SRI LANKA has all that a western tourist looks for – good climate, beautiful beaches, lovely hill stations, Buddhist monasteries, ancient Hindu temples and other heritage sites. In short, it’s a country, as the saying goes, where every prospect pleases, only man is vile. For how else can we describe an ethnic divide between the Tamils and the Sinhalese that started even before independence in 1948 and which, after a series of anti-Tamil riots and broken pacts like the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam agreement of 1955, reached a flash point in July 1983 over the killing of just nine soldiers in Jaffna by the Tamil Tigers fighting for a separate homeland for the Tamils? Since then, over 70,000 combatants and noncombatants alike have died in the ethnic war alone, excluding over 60,000 Sinhalese, the cream of youth, killed during the ultranationalist Janata Vimukti Peramuna’s failed revolt in the Sinhala south against the Indian Peace Keeping Force in the late 1980s.

With the Rajapakse government formally abrogating the February 2002 ceasefire agreement with the LTTE, in any case in tatters since 2006, the country is back to full-scale civil war after a period of relative, if uneasy, quiet from 2002 to 2004. With that a hope for peace, among incurable optimists, has died.

July 1983 can be called a watershed in the history of Sri Lanka, in that over 10,000 Tamils were killed in a country-wide pogrom that led to the exodus of over nearly a million Tamils, a third of them to Tamil Nadu, including moderate Tamil leadership represented by the Tamil United Liberation Front and militant groups armed and trained by the Indira Gandhi regime. The result was the July 1987 peace agreement between the then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi and the then Sri Lankan President, J.R. Jayewardene which brought stability to the embattled north and east, but not peace, and offered the war-weary Tamils a measure of autonomy akin to what the Indian states enjoy. It also brought about a clear north-south divide, with the Sri Lankan government leaving the north and east entirely to the IPKF to take on the LTTE to enforce the accord, while it concentrated on the JVP in the south whose revolt it eventually crushed.

After the exit of the IPKF in March 1990, thanks to a marriage of convenience between the LTTE and the then President R. Premadasa, there has been no let-up in violence with the periodic truce used by the LTTE only to rearm and start another round afresh. Its leader Prabhakaran has eliminated whoever stood in the way of his dream of an independent Eelam – be they moderate leaders ranging from Amirthalingam to Neelan Tiruchelvan to Laxman Kadirgamar (who was on the other side of the fence and was responsible for getting the organisation banned as a terrorist outfit by the West), or former or ruling heads of governments like Premadasa and Rajiv Gandhi and, of course, rival Tamil militant groups.

Chandrika Kumaratunga tried in vain to bring the Tigers to the negotiating table between August 1994 and March 1995 and then started a ‘war for peace’ that ended in disaster five years later. But she was the only Sinhala leader to have acknowledged that even if the LTTE was eliminated, the Tamil problem would remain, a statement she made after surviving an assassination attempt that helped her scrape through the 1999 presidential election.

The last century ended with a bloody war that led neither side anywhere. But the dawn of the 21st century saw the Tigers wearing the peace cap once again. The reason was the terrorist tag attached to it by India, the US, England and EU which had hurt it strategically and otherwise. The result was the Norway-brokered cease-fire agreement between the LTTE and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe in February 2002.

 

From the inception, the agreement was doomed to failure. This was because Wickremasinghe was from the United National Party and President Kumaratunga was from the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, leading to uneasy cohabitation between the two. Wickremasinghe as prime minister in a presidential system of government had no power or authority to execute an accord even if one was reached with the rebels. He contributed to an early end of talks by not keeping the all-powerful executive President Chandrika Kumaratunga in the loop. And she struck back by taking away the key defence portfolio on the ground that Ranil Wickremasinghe was compromising the country’s security by giving too much leeway to the Tigers.

On the other side, Prabhakaran signed the pact only to show the world that his outfit was not averse to a negotiated settlement and thus get the ban on it lifted by the West, and if possible by India, even as he made clear in his April 2002 press conference that in his view the only permanent solution was an independent Eelam. Clearly, the deep division in the Sinhala south between the president and prime minister helped Prabhakarn to wriggle out of the talks in April 2003.

Again, under world pressure, the LTTE came up with the proposal of an Interim Self-Governing Authority as an alternative to a separate Eelam, which envisaged a loose confederation between what the Tigers call ‘the Tamil and Sinhala nations’. Expectedly, it was rejected by Chandrika Kumaratunga the same way the Tigers had rejected her 2000 proposal envisaging a federal solution and recognition of Sri Lanka as a union of regions, though the package met the Tigers’ separatist demand more than half way.

During the politically turbulent phase of the truce period, Chandrika called for early parliament elections resulting in the SLFP forming a minority government in April 2004 with Rajapakse as prime minister. When Chandrika’s second term as President ended in November 2005, Rajapakse became the SLFP candidate backed by the JVP which was for renegotiating the truce agreement and a unitary solution.

 

This was when Prabhakaran’s long-term plan came to the fore. Tired of a truce and itching to go back to war, he ensured the defeat of a self-proclaimed peacenik like Wickremesinghe by asking the Tamils in the north and east to boycott elections. In a closely fought election this led to Rajapakse’s victory as the south was sharply divided. In other words, Prabhakaran wanted a hawk like Rajapakse to win so that he could go back to war without getting blamed by the West. He made his intentions clear in his Heroes Day speech in November 2005 when he said the Sinhala establishment would not deliver on its promise and the Tamils had to fight for their rights. That was the cue for renewed attacks on the armed forces by the Tigers in 2006, months after Rajapakse became President. Though there was a brief lull in February and again in October 2006 when Norway, with western backing succeeded in getting the two sides to the negotiating table at Geneva, the talks yielded no results.

 

Subsequently, the government under Gothabaya Rajapakse, brother of the President and defence adviser, started an all-out offensive, starting with the east. Soon, it flushed the region of the LTTE, expected as the LTTE had already suffered a split in the east during the truce period with renegade leader Muralidharan alias Col. Karuna breaking away.

However, when the armed forces began an offensive in the north, the LTTE sprang a surprise by bringing its nascent air wing into play. In three precision night attacks, it successfully bombed the Katunayake airport near Colombo, oil depots in the capital and the Anuradhapura air base close to Vavunia, the northern outpost of the army after which the Tiger country begins and stretches till the Jaffna peninsula which has been under army control since 1995.

In a major blow to the LTTE, the Sri Lankan air force bombed the hideout of LTTE’s political wing leader S.P. Tamil Chelvan in an early morning raid, killing him along with a few other top ranking leaders. This showed that the air force acted on real-time intelligence and its Israel-supplied Kfir jets were capable of precision bombing. Even before Prabhakarn could recover from this mortal blow, which came on top of the death of his ailing ideologue Anton Balasingham, the air force struck again in the rebel-held Killinochi district in the north, this time claiming that it had hit Prabhakaran’s bunker and injured him. This has since been proved incorrect.

More worrisome than the relentless pursuit of the military option by the Rajapakse government is the adoption of counter-terror tactics made famous by the Israeli Mossad. The deep penetration units of the army intelligence in conjunction with the anti-LTTE Karuna faction and the Eelam People’s Democratic Party, have in the last three years targeted and killed five pro LTTE Tamil Alliance MPs, most notably Joseph Pararajasingham, shot dead during midnight mass in a church on Christmas eve.

Equally shocking was the shooting down of another MP, Ravi Raja, in Colombo. What has unnerved the Tigers most is the elimination of yet another MP, Sivanesan, in a claymore mine attack inside the rebel-controlled territory on the Kandy-Jaffna highway while returning home to Malawi in Killinochi from Colombo. The Tigers blamed it on the deep penetration unit. If true, it demonstrates the vulnerability of an outfit once considered impenetrable even by the IPKF.

 

Using a Supreme Court verdict against the temporary merger of the east with the north brought about by the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, the government has successfully delinked the east. Proving that it has gained an upper hand, it conducted local body elections in the east in which predictably the Karuna faction won handsomely in Batticaloa. In other words, the Tiger homeland, comprising the north and east, is now under de facto army control except for the Mullaitivu and Killinochi districts which are still controlled and administered by the LTTE. These two are sandwiched between the army controlled areas in Vavunia in the south and the Jaffna peninsula in the north.

 

The government’s approach of militarily containing the LTTE has tacit sanction from New Delhi. However, India wants the Rajapakse regime to simultaneously pursue the search for a political solution within the framework of a united Sri Lanka, a package which will meet the aspirations of all communities. The result is the proposal put forward by the All Party Representatives Conference which envisages giving effect to the 13th amendment to the Constitution, a product of the Indo-Sri Lanka agreement which promises greater devolution to the north and east. Though the UNP, under pressure from New Delhi, has agreed to cooperate with the government, the hawkish JVP remains hostile to the idea.

With Norway having pulled out, the government having abrogated the ceasefire agreement, and the West preoccupied with conflicts elsewhere, it has fallen upon New Delhi as Lanka’s next door neighbour to play a more pro-active role, given the ethnic affinity among Tamils of Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu and its own geopolitical and strategic interests.

But with Prabhakaran as prime accused in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination and the LTTE remaining a banned outfit, New Delhi cannot directly use its good offices. That is why it is indirectly helping the Sri Lankan army to gain an upper hand, give effect to the APRC proposals and then implement them on the ground in the north and east, as ultimately the terrorists can be isolated only by restoring democracy in the troubled region.

The LTTE’s cry of despair is evident from its latest statement which criticizes India for giving a state welcome to Sri Lankan Army Chief Sarath Fonseka after the island government abrogated the ceasefire and the armed forces launched an all-out offensive. For the first time it has ‘condemned’ New Delhi, particularly the Indian army chief, for saying that ‘India wants to ensure that the Sri Lankan army maintains an upper hand over the LTTE.’ Its comments like ‘We did not leave the ceasefire agreement and we did not start the war’, and ‘We still have not abandoned the Norway-sponsored peace efforts and we are ready to take part in such efforts’ show that Prabhakaran is regretting the day he provoked the Sri Lankan state into another war.

 

Luckily New Delhi no longer has to worry about the so-called Tamil Nadu factor despite Prabhakaran’s appeal to leaders in the state for support. Except for fringe elements and the Marumalarchi DMK, mainline parties no longer back the LTTE, though they are sympathetic to the Tamil cause. As Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi stated more than once, the euphoria of the pre-Rajiv assassination days are over. And Sri Lanka has ceased to be an issue in any election in Tamil Nadu since Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991 at Sriperumpudur.

With no prospects of a breakthrough, either militarily or in peace efforts, the worst sufferers will be innocent civilians. Already over one lakh Tamils and an equal number of Tamil-speaking Muslims have been internally displaced in Sri Lanka. Another one lakh are in various camps as refugees in Tamil Nadu. This leaves out nearly a million Tamils spread all over the world, the so-called Tamil diaspora which funds LTTE’s war effort. Unless they tighten their purse strings, which is impossible considering they still maintain links with their homeland where the LTTE’s writ runs, there is no hope of a solution.