By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Sep 24 2002 (IPS)

One week after Tamil rebel negotiator Anton Balasingham said the Tigers have scaled down their long-cherished goal of a separate state, many Sri Lankans and commentators on both sides of the ethnic conflict are far from convinced about his statement.

In fact, in a rare occurrence in the 19-year-old conflict, commentators sympathetic to the majority Sinhalese side and to the minority Tamils’ views are for once united – in disbelief at the remarks Balasingham made at the peace talks in Thailand Sep. 18.

Analysts who reflect a pro-Sinhalese point of view say Balasingham and the Tigers cannot be trusted, despite Balasingham’s pronouncements that mark a scaling down of the Tamil Tigers’ position on a separate state to be called Tamil Eelam.

Some Tamil commentators sympathetic to the Tigers also appear to have been surprised by the statement, saying they found it hard to believe the Tigers would publicly step back from one of their core goals.

For others however, “Eelam (separate state) or not”, the peace process is more positive than before.

Still, “it’s like old wine in a new bottle,” one sceptical political analyst said of Balasingham’s statement, although much of the world media may be in rapture over his remarks.

“I don’t think the Tigers have renounced Eelam (separate state). They may not be fighting for it, but have not renounced it. They will get back to that struggle if they are not satisfied with the peace process,” a senior Tamil journalist remarked. “I don’t think they will ever give up the struggle for a separate state.”

Balasingham told reporters in Sattahip, Thailand last week that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is not fighting for an independent state but for “self determination” and a homeland for the Tamil minority community in Sri Lanka.

“The LTTE doesn’t operate in the concept of separate state… We operate with the concept of homeland and self determination,” he said.

But if regional autonomy is rejected, he added, then a fight for “political independence and statehood is only the last resort.”

The remarks were flashed across the world by media covering the first peace talks in seven years – and the Tigers have not retracted or pulled back from Balasingham’s statement.

But so divisive has the ethnic conflict been that sections of the Sri Lankan media — even a state-owned newspaper — remain sceptical of Balasingham’s comments anyway.

The sense of disbelief that most commentators in the weekend newspapers conveyed about Balasingham’s statement reveals how deep the entrenched positions are on either side of the political divide.

For instance, the ‘Divaina’ — an independent Sinhala-language weekly which has often taken a pro-Sinhalese line – says it is difficult to understand Balasingham’s comment because Tamil Tiger guerrillas are already running their own affairs in the areas in the north and east that they control.

“The words sound sweet à but if they are already running their own banks, courts and a police force what is it, if not an independent state?” it asked.

David Buell Jeyaraj, an Ottawa-based Sri Lankan Tamil journalist with close links to the LTTE leadership, also maintains that the Tigers have never declared that their demand for separation has been dropped.

Writing in the English-language ‘Sunday Leader’ newspaper, Jeyaraj said: “Moreover, it is not necessary for them to drop the demand as a pre-condition or prerequisite for entering talks. It is perfectly normal and even logical for an organisation to enter talks of such a nature without dropping the relevant demand.”

Jeyeraj, whose comments are closely followed by the Sri Lankan establishment, says he found remarkable the publicity given to what he called a non-existent stance of the Tigers.

“Unless Tamil aspirations are accommodated, the demand for Tamil Eelam will not be abandoned. If a viable alternative to it is to evolve then the core principles of homeland, nationhood and self determination have to be recognised,” he wrote.

“Only the ignorant, naive and incompetent will believe, let alone project, that the LTTE has entered talks after abandoning the Tamil Eelam demand,” he argued.

Dayan Jayatillake, a columnist for the Sunday Island newspaper, called Balasingham’s statement a “good, old fashioned conjuror’s trick à smoke and mirrors”.

But the debates in the media have also had room for more moderate voices.

For instance, ‘Lankadeepa’, the biggest selling independent Sinhala-language Sunday weekly, in an editorial comment this week, praised Balasingham’s comments and said it “boded well for peace talks”.

Lakshman Gunasekera, editor of the state-owned ‘Sunday Observer’, says the LTTE position was basically no different from its general posture these past three to four years.

In his weekly commentary, he wrote that Tiger leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran has clearly stated in successive Heroes Day speeches that the LTTE is prepared to renounce cessation for a proper power-sharing arrangement from the government. But he has also said it would retain its separatist goal if the solution fails.

But Gunasekera says the difference this year lies in the rhetoric and nuances, and not the substance, of the LTTE posture. “The Tiger leadership, while not diluting its position, has gone further than ever before in praising a government in Colombo and in making public pronouncements that would ease the fears of the Sinhala majority community.”

The rebels have been engaged in a bloody, separatist battle since 1983 in northern and eastern areas of the country, where most of Sri Lanka’s Tamils live.

The LTTE has at times been at variance over its primary demand of an independent state, and political watchers over the years have eagerly awaiting any comments made by rebel leader Prabhakaran in public on this issue.

In November last year, Prabhakaran said the rebels were prepared to discuss any alternatives to Eelam. But asked about this at a press conference in April, Prabhakaran acknowledged that his cadres are likely to kill him if he renounced separation.

In the end, Savithri Wijesekera, a lawyer and activist, says she just hopes the peace talks succeed: “Both sides are talking of peace within a unitary state. I want to believe what they are saying because the war has to stop at some point.”

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