A Presidential Intervention
[November 18, 2003]

(Reproduced from the South Asia Intelligence Review [SAIR])

By Guest Writer: Prof. G.H. Peiris
(G.H. Peiris is a Senior Professor, University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and Senior Fellow, International Centre for Ethnic Studies)

On November 4, 2003, President Chandrika Kumaratunga exercised her constitutional powers to take over the cabinet portfolios of Defence, Interior and Mass Communication, dismissing three members of the United National Front (UNF) from their respective ministerial posts. Further, she replaced with her own appointees the secretaries of two of these ministries and the heads of several Government-controlled media institutions. She also prorogued Parliament for two weeks, terminating its on-going session, during which the UNF was to have initiated proceedings for impeachment of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The related announcements were accompanied by the promulgation of 'emergency regulations' under the Public Security Act, and the mobilization by the President of the Army for intensified security duties in Colombo. These latter measures were, however, withdrawn shortly.

The President's actions did have an element of surprise for those who believed (despite ample evidence to the contrary) that she is reconciled to performing a nominal role during the remainder of her term of office (scheduled to end in 2006) and permitting Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to function as the de facto head of Government. It may be suggested that the near-universal practice of referring to the body of ministers as the "Government of Sri Lanka" standing distinct from the office of the President - from a constitutional viewpoint, a misleading dichotomy that has been in vogue ever since the General Elections of December 2001 that gave Wickremesinghe's UNF a parliamentary majority - contributed to the perpetuation of this illusion, perhaps even in the minds of Wickremesinghe and his Party colleagues. But for those more acutely conscious of Kumaratunga's confrontational style of politics and her constitutional powers as Head of State and Head of Government, her action on November 4 represented no more than an expected culmination of the escalating power struggle between the virulently hostile national parties, the UNF and Kumaratunga's own Sri Lanka Freedom Party [SLFP, a constituent of her People's Alliance (PA)]. There could hardly be any doubt that by bringing about a major cabinet reshuffle, what the President wanted more than all else was a political showdown with the Prime Minister.

To many independent observers within and outside Sri Lanka, the Presidential challenge was not entirely unreasonable. The President remained well within her constitutional rights, and her show of power was a response to the barely concealed and sustained attempt by the Prime Minister and his colleagues to bypass her in key decision-making processes. This was reflected most clearly in the so-called 'peace efforts' that the Wickremesinghe-led segment of the Government launched soon after the UNF electoral victory. In this context, it may be recalled that Wickremesinghe's initial response, as the newly appointed Prime Minister, to the unilateral ceasefire declared by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on December 24, 2001, was not based on any prior consultation with the President on whom there was, apart from all else, an LTTE assassination attempt barely two years earlier. Nor was there an input by the President and her party to the formulation of the terms and conditions of the 'Memorandum of Understanding' formally signed by Wickremesinghe and the LTTE leader Prabhakaran on February 22, 2002. At the six rounds of direct negotiation between the Wickremesinghe-led segment of the Government and the LTTE conducted thereafter over several months, the 'Government delegation' did not accommodate any representative of the President. Nor did the President have a say in determining the Government's negotiation stances and the concessions that were offered to the LTTE at these negotiations, ostensibly with a mandate exclusive to the UNF from the people of Sri Lanka. Briefing of the President after each round of negotiation by the Prime Minister or his spokesmen, and the meetings which the Norwegian 'facilitators' had with the President from time to time, were also no more than perfunctory gestures. In the more recent past, there was the public exposure of several significant differences between the version of the 'draft proposals for an interim administration for the northern and eastern provinces' (a precondition set by the LTTE for the resumption of negotiations from which it withdrew in March 2003) prepared by the Wickremesinghe segment of the Government in consultation with the Norwegian participants of the 'peace process' and submitted to the LTTE high command, and the version of what purported to be the same proposals submitted to President Kumaratunga. The explanation for this appalling error publicized by Minister G.L. Peiris, the leader of Wickremesinghe's delegation at the negotiations, was barely credible, and enhanced the public impression of a total lack of transparency in what the Prime Minister and his coterie were prepared to give away to the LTTE in their claimed pursuit of peace. There have, over the past few months, been several other confrontations, too numerous to recount here, between President Kumaratunga and the UNF leadership, that are likely to have contributed to the present impasse.

There is no doubt that President Kumaratunga's recent moves have caused alarm and despondency in many quarters. It was Prime Minister Wickremesinghe himself (who, at that time, was on an official visit to Washington DC) who led the chorus by declaring that President Kumaratunga had 'precipitated a national crisis'. Among his colleagues back at home there was what appeared to be an almost panic reaction as spokesmen for the UNF accused her of disrupting the peace process, destroying the economic advances so laboriously achieved by them since their assumption of office, and bringing the country to the brink of war. As evidence in support of these views, they referred to the sharp dip recorded by the mini stock market in Colombo on the day following Kumaratunga's announcement (there was an equally sharp recovery thereafter), and the cancellation of several hundred hotel reservations by tourists from abroad (tourist arrivals peaked again thereafter). They said that a 'free trade pact', which the United States was to have entered into with Sri Lanka, during the Prime Minister's visit to Washington, was cancelled as a result of the turmoil created by the President (this was denied by the US embassy in Colombo). They claimed that Sri Lanka has lost the US$ 4.5 billion of aid pledged by donors at Tokyo a few months earlier (the promised aid was tentative and had many conditionalities, some of which were impossible to fulfill). As the greatest disaster of all, the UNF leaders pointed to the withdrawal of the MCC from the scheduled cricket tour of Sri Lanka! (The England team did arrive according to plan.)

The issue of whether President Kumaratunga's offensive against the UNF precipitated a crisis or, on the contrary, averted an impending crisis, needs to be examined more closely. Perhaps the foremost consideration, from the viewpoint of electoral politics, was Wickremesinghe's and the UNF's declining popularity, for which there was an abundance of evidence in the form of increasing incidence of highly successful opposition-engineered strikes and other disruptions in the formal sectors of the economy, and intensifying unrest the university and farming communities, as well as the massive public support that the opposition parties have been able to muster for their campaigns of agitation. This waning popularity is due partly to economic causes - rising costs of living and unemployment, and the fact that the promised 'peace dividend' is yet to reach the large majority of people. More significantly, it reflects the growing disenchantment of the people with the UNF 'peace efforts' - the fact that, hitherto, it has been no more than a process of naive appeasement.

Specific factors that have contributed to the build-up of anti-UNF sentiments were the apparent inability of the Wickremesinghe administration to protect the Muslim communities of the Eastern Province from relentless LTTE harassment and repression; its insensitivity to the genuine grievances of the Buddhists - especially the views expressed on matters of crucial importance to the country by the sanga; and its monumental blunder of attempting to impeach the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court with the obvious purpose of intimidating the Court while it was engaged in an arbitration of a constitutional dispute, thus antagonizing the politically powerful legal fraternity.

President Kumaratunga's decision assumes special significance in the context of the long-awaited proposals of the LTTE on the interim administration for the northern and eastern provinces, submitted to the Wickremesinghe-led segment of the Government five days earlier, which came under intense scrutiny both within and outside the country. Though a wide diversity of responses greeted the LTTE proposals, the majority of observers inclined to the view that the LTTE demands (albeit in the form of a negotiating stance) by way of 'powers of self government' extended well beyond any power sharing arrangements between the Centre and the regions possible under any existing federal systems of Government in the world. The opinion in many quarters was also that the interim administration envisaged by the LTTE would be an autonomous institutional system over which the LTTE itself would wield total control, and would hence serve as a stepping-stone to secession. The President herself noted, in a detailed public statement released by her party on November 5, that "the proposals released by the LTTE for the establishment of an Interim Self Governing Authority… lays the legal foundations for a future separate sovereign state (and that) ... the proposals clearly affect the sovereignty of the Republic of Sri Lanka and violates its Constitution."

Apart from the LTTE's unswerving commitment to its eventual goal of secession evident, the most critical consideration taken into account by President Kumaratunga must surely have been the continuing acquiescence of the Wickremesinghe-led segment of the Government in the face of innumerable violations by the LTTE of both the letter and the spirit of the 'Memorandum of Understanding'. In strange irony, it was Minister G.L. Peiris who, through his attempts to trivialize such violations, unwittingly became the most effective propagandist for the LTTE within country. The LTTE persisted with its recourse to violence and intimidation, ravaging the inhabitants of many areas in the northern and eastern provinces into submission. It instigated mob attacks on several military encampments located in the districts of Jaffna and Batticoloa with the obvious purpose of evicting the security forces of the Government from the 'north-east'. LTTE cadres have repeatedly attacked civilians living in these areas, mainly by way of punishment for resistance to extortion. It has established a network of illegal 'law courts' and 'police stations', some of which function outside their areas of control as demarcated in the Memorandum of Understanding. The LTTE has continued its earlier spree of murder of activists of other (not necessarily rival) Tamil political groups - by early November 2003 the number of victims since the ceasefire was reported be about 46. It has established several military encampments around the strategically important Trincomalee harbour, well within the supposedly Government-controlled areas in that part of the country. The relaxation of Government security controls since the ceasefire is also believed to have enabled the LTTE to store caches of arms and to establish 'safe houses' throughout the country, especially in the city of Colombo, to be activated for possible terrorist attacks in the future. It has increased its armed cadres from about 7,000 at the time of the ceasefire in December 2001, to an estimated 16,000 by November 2003, and has not abandoned its recruitment of child soldiers, despite the international outcry against this practice. Its clandestine procurement of arms from foreign sources has continued throughout, almost unabated.

In the face of all these, there have indeed been times at which the attitude of Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and his colleagues appeared to extent beyond mere acquiescence, and to tantamount to collaboration. This segment of the Government has been ever ready to accept the LTTE as the sole representative of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, ignoring any claim or evidence to the contrary. These leaders have made known, explicitly and implicitly, their willingness to ignore or by-pass the Constitution of the country, which they had sworn to protect and uphold. The incident that revealed this mindset most vividly concerned the British journalist Paul Harris who, while serving in Sri Lanka in mid-2002 as correspondent for the London Daily Telegraph, reported on the many violations by the LTTE of the ceasefire agreement and of human rights norms, and on one occasion, described (in journalistic hyperbole, no doubt) the inaction of the Wickremesinghe Government as the 'greatest give-away in history'. In early November that year, Prime Minister Wickremasinghe retaliated, allegedly under pressure from the LTTE leadership, by expelling Harris from the country.

President Kumaratunga's dissatisfaction over the manner in which the representatives of the Government of Norway were performing their functions as facilitators of the 'peace process', especially in the monitoring of the ceasefire, and the scant regard for the President's views displayed both by the Norwegians as well as by Wickremesinghe and his colleagues, are also likely to have been major concerns in the President's mind. Over the past few months, there has been a growing body of opinion in Sri Lanka that the Norwegians are not entirely impartial in their role as mediators. This suspicion, based as it was on the disregard by the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) of many LTTE ceasefire violations, was also fed by considerations such as the presence of a seemingly influential community of expatriate Sri Lankan Tamils in Norway, whose support for the LTTE has remained completely unchecked by the Government of that country, its awareness of such support being channeled into terrorist activities in Sri Lanka notwithstanding; and by the much publicized claim that some 'Sea Tigers' (an LTTE outfit specialized in maritime warfare) have received training in underwater assault techniques from ex-officers of the Norwegian navy.

The event that had a catalytic impact in this connection was the leakage (deliberate or inadvertent?) of information on October 16, 2003, from the office of Tryggve Tellefsen, the Norwegian Head of the SLMM, to the LTTE headquarters at Killinochchi, regarding a Sri Lanka navy operation off the northeast coast of the island to track down a suspected LTTE vessel smuggling arms into the country, thus enabling the vessel to escape the search and withdraw from Sri Lanka's territorial waters. Following the disclosure of the related facts, President Kumaratunga wrote to the Government of Norway on October 24, 2003 expressing "serious doubts about his (i.e., Tellefsen's) impartiality and willingness to be objective in discharging his duties under the Ceasefire Agreement", and requesting Tellefsen's immediate removal from his post. The casual but sanctimonious response of the Norwegian Government to the President's request could, at best, be seen as a diplomatic blunder.

In response to the events of November 4, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe, following consultations with his parliamentary group, declared that he could no longer provide leadership to the 'peace process', and requested President Kumaratunga to assume that role. Given his earlier call for a bipartisan approach to negotiations with the LTTE, his assertion that the 'peace process' cannot be sustained unless he alone is empowered to exercise control over all related aspects of Government appears unconvincing, if not unbecomingly churlish. The President, meanwhile, called for the formation of an all-party 'Government of Reconstruction and Reconciliation' to work towards a solution to the national question, pledging that the Sri Lanka Government would continue to abide by the terms of the ceasefire. Although this has received enthusiastic endorsement from many segments of Sri Lankan society, the UNF response has hitherto remained less than lukewarm. The representatives of the Norwegian Government have responded by withdrawing from their role as mediators, stating that they would consider resuming that role only if the dispute within the Sri Lanka Government is resolved. This is likely to resonate unfavourably for Sri Lanka outside the country, at least in the short-term. The Norwegian response, however, seems to provide confirmation of their lack of rapport with President Kumaratunga, and might, in the long run, prove to be a blessing. The LTTE leadership has remained aloof in this dispute, though some of their propaganda organs abroad have been fierce in their condemnation of the President. It must, of course, be understood that it is only if and when an approach of consensus between the two main political parties constituting the Government of Sri Lanka - the UNF and the People's Alliance (PA) - emerges, that an agreement forged through negotiation between Colombo and Killinochchi could gain constitutional expression. Any attempt to bypass the Constitution is likely to produce chaos.

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Last Updated Date: November 18, 2003 .