POLITICS-SRI LANKA: This Time, Peace Talks are More Promising

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Apr 3 2002 (IPS) - The first round of face-to-face peace talks between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers, due to start in Thailand early May, will be distinct from the previous peace talks for a key reason: the absence of an agenda for a political solution.

But this is also what makes this fifth attempt at resolving the bloody ethnic conflict in that South Asian island nation all the more promising. This time, both parties will have an equal stake in shaping the agenda that will eventually be placed on the negotiating table.

These “talks about talks,” as they are dubbed in the Sri Lankan media, will also have another function — enable the negotiators of the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to gauge the spirit of compromise of their opposite numbers ahead of the substantive peace talks.

Already, Colombo is giving a whiff of some of the issues it intends to place on the table during the “talks about talks”. The most significant among these is that the ruling United National Front (UNF) government is prepared to establish an interim administration in the predominantly Tamil-speaking northern and eastern provinces of the country.

“The Tigers will be given pride of place in the proposed set-up,” D B S Jeyaraj, a Tamil journalist close to the LTTE, wrote in the latest issue of the ‘Sunday Leader’, an independent Sri Lankan newspaper.

If so, it will find the Tigers participating in the mainstream Sri Lankan political culture for the first time, marking a distinct shift from the means they have pursued hitherto. It will also mean that the Tigers will take part in substantive peace talks as a political organisation, rather than simply a rebel movement.

For over two decades, the LTTE has been waging a separatist war against Colombo to establish the state of Tamil Eelam in the northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka.

More than 60,000 people have died due to this conflict, which grew out of government policies that favoured the Sinhalese majority over the country’s minorities. The Tamils are the island’s largest minority, followed by the Muslims.

The present approach to the political resolution of the conflict is far from the two previous attempts at peace. In the 1995 effort, the government of the day was keen on discussing the substantive issues for a peaceful settlement soon after deciding to enter into a ceasefire. Colombo sent a team to Jaffna in a rush for peace.

During the 1989-90 attempt at peace, another government pushed ahead with the hope of addressing the high political stakes of peace.

On that occasion, what brought the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE together was a shared hostility toward the Indian Peace Keeping Forces (IPKF), who were in Sri Lanka’s north and east as part of a previous peace deal involving India. To talk peace, the Tigers sent a team to Colombo.

But the LTTE, as it became subsequently clear, were far from committed to such initiatives. It used the peace talks as a strategy in their military campaign, regrouping during the lull for the next phase of their battle with the Sri Lankan state.

The country’s Muslim minority in the east and north faced the brunt of the Tiger’s wrath when peace talks gave way in the mid-1990s to another phase of the “Eelam War,” as it is often referred to in Sri Lanka.

In the east, hundreds of Muslims were shot in cold blood by the Tigers while they were praying in mosques. In the north it was as severe – the Tigers drove over 70,000 Muslims away from their homes at gunpoint in the country’s worst case of ethnic cleansing.

Acts like this and more have earned the LTTE the derision of many. Currently, it is a banned organisation in neighbouring India and a number of Western countries. Since January 1998, it has been banned in Sri Lanka, a ban the Tigers want lifted before the talks.

This record of the Tigers has not been lost in some quarters in Sri Lanka. Indeed, in the aftermath of unilateral ceasefires announced by the LTTE and the government in late December and their formal truce in February, critics of the current peace process argue that the Tigers cannot be trusted.

“The Tigers know they cannot win the war. And since their commitment to a Tiger-run separate state remains unchanged, they have adopted the only possible strategy – a politico-military one, which was why the Tigers were angling for a new ‘peace process’ on their own terms, long before September 11th,” states Tisaranee Gunasekera, in a political commentary Sunday for ‘Lanka Academic’, a web site on Sri Lankan affairs.

The government, however, is determined to go ahead with its push for peace.

Colombo is also turning a blind eye to reports of the Tigers either overtly or covertly flouting the spirit the existing ceasefire. This has ranged from the LTTE conscripting Tamil children in the north and east to their ranks, to extortion.

This attitude of the UNF government goes hand in glove with its effort at the beginning of the year to ease the many burdens faced by the Tamils in the north due to the ethnic war. Most of the demands made by the Tigers to alleviate the Tamils’ hardship are being met, including free movement for the people and unrestricted supplies of food and medical needs.

These efforts, described by the government as “confidence building measures,” reveal what Colombo has in mind: to deny the Tigers room to slip away from the peace process, to keep them engaged in the entire peace process.

In fact, this track – of first a ceasefire, followed by moves toward normalcy in the war zones and then the “talks about talks”- is new in the annals of conflict resolution in Sri Lanka.

So, too, Norway’s role as the peace broker. It is the first time that a Western country is playing this role to bring about a solution between Colombo and the LTTE. Given the Norwegian record at conflict resolution, it is little wonder that this effort has far greater backing from the international community than the previous attempts at peace.

Still, one cannot be too sanguine that the progress made ahead of the discussions on the substantive issues will translate to a final round of successful peace talks. In the aftermath of the euphoria over the upcoming “talks about talks”, the future shape and form of the Sri Lankan state remains a political minefield.