Will war lead to peace in Sri Lanka?

Ram Manikkalingam

Sri Lanka’s phoney peace is over. By abrogating the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan government has finally proclaimed what has been a reality for two years – the effective end of the ceasefire brokered by the Norwegians six years ago.

The Sinhala-dominated government and the Tamil Tigers have decided that war is not only inevitable but also required, before any fresh political process can emerge. President Mahinda Rajapaksa has promised to eradicate terrorism. His brother, Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapakse has promised to kill Velupillai Prabakaran, the leader of the Tamil Tigers. Scenting victory, the Sri Lankan military is pressing in on the Tiger heartland of the north on several fronts, while targeting Tiger leaders for assassination.

Meanwhile, the LTTE leader has proclaimed that only military force will work to change the government’s policy. He has directed attacks against hard military targets such as Air Force bases and soft political targets like ministers and civil guardsmen. The Tamil Tigers are using a combination of hit and run attacks, bombings and assassinations to deter and delay the government’s impending assault.

The Sri Lankan government has newly acquired armaments – multi-barrel rocket launchers, heavier artillery, precision guided missiles, and bunker busters – and has recruited 30,000 new recruits into its armed forces. The Tamil Tigers have developed an air wing, an effective sea wing, and have heavily infiltrated population centres in the Sinhala-dominated South. This next round of violence will lead to the deaths of thousands, the displacement of hundreds of thousands, and the destruction of property on a larger scale than what we have ever witnessed before in Sri Lanka.

The LTTE can emerge defeated, weakened, or emboldened from this fighting. The Tigers will be defeated if the government succeeds in ejecting them from territory they control and in eliminating their leadership. They will be weakened if the government ejects the Tigers from territory they control but they can still continue as an insurgent organisation capable of guerrilla operations and terrorist attacks. The LTTE will be emboldened, of course, if it succeeds in bringing the government offensive to a standstill. While these three scenarios are very different, the role that friends of Sri Lanka, in the region and outside, can play in helping to move the country towards a stable peace is the same in all of them.

The first scenario is the government deals a decisive blow to LTTE – ejecting it from territory it controls and eliminating its leadership. The hope, in this scenario, is that a Sri Lanka liberated from war will find the will to seek peace. Sinhala hardliners fearful of Tamil autonomy in LTTE hands will be less opposed to granting it after a Tiger defeat. Tamil hardliners seeking a separate state will stop doing so. This will create the opportunity for a new politics of co-existence among all communities on the island. But the fear is that military victory may instead embolden Sinhala hardliners to reject any concession to the minorities – Tamil and Muslim – compelling them to live at the sufferance of the majority. War will give way, not to peace and reconciliation, but to bitterness and recrimination. Sri Lanka may not have war but neither will it have a just peace.
The second scenario points to a weakened, though not defeated, LTTE. It is ejected from territory it controls, but continues as a formidable insurgent organisation capable of guerrilla operations and terrorist attacks. The hope here is that both parties will declare victory and call a truce. The government will view further efforts at defeating the LTTE as too costly, and the Tigers will accept that they cannot get what they want by military means alone. Each will give up on its preferred political objective. The government will give up on centralising all power in Colombo and the LTTE will give up on the establishment of a separate state. The result will be the classic federal compromise that most people see as the only reasonable solution. The fear is that neither party will have the political sagacity to stop at a partial victory or defeat. Rather the Sri Lankan government will press on in the hope of eliminating the LTTE permanently. And the Tamil Tigers will refuse to accept a new balance of power where they do not control territory and administer populations. Each side will seek to continue the war. Neither will prevail.

The final scenario is a bloody stalemate – where the government fails to eject the LTTE and the Tamil Tigers fail to make military headway themselves. The government will unleash all it has, but will not dislodge the LTTE from territory it controls. The Tamil Tigers will hold firm but they will not be able to expand their hold on territory or population. The result will be a stalemate, but after spilling a lot of blood. The hope is that after much cost to the people of the country the government and the Tamil Tigers will have relearned the lesson that war alone will not alter the political dynamic of the country. They will initiate a political process that will keep the strengths and redress the weaknesses of the previous one. This process, with a combination of internal acceptance and external support, will get somewhere. The fear in this scenario is that a combination of Sinhala extremism and political rivalry in the South and Tamil extremism and militarism in the North will prevent the parties from seizing the opportunity to move forward toward a fresh process. Instead, they will continue seeking military breakthroughs only to be further mired in a bloodier stalemate.

While these three scenarios are distinct, the role friends of Sri Lanka, in the region and outside, can play in helping to move the country towards the more hopeful scenarios, and away from the fearful ones, is the same.

The Sri Lankan government as a responsible state in the international system has some basic obligations even while fighting an insurgency. These include upholding the human rights of all its citizens, irrespective of their ethnic affiliation; respecting the laws of war; providing humanitarian assistance to those affected by the conflict, including refugees; and ensuring access to humanitarian organisations, local and international, seeking to assist those affected by the armed violence. Sri Lanka’s friends can help it fulfil these responsibilities.

At the same time, the world can also impress upon the Tamil Tigers that while they are no state, they must still respect the laws of war as an armed group engaged in a conflict. These include, but are not limited to, refraining from deliberately targetig civilians, ensuring humanitarian access to those affected by war, and refraining from recruiting children. They must emphasise that the future role of the Tamil Tigers as serious political interlocutors in a peace settlement will depend on how they conduct themselves during war.

Sri Lanka’s friends can also prod the two parties to lay out their respective visions of a political settlement without evading it. These must not be the reiteration of tired old positions by both sides – where the LTTE repeats its call for an interim administration that only it controls, and the Sri Lankan government reiterates its commitment to a unitary state that only it controls.

Rather it must be an imaginative effort to describe both an end goal – where they would like to see the country end up - and a pathway for getting there – how they would like to set about achieving it. This will invariably involve a permanent political settlement, an interim structure for getting there, a process for disarmament on the part of the LTTE and demilitarisation on the part of the state, and finally, a mechanism for post-war reconstruction that can rebuild the shattered lives of all communities.

Finally, the world can also help amplify Sri Lankan voices that support a solution that respects the concerns of all communities equally within an undivided country. These include the Muslims, the upcountry Tamils, and the left-liberal political actors, whose significant presence has been ignored, precisely because they have not been obstacles to peace.

While none of these steps are easy, they are also not impossible. But the window of opportunity for initiating them will be very brief, immediately after the next round of fighting ends, and just before both parties forget about the bloody futility of war.

While the belligerents make war, those who are seeking peace in Sri Lanka from within and those who wish to help from without must begin their plans for making peace. The people of Sri Lanka deserve another chance.

(Ram Manikkalingam is a Visiting Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. He served as Senior Advisor in the peace process to President Kumaratunga)
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