On the Brink: A New Approach to Peace is Urgently Needed if a Devastating War is to be Avoided
(written 5 May 2006)
by Alan Keenan
Sri Lanka’s beleagured peace process was jolted by another round of violence last week – the worst since the ceasefire between the government and the Tamil Tigers was agreed to in February 2002. With the news that a 21 year old Tamil Tiger suicide bomber had gained access to the Sri Lankan Army Headquarters and detonated herself next to the car carrying Sri Lanka’s Army Commander – wounding him grievously and killing eleven others – many assumed that the Tigers, after numerous hints, had finally chosen to return to war. Fears of war seemed confirmed when the Sri Lankan military quickly replied by bombing Tamil Tiger bases in eastern Sri Lanka. The raids damaged schools and homes, killed a dozen or more, including at least some civilians, and displaced thousands more from their homes. After a brief lull – as each side caught its breath and responded to international pressure with public reaffirmations of their commitment to peace – more violence has followed, as the Tigers have renewed their attacks on Sri Lankan military targets in the north and east of Sri Lanka and more and more Tamil civilians have been killed by Sri Lankan “security” forces in response.
The downward slide into something more and more resembling war has been gathering speed since last summer’s assassination of Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar. Kadirgamar, himself a Tamil, was a fierce critic of the Tigers, who jealously guard the right to be the sole political voice for Tamils. Violence picked up in frequency and intensity with the November election of President Mahinda Rajapakse, who ran on a platform that appealed to the fears of many of Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese that the ceasefire and peace process have facilitated the Tigers’ quest for a separate state in the north and east of the island. With the government allied with Sinhala political parties who advocate a tougher approach towards the Tigers than previous governments, the Sri Lankan military has begun to hit back covertly at the Tigers and those seen as Tiger supporters.
The most immediate cause for the cycle of violence lies in LTTE anger that the Sri Lankan military continues to assist the former LTTE eastern military commander, known as Col. Karuna, who broke off from the Tigers in early 2004 and whose forces have since been waging a low intensity guerrilla war against the Tigers. Given mounting evidence of government assistance in establishing Karuna camps and harboring his men in their own bases, repeated government denials of involvement are no longer believed by any independent observers.
This past December and January the LTTE launched a wave of attacks on the Sri Lankan military, killing more than a hundred soldiers and wounding many more in a series of grenade and claymore mine attacks, many of them carried out by recently trained civilian auxiliaries. While the Sri Lankan military has generally refrained from overt attacks on LTTE positions, they have chosen to respond through a disturbing return to the forced “disappearances” and political assassinations that were all too frequent in the 1980’s and 90’s. Over the past five months, scores of LTTE members and their civilian supporters – including a Tamil member of Parliament and a Tamil activist due to be chosen as his successor – have been abducted or gunned down either by the Sri Lankan military, Karuna’s forces, or by former Tamil militants now working with the government. There have been no serious police or judicial investigations into any of these murders. Indeed, a number of high-ranking military officials have made statements that amount to justifications of extra-judicial killings of Tigers and civilian Tiger supporters.
Despite protestations of innocence by the Tigers and the government, political killings by both sides and by Karuna’s men have been documented by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Killings, Philip Alston, in an incisive and devastating report released just last week.
Political violence came to a sudden – but brief – halt in early February, once the Tigers and the government agreed to meet in Geneva later that month to discuss ways to strengthen the ceasefire. The talks initially seemed a modest success, with each side agreeing to uphold the ceasefire agreement and to meet again on April 19-21. When it became clear that the government did not, in fact, intend to disarm Karuna’s forces, despite the LTTE’s belief that this had been agreed to, the LTTE recommenced its daily grenade attacks on army sentries and claymore mine attacks on SL military convoys. Scores more soldiers have been killed and wounded over the past six weeks.
In addition to hoping their attacks might force the government to disarm Karuna – a project that would likely be resisted violently by Karuna’s men – the Tigers may also be hoping to provoke the Sri Lankan government into being the first to renounce the ceasefire officially. If that doesn’t work, their attacks could still help goad the military and police into sanctioning large scale anti-Tamil violence that would harm the government’s international standing and help legitimate Tiger claims that Tamils can be safe only with their own state. Any of these outcomes would benefit the Tigers.
Unfortunately, the Sri Lankan military seems increasingly willing to play according to the Tiger script. After a mid-April Tiger bomb attack in a Sinhala section of the multiethnic northeastern town of Trincomalee, the military and police stood by as truckloads of armed Sinhalese thugs were brought in to attack, kill, and burn out Tamils from their homes and shops. At least twenty people were killed and hundreds were displaced. The attacks – and the refusal of the state to protect Tamil civilians – were a chilling reminder of the week-long campaign of anti-Tamil violence in July 1983 that transformed Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict into full scale war. To this date, neither the President, nor any other high ranking Sri Lankan official, has offered any apology for the government’s failure to protect its own citizens. Reciprocal reprisal attacks on Tamil and Sinhala civilians are now almost daily occurrences.
While it is true that the central demand of the Tigers is for the government to disarm Karuna’s forces, however, it would be a mistake to see the government’s continued support for Karuna as the primary obstacle to a return to peace, as Tiger propagandists and some peace activists and journalists maintain. Such an interpretation ignores two related and much deeper problems.
It ignores, first of all, the role that the LTTE’s own behavior has played in provoking Karuna and the Sri Lankan military’s violence. Determined to consolidate their control over the north and east, the Tigers have used the last four years to murder hundreds of their unarmed Tamil political opponents, forcibly recruit thousands of children as soldiers, kill and harass Tamil-speaking Muslims who resist their rule, and assassinate scores of Sri Lankan military intelligence officers. Previous Sri Lankan governments have been either uninterested or powerlessness to stop this. It is only since mid-2004, after Karuna broke away and challenged Tiger dominance in the Eastern Province, that the LTTE have suffered any violence in return.
Had the government and the Norwegians respected Karuna’s repeated requests when he first broke from the Tigers to sign his own ceasefire deals with the GoSL and the LTTE, today’s cycle of violence might have been avoided. Instead, the Norwegians, the Scandinavian ceasefire monitors, and the government of then President Chandrika Kumaratunga all looked the other way when LTTE troops loyal to Tiger chief Prabhakaran crossed the ceasefire lines and defeated Karuna’s forces in a few days of fighting. Before he could be entirely crushed, however, Karuna disbanded his forces and went into hiding.
The Tigers have proven – both before and after Karuna’s defection – that they are willing and able to track down and murder any Tamil who publicly opposes their de-facto rule. It’s not surprising, then, that Karuna and his men have chosen to regroup and wage a low-intensity guerilla struggle to deny the LTTE control of the Eastern Province -- rather than return to what would likely be very brief lives as civilians. It is also not surprising that the military would lend his forces some support, especially as the Tigers have used the four years of ceasefire to build up their forces and prepare for war. The knowledge and skills of Karuna’s fighters could be of immense value to the Sri Lankan military should war resume – as grows more likely every day.
As this example suggests, though, there is an even deeper problem that underlies Sri Lanka’s present crisis. The Norwegian’s and their international backers have imagined that a lasting peace can somehow be achieved between the government and the Tigers without either party first showing any willingness to transform themselves in democratic or peaceful ways.
The Tigers, for instance, have faced only mild sanctions for their relentless human rights violations and systematic denial of Tamils’ freedom of political expression, which have made a mockery of their claims to be a liberation movement. The Norwegians and their supporters in the international community have instead consistently downplayed the importance of human rights protections, for fear of complicating the possibility of negotiations.
Nor have the Tigers ever expressed any interest in – or been pressured towards – negotiating a permanent solution to the ethnic conflict. The closest they came was their joint declaration with the then government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe in December 2002 to “explore” a federal solution. Four months later they pulled out of talks. When they did offer a proposal for an interim administration in the North and East in November 2003, it was grounded in no real federalist or democratic principles, and would instead have granted the Tigers an effective monopoly of power. Since then they have consistently refused to discuss any political proposals other than their own interim administration plan.
The government on the other hand, particularly in its present incarnation, has also failed utterly to respect the democratic rights of Tamils, as shown most blatantly in the complicity of the Police and military in the anti-Tamil violence in Trincomalee. While there is a long history of government-supported violence against Tamil civilians and political leaders, the impunity with which the Tigers have been able to carry out political killings and other human rights violations over the past four years has clearly angered and emboldened hard line elements in the military and elsewhere. Many now seem to consider their own extra-judicial killings as righteous retaliation and self-defense. Still largely prevented from attacking the Tigers frontally, Sinhalese militarists have chosen instead to hit back at Tamils.
Equally important, the present government has backtracked and rejected the previous consensus among mainstream Sinhala parties that a political solution to the war must involve a federal restructuring of the state that would grant a significant degree of political autonomy to the predominantly Tamil-speaking areas in the north and east. Having been elected on a promise to defend the “unitary” state, and allied to Sinhala supremacist political parties, President Rajapakse is very far from having anything he could offer Tamils in the way of meaningful political reforms.
For all these reasons, then, even if the LTTE decide to relax their push for war and return to Geneva for the postponed second round of ceasefire talks – which to date they have not seemed eager to do – this will provide temporary relief at best. The strategy of keeping the government and the Tigers talking, in the hope this might eventually “build confidence,” has now clearly exhausted what limited potential it once had. Rather than maintain a policy that further entrenches the two extremes, the international backers of the peace process – Norway, the EU, the US, and Japan – must begin publicly to challenge the human rights violations and lack of democracy that are central to how the LTTE and the GoSL both maintain their power.
This means, first of all, making continued international support to the Sri Lankan government contingent on its actually developing a package of reforms and political proposals that begin to address Tamil aspirations to be full citizens and equal partners in power – regardless of whether this fits in with Tigers’ plans to consolidate their own rule. This clearly will require going beyond the “unitary” state, even if the word “federalism” isn’t mentioned.
The government must also be pressed to implement the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, especially that of signing on to the International Criminal Court and inviting the UN or other international body to send a human rights monitoring mission. Had these steps been taken earlier, today’s cycle of violence might not have gotten so out of hand.
Equally important, the government must also be told in no uncertain terms that it cannot continue to harbor anti-Tamil ideologues at the highest level of the defence forces, and that it must end its campaign of extra-judicial killings and disappearances waged against civilians suspected of being Tiger sympathizers. This is not only the morally correct thing to do, it is also strategic: only by genuinely reaching out to Tamils can the government start to call the Tiger’s bluff and put them under real political pressure. Equating Tamils and Tigers is to play the Tigers’ own game.
At the same time, the Tigers need to be told to cease their attempt to goad the GoSL into war and to return to Geneva without further delay. They must be given a clear and consistent message that the only route to an interim administration and a more permanent form of autonomy that would give them a major share in power is to start respecting basic rights – of Tamils, Muslims, and Sinhalese – and engaging in real political dialogue. Should the Tigers be serious about something less than a separate state, an offer of real dialogue would deny the government any further excuses to avoid grappling with the issues at the heart of the conflict.
It may, though, already be too late, war may be inevitable. If so, the international community, whose mistakes have helped bring Sri Lanka to the brink of a devastating war, has a grave moral responsibility to provide the humanitarian assistance and civilian protections that will be so desperately needed by the hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans who will, yet again, be caught in the middle.
by Alan Keenan
Sri Lanka’s beleagured peace process was jolted by another round of violence last week – the worst since the ceasefire between the government and the Tamil Tigers was agreed to in February 2002. With the news that a 21 year old Tamil Tiger suicide bomber had gained access to the Sri Lankan Army Headquarters and detonated herself next to the car carrying Sri Lanka’s Army Commander – wounding him grievously and killing eleven others – many assumed that the Tigers, after numerous hints, had finally chosen to return to war. Fears of war seemed confirmed when the Sri Lankan military quickly replied by bombing Tamil Tiger bases in eastern Sri Lanka. The raids damaged schools and homes, killed a dozen or more, including at least some civilians, and displaced thousands more from their homes. After a brief lull – as each side caught its breath and responded to international pressure with public reaffirmations of their commitment to peace – more violence has followed, as the Tigers have renewed their attacks on Sri Lankan military targets in the north and east of Sri Lanka and more and more Tamil civilians have been killed by Sri Lankan “security” forces in response.
The downward slide into something more and more resembling war has been gathering speed since last summer’s assassination of Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar. Kadirgamar, himself a Tamil, was a fierce critic of the Tigers, who jealously guard the right to be the sole political voice for Tamils. Violence picked up in frequency and intensity with the November election of President Mahinda Rajapakse, who ran on a platform that appealed to the fears of many of Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese that the ceasefire and peace process have facilitated the Tigers’ quest for a separate state in the north and east of the island. With the government allied with Sinhala political parties who advocate a tougher approach towards the Tigers than previous governments, the Sri Lankan military has begun to hit back covertly at the Tigers and those seen as Tiger supporters.
The most immediate cause for the cycle of violence lies in LTTE anger that the Sri Lankan military continues to assist the former LTTE eastern military commander, known as Col. Karuna, who broke off from the Tigers in early 2004 and whose forces have since been waging a low intensity guerrilla war against the Tigers. Given mounting evidence of government assistance in establishing Karuna camps and harboring his men in their own bases, repeated government denials of involvement are no longer believed by any independent observers.
This past December and January the LTTE launched a wave of attacks on the Sri Lankan military, killing more than a hundred soldiers and wounding many more in a series of grenade and claymore mine attacks, many of them carried out by recently trained civilian auxiliaries. While the Sri Lankan military has generally refrained from overt attacks on LTTE positions, they have chosen to respond through a disturbing return to the forced “disappearances” and political assassinations that were all too frequent in the 1980’s and 90’s. Over the past five months, scores of LTTE members and their civilian supporters – including a Tamil member of Parliament and a Tamil activist due to be chosen as his successor – have been abducted or gunned down either by the Sri Lankan military, Karuna’s forces, or by former Tamil militants now working with the government. There have been no serious police or judicial investigations into any of these murders. Indeed, a number of high-ranking military officials have made statements that amount to justifications of extra-judicial killings of Tigers and civilian Tiger supporters.
Despite protestations of innocence by the Tigers and the government, political killings by both sides and by Karuna’s men have been documented by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Killings, Philip Alston, in an incisive and devastating report released just last week.
Political violence came to a sudden – but brief – halt in early February, once the Tigers and the government agreed to meet in Geneva later that month to discuss ways to strengthen the ceasefire. The talks initially seemed a modest success, with each side agreeing to uphold the ceasefire agreement and to meet again on April 19-21. When it became clear that the government did not, in fact, intend to disarm Karuna’s forces, despite the LTTE’s belief that this had been agreed to, the LTTE recommenced its daily grenade attacks on army sentries and claymore mine attacks on SL military convoys. Scores more soldiers have been killed and wounded over the past six weeks.
In addition to hoping their attacks might force the government to disarm Karuna – a project that would likely be resisted violently by Karuna’s men – the Tigers may also be hoping to provoke the Sri Lankan government into being the first to renounce the ceasefire officially. If that doesn’t work, their attacks could still help goad the military and police into sanctioning large scale anti-Tamil violence that would harm the government’s international standing and help legitimate Tiger claims that Tamils can be safe only with their own state. Any of these outcomes would benefit the Tigers.
Unfortunately, the Sri Lankan military seems increasingly willing to play according to the Tiger script. After a mid-April Tiger bomb attack in a Sinhala section of the multiethnic northeastern town of Trincomalee, the military and police stood by as truckloads of armed Sinhalese thugs were brought in to attack, kill, and burn out Tamils from their homes and shops. At least twenty people were killed and hundreds were displaced. The attacks – and the refusal of the state to protect Tamil civilians – were a chilling reminder of the week-long campaign of anti-Tamil violence in July 1983 that transformed Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict into full scale war. To this date, neither the President, nor any other high ranking Sri Lankan official, has offered any apology for the government’s failure to protect its own citizens. Reciprocal reprisal attacks on Tamil and Sinhala civilians are now almost daily occurrences.
While it is true that the central demand of the Tigers is for the government to disarm Karuna’s forces, however, it would be a mistake to see the government’s continued support for Karuna as the primary obstacle to a return to peace, as Tiger propagandists and some peace activists and journalists maintain. Such an interpretation ignores two related and much deeper problems.
It ignores, first of all, the role that the LTTE’s own behavior has played in provoking Karuna and the Sri Lankan military’s violence. Determined to consolidate their control over the north and east, the Tigers have used the last four years to murder hundreds of their unarmed Tamil political opponents, forcibly recruit thousands of children as soldiers, kill and harass Tamil-speaking Muslims who resist their rule, and assassinate scores of Sri Lankan military intelligence officers. Previous Sri Lankan governments have been either uninterested or powerlessness to stop this. It is only since mid-2004, after Karuna broke away and challenged Tiger dominance in the Eastern Province, that the LTTE have suffered any violence in return.
Had the government and the Norwegians respected Karuna’s repeated requests when he first broke from the Tigers to sign his own ceasefire deals with the GoSL and the LTTE, today’s cycle of violence might have been avoided. Instead, the Norwegians, the Scandinavian ceasefire monitors, and the government of then President Chandrika Kumaratunga all looked the other way when LTTE troops loyal to Tiger chief Prabhakaran crossed the ceasefire lines and defeated Karuna’s forces in a few days of fighting. Before he could be entirely crushed, however, Karuna disbanded his forces and went into hiding.
The Tigers have proven – both before and after Karuna’s defection – that they are willing and able to track down and murder any Tamil who publicly opposes their de-facto rule. It’s not surprising, then, that Karuna and his men have chosen to regroup and wage a low-intensity guerilla struggle to deny the LTTE control of the Eastern Province -- rather than return to what would likely be very brief lives as civilians. It is also not surprising that the military would lend his forces some support, especially as the Tigers have used the four years of ceasefire to build up their forces and prepare for war. The knowledge and skills of Karuna’s fighters could be of immense value to the Sri Lankan military should war resume – as grows more likely every day.
As this example suggests, though, there is an even deeper problem that underlies Sri Lanka’s present crisis. The Norwegian’s and their international backers have imagined that a lasting peace can somehow be achieved between the government and the Tigers without either party first showing any willingness to transform themselves in democratic or peaceful ways.
The Tigers, for instance, have faced only mild sanctions for their relentless human rights violations and systematic denial of Tamils’ freedom of political expression, which have made a mockery of their claims to be a liberation movement. The Norwegians and their supporters in the international community have instead consistently downplayed the importance of human rights protections, for fear of complicating the possibility of negotiations.
Nor have the Tigers ever expressed any interest in – or been pressured towards – negotiating a permanent solution to the ethnic conflict. The closest they came was their joint declaration with the then government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe in December 2002 to “explore” a federal solution. Four months later they pulled out of talks. When they did offer a proposal for an interim administration in the North and East in November 2003, it was grounded in no real federalist or democratic principles, and would instead have granted the Tigers an effective monopoly of power. Since then they have consistently refused to discuss any political proposals other than their own interim administration plan.
The government on the other hand, particularly in its present incarnation, has also failed utterly to respect the democratic rights of Tamils, as shown most blatantly in the complicity of the Police and military in the anti-Tamil violence in Trincomalee. While there is a long history of government-supported violence against Tamil civilians and political leaders, the impunity with which the Tigers have been able to carry out political killings and other human rights violations over the past four years has clearly angered and emboldened hard line elements in the military and elsewhere. Many now seem to consider their own extra-judicial killings as righteous retaliation and self-defense. Still largely prevented from attacking the Tigers frontally, Sinhalese militarists have chosen instead to hit back at Tamils.
Equally important, the present government has backtracked and rejected the previous consensus among mainstream Sinhala parties that a political solution to the war must involve a federal restructuring of the state that would grant a significant degree of political autonomy to the predominantly Tamil-speaking areas in the north and east. Having been elected on a promise to defend the “unitary” state, and allied to Sinhala supremacist political parties, President Rajapakse is very far from having anything he could offer Tamils in the way of meaningful political reforms.
For all these reasons, then, even if the LTTE decide to relax their push for war and return to Geneva for the postponed second round of ceasefire talks – which to date they have not seemed eager to do – this will provide temporary relief at best. The strategy of keeping the government and the Tigers talking, in the hope this might eventually “build confidence,” has now clearly exhausted what limited potential it once had. Rather than maintain a policy that further entrenches the two extremes, the international backers of the peace process – Norway, the EU, the US, and Japan – must begin publicly to challenge the human rights violations and lack of democracy that are central to how the LTTE and the GoSL both maintain their power.
This means, first of all, making continued international support to the Sri Lankan government contingent on its actually developing a package of reforms and political proposals that begin to address Tamil aspirations to be full citizens and equal partners in power – regardless of whether this fits in with Tigers’ plans to consolidate their own rule. This clearly will require going beyond the “unitary” state, even if the word “federalism” isn’t mentioned.
The government must also be pressed to implement the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, especially that of signing on to the International Criminal Court and inviting the UN or other international body to send a human rights monitoring mission. Had these steps been taken earlier, today’s cycle of violence might not have gotten so out of hand.
Equally important, the government must also be told in no uncertain terms that it cannot continue to harbor anti-Tamil ideologues at the highest level of the defence forces, and that it must end its campaign of extra-judicial killings and disappearances waged against civilians suspected of being Tiger sympathizers. This is not only the morally correct thing to do, it is also strategic: only by genuinely reaching out to Tamils can the government start to call the Tiger’s bluff and put them under real political pressure. Equating Tamils and Tigers is to play the Tigers’ own game.
At the same time, the Tigers need to be told to cease their attempt to goad the GoSL into war and to return to Geneva without further delay. They must be given a clear and consistent message that the only route to an interim administration and a more permanent form of autonomy that would give them a major share in power is to start respecting basic rights – of Tamils, Muslims, and Sinhalese – and engaging in real political dialogue. Should the Tigers be serious about something less than a separate state, an offer of real dialogue would deny the government any further excuses to avoid grappling with the issues at the heart of the conflict.
It may, though, already be too late, war may be inevitable. If so, the international community, whose mistakes have helped bring Sri Lanka to the brink of a devastating war, has a grave moral responsibility to provide the humanitarian assistance and civilian protections that will be so desperately needed by the hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans who will, yet again, be caught in the middle.
posted by Alan Keenan at 5:09 PM
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