Asia-Pacific, Headlines

SRI LANKA: President Stakes Job on Rebuilding With Rebels

Amantha Perera

COLOMBO, Jun 14 2005 (IPS) - At midnight tonight, beleaguered Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga faces her most important deadline since first elected 11 years ago. The People’s Liberation Front, a partner in her government, has threatened to walk out unless she withdraws a proposed deal with the separatist Tamil Tigers to handle tsunami reconstruction efforts.

Kumaratunga says the agreement, the so-called Joint Mechanism, is essential to deliver aid to tsunami victims in Tiger-held areas in the north and east of the nation. Donors have blamed the delay in signing the deal and the lack of a final national reconstruction plan for a slow moving rebuilding effort.

Without the 39 parliamentary seats controlled by the PLF, Kumaratunga’s UPFA coalition will lose its parliamentary majority in the 229-seat house. “If she does not let go of the joint mechanism by the 15th, there will be no government by the 16th morning,” PLF General secretary Tilvin Silva said Tuesday.

The PLF and affiliated organisations have been holding massive protests against the proposal in Colombo in recent days.

Kumaratunga is heading her third government since 1994. During her current tenure she has backed down from policy decisions when faced with PLF opposition. This time, however, she has steadfastly maintained she will sign the agreement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, as the Tigers are formally known.

“What we are attempting do is to bring a group clamouring for a separate state to work in a small area,” she said last weekend.

Sri Lanka’s death toll from the Dec. 26 tsunami, which battered over three-fourths of its coastline, was 38,000 people, with a further 800,000 being displaced. The Indian Ocean island was the second worst affected of the 12 countries in South and South-east Asia hit by the tsunami, which killed over 220,000 people.

Soon after its destructive waves lashed the island, hundreds of local and foreign aid groups and volunteers poured into the disaster areas. But their efforts have not been matched by the reconstruction programme spearheaded by the government.

A day before a donor conference in May, the government said that of an estimated 77,561 houses that needed rebuilding, only 119 had been completed by May 15.

More than a quarter of the affected population is estimated to be living below the poverty line of 1,423 rupees (14 U.S. dollars) per month. The total loss of jobs due to the tsunami is estimated at 200,000.

Kumaratunga met with her own party members Monday and reiterated that she was going ahead with the mechanism. But she added that a secretary to a ministry would sign it on behalf of the government and that the pact will only be finalised once she holds discussions with the country’s powerful Buddhist clergy.

The Buddhist monks too have been vociferous in the their opposition to the mechanism, and last week a death fast by a monk stopped only after Kumaratunga assured the chief prelates she would not sign a deal until she held full talks with them. Eight Buddhist monks were elected to the parliament in 2004 and at least six of them are opposed to the mechanism.

Despite political differences, the protesting monks and the PLF make up a powerful lobby, especially among the majority Sinhalese. They oppose the mechanism, brokered between the Tigers and government through Norwegian mediators, as it would allow the Tigers to enter into an agreement with the government.

“By establishing the tsunami relief structure, the Government of Sri Lanka is attempting to hand over part of its power legally vested in them by the people to a group (the Tigers),” said the PLF central command said, warning during a massive rally in Colombo on Tuesday that if Kumaratunga pursues the deal it will bring thousands of protesters onto the streets.

“We will do everything democratically possible to stop it,” Silva warned, addressing the 10,000-strong crowd. The threat came soon after Kumaratunga won an assurance from opposition leader Ranil Wickremasinghe that his party would support the mechanism.

For two decades the Tamil Tigers have been fighting to create a separate state of Tamil Eelam in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, arguing that the minority Tamils have been discriminated by the Sinhalese. More than 64,000 people have died in the ethnic conflict.

It will be difficult to disburse tsunami reconstruction funds in areas under Tiger control without a formal structure. Despite a three-billion-dollar aid pledge, most governments and institutions are loath to channel funds directly through the Tigers, who are banned in India, the United States and the UK.

“We urge the immediate signing of the agreement in order to ensure proper flow of reconstruction aid to tsunami victims in the north east,” the co-chairs of the Sri Lanka Donor Group, the United States, Japan, Norway and the European Union, said in a statement released after talks in Washington Monday.

About 60 percent of the rebuilding must be done in the north and east parts of Sri Lanka, though most of the damage occurred in areas under government control.

In a gesture of support to the president, the donor group endorsed her decision to sign the mechanism, adding, “we believe such a structure will facilitate effectiveness and equity in tsunami assistance”.

The absence of a mechanism would definitely be felt in the north-east, according to Jehan Perera of the National Peace Council, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) supporting the deal.

“It will affect the LTTE controlled areas. The LTTE is not capable of carrying out massive reconstruction projects on its own. The NGOs working in those areas too are not able to help that much – the state structure is needed for the reconstruction,” he told IPS.

The PLF, on the other hand, proposes to use the prevailing government structure in Tiger areas to disburse funds. Government agents and other state officials still work in those areas, though their effectiveness is limited.

To date, the bulk of the relief efforts in Tiger-controlled areas have been coordinated by the Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation, a pro-Tiger agency.

In any case, the tense political environment would make aid and reconstruction work cumbersome, according to Perera. “The overall situation would not allow the tsunami reconstruction work to move smoothly if we have the two sides (government and Tigers) moving further away,” he said.

There is also fear that the failure to strike a deal with the Tigers would further widen the gap between the separatists and the Kumaratunga administration. Despite a three-year ceasefire, peace talks have been stalled since April 2003.

The Tigers signed the truce with a government led by Wickremasinghe, which was defeated by the Kumaratunga-PLF partnership in April 2004. The latter campaigned on a platform that tagged the ceasefire as a sell-out to the Tigers.

The rift widened when Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, alias Karuna, the former Tiger eastern commander, rebelled and defected to the government side in April 2004. Since then, violence between the Karuna faction and the Tigers has spread to the capital Colombo from the east, with the rebels blaming the government for harbouring and aiding the renegade commander and his supporters.

In the latest such attack, the TRO office in the eastern town of Batticaloa was attacked Monday night. “If the mechanism fails, the LTTE and the government will feel more estranged, the drift towards war rhetoric will be accelerated,” Perera warned.

Such a drift will not do any good for an economy that is overheating due to rising energy costs and double-digit inflation. Many observers in Colombo believe that, ultimately, it is the economy and the respite offered by donor funds that will convince Kumaratunga to stake her own future on the mechanism.