Sri Lanka closes out its 60th year of
Independence, though in the strictest sense
it lasts till the beginning of next February
when we celebrate our 61st Independence Day.
It is a moment to take stock. Due to all the
wrong turnings we took and the right ones we
did not at and since our Independence six
decades ago, we have spent a quarter century
commemorating our independence in conditions
of a separatist civil war. This will in all
probability be so next year too. However, it
may not be so the year after, and from then
onwards, because of what we have achieved
this year. And I do mean “we”: the
leadership, the government, the military,
the vast majority of people, the dissident
Tamils.
What has been the balance sheet of 2008? It
is that we are winning but have not yet won.
Victory is on the horizon but it has not yet
been achieved. 2008 was the year in which
the Sri Lankan political leadership
decisively reversed the balance of forces
between the state and the LTTE. It is the
year in which the country feels itself on
the strategic offensive while the enemy is
on the (admittedly dogged) defensive.
The main achievement of 2008 was the
shift in the balance of forces between the
Sri Lankan state and the LTTE and the
maintenance of the posture of strategic
offensive by the Sri Lankan armed forces.
The Lankan military has succeeded in
squeezing the LTTE into parts of two
contiguous districts and the peninsular
neck. The LTTE was unable to make any
territorial gains this year. Nor was it able
to regain any territory it lost. As
importantly or even more importantly, the
Tigers lost thousands of valuable fighting
cadres. The corresponding losses by the Sri
Lankan forces are affordable given the
discrepancy in size of the two armed
formations as well as the vaster discrepancy
in the population base of recruitment.
Voluntary recruitment to the Sri Lankan
armed forces kept rising throughout the
year, while forced conscription in the LTTE
controlled areas brought in ill-motivated
fighters into the ranks of the enemy.
The main result of 2008, that of the
maintenance of the offensive posture of the
Sri Lankan armed forces, was a unique one on
the part of the Sri Lankan governing elite
over the decades since the conflict erupted.
As Karuna, ex-LTTE rebel commander turned
parliamentarian –who was double-crossed by
President Kumaratunga when she allowed
Prabhakaran’s seaborne attackers a landing
behind his lines at Verugal-- points out,
these achievements would have been
impossible if not for the leadership
provided by President Mahinda Rajapaksa,
Secretary of Defense Gotabaya Rajapaksa and
Army Commander Sarath Fonseka. I would add
the Prime Minister Ratnasiri Wickramanayake
and the Naval and Air Service chiefs
Wasantha Karannagoda and Roshan Goonetilleke
to the list. A half a dozen good men. But
these men would have been unable to turn the
tables on the Tigers as they have, and no
one else before had done sustained and
strategically, if not for the morale of the
officer corps and rank and file of the armed
forces. This morale itself is drawn from the
supportive population base, whose active
support for the war is manifested in
popularity pools which range from a low of a
75% approval to a high of 83%-93%. Thus it
is the people, chiefly but not exclusively
the Sinhala people, who by their support and
sacrifice have provided the foundation for
the military success.
What this reveals is an organic identity
between the people, the armed forces and the
political leadership; an identity between
state and society, which is a historic
rarity. For the first time we have a
leadership that listened to the people on
this central issue, that turned itself into
an instrument of the people’s will. This is
the secret of the success of 2008 and one of
the main features of this year.
The Tiger’s “Police Chief” has clearly
indicated to the BBC last week that economic
targets will be high on the list of
terrorist priorities. What the man and his
leaders obviously do not understand from
their own record of destructive achievement
is that such attacks only clarify matters
and swell support for a war to a finish.
They do not diminish or erode popular
support. The erroneous thinking is based on
the parliamentary elections of 2001 in which
Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe won, seemingly on
the back of the economic damage caused by
the attack on k\Katunayake airport and as a
result of the emergence of a lobby of
corporate fat cats calling itself Sri Lanka
First. What this interpretation fails to
take into account is that the real secret of
that election is something that has been
known since 1952, namely that if the forces
of the Centre (the SLFP) and the Left (be it
MEP, LSSP, CPSL or JVP) remain disunited,
the Right wins. In 2001, the SLFP and JVP
ran against each other. The combined SLFP –
JVP vote was larger than the UNP vote.
Today, the JVP will run against the SLFP,
but it is a divided and diminished party,
whose main orator will run with the
governing coalition.
If the outstanding achievement of 2008 has
been the shift to and maintenance of the
strategic offensive against the LTTE, what
is the main task of 2009? President
Rajapaksa has, in his remarks to a civil
society gathering on December 22nd, already
identified it correctly in its historic,
military and political dimensions:
"The year 2009 will be the year when
our motherland would be finally liberated
from the LTTE…There will be many attempts to
stall the forward march of the security
forces. Malicious elements have already
begun to create political unrest by making
many problems for the government in an
attempt to save terrorists from their
imminent defeat. Therefore, I expect that
there would be testing times ahead. For this
very reason, I would like to declare 2009 as
a year of victory for heroic soldiers”.
(Lanka Dissent)
The challenge of 2009 is to conclude the war
victoriously and do so in a manner that
precludes to the extent possible, a
prolonged guerrilla war. This is by
decapitating and destroying the LTTE’s
fighting forces in the battles to liberate
Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu. The finest
military mind of the post WW2 20th century,
Vietnam’s General Vo Nguyen Giap calls this
definition of the military goal as “the
annihilation of the living forces of the
enemy”. It is a myth of the misinformed
that a powerful irregular force, especially
if based on some collective identity or
social constituency, can never be fully
defeated, and that even if conventionally
defeated they revert to or are reborn as
guerrilla movements which are impossible to
eradicate. Take three well known examples:
Chechnya, Angola’s UNITA and Pol Pot’s Khmer
Rouge. All three were defeated and
decapitated, never to be reborn as
guerrillas.
Part of the challenge of 2009 is that the
large unit war will have to be won within a
fairly compressed time frame, before the
impact of the world economic crisis
manifested in collapsing commodity prices
combines with the burden of military
expenditure to damage the economy. A victory
and the restoration of normality will
spontaneously generate an economic upsurge.
Having won the quasi-conventional war, the
Sri Lankan armed forces will have to
eradicate the infrastructure of a residual
or resurgent terrorist campaign. This cannot
be done and must not be attempted by the Sri
Lankan forces alone. It will require the
legitimate, large scale engagement of Tamil
allies and auxiliaries, and this legitimacy
can result only from the constitutionally
ordained devolution of power to the Eastern
Provincial Council and its Northern
counterpart. A genuine measure of autonomy
and self government, and joint operations
with elected local allies has always been
the secret of effective counterinsurgency.
The real challenge of 2009 then is twofold
and indissolubly twinned: the liberation of
Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu in such a
decisive and comprehensive manner as to
pre-empt to the maximum degree the survival
of the LTTE as a guerrilla/terrorist force,
and the redrawing of the Sri Lankan social
contract in so enlightened and reformist a
manner that the Tamil people feel included
as fully fledged citizens enjoying equal
rights and genuine provincial autonomy. 2009
must be the year of the full and final
liberation and reunification of Sri Lankan
territory and upon that reunified territory,
the beginning of the construction of a truly
Sri Lankan identity, an authentically Sri
Lankan nation.
(The opinions expressed are the strictly
personal views of the writer).
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