From Thailand to Thamileelam

(Reproduced from the Sunday Island of August 25, 2002)

By Dayan Jayatilleka

The road to Paris lies through Calcutta, said Leon Trotsky. The road to Thamileelam may run through Thailand. It requires a quite extraordinary admixture of amnesia and myopia to regard the passage to Phuket as an occasion to break out the bubbly, even if one could afford it. Not only have we all been here before, we’ve been here a great many times before, and always with the same dismal result. Certainly there are things that are different this time around, but then there were such differences and specialities each time, in relation to the previous exercise! Those things that are different today aren’t all in our favour (post MOU expansion of LTTE zone of control and unilateral shrinkage of Sri Lanka), while those factors that are in our favour (post-Sept 11^th globalisation of anti-terrorism, ex-Mahattaya faction Tamil guerrillas inducted into the Army’s DMI) have either been negated or thrown away by the UNF administration.

The Tigers have talked many times before. They were there in Thimpu, Bhutan, in 1985 at negotiations convened by Shri Rajiv Gandhi, whose mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave shelter, support and patronage to the Tamil resistance after Black July ’83. In November 1986, Prabhakaran was flown to the venue of the Bangalore SAARC Summit to participate in proximity talks with President J. R. Jayawardene, with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi acting as intermediary. They murdered Rajiv a scant five years later; actually four years after he sent Mirage-2000s to abort Operation Liberation and save the Tiger. One would have to re-read the memoirs of the various Indian players, chiefly J. N. Dixit, and supplement this with Prof. K. M. de Silva’s Woodrow Wilson Centre book ‘Regional Powers’, to estimate the number of times that ranking Tigers dialogued with key Indian personalities belonging to all branches of the Indian state, and to narrow down the number of times such personalities spoke with Mr. Prabhakaran. Prabhakaran’s actual conduct in going to war against the IPKF in October ’87 must be contrasted with his warm words about India in his Sudumalai speech a few months earlier.

Our PM’s statement on TV (on no less solemn an occasion than the anniversary of his entry to politics a quarter century ago) that “Prabhakaran now meets the media as I do” is a little forgetful. I still have somewhere the Sunday Times clippings of Prabhakaran’s post-Accord                              press conference, and Kendall Hopman and Qadri Ismail would have vivid personal recollections of the occasion. Furthermore there are the two quite elaborate episodes of LTTE negotiations with the Government of Sri Lanka, under two Presidents, quite divergent in almost every way, and belonging to two opposing political parties, but with the same result; the only difference being that President Chandrika survived the assassination attempt on her, the only one to survive a Tiger suicide bomb attack.

Two armies, two states. It’s quite as simple as that. The interim administration is going to be handed over to an organisation that has, or rather is, a parallel army. In other parts of the world, such autonomous/interim structures have their own police forces or militias, but these are armed by the state itself or permitted by the peace agreement to retain a percentage of their own weapons-which arsenal explicitly excludes heavy weapons. Never is a parallel structure allowed while a rival regular army (and navy!) are intact. Of course the LTTE army existed before the peace accord, but it was never accorded legitimacy. That then is what the MOU/de-proscription/interim administration triad does: it violates Max Weber’s fundamental definition of a state as maintaining the sole monopoly of legitimate force. The LTTE had broken the monopoly in actual fact, but it was in contestation with the state, whose armed forces were resisting the LTTE army. The UNF leadership is conferring legitimacy twice over-deproscription and an administrative structure-on a powerful parallel army, the leadership of which refuses to accept the concept of a united country. Mr. Wickremasinghe has thus permitted the LTTE to break the sole monopoly of legitimate force, and in doing so, he has midwifed a distinct, separate state, in the strictly scientific sense of the term: one with its own legitimate-or rather, legitimised (by the UNF Govt.) - conventional army.

The Sri Lankan state, the unitary form of which is long outdated, is not being reformed (as it should be). It is being ruptured, its throat slowly slit by its own ruling elite, and a two-state entity, a hideous two-headed hybrid, is coming into being. What is worse, that second state with which we shall have to share this small island is no benign neighbour as Slovakia is to the Czech republic or an independent Quebec would be to Canada, but a heavily militarised, aggressive, child-abducting, totalitarian entity, which also has as Mr. Prabhakaran’s large wall map shows, annexationist designs beyond its ‘natural’ ethnic borders, on significant Sinhala and Muslim majority territories. He will evict the Sri Lankan armed forces from his ‘homeland’ and move into those areas militarily because he believes in his map as the Zionists do in theirs, because prolonged peace and prosperity will soften his people and tame his Tigers, and because that is the pattern and pull of this island’s history. 

To paraphrase Antonio Gramsci, the old state is dead, the new is not yet born - and in this interregnum a great variety of the most morbid symptoms will appear. Prime Minister Wickremasinghe’s counter-revolution is striking at the state from three directions, at its three dimensions: territoriality, structure, role. The Lankan state is being retrenched in terms of its territorial control and spheres of influence in the North-East. This is part of a more radical transition that not merely changes the relations between the centre and the periphery, but shrinks the state spatially while it strategically sheds the Northeast, de-linking it from the centre. The state is also being challenged in its internal structural arrangements and relationships: the strong executive, the sole entity elected by the country as a whole and therefore the foremost symbol of the notion of a united Sri Lanka, is being besieged. Our history shows that whenever the domestic governance grievances of the elite (and the clergy) led it to undermine the head of state at the expense of defence against the external enemy, the latter prevailed and we were subjugated for protracted periods. 

The state’s role in the economy and society is being radically rolled-back: the public sector is being liquidated. Taken together this three-dimensional dismantling of the state will drastically alter the power balances between the world system and Sri Lanka, North and South, LTTE and the military, foreign and national capital, big business and small and medium enterprise, financial speculation and industrial production, the privileged elite and the working majority. It will entail a drastic diminution in our collective notion of what Sri Lanka is, of what it is to be a Sri Lankan - and in the status of our Sinhala selfhood. 

It is not only the Sinhalese who will be sold out. The Tamils, having suffered and sacrificed for equality, will find themselves among the few nations on the planet in this 21^st century, to live under a harsh, restrictive despotism. They will also not enjoy any of the democratic and human rights and freedoms considered basic by the Sinhala South. Thus the Sinhalese, Tamils and the Muslims will all be losers, conferring upon them a caricatured commonality, a Sri Lankanness through negation. But they will be losers in different ways, so they will remain hostile to each other, marooned in their mutual alienation, alone in their anomie. 

Theda Skocpol’s massive and definitive work ‘States and Social Revolutions’ demonstrates that revolutions are occasioned not chiefly by economic contradictions, but precisely by crises of the state and more specifically by a major defeat/retreat/surrender i.e. a major diminution of capacity and status of the state. It is precisely the kind of rupture and ‘loss’ of state and status that Skocpol deals with, that Sri Lanka is undergoing today. It is to be hoped that the response to this comprador counter-revolution will be permitted to have a systematic safety-net (the Presidency, the Parliamentary Opposition including the JVP MPs) and safety-valve (elections). If the disaffected have no recourse to countervailing by a sympathetic President and no hope of reversal of the tendency of ‘state loss’ by means of electoral change, then with their sense of betrayal compounded by a perception of Northern development and the development of Southern underdevelopment, they will rage against the Machine. 

Whatever the literary performances of expatriate Sri Lankan writers and locally based Ondaatje-wannabes, the unsurpassed work of fiction on this country remains Leonard Woolf’s Village in the Jungle. Woolf’s imaginative text, slipping inside the relations of Sinhala society and entering the substructures of Sinhala consciousness, should be read or re-read by all declaiming diplomats and dabbing donors, conflict management missionaries and feminist friends of peace, sundry social scientists and earnest students of ethnicity, dedicated deconstructionists and professorial post-modernists, corporate sector conmen and predatory politicians about town. It depicts how an impoverished, marginalized, alienated Sinhala man is hustled and then set-up by the local System, the slick and soulless local wielders of power, wealth and influence; and how, realising that he has been dispossessed of what little he had and recognising the identity, intentions and moral nature of his dispossessors, he is finally, existentially, driven to respond. This then is the Silindu Syndrome. 

If the Thai talks are not to be a transit lounge to Thamileelam, and its inevitable deadly blowback averted, five features have to be solidly built in: 

1)  A declaration signed by Mr. Prabhakaran on behalf of the LTTE committing it to accepting the concept of a single united country, embracing the entire island. (This in no way implies acceptance of a particular state structure i. e. , the unitary form). If the UNF wants a signed guarantee from an elected President, they should surely seek one from a separatist terrorist who murdered several of their leaders! 

2)  A time-table for internationally supervised elections. Learn from our sagacious British colonial rulers whose incremental granting of self-rule was linked to demonstrated maturity in democratic representative self-government. 

3)  A time-table for de-commissioning and de-militarisation, perhaps of a limited and partial nature, under international supervision. 

4)  The ratification of any agreement arrived at, by three internationally supervised referenda: North, East and island-wide. 

5)  A no-first use of weapons agreement with a guarantor of sufficient strategic strength and political will to enforce compliance by coercive/military means if necessary. (This would mean an existing multilateral organisation of states, such as the Asian Security Conference, or a group of states). 

Never mind where you’re coming from, you can get from there to here, Fly Thai.

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Last Updated Date: September 25, 2003 .