POLITICS-SRI LANKA: Tamil Tigers Are No Pushovers

Analysis - By Marwaan Macan-Markar

COLOMBO, Jun 11 (IPS) - While the Sri Lankan government views the financial pledges made at this week's aid meeting in Tokyo as a windfall, this sentiment may be short-lived if the Tamil Tigers live up to their mark as rebels who are not easy pushovers.

The weeks ahead will serve as a key indicator of how the Tamil rebels perceive the international community's endorsement of the peace process at the Tokyo meeting and where they fit into the picture.

This has not been lost on Colombo, which has upped its conciliatory gestures to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the wake of the Tokyo meeting. The aid conference in the Japanese capital on Jun. 9-10 attracted 51 countries and 22 international agencies.

By pledging 4.5 billion U.S. dollars to help rebuild war-ravaged Sri Lanka, donors exceeded the three billion U.S. dollars that the Sri Lankan government was expecting to be committed at the meeting.

''Now we have to work with the LTTE. The Tigers should also contribute in the rebuilding efforts,'' a government official close to Sri Lanka's peace negotiators said in an interview. ''Decisions must be taken jointly.''

But that may be easier said than achieved, given the rebels' current mindset. For one, the LTTE stood by its belief that it had nothing to lose by boycotting the aid meeting. This came on the heels of the Tigers' pullout of the ongoing peace talks in April.

In sticking to this position, LTTE supremo Vellupillai Prabhakaran demonstrated that he was still his own man - and that he would not be swayed by international pressure to entice the rebels to attend the aid meeting.

Diplomats and foreign envoys who visited Prabhakaran in the weeks leading up to the Tokyo meeting failed to convince him otherwise. Even Norwegian officials, in their capacity as the peace brokers in the current reconciliation efforts, fell short of getting the rebel leader to shift his stance.

The LTTE is in no mood to play along with the 15-month-old peace process to end over the two-decade-old civil war in Sri Lanka, which has led to the deaths of more than 64,000 people. The Tigers believe that the talks, aimed at resolving their separatist battle for the independent state of Tamil Eelam in the north and east, have not made enough of a difference.

Thus far, the LTTE has accused Colombo of failing to honour two of its core demands - an interim administrative structure in the country's north and east to be governed by the Tigers and the transfer of government troops from the northern Jaffna peninsula.

The Sri Lankan government, however, is unable to deliver on the Tiger demand for an interim administration since the country's unitary constitution does not provide for the autonomous body the LTTE seeks in the disputed northern and eastern regions.

Moreover, the ruling government's slim majority in parliament makes it all but impossible to seek the legislature's backing for a constitutional amendment to satisfy the Tigers.

The LTTE has also resurrected an old argument from a previous round of peace talks to reveal how differently it views the current peace process from, say, the Sri Lankan government and the international community. The rebels see the unprecedented interest shown by the international community in the talks as one leading to a ''peace trap,'' rather than a milestone of opportunity.

This was hammered home in an editorial published in 'Sudaroli,' a Tamil daily newspaper that reflects LTTE thinking, on the eve of the Tokyo talks. According to this mindset, the political price that the LTTE will have to pay in exchange for development assistance to the war-torn northern and eastern provinces will be too costly for its cause.

Among them are issues that often touch a raw nerve with the Tigers - the need to respect human rights and stop to child conscription. The LTTE has been unable to get such concerns off its back.

Some critics of the Tigers see parallels between the rebels' current reluctance to fall in line with the thinking of the international community and the LTTE's reluctance toward the conditions placed by the Indian government in 1987 to solve Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict.

But while the Tigers may succeed on this front - refusing to be pushed around by the international community - they may find their uncompromising stance eroding the little goodwill they have achieved since they agreed to stop fighting in February 2002.

The U.S. government has already offered the LTTE a glimpse of such a possibility. ''The (aid) conference shows the international community did not succumb to the blackmail of the LTTE,'' U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in a speech at the Tokyo meeting.

The endorsement that the current peace process received from the foreign governments and donors in Tokyo also shows that the LTTE has failed to attract international sympathy toward its political take of the process so far.

Yet given the Tigers' past record, drawbacks like these may only strengthen their resolve to be anything but a pushover, and to prove that the LTTE is a different kind of political animal. (END/2003)