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Tracking the
Norwegian Conflict Resolution Initiative
Sri Lanka’s stalemated conflict
Sumantra Bose,
in
openDemocracy: free thinking for the world, 12 June 2007
I remember Kittu well. Kittu - full name Sathasivam
Krishnakumar - was the second-in-command of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers (the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE) during the first decade of Sri
Lanka’s civil war. As LTTE commander from 1985-87 on the Jaffna peninsula - the
Tamil heartland in the island’s far north - Kittu, born in 1960 in
Velvettithurai, a coastal town devoted to fishing and smuggling on the
peninsula, led the Tigers’ meteoric rise as the civil war intensified. When he
stepped down from his command, after losing a leg to an assassination attempt in
1987, he had already achieved mythic stature as a guerrilla leader.
I had many conversations with Kittu in London in the early 1990s, and remember a
bespectacled, soft-spoken man of steely resolve. Kittu believed that the
escalating discrimination and violence Tamils had suffered as a minority in Sri
Lanka since independence from Britain in 1948 entitled them to establish a
separate state covering the island’s north (which is overwhelmingly
Tamil-populated) and east (which is multi-ethnic, but has a Tamil plurality) to
guarantee his people’s survival, security and dignity. He told me that he
decided to join the then-tiny LTTE in 1978 after working as a teenage volunteer
in camps established in Jaffna for Tamil survivors, Hindu and Christian, of mob
violence that broke out in 1977 in the two-thirds of the country predominantly
inhabited by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-Buddhist majority.
Kittu admitted that an outright Tamil military victory that would lead to the
birth of "Tamil Eelam" the sovereign state - looked implausible, especially once
the Tamil insurgents lost India’s patronage in the late 1980s, when the Tigers
fought a bitter and successful guerrilla campaign against an Indian
expeditionary force sent to terminate the civil war. But he insisted that the
Sinhalese-Buddhist state would never treat the Tamils as true equals, nor
concede their decades-old demand for self-rule in the northeastern Tamil
"homeland", until brought to its knees by relentless armed resistance.
Kittu died in January 1993, when a ship on which he was sailing to Sri Lanka to
rejoin the struggle was intercepted by the Indian navy in the Indian Ocean.
After a stand-off, he apparently blew up the ship rather than surrender, and
went down with nine other Tigers - mostly officers of the movement’s naval wing,
the Sea Tigers - after allowing the nine professional crew of the trapped ship,
who were not LTTE members, to depart in a lifeboat. The LTTE’s warrior code,
which asks of fighters that they kill themselves rather than be captured alive
by the enemy - the LTTE’s fighters, male and female, typically bite into
capsules of potassium cyanide worn around their necks to avert capture -
dictated this end.
The footsoldiers’ war
The Tamil Tigers continued to wage a ferocious and ever bloodier war of
independence for almost a decade after Kittu’s demise, drawing on the thousands
of footsoldiers inspired by mahaveerar (great heroes) like the legendary
Sathasivam Krishnakumar. I met one such footsoldier in September 2004, at the
"immigration and customs" point for travellers seeking to enter the
LTTE-controlled zone in Sri Lanka’s north.
He was probably in his early 20s, working at the Tigers’ checkpoint at Omanthai,
ten miles north of Vavuniya, the last government-held town before Tiger
territory. As he processed my paperwork, he noticed me looking at a large poster
on the shed’s wall of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE’s founder and supreme
leader. "That’s Prabha", he informed me, as a warm and innocent smile spread
across his face and lit up his eyes. He then went on, in halting English, that
he had lost both parents to the war - in either artillery shelling or aerial
bombing by the government, he conveyed that some sort of explosion was
responsible - while his two older brothers and one sister had all died in
combat, fighting for the LTTE.
A generation earlier, Kittu had made a conscious decision to take up arms
against a state he viewed as discriminatory and brutal towards his people. But
this youth, manning the frontlines of a stalemated civil war, had probably not
had much of a choice. Orphaned and bereaved, he is the product of a brutalised
society in which the iyakkam (movement) came to represent the only remaining
refuge. Between November 1982, when the first LTTE militant fell in battle, and
February 2002, when a now-collapsed ceasefire agreement mediated by Norway put a
temporary end to two decades of civil war, the Tigers lost 17,780 fighters in
action - about a quarter of whom were female and many were children. By November
2006, that figure had risen to 18,742 killed, most since end-2005, when the
ceasefire collapsed in all but name and the peace process effectively expired.
The Tigers’ turn
In 2002, the Tigers made a strategic shift. They agreed to put the armed
struggle in abeyance and participate in a peace process facilitated by Norway.
This was not an ideological shift - Eelam remained a sacred concept, and
glorification of armed struggle and martyrdom continued. But it was more than an
expedient tactical shift.
The strategic shift had three causes. First, by 2001 the war was well and truly
stalemated. In 2000 a major Tiger offensive to retake the Jaffna peninsula from
government control stalled after stunning initial victories, and LTTE forces
were pushed back to the peripheries of the peninsula (in 2001, the Tigers
repulsed a government attempt to evict them from these areas, and subsequently
launched a devastating suicide-commando raid on Colombo airport to demonstrate
their long reach).
Second, the areas held and administered by the Tigers on the northern mainland
and the eastern province consisted primarily of jungle and rural hinterlands,
their populations cut off from government-held towns like Jaffna in the north
and Trincomalee and Batticaloa in the east and trapped in dire economic
conditions.
Third, the Tigers were internationally more ostracised than ever, banned in
India and Britain and listed as a "foreign terrorist organisation" by the United
States. The LTTE leadership belatedly realised the need to recover some
international credibility. In late 2002 the Tigers reformulated their agenda to
"internal self-determination", based on "regional self-government" and a "system
of self-rule...within a federal structure" - specifically "substantial
autonomy...for north-eastern Sri Lanka, the homeland of the Tamils and Muslims
[Muslims, the country’s third-largest ethnic community, are a fifth of the
northeast’s population and a third in the east]".
Five years on, the conditions that made the ceasefire possible have not changed.
The war is still in a strategic stalemate that is unlikely to be broken. The
belligerents can score strategic victories over each other, if at all, only at
prohibitive cost to themselves - an all-out Tiger attack on the Jaffna peninsula
will produce LTTE casualties on a scale the movement cannot afford, while an
all-out government attack on the main LTTE military formations and bases located
in the Vanni region, the northern mainland south of the peninsula, will produce
crippling losses for the army. Neither side may be able to hold territory gained
in such large-scale offensives. That is why the renewed fighting has been
limited to skirmishing, commando raids, and a few localised pitched battles, in
addition to a spate of death-squad killings.
In March 2007 the Tigers unveiled their capacity to wage war from the air with a
characteristically daring bombing raid on the government’s main airbase just
north of Colombo, conducted by two light aircraft which flew in from the Vanni
and returned safely to base. The "Tamil Eelam Air Force" repeated the sortie a
month later, this time targeting oil and gas installations near the capital, and
LTTE light bombers have also been in action once in Jaffna’s skies. But while
the small LTTE air fleet is a feat for a non-state actor, its effect is to
deepen the strategic stalemate, by making the Colombo government’s visions of a
military victory ever more risky.
Economic prospects continue to be critically dependent on ending the war. The
limited reconstruction in LTTE-controlled areas since 2002 is in jeopardy. In
the east the Tigers have been forced to let civilians living in areas they
controlled leave for government-controlled zones - and subsequently, denied
population cover, their fighters too have had to vacate these areas - due to
intolerable pressure generated on these civilians by government blockades on
essential goods, backed up by constant artillery shelling and aerial attacks by
government forces.
But the economic factor cuts both ways. The government’s militarist agenda
entails spiralling defence expenditures, which threaten to destroy the remnants
of Sri Lanka’s once outstanding developmental state and exacerbate poverty (a
previous Colombo government’s "war for peace" between 1995 and 2001 was
eventually exposed as not just militarily but financially unsustainable). After
the ceasefire, annual growth quadrupled from 1.4% in 2002 to 5.6% in 2003, and
tourism revenues soared. All that stands to be undone.
On the international scene, the Tigers made some progress on improving their
reputation after entering into the 2002 ceasefire which committed "the Parties"
- the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - "to
find a negotiated solution to the ongoing ethnic conflict." But after the
ceasefire unravelled, the LTTE has been faced with renewed isolation. In May
2006 it was banned by the European Union, in an ill-timed decision whose effect
was to encourage warmongers among the Sinhalese and hardliners in the Colombo
government and its military. Colombo does not face the same specter of
international isolation, since states have a legitimacy in the international
system that rebel movements do not.
An unwinnable war
If the armed conflict is unwinnable by each side, and the peace dividend so
obvious and substantial, what explains the breakdown of the peace process? This
is a puzzle, though hardly an inexplicable one, that applies to many
ethno-national conflicts.
In Sri Lanka’s case, the Tigers have contributed significantly to the breakdown.
In April 2003 they suspended peace talks, on flimsy grounds, with Ranil
Wickremasinghe, the relatively moderate prime minister then in office, who had
signed the ceasefire agreement with Prabhakaran. The peace process never
recovered momentum thereafter.
In November 2005, with the process in freefall, the Tigers called on Tamils
to abstain from a contest for the country’s powerful presidency between the
dovish Wickremasinghe and Mahinda Rajapakse, a hardliner backed by Sinhalese
chauvinist groups, on the flawed reasoning that Sinhalese politicians are
uniformly inimical to Tamil aspirations. Tamil turnout was low as a result, and
this enabled Rajapakse to beat Wickremasinghe by a razor-thin margin.
Rajapakse’s ascent to power in Colombo dealt the comatose peace process a mortal
blow.
After the ceasefire, the Tigers also continued their practices of recruiting
child soldiers, and killing anti-LTTE Tamils. Lakshamn Kadirgamar, the Sri
Lankan foreign minister (and a Tamil), was assassinated in Colombo in August
2005. From 2006, LTTE teams have been conducting decapitation attacks on the Sri
Lankan military hierarchy - the army commander was gravely wounded by a woman
suicide-bomber in Colombo in April 2006. The growing evidence of the LTTE’s
unreformed nature boosted the anti-peace movement which has steadily gathered
strength and momentum among Sinhalese-Buddhists since 2003 (the Tigers cite
government provocations, such as the military’s use since 2004 of a renegade
LTTE militia led by Colonel Karuna in the east’s Batticaloa district to murder
senior LTTE officers and prominent civilian supporters). Norway, the third party
in the peace process, lacked the clout to rescue the process from terminal
decline.
Yet the Tigers’ foibles have simply provided additional energy to an anti-peace
movement that is deeply ingrained in Sinhalese-Buddhist society, and which is
essentially opposed to any political settlement with the Tamils. These elements,
especially the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People’s Liberation Front / JVP), an
extreme majoritarian-nationalist group, were in 2005 responsible for sabotaging
the joint government-LTTE mechanism for post-tsunami reconstruction advocated by
the United States and India.
From Sri Lanka to Cyprus and until recently, Northern Ireland, ethno-national
majorities harbour powerful forces wedded to ideas of hegemonic dominance. Peace
in Sri Lanka is contingent on the defeat of such supremacist delusions, and the
reconstruction of the island as a federal state which institutionalises
self-rule for a Tamil-majority northeast, combined with a measure of shared rule
at the centre in Colombo for representatives of all of the island’s communities
and a measure of shared rule within the autonomous northeast for its Tamil
majority and Muslim and Sinhalese minorities. The extent of self-rule would have
to be a compromise between the Tigers’ preference for a loose confederation, on
the lines of what the Dayton agreement engineered for Bosnia and the Annan plan
prescribed for Cyprus, and the moderate devolution favored by Sinhalese doves,
whose model is unitary but decentralised states like the United Kingdom and
Spain.
Such a solution is contingent on the LTTE’s involvement and cooperation. The
Tigers are arguably no more ideologically dogmatic than the Provisional IRA had
historically been. The Tigers’ influence among their people - partly coerced,
but much of it genuinely popular - is comparable to that of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation among Palestinians at its zenith in the 1970s. In Sri
Lanka’s last parliamentary election, in April 2004, Tiger-backed candidates
swept the Tamil electorates in the north and east. On the Jaffna peninsula,
almost entirely under the government’s military control, candidates endorsed by
the Tigers won 90% of the popular vote. In the multi-ethnic east-coast district
of Trincomalee, where most Tamil voters also live in government-controlled
areas, LTTE-backed candidates polled 69,087 votes, while a rival Tamil group
sponsored by the government and military got 560 votes.
In early July 2007, the Tigers will observe "Black Tigers’ Day" - the twentieth
annual commemoration of the first attack by the LTTE’s suicide-warfare
specialists, the Black Tigers, on 5 July 1987. At the last Black Tiger
commemoration in July 2006, Black Tiger martyrs stood at 273 - 199 men and
seventy-four women. Unfortunately, that number, and those of their victims,
looks likely to rise in the foreseeable future.
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