January  2003 
Year 9    No.83
Cover Story
Sri Lanka


An Untenable Peace

Peace activists in Sri Lanka today avoid reporting human rights violations in the North-East by the LTTE in the vain hope of not rocking the peace boat. This failure continues to be a major barrier towards tapping the immense potential for 
genuine peace in Sri Lanka


There is a lack of critical scrutiny of the ongoing peace process, particularly, in civil society. The UNF government appears desperate to sustain the peace process as it sees the process as the only way to stabilise the economy outside the North and East. On the other hand, civil society groups that recognise the need to end hostilities and arrive at a political solution, are faced with a challenge from Sinhalese chauvinists who are openly mobilising against the peace process and the MoU.

As a result, we are increasingly being pushed into polarised positions — for the MoU or against — without being able, critically and constructively, to engage with the ongoing peace process. What we have now is most NGOs avoiding reporting human rights violations in the North–East by the LTTE. This they do in the vain hope of not rocking the peace boat. This failure continues to be a major barrier towards tapping the immense potential for genuine peace in Sri Lanka. It has, moreover, led to a false perception, both locally and internationally, that all is well with the peace process.

While the cessation of hostilities between the government and the LTTE has brought long overdue respite for the war weary people, continuing child conscription is a painful reminder that optimism is ill-founded. Meanwhile, abductions and extortion have, in fact, increased.

Furthermore, moves towards leaving the LTTE in total control of the interim administration, without a time–frame for the resolution of core issues and arriving at a political solution, is smothering any remaining social or political space for dissent in the Tamil community. The community is being thrust into a polity where the most fundamental of rights are neither acknowledged nor observed.

The December 2001 general elections in Sri Lanka were themselves marred by terror and a severe lack of political alternatives. The new UNP government successfully carried out a strategy of winning Tamil votes and appeasing the LTTE in the hope of stabilising the Southern economy. For their part, the LTTE, through the use of terror and an appeal to their opportunism, brought several Tamil parties together under the TNA umbrella.

There was widespread anger in the Tamil electorate at continuing child conscription by the LTTE. The Tamil voters elected TNA candidates overwhelmingly in the hope that the LTTE would return their children and end preparations for an offensive in the North. This was a choice made through sheer desperation for peace. Therefore, electoral support for the TNA by no means represents a belief that the LTTE is the sole representative of the Tamil people.

The government of Sri Lanka, by not wanting to offend the LTTE, fails to protect its own citizens in the North–East. Since there continues to be an alarming silence among civil society and much of the peace lobby about these abuses — especially child conscription — the so–called peace process amounts to a game of deal–making between the government and the LTTE. What is needed, now more than ever, is a genuine push to monitor and report all human rights violations whether by the LTTE or the government. It is now more than high time for the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General for Children to become directly involved in the monitoring process in Sri Lanka.

Civil society organisations and peace groups must stand up and tell the truth about the worsening situation of the peoples of the North and East. Any level of peace will depend directly on addressing the immediate and desperate need for human security and freedom from terror. It is the duty of the government, the LTTE, the Norwegian Monitoring Team and the International Community to heed this call for genuine peace with human rights.

The long awaited peace talks between the government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the LTTE were held in Sattahip, Thailand, from September 16–18,2002. Media reactions ranged from disbelief to relief and cautious hope. The underlying issue at this initial stage is the proposed hand-over of the North–East to an LTTE dominated Interim Administration (IA), with the carrot of development aid dangled for good behaviour. In September 1987, the LTTE asked for and secured majority control over the envisaged Interim Council for the North–East under the Indo–Lanka Accord. After a bloody and destructive interlude of nearly 15 years almost to the day, it is ready to accept an interim council, also under the 13th Amendment!

The LTTE spokesman, Anton Balasingam, articulated openly the LTTE’s strategy to win international validation of its self–acclaimed totalitarian charter. Playing to the liberal sensibilities of an international audience, Balasingam declared that the LTTE did not regard separatism to be the only route to self–determination and accepted the UN’s definition of self–determination as that which could be attained by a people within a single multi–ethnic state. This was welcomed, optimistically, as an abandonment of the LTTE’s 27–year quest to divide the country and a positive step to peace.

Leaving aside potential pitfalls, the fact that peace talks have commenced under the aegis of the international community is most welcome. As a group that has regularly monitored developments in the North–East, we focus on the underlying realities at ground level in the present report. It is these that will determine, eventually, the outcome of the present peace process.

From the UNP’s election victory in December 2001 until about April 2002, it looked as though it was going to be a straight hand over of the North-East to the LTTE by the government.

The key drawback in today’s peace process is that rather than being driven by a concerted attempt to seek a national consensus, it is largely perceived as resulting from a secret understanding between the UNP, now forming the government, and the LTTE. This is vastly different from a transparent political understanding reached with a democratic parliamentary party.

In playing their power games over the years, both the UNP and the LTTE have thoughtlessly and callously sacrificed the lives of thousands of ordinary people. There are signs that today’s peace process, where large segments of opinion are not being reassured about its integrity, is creating a dangerous political vacuum. Unless a reckoning for the past with a will to refashion our institutions, so as not to repeat it, accompanies the peace process, the people have little stake in it.

The key problem with the UNP is its inability to face up to its own violent past and its institutionalisation of state terror, first against the Tamils and then against Sinhalese opponents, which brought Sri Lanka to the brink of being a failed state. It has been consistently incapable of talking to the country honestly about the Tamil question.

Simply for the sake of power, it identified with Sinhalese chauvinist sections to obstruct the PA government’s attempt at a constitutional resolution. Forced to deal with the problem, it can only do so manipulatively, avoiding open discussion to evolve a consensus. It may also prove a fatal handicap when negotiating with the LTTE.

When there is a lack of openness about such a harrowing past as one this country has had, there arises a compelling need to pervert our institutions of justice at the highest levels. Its effect is to render us cynical, destroy our sense of public decency, trivialise our values and render us frivolous as a nation. We will take a particular disturbing instance.

It were suddenly as though the masses of evidence documented by the Disappearance Commissions and the harrowing events at a torture camp to which the Prime Minister was closely linked, as detailed by the Batalanda Commission, have become figments of imagination. These were events that took place in the late 1980s. During the latter years of the PA government, a unit of the CID and the attorney general’s department had been conducting investigations on testimony before these commissions and their findings, with a view to filing indictments.

It is well known that a number of UNP ministers and MPs were presiding over death squads with the aid of sections of the security forces, as is also clearly evident in findings of the commissions above. The UNP government elected in 1977 perverted the judicial process and made tampering with it a normal part of governance, whence in the early 1990s it continued to obstruct investigations into the events of 1987–1990. There is hardly a better illustration of this art than defence minister Tilak Marapone’s earlier career in the AG’s department.

Instead of being dignified, we have a government quite willing to ditch the Tamil opposition and its ministers shamefully performing the gratuitous service of exonerating the LTTE from charges of child conscription, (as many as 12,000 child conscripts grace the LTTE’s armed wings, each engaged through violence, threat and force) and extortion and planned attacks on Muslims (several attacks on Muslims in the North-East by the LTTE have taken place last year including the systematic economic boycott and killing of 12 Muslims). We moreover have reports, the undignified fallout from which surfaces in media gossip, of rival groups of ministers falling over and undercutting each other to cultivate advantageous relationships with the LTTE, presumably with an eye to the millions of dollars expected as rehabilitation aid.

Since last June there were a spate of incidents by the LTTE targeting Muslims. In one brutal instance, 12 Muslims were killed. There has been no change of policy on the harassment of Muslims especially around Valaichenai in the North–East. Moreover, the policy of cramping the Muslims and isolating them economically that was begun in June, still continues. Reports also speak of the eviction of hundreds of Muslim families at gunpoint from Paalai Nagar, two miles from Valaichenai, after the recent violence (e.g. Rauf Zain in the Mirror, September 5,2002).

This is in good measure a policy orchestrated from the top to make the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) subservient like the TULF. The LTTE cannot control the Muslims at the grassroots as it does the Tamils. The Muslims are still free to talk in their villages and in their mosques, and to take positions without individuals being targeted. For this reason many Tamils regard them the last hope for democracy in the East.

Another ruse to get the Tamil opposition parties out of the scene is to make the government postpone local council elections, dissolve the existing councils in the North–East and hand them over to a commissioner. This is being orchestrated through the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) of which the TULF is the main constituent. Incomes that legitimately accrue to many local councils are now being collected by the LTTE without providing any services in return, while starving these councils of funds. Local councils are important for the survival and security of the opposition parties. Since the MoU, the government is being urged to do away with some basic facilities they had previously provided to these parties. Hence, this becomes a way for stifling their existence and endorsing only the LTTE.

The LTTE has long tentacles and reaches into every nook of society to ensure that no semblance of opposition or independent political activity can survive in the North-East. At least 4 members of the EPRLF (V) have been abducted by the LTTE in the East during the course of the year. They include Anthony Claire (24) of Ariyampathy, taken from home on 9th January, Vijayanathan Vijitharan (29) of Navatkuda, taken on 16th January, Raju Suman of Valaichenai, taken on 21st February and Chelliah Kandasamy of Pandiruppu, a father of two. The last, who suffered from a physical handicap, was taken from home in the night of 19th July and the worst is feared. Several members of the EPRLF(V) narrowly escaped abduction as reported by us earlier.

We see clearly the ingrained weaknesses of the MoU, which is fundamentally anti–democratic and anti–people. It functions as a means to legitimise a totalitarian order in the name of peace, where checks cannot work. Whatever the limitations and weaknesses of parties such as the EPDP and EPRLF(V), they are the only political organisations that have withstood the LTTE’s terror and are attempting to function in the North–East within a formal democratic framework. Any peace process should aim at creating conditions for independent political activity to evolve rather than to suppress it. Knowing the history of the LTTE and its politico–military strategy, it is incumbent on any peace process to ensure that the values of democracy are instilled and the people encouraged in exercising them.

The MoU is an agreement between military actors, not a human rights pact. It is inherently biased towards military forces that have shown a lack of concern for the people and an antipathy to democratic principles.

Mysterious deaths, suicides, the attack on the Principal of Hartley College and other like developments are troubling hints of the ‘peacetime’ modus operandi of the LTTE. Such mysteries even seem to follow the LTTE’s free access to Colombo.

Now the process has reached a strange phase where the present heirs to that UNP government, contrary to basic common–sense dictates of security, do not want to have eyes and ears in the North–East to see what the LTTE is cooking. The Press on 14th September carried defence minister Marapone’s response to President Kumaratunge’s letter concerning an arms build–up, recruitment of children and harassment of Muslims by the LTTE.

The defence minister’s response summarised briefly, reads: "The government sees little in the North-East and has evidence of even less, so why worry?" On the contrary, the government thinks it is being clever in seeking a US–sponsored ‘safety net’ as a substitute for sound intellectual labour and organisational effort. Does that mean repression in the South and typically American press–button destruction in the North–East in the event of the LTTE not playing by Oslo, rules?

While welcoming the outcome of the first round of talks at Sattahip, both the National Peace Council and the Peace Support Group have drawn attention to issues not addressed in the communiqué. They have pointed to the silence on human rights, democracy and pluralism and arrangements to protect these.

The LTTE’s growing unpopularity along with that of its order is transparent to the insider. No order based on extortion and conscription of children can possibly be popular. This is why the LTTE wants an administration where it will get the cash while the appointed scapegoats get the blame. It is why the LTTE is becoming increasingly paranoid about the EPDP, EPRLF(V) and even the tiny SEP that many commentators would have regarded spent forces a few months ago. Even a murdered leader’s 75th birthday has become a nightmare. The TULF now rues its opportunism in hitching its wagon to the LTTE at the last elections. There should be no delay in addressing the core issues of democracy and human rights. With every passing hour, the shadows of a drear night are falling thick and fast. 

(An extract from the report ‘In the Shadows of Sattahip: The Many Faces of Peace’ by the The University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna). The (UTHR(J)) was formed in 1988 at the University of Jaffna, as part of the national organisation University Teachers for Human Rights.


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