Saturday, May 23, 2009

LOOKING BACK| EPILOGUE - OF A DIVIDED SRI LANKA

''There's an eerie feeling here,'' the diplomat said of the capital. ''People are going about their business as if they don't realize that their country no longer exists.''

STEVEN R. WEISMAN, Special to the New York Times published the followng article on Wednesday, October 28, 1987. Sri Lanka was in turmoil, the IPKF had landed and were fighting a war they would lose horribly to the LTTE in the north, while the SL Army was cracking down on a vicious JVP insurrection. Forecast; Sri Lanka will end in two seperate states.


By capturing the Tamil rebel stronghold of Jaffna this week, Indian Army troops signaled their determination to enforce a peace accord in Sri Lanka. Yet achievement of a genuine peace here appears to many analysts to be more distant than ever.

Indeed, a mood of pessimism has settled among diplomats, Sri Lankan leaders and Indian officials regarding the future of Sri Lankan national unity. More and more, one hears comparisons with the permanent divisions and alien occupation forces of two other troubled islands, Ireland and Cyprus.

''I don't think that until recently I realized how much I love my country,'' a weary and saddened Sri Lankan official said. ''But I have to be realistic. Sri Lanka is finished as we have known it.''
Since 1983, Sri Lanka has been torn by warfare as ethnic Tamil rebels in the north and east pressed their fight for a separate country. The island is dominated by the Sinhalese ethnic majority.

A Shift in Tactics

This summer the Sri Lankan Army counterattacked, pushing the main guerrilla group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, into the northern Jaffna Peninsula. Then, President J. R. Jayewardene shifted tactics and agreed to a negotiated settlement with India as a collaborator.
At first the Liberation Tigers seemed to accept the Indian-Sri Lankan accord calling for them to surrender their arms in return for greater political autonomy in Tamil areas. The Tigers, in effect, bowed to New Delhi after years of using southern India as a sanctuary, supply center and training base.

But this month the Tigers resumed attacks on military and civilian targets, evidently feeling that India and Sri Lanka were not living up to their part of the bargain. The collapse of the accord compelled India to disarm the Tigers by force or risk being ordered to leave by Mr. Jayewardene.

The current pessimism derives from the configuration of armed forces in Sri Lanka and the increasing likelihood of continued fighting.

In the north and east, Indian troops are given little chance of crushing the Tamil rebellion, as they had recently hoped to do. Meanwhile in the south, the Sri Lankan Army has become almost an occupying force, itself pressing a campaign against extremist Sinhalese who have carried out assassinations and other acts to undercut the peace accord.

In Jaffna, the escape of Tamil guerrillas this week rendered the fall of the city a hollow victory for India, which lost more than 200 men by its own count. ''No doubt India has dealt a psychological blow to the guerrillas,'' a Western diplomat said of the Jaffna campaign. ''But the guerrillas are alive and well in the countryside, armed and dangerous, with a sense of fervor that is extremely worrisome.''

Sri Lankan and Indian military analysts say also that the Liberation Tigers are likely to melt into the jungles, the countryside and even urban centers in classic guerrilla fashion. Indian troops are handicapped by their inexperience at this sort of fighting, and by their role as an alien force unable to speak the local language.

Some analysts think there may be a lull in attacks by the Tigers in the next few weeks, but the group's leaders indicate that they may soon turn to suicide squads to bomb civilian targets. The Tigers are also considered certain to continue their highly effective technique of blowing up police convoys and troops with land mines and other kinds of bombs.

These tactics, in turn, almost always provoke retaliatory excesses such as mass arrests of young men suspected of involvement, further inflaming the civilian population. Jaffna residents appear to distrust or hate Indian troops after the death of hundreds of civilians and uprooting of tens of thousands of residents in two weeks of fighting.

India's main task now is widely seen as restoring its credibility by rushing in food, medicine and other supplies to Jaffna and surrounding areas it occupies. But two other tasks facing India are much more urgent and difficult, if not impossible.

Given the likely refusal of the Tigers to lay down their arms or participate in a peace settlement, the first of these is to somehow keep them on the run, unable to inflict military damage.
Second, Indian officials say they must somehow help knit together a force of mainstream Tamil leaders to assume control of the civil administration in the north and east as an alternative moderate political force. Mounting Political Pressure

But this task is shadowed by fear on the part of moderates that they will be assassinated if they try to present themselves as rivals to the Tigers. Such assassinations have occurred many times in the past.

A few months ago, the presence of Indian troops here was looked on as a temporary measure to enable Tamil guerrillas to surrender their arms. But now, no one can see circumstances permitting an Indian withdrawal in the near future. Some say that Indian forces could be here for years, constrained only by the possibility of mounting political pressure in India for their withdrawal.

An irony of the situation is the perverse pride that many Sri Lankan Sinhalese who despise the Tamil guerrillas take in the skill, courage and fighting ability of the Tigers. ''The Indian Army thought they were coming here to subdue a bunch of primitive tribesmen,'' said a Sri Lankan official who is Sinhalese. ''But these boys are Sri Lankans! The Indian Army had a superiority complex that was unwarranted.''

Another paradox is that the presence of Indian troops in Tamil-dominated areas has already created a kind of de facto separate state with a separate form of government in the north and east, except in those areas where there is such chaos that no government exists at all.

A diplomat friendly to Sri Lanka pointed out gloomily that with the Indian Army in the north and east, and the Sri Lankan Army in the south, only two parts of the country are in a truly normal state of affairs. These are the capital, Colombo, which bustles warily with tourists and commerce, and the central highlands, an area of forest and tea estates.

''There's an eerie feeling here,'' the diplomat said of the capital. ''People are going about their business as if they don't realize that their country no longer exists.''

http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/28/world/analysis-sri-lankan-epilogue-a-divided-land.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

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