sunanda Deshapriya is a Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) and the convenor Free Media Movement. Sanjana Hattotuwa is a Senior Researcher at CPA and Editor of Groundviews, www.groundviews.lk.