UNIVERSITY
TEACHERS
FOR
HUMAN RIGHTS (JAFFNA)
SRI LANKA.
Date of
release: 28th March 2005
Political Killings and Sri Lanka’s Stalled
Peace
CONTENTS
1.
Introduction
2.
The
False Dichotomy between Justice and Peace
3.
The Twisted Corporate Reality in the
North-East – A Glimpse of Life under the ISGA
4. The LTTE’s
counterinsurgency in Batticaloa and Environs
5.
Political Vacuum and the role of the JVP
6. Jaffna: The Goons Takeover and Fears of War
11.
The Valvettithurai Killings
16. An honest approach to the dilemma
Appendix I: Violations in the North-East
I.1. Victims of Murder and Disappearance resulting from LTTE action
I.2. LTTE cadres killed and injured
I.3. Cases of Grievous Injury to Persons by LTTE Action
I.5. Torture, Harassment, and Other Instances of Violence
Once again a wave of political killings in northern and eastern Sri Lanka is threatening the security of civilians; the violence also threatens their fragile psychological recovery from the devastating tsunami disaster. Both the LTTE and its rival Karuna faction have carried out violent attacks, but to dismiss these killings lightly as tit-for-tat would be utterly misleading as their forces are far from equivalent. The violence today is occurring at a time when some within the international community, eager to get on with the pressing needs of reconstruction, appear ready to confer quasi-statehood on the LTTE’s violently maintained fiefdom.
To encourage this trend the LTTE has sought to sustain its perceived monopoly on power. To do so it has had to downplay the importance of challenges to its authority, while simultaneously eradicating dissenters. This has proved increasingly difficult to carry off gracefully with post-tsunami attention to Sri Lanka at an all time high. To manage the feat it resorted to an old tactic. It accused the Government of using unnamed “paramilitary” forces to carry out killings and suggested that these groups were responsible for the carnage. This had the added benefit of placing all the LTTE’s opponents under suspicion, decreasing sympathy for victims of violence and increasing pressure on the Government, with which it was being urged to resume negotiations. Disturbingly, although the LTTE has failed to provide evidence to back up its allegations, leading sections of the international community accept this explanation.
The charge has also been taken up by government opponents, who are intent on gaining political mileage from the violence, regardless of the consequences to the people of the East or the peace process.
In March 2005, a weekend newspaper close to the UNP
publicised as a scoop the open secret that Karuna’s men lived in companies
along the border of the Eastern Province.
In response the National Peace Council called upon
the Government ‘to disprove the allegations regarding its support for the
Karuna group immediately and ensure that no such camps are permitted to exist
in the territory it controls’. The NPC pointed out that the ‘Cease Fire
Agreement between the GoSL and the LTTE in its clause 1.8 prohibits armed
paramilitaries in the NorthEast’, and also that Karuna’s group has child
soldiers. It is of course appropriate to insist that the government abide by
its obligations and to scrutinise the human rights records of all parties, but
such questions do not exist in a historical or political vacuum. It has hardly been lost on the people why
the UNP, among the several political actors with something to gain from a
return to the status quo, would want LTTE control to be restored in the East,
and why the peace lobbies and the interests backing it are suddenly concerned
about Karuna. The presidential election is due at the end of 2006 at the latest
and will likely be decided by a small margin.
Intimidation of voters and candidates, murders and ballot stuffing by
the LTTE has become accepted as the norm in the North-East (see Bulletin
No.36); and the LTTE has long seen the UNP as being the more amenable to its
political agenda.
When the Karuna split occurred in March 2004, we argued that
it needed an honest approach that would give the people of the East greater
justice, ensure accountability and end the inhumanity of child conscription in
that region. But the strategy of
appeasement of the LTTE (Vanni) introduced by Norway and embraced successively
by the United National Front government and the United Peoples Freedom Alliance
demanded aloofness from
Karuna’s uprising, setting the scene for the Vanni faction to crush the
rebellion. Instead of creating
conditions for a more open atmosphere, where everyone could articulate
themselves politically on an equal footing, would-be peacemakers simply helped
restore the LTTE Vanni faction’s arbitrary rule. Scores of child soldiers under Karuna were killed and leaders who
surrendered were executed, some after prolonged torture. Children released by
Karuna were reconscripted into the Vanni’s army – a process that
continues. Karuna and his followers
were ostracised, their existence and problems denied. Anyone alleged to be a
sympathiser could be killed with impunity. The people’s interests were
ignored and their fate pegged to the ulterior motives of others. Once that wrong became
accepted wisdom, everything that followed was wrong and murky.
This report contains details of a number of incidents that are part of a continuing pattern of LTTE violence. We will attempt here to provide a context for the violence that explains why international policies that seek simply to draw the LTTE into the fold will not work. It should be stressed that the immediate necessity is to stop the killings. This requires coordinated action between the Government of Sri Lanka and all international and domestic forces capable of investigating the violence and bringing perpetrators to justice. A commission should be appointed to probe all killings under the CFA -- not only the deaths of high level LTTE personnel. This Commission should be one with credibility, having international members of standing who understand the byways of Sri Lankan politics.
In attempting to address the current situation, some important features need to be kept in mind:
· The abduction, killing and torture of opponents and even inadvertent dissidents has become part of the established order since the LTTE asserted totalitarian control in 1986. This behavior intensified during the ceasefires of 1987 and notoriously in 1990 when people were off-guard thinking that peace had returned. These victims did not pose an armed challenge to the LTTE.
·
The LTTE’s violence could be viewed as a paranoid
reaction to the widespread latent anger against its record of murder and
oppression, but the main reason for its persistent killing is that it works.
The people have been cowed. As for the Southern polity, it helps distract
attention from their own abysmal record in the North-East and makes them look
better, if not good. Most disquietingly, the international community has come
to accept it as a normal part of peacemaking where the LTTE is concerned. The
direction of the internationally backed peace process has been to entice the
LTTE with the possibility of de jure totalitarian control, while helping
them to establish it de facto.
· The LTTE’s killing, torture and abduction of persons was going on with growing intensity even during the first two years of the CFA when there was no prospect of an armed challenge to the LTTE and everyone was looking forward to some settled order.
· The LTTE has sought the systematic elimination all real and potential challenges to its self-proclaimed role as “sole representative.” Many of its victims posed little obvious threat, but the LTTE’s leadership appears intent on preventing future representation from emerging by cutting out anyone with even remote links to its critics. A large proportion of the rural folk, including nearly everyone in the rural East, where the LTTE was a latecomer, suffered a near relative killed by the LTTE. The poorer folk live in terror of their children being abducted. Muslims and Sinhalese have been killed, displaced and terrorised. What the LTTE has not understood is that its own repression is what is fuelling the growing opposition, opposition it is increasingly unable to contain.
· The truth behind the actions of people the LTTE has killed as ‘traitors’ is much more parochial than the LTTE would admit. People wanting to lead normal lives and caught between the LTTE’s violent disruptiveness, economic hardship and the pressures and demands of other armed actors have often been driven to what the LTTE would label ‘treachery’. Calling someone a “military informant,” is not terribly instructive. We must ask not only what organisations the victims had associated with, but why, in what capacity, how long ago, and under what circumstances.
· As with LTTE repression, throughout the conflict resistance too remained endemic. As to when and where it would take an organised form remained a matter of conjecture. The violent and derisive manner in which the LTTE was treating the Muslims during the ceasefire led to upsurges in Mutur, Valaichenai and Kinniya. Muslims in the Amparai District too were becoming restive. Whatever Batticaloa-Amparai commander Karuna’s personal reasons, his rebellion had a social basis, as recounted in his statements and implicit confessions.
· Organisationally Karuna is no match for the LTTE. With regard to intelligence, the LTTE is more than a match for the Sri Lankan State. The LTTE has put enormous resources under its chief of international intelligence and scores of trained killers to pacify the East. It is rather like President Jayewardene sending a brigade commanded by Tissa Weeratunge and a coterie of ambitious officers to pacify Jaffna in 1979, when the active militants were a mere handful. In both instances the underlying problem was political. Both were exacerbated by violent repression.
2. The False Dichotomy between Justice and
Peace
An imaginative peace process that lays the foundation for pluralism, justice and democracy must challenge narrow the nationalisms that began and sustain the Sri Lankan conflict. Instead the present peace process has inflamed nationalism on all sides by recognising the LTTE’s totalitarian claim to sole representation and turning a blind eye to persistent criminality against its own people contrary to the spirit of the CFA.
The LTTE has had extraordinary success manipulating the international community by encouraging a false dichotomy between “justice” and peace. The international community, desperate to keep the LTTE engaged in the peace process, has embraced a distorted view of peace and an inflated threat of large-scale war breaking out. This has allowed the LTTE considerable licence for the violation of human rights and democratic principles.
We call the view distorted because despite scores of brutal political assassinations and persistent child conscription what we have in Sri Lanka is still considered a satisfactory ‘peace’. By using the ceasefire as bait, the LTTE has manoeuvred Norway and prominent international NGOs into acting effectively as its diplomatic corps, covering up crimes and laundering its image. At the same time there has been very little effort to leverage the international community’s considerable influence to explore the LTTE’s own dependence on the ceasefire and take advantage of that dependence to promote human rights.
The continued donor emphasis on condemning Sinhalese nationalism – whose extremism is vocal but non-violent at present, while condoning Tamil nationalism, invites disaster. On 14th December 2004 the Japanese embassy issued a statement on behalf of the donor co-chairs (Japan, EU & USA) expressing “deep concern about the ongoing JVP-led actions against the peace process in Sri Lanka - and the government of Norway's efforts as facilitator of that process”. This condemnation of the JVP’s extremist sentiments and its skepticisms regarding the peace process travels alongside tacit exoneration of the LTTE’s extremist violence and disruption of the peace process. For instance, while the donor community pressured President Kumaratunge to bring the JVP to heel, they did not show much resolve in bringing the LTTE to heel after it walked out of peace talks in April 2003. If Sinhalese nationalists are marginalised while the LTTE is rewarded and feted in European capitals, it sets up a destructive dynamic that has already provoked a Sinhalese backlash against the peace process, and is likely to further fan the flames of Sinhalese extremism
Seldom has a peace process pursued with so much international backing yielded such grotesquely unreal results. Most poignant today is the situation faced by people in the East, who after two decades of violence and neglect were hit by the tsunami. They are now paralysed by an ongoing spate of killings as well, mainly by the LTTE (Vanni faction). The details provided in Appendix I, which we have mostly checked with care but would inevitably be deficient in minor aspects, give us the picture of a full-blown counter-insurgency campaign by the LTTE in the name of peace. It is reminiscent of some of the worst instances of counter-insurgency by the Sri Lankan forces from the 1980s. One recalls in particular the STF’s killing of about 80 employees of the prawn factory in Kokkadichcholai in January 1987 after lining them up with their identity cards, and the disappearance in 1990 of hundreds taken from refugee camps. They were the wrong people (Eastern Tamils), in the wrong place, at the wrong time; suspected, with good reason, of the wrong sympathies.
Mylvaganam Jeyaganesh (23) was shot dead in the night by the
LTTE men near his wife’s home in Kaluthavalai (15 Mar.05). A native of
Chenkalady, he moved to Kaluthavalai because the LTTE called at his place
regularly and harassed those at home asking about him. Jeyaganesh had no
connection with any other group, except that his elder brother Sasi had
belonged to the EPRLF very briefly. Jeyaganesh also had a friend Segar in the
TELO, who left and is now working in the Middle East. This is an example of the
logic of counter-insurgency at work: Someone from this environment who is
not demonstrably with us, had best be dealt with as one who is against us.
Most of those being targeted or killed carry no weapons at any time, and have no apparent connection with Karuna, the leader of the LTTE rebel faction, except possible sympathy; some family, regional or legitimate economic contact; or through sheer accident of history and situation. An important group of persons being killed are ex-militants from groups opposed to the LTTE, some of whom for self-protection later worked with the Army, former LTTE members, and LTTE deserters who surrendered to the Army. These people in general became defunct in any armed capacity and returned to civilian life. Indeed, the LTTE propaganda machine frequently dubs the dead ‘paramilitaries’ and the rest of the media repeat it indifferently, thus again muddling the true nature of the killings. Police versions, sometimes more than one, are often colourful and misleading.
Local observers place the steep rise in killings by the LTTE Vanni faction as a move by them to undercut Karuna’s support after the killing of Kausalyan. An undercurrent of support for Karuna is attributed to his role in paralysing Vanni domination, which cuts across various group divisions and is a widely shared feeling in Batticaloa-Amparai. The facts on the ground are that the LTTE has hardly been able to run its political offices in the government-controlled area (the Batticaloa office was recently bombed). Its ability to conscript and extort have been greatly diminished, also threatening its clout at negotiations. The killing is therefore born of desperation and in many ways blind.
The killings have recently become concentrated in the Welikanda area of Polonnaruwa District, just outside Karuna’s native area of Valaichenai-Kiran. The LTTE’s killing machine is under Newton, chief of international intelligence, and the local operational head is Balraj, who is based nearby in Vaharai. Both are Northerners, and thus likely to be more suspicious of Tamils in the East and inviting a corresponding local reaction.
The developments mark another stage in the process of the LTTE rendering the North-Eastern Tamil Homeland the one place Tamils least want to live in. Communal relations with Sinhalese deteriorated in 1956, and from that time the border areas of the East were generally considered dangerous for Tamils. But older ties survived. Necessity aided by an easing of tensions in the latter 1990s helped to revive them. Welikanda had been for example an area of bitter conflict over Sinhalese land colonisation, and the Tamil communities there hung on tenuously during the insurgency when suspicion and reprisal massacres by the Sri Lankan forces were their lot. (See Report No.11 of 1993.)
A change was evident when the LTTE began large scale forced child conscription in 2001. Wealthier Tamils sent their children to Colombo and Kandy. The poor sent their children to largely Sinhalese areas along the border of the Eastern Province. Many more people in Batticaloa felt threatened when the Vanni Forces reoccupied Batticaloa-Amparai after the Karuna split (April 2004) and the killings intensified. This occasioned some displacement to Welikanda. Welikanda today is a hotbed of killings by the Vanni faction, making the older, impoverished local Tamil communities, who barely survived the Government’s counterinsurgency operations, the targets of another vicious one – this time by the Tamils’ self-proclaimed sole representatives.
The situation has become almost surreal. Contributing to the state of unreality is the ongoing Presidential Commission of Inquiry into killings of members of the LTTE (Vanni faction), whose mandate excludes the bulk of the killings – killings by the Vanni faction of mainly unarmed persons trying to lead normal lives. Meanwhile LTTE leaders are privileged with regular rides on government Air Force helicopters, while blasting their opponents as ‘paramilitaries’ (mercenaries, in this case of the Government) and instigating mob attacks on the Army in Jaffna. Officially, Karuna does not exist for them. But even the most hardened LTTE apologists are beginning to feel uncomfortable.
The editor of a pro- LTTE website and native of the East
reported the shooting (not fatal) of a bar owner in Batticaloa, that he ‘appears to be a victim of the current "shadow war”
that has claimed many lives in the troubled district’. Whom is this ‘war’
(which the LTTE would never acknowledge) against? Persons like the bar owner
with perhaps accidental contacts he never bargained for or extortion fees he
failed to pay, former militants who visited their families that had already
suffered grievously from the tsunami, labourers in a paddy field not answerable
for the cultivator’s connections, one whose brother was in a militant group a
long time ago, and the list meanders on ridiculously.
The tsunami brought home to the keener
observers some startling effects of the political vacuum the people of the
North-East have lived through for a generation. In particular the quite
widespread sympathy the JVP earned for its tsunami relief in the East,
especially in some poorer Muslim and Tamil areas, where JVP activity had
previously been greeted with suspicion.
JVP cadres came in sizeable numbers and put their hands into menial
work, such as collecting and cleaning dead bodies for a decent interment. It
was different from the top down relief efforts by most NGOs that people had
seen over the years of conflict, and also by the LTTE.
The same Tamil journalist, who was
struck by the JVP’s inroads, wrote in the Virakesari (13 Mar.05), “Here
is the lesson we must learn. It is not enough for Tamil Nationalism merely to
mobilise behind the cause of Sinhalese hegemonism alone. Only when it upholds
all facets of liberation can it build up a committed base among the people.”
This is a remarkable shift from Prabhakaran to his victims on the Left,
underlining the political fragility of a force that behind the façade of
Nationalism has taken and taken from the people and given them only misery in
return.
Tamil fascism destroyed political
activism with a social conscience and the spontaneous mobilisation of the people. These were last massively in evidence at the
University of Jaffna in 1986 to protest against the disappearance of the
student Arunagirinathan Vijitharan from Batticaloa. What remained was driven underground by LTTE violence. After the tsunami, it fell to the JVP to
bring that home to those who had chosen to be blind.
A JVP member in his twenties sent to do
relief work in the east commented to his superiors that it was only now that
the young were making amends for harm inflicted by their elders twenty five
years ago. Of course the JVP cannot begin to be the voice of the Tamil people
(less so still the UNP or the SLFP) as long as it ignores the realities of a
history of violent ethnic oppression by a state committed to the ideology of
Sinhalese supremacy. The record of abuse on all sides is grave and demands a
full accounting. To ignore Tamil
sensitivities resulting from this legacy and simply talk about people living
happily together as equals, is to perpetuate the legacy of Sinhalese supremacy.
This blindness led the JVP in early March to the aborted attempt at building
permanent houses on crown land near McHeyzer Stadium, Trincomalee, for tsunami
affected poor Sinhalese who dwelt in temporary shanties near the market. Of
course they needed to be found homes, but doing so unilaterally in an area
where the Tamils have faced systematic murder, destruction of homes and
deliberate, violent displacement by the State, was thoughtless and
misguided.
Whether we speak of Sinhalese
nationalism, Tamil militancy, or state-sponsored oppression, Sri Lanka’s
violent past and present are impeding its future as a peaceful, democratic
society. For the LTTE, it is ironic
that the results of their counterinsurgency in Batticaloa are very unlikely to
be different from President Jayewardene’s in Jaffna. At first Karuna’s men were
deemed a nonentity on the borders of Batticaloa. But when the LTTE kills scores
all over the District as his supporters, it creates a very different impression
about Karuna’s strength and support, even when people are distrustful of his
terrible past.
There were many bad things about
Jaffna. But it also had its good side, which held out hope for the future. It
had a strong reform movement from the 1920s. Hard work and integrity were held
in high esteem. Much of that was killed off by the LTTE’s repression and its
corporate ambitions based on total control. For those who valued the good side
of Jaffna, the present cannot but bring tears of helplessness. The LTTE did not
do any political work as envisaged by the ceasefire agreement. Instead the CFA
permitted a virtual takeover of Jaffna by the LTTE’s intelligence wing. Its
network serves a variety of functions: providing information necessary to sustain
social and political control, and to identify targets for extortion or
recruitment. People can be watched
minutely and kept in a state of permanent unease, which discourages independent
thinking. The LTTE presence in Jaffna
has enabled it to coerce civilian participation in regular agitations aimed at
harassing and demoralising Army personnel.
This last could one day provoke an Army massacre of civilians who had
been forced or inveigled onto the streets, thus creating conditions for renewal
of war, or for playing on the subsequent international outcry to wring
concessions from the government.
A recent instance was the agitation on
4th March after a schoolgirl died in a traffic accident with an army
vehicle. Mobs were mobilised and agent provocateurs called out boys from a
neighbouring boys’ school. Agitation was also launched at the University. For
some curious reason, the SLFP political party office was burnt. Army sentry
points were attacked with stones and petrol bombs. The Army opened fire near
the University. It is something of a miracle that the day ended with just one
old man killed.
The visible leader of the agitation was
Gajendran, leader of the International Students’ Union, master vote rigger and
now MP with the highest preference vote. When the LTTE entered Jaffna to set up
‘political offices’ in April 2002, Gajendran swore that if the Army did not
leave Jaffna, 48 000 troops would “fertilise its soil” of Jaffna. He was seen
at large issuing orders, and at the burning of the SLFP office. Others
assisting him included Mohan and Suthan from LTTE intelligence. Probing deeper
into these agitational tactics elicited some frightening facts.
A typical instance here is just the tip of the iceberg. In
Kodikamam there was a brawl between a toddy tapper community and another group.
The latter took the matter up with the LTTE. The tappers reminded the
LTTE that every time they were ordered to attack the Army, they had
complied. Because of this they said the LTTE should allow them leeway and leave
them alone. Progressive reform movements of a bygone era offered their
solidarity and helped the oppressed castes to reassert their dignity and fight
oppression in a manner that won them respect. The LTTE’s interest was not in
dignity, but in recruits and street gangs.
The LTTE’s record of ruin inevitably touched Jaffna’s much
esteemed and painstakingly built system of education. Jaffna University is
virtually controlled by the likes of Gajendran and intelligence cadres sent to
the University, frequently from the Vanni by the equestrian method, or simply
‘horse riding’ in colloquial Tamil. Their interest in studies is such that an
equestrian entrant scoring nearly zero at every examination comes as no
surprise. In the case of one caught cheating the matter was quickly hushed up
by the authorities. In one faculty now, six intelligence cadres are well known,
while others are less known. Among their jobs is to control the students and to
get the University involved in agitation against the Army when ordered.
We pointed out in Bulletin 37 that the LTTE’s plans to provoke a
war were far advanced when the tsunami struck last December. We now have
further confirmation from local observers. The mobilisation of gangs to agitate
and provoke the Army was begun soon after the Leader made his Great Heroes Day
speech last November. Jaffna’s rowdy elements were summoned to one of their
‘political’ offices to meet Chenkai Aaliyan, an intelligence dignitary
specially sent from the Vanni. His overall aims included, intimidation and
murder of opponents and elimination of every shadow of dissent. The gangs
summoned according to persons with access to them included ones with such names
as Paasaiyoor Gemini Gang, Five Junction Zaheer Gang, Kalviankadu Ancient Gang
and Perumal Kovil Vasi Gang.
With the tsunami the LTTE had to abandon any immediate plans of
war, but their virtual loss of Batticaloa-Amparai, and the corresponding loss
of prestige, remained a major headache. The LTTE’s claim to control
Batticaloa-Amparai may be compared with what Jaffna Army commander Brigadier
Nalin Seneviratne told a journalist about his control of Jaffna at a time in
the early 1980s when the Army regularly went out on operations and made
arrests. The Brigadier gesticulated towards the perimeter fence of Palaly base
and revealed dramatically that his control ended there. Developments in Jaffna
suggest that the LTTE again sees pulling off a major military coup in Jaffna
(or less likely in Trincomalee) as the means to recover prestige, reassert
control over Batticaloa-Amparai and to suppress growing dissension everywhere.
7. Absolute Corruption of Civil and Public Life
We understand from knowledgeable local sources that the LTTE sent
a team led by Major Thomas from its intelligence wing to revamp intelligence in
Jaffna. This was weeks after the tsunami. Among the tasks was to gather
information about the disposition of the Army and to tighten the intelligence
shadow over civil life in Jaffna. Persons have been recruited for monthly
salaries, said to range from Rs.6000 to 10 000 a month, from government
departments, NGOs, teachers and newspapers to submit regular reports,
particularly on hints of dissident activity. Some LTTE men have boasted that
according to their assessments the Sri Lankan Army in Jaffna is weak,
demoralised, and poorly equipped after the tsunami and that they could take
control of Jaffna in a matter of days. Gangs and public agitation are meant to
wear down the Army and to provoke a major incident at the expense of the
public.
The corruption of public life has placed honest public servants
under enormous pressure, when forced to perform irregular services at the
behest of the TRO. Most public servants and village headmen have taken the easy
way out and have also acquired considerable personal wealth. One example is a
public servant with a record of corruption in Jaffna that was proverbial and
now tipped for an appointment in a world body. In Batticaloa fears have been
voiced for the safety of several honest public servants who resisted the LTTE’s
pressures. The LTTE may find however that the resentment it has evoked with
such tactics may prove too much to be crushed by the terror of its intelligence
wing.
More remarkable than armed resistance,
is the recent show of non-violent and politically mature resistance to the LTTE
by government officers in Batticaloa. A number of these officers and
civic-minded persons, despite the personal losses they suffered during the
tsunami, worked very hard at providing relief to the survivors. Subsequently
the LTTE-TRO moved in with the media behind them and started issuing orders to
these officers. On 13th March the TRO tried to frame an officer who
resisted its attempts to fraudulently acquire relief supplies. This backfired
and precipitated a demonstration by local government and divisional secretariat
staff, demanding among other things, an end to unlawful interference in the
performance of their duties. The people may be silenced, but their gut feeling
about the LTTE’s coveted internationally backed ISGA is unmistakable (see
Appendix I.5).
8.
“Paramilitary Threat”: a Smokescreen
To maintain its standing with its new international allies, the LTTE has had to maintain tight control over its perceived monopoly on power. In the case of the Karuna rebellion it meant that the LTTE had to downplay the ability of Karuna to act against it, while simultaneously eradicating Karuna’s support base. It was a strategy it had long applied to other adversaries. But there was little chance that violence of its scale would go unnoticed – particularly in the wake of the tsunami, which drew unprecedented international attention to eastern Sri Lanka. How better to deal with this dilemma than by muddying the waters? It did so by accusing the government of backing unnamed paramilitary forces and suggesting that these groups were responsible for the carnage. This had the added benefit of placing all the LTTE’s other opponents under suspicion, deceasing sympathy for the victims, and increasing pressure on the government, with which it was being urged to resume negotiations.
With the international community pressing for a resumption of peace talks, the LTTE spokesman Anton Balasingham tried to use the killing of Kausalyan, a senior Eastern leader of the LTTE, former MP Chandra Nehru and three other LTTE cadres in February to reiterate an old demand. On 14th February he told the visiting Norwegian delegation led by Eric Solheim that among the things the Government should do to create a conducive environment is to ‘disarm the paramilitary forces functioning with the Army or integrate them into the armed forces and station them outside the North-East’.
The UN Secretary General’s selective and uncharacteristic condemnation of the ambush that killed Kausalyan was evidence that the LTTE’s public relations exercise was having an effect. The Secretary General’s condemnation of these ‘callous killings’ appeared to point a finger at the Government – the other party to the ceasefire The International Working Group, a consortium of INGOs with programmes related to Sri Lanka, facilitated a statement by international relief organisations calling for an end to the killings. This is discussed at length below. This and reports of responsible persons familiar with Norwegian diplomacy both show evidence that the LTTE’s lobby was successfully advancing the “paramilitary” line. The UN Secretary General’s bureaucratically generated statement bears the stamp of the same lobby. (Indeed, ironically, a few days later, the same SG recommended sanctions against the LTTE for continuing child conscription.)
An SLMM spokesman meanwhile indicating the Karuna faction’s responsibility ruled the killings were not a cease-fire violation.
Interestingly, even as the LTTE blamed the Government indignantly for the killing, its websites suggested that it took seriously the possibility of a mole having informed the Karuna faction of Kausalyan’s movements.
Singling out Kausalyan’s killing for international focus as against near silence over more than a 100 politically motivated killings by the LTTE makes pragmatic sense if it restrains the LTTE. But that misreads the institutional nature of the LTTE and its apparatus focused simply on one thing: Killing political opponents as and when opportunity arises. Towards this endeavour ceasefires and solemn pledges mattered nothing. Under the CFA, weapons given to its opponents for their protection were withdrawn. The LTTE killed them and blamed the killings on ‘paramilitaries’ allied to the Army. Appendix I provides samples of such incidents as well as examples of continuing child conscription relating to the LTTE. These speak of the unchanging plight of the civilian population.
The steep rise in attacks represents the aftermath of the LTTE (the Vanni faction) sending an intelligence team under Newton, Chief of International Intelligence, backed by scores of killers from the Vanni to clean up Batticaloa of all dissident activity. Among those identified as leading the elimination of dissidents are Keerthi, Illanko, Ramesh and Bhanu.
What kind of a ceasefire or peace process is it that allows the LTTE to carryout a full-blown counter-insurgency with its mounting toll of political killings?
Unfortunately the LTTE’s utter lack of accountability, its inability make a trade-off between tolerance and acceptability and its dubious support, where people must lie and dissimulate to live, have been virtually ignored by the international community. In fact the LTTE is increasingly dependent on political and financial backing from the international community to suppress the people.
We have a very influential example in the statement of November 2004 by International Humanitarian NGOs, which was facilitated by the IWG, urging the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE to end killings. After mentioning that several of the groups targeted were opposed to or regarded an obstacle by the LTTE, it records that the LTTE denied any role in the killings. With some mild reminders of its obligations, the INGOs commend the LTTE for its expressions of concern. Thereafter any blame on the LTTE is reduced to the small print. The blame is thoroughly confused by pointing to mysterious parties (note for instance, the SLMM’s famous references to a ‘third party’ to skirt unpleasant facts) as the “leadership of paramilitary organizations including those loyal to Karuna”. They list some recent killings without saying who was responsible, even in instances like the Valvettithurai incident where there was little doubt about the perpetrators on the part of the SLMM or other observers. Finally, in distracting attention away from the LTTE even further the statement conveys the impression that there are several parties including ‘paramilitaries’ and the Government that are responsible for killings - this in a context where human rights groups clearly recognise that since 2002, more than 90 % of the killings of non combatants in the East and 100% in the North were by the LTTE. In fact, the remainder of killings in the East that are not attributed to the LTTE Vanni faction, can be attributed to the breakaway LTTE Batticaloa faction. Designating one faction as LTTE and the other a ‘paramilitary’ is another distortion of reality.
In fact, the rather vague use of the term paramilitary to describe the victims of the LTTE is both mischievous and dangerous. This is the term that the LTTE has used to legitimise its killing of political opponents – members of the EPDP, EPRLF and other former militant groups that have now joined the political mainstream, field electoral candidates, and work as democratic political activists in civil society. LTTE propaganda organs such as the TamilNet have been using terms such as paramilitary agents to twist facts and justify the killing of scores of such activists, many of whom like Subathiran, Alahathurai and Balanadaraja Iyer were irreplaceable assets to democracy in the North-East. Thus the use of the term ‘paramilitary’ by the NGO community is to entrench the LTTE’s own campaign to legitimise the assassination of political opponents, and is particularly unworthy of organisations that represent Sri Lanka to international decision makers.
In sum, the statement by the international humanitarian NGOs did very little to restrain the LTTE and protest against human rights abuses; rather its overall effect did more to legitimise the status quo. This statement and others like it, may be defended as being tactically calculated to preserve the ceasefire and trap the LTTE into not returning to war. Yet, it does seem that it is the LTTE that has been more successful in using the ceasefire as a trap to outsmart the international community and hold it hostage to an immoral ‘peace’. In fact, to refer to the current status quo as ‘peace’ is itself to distort the term.
The Valvettuthurai incident referred to above is one where the intended victim survived and two bystanders were killed. That killing in the Leader’s birth-place unmasks myths about the LTTE leader’s standing in his birth place. In stark contrast to reality the LTTE maintains that ‘paramilitaries’ or government forces have carried out all killings under the CFA in ‘government-controlled’ areas. Even while public knowledge is to the contrary, LTTE propaganda and the absence of investigation have helped the international community to turn a blind eye (e.g. IWG statement above).
The circumstances of the Valvettithurai incident, local public agitation, the survival of the intended victim and the fact that he had complained to the SLMM several times, created a problem of plausible deniability to outsiders. As always in such circumstances (as recently in Jaffna), the LTTE resorts to agitation and provocation of the armed forces hoping for the worst. The war hysteria was played up until aborted by last December’s Tsunami.
Under the
command of Brigadier Larry Wijeratne (the only military officer to be targeted
by a suicide bomber), the people of Valvettithurai and the Army established a
relatively easy relationship. Disregarding the LTTE’s repeated warnings, the
people played in the Sithampara College grounds near Athikovil and the Army
camp. In so doing they played, socialised with the Army, and received
refreshments from them.
In
Valvettithurai in particular, where the LTTE had built up a myth of universal
popular support, it was also trapped in the myth. To take the kind of brutal
measures it would have taken without any hesitation in the East would have
shattered the myth. Dealing with political dissent in VVT was undertaken
circumspectly. The ageing and sickly local TELO senior Sivajilingam never
forgot that when the LTTE leader ordered the massacre of TELO members in 1986,
Prabhakaran’s minions came looking for him in the same house where he had
sheltered the fugitive Prabhakaran from the Police 5 years earlier.
Sivajilingam allowed the LTTE to co-opt him for the reward of a parliamentary
sojourn and pension.
November
2004: But as
Prabhakaran’s 50th birthday on 26th November 2004 drew
near, things became unbearable. The LTTE’s conflicts with the local populace
are elaborated in the accompanying feature (see Appendix III). In the run up to
the great day, two LTTEers, Mohan and Yarl (Jaffna) Eelavan called on Ponniah
Deivendran (32), a family man from Athikovilady. They wanted him to go to the
Vanni for an inquiry. Deivendran declined, offering instead to talk to them in
Jaffna. The LTTE men left after warning him.
We have
verified independently that Deivendran had been to the SLMM three times seeking
protection, telling them that he was in danger. The LTTE accuse him of having
contact with the EPDP. On the evening of 19th November, while
watching a game of football in Sithampara grounds, Deivendran noticed two LTTE
men known in the area as Poopalan and Vennilavan approaching him on a red motor
cycle and moved to take cover. The LTTE
men fired indiscriminately killing two bystanders Sathasivam Kumaran and
Rajendran Sureshkumar, both 21, and injuring Deivendran.
Deivendran
and the dead lads were taken to Oorani Hospital nearby, which was surrounded by
the Army and Police. Colonel Ratnayake from the Pt. Pedro Brigade and the officer
in charge of Valvettithurai Police went to the hospital and the next day
decided to remove Deivendran to Palaly Base. Although the truth was well-known
locally, the LTTE in the run up to the Leader’s birthday was faced with the
blame for murdering two innocent youth in his birthplace, the very kind of
thing for which youths took up arms against the Sri Lankan Army. The LTTE’s
attempted cover up exposes the role of TNA MPs and so-called ‘public
organisations’.
It might at
this juncture be useful to examine a few press accounts of the incident, which
taken in conjunction with the independent testimony of witnesses and observers
provide an interesting juxtaposition.
Nitharsanam, the website widely credited to Pottu Amman’s intelligence
wing, was the first to report the same day (19th Nov.) that two
persons were killed and one injured in indiscriminate firing by two members of
the Army’s Special Forces who came at speed wearing helmet and jacket, and
crucially, Nitharsanam claimed that eyewitnesses had seen the gunmen
coming out of Valvettithurai army camp. The injured person Deivendran, was
named, but no connection was made to the EPDP. TamilNet did not commit
itself beyond saying that ‘relatives’ blamed the Army, who denied it. While
publishing the statement by Jaffna political wing leader Illamparithy
(Aanjaneyar), TamilNet was careful to
keep a distance. Dated the following day (20th), Illamparithy did
not repeat Nitharsanam’s claim of
witnesses seeing the gunmen emerge from the army camp. His was another rehash
of the standard LTTE line: “How could anyone else have carried out this
‘premeditated’ killing within 100 metres of the army camp?” He too did not
connect the injured Deivendran with the EPDP. The target audience was clearly
the Tamil literate.
As part of
the cover up, the LTTE fomented protests over Jaffna against the Army, blocking
roads with burning tyres and barricades. Violence was used to stop transport.
People trying to get about urgent tasks were intimidated and threatened by
youths of around 18-20 years. During the afternoon of the 20th the
Army removed Deivendran to Palaly. His account, which was broadcast over the
radio, gave the people distant from Valvettithurai and who relied on the Tamil
media, a more credible perspective. It was from this point that LTTE propaganda
did an about turn on Deivendran and moves were afoot to discredit him.
The Jaffna
daily Uthayan of 23rd
November published a statement by a ‘Valvettithurai All People’s Front’
claiming that Deivendran, hitherto reported as a victim by the LTTE media, was
part of a dark EPDP conspiracy to spoil the Leader’s 50th birthday.
He plotted the murder of ‘our sons’, it charged, and went away with the
Army feigning injury to work this mischief of falsely blaming the LTTE. By an odd coincidence the same issue of the Uthayan carried a complaint to Police by
the medical officer at Valettithurai (Oorani) Hospital, ostensibly to protest
that the concentration of security forces had paralysed the hospital and scared
the patients. In contrast to the All People’s Front, the doctor, K.
Mylerumperumal, while affirming that Deivendran was indeed admitted as a bona
fide patient on the 19th and treated for injuries, protested
that the Army removed him about 3.30 PM on the 20th contrary to
procedure, without consultation and without having the patient discharged.
TNA MPs
were obliged to wave fists and say something appropriately bombastic. Some were
almost humorous in their ambiguity. Suresh Premachandran MP said: “The fact that such atrocities are being
staged in public by broad daylight [on the eve of the Leader’s birthday] means
that there is a well-planned conspiracy behind them. The people must unite to
extinguish at the very root these sinister forces goading us towards war by
killing innocent youth”. Apparently Sivajilingam, the MP from
Valvettithurai, said little. The SLMM knew a great deal, but was silent.
As to who
was goading the people towards war,
TamilNet reported on 26th November, the Leader’s birthday, that
two soldiers from the Nunavil camp, near Chavakacheri, had been attacked with
knives, one of whom was rumoured to have succumbed after being rescued and
moved to Palaly. Nitharsanam, giving
more gory details the next day, claimed at the beginning that ‘common people’
attacked the soldiers from Military Intelligence who went into the village at
7.00 PM pretending to be on duty, but actually to spy. One, it said, had his
hands severed and the other received a cut on his head, and were both said to
be in a critical condition. The report added indicatively that the soldiers
were attacked by ‘persons who had followed them’, leaving no doubt who they
were. Evidently, the weapons used were swords, the same weapon with which the
LTTE chopped and killed a father, mother and their 8 months old infant in the
same area in January 2004.
The miscarried killing in Valvettithurai had nothing to do with armed opposition to the LTTE. It is rather to do with the ongoing programme to eliminate all those who challenged the suicidal course imposed on the community by the courageous act of standing for election. In fact the LTTE has killed most of the key persons who opposed them politically. However, they are constantly on the look out for more targets. Why is this significance constantly obscured by the international community and the door kept open for the LTTE to kill with impunity? Some of the answers are to be found in Norway’s role.
We pointed of in Bulletin No.36 how Norway and the SLMM failed to act after Karuna’s rebellion to protect the interests of the people of the East or the children in Karuna’s ranks. Karuna had in fact wanted the ceasefire agreement with the Government to continue. He had stopped conscription and had strongly indicated his willingness to move towards international norms in return for some recognition and protection.
After a meeting with the LTTE’s Vanni faction on 11th March 2004, Norway’s Eric Solheim set the cue for anarchy in the East. His highly politicised statement declared that Norway would not involve itself in an internal matter for the LTTE ‘exactly’ as they would stay out of discussions between the President and Prime Minister of Sri Lanka. The latter he described as an internal matter for the South and the former, of the North-East.
Solheim would have known that Prabhakaran was not having any discussions with Karuna, whom he declared a traitor and was moving to crush him militarily. The SLMM pretended that Karuna had rejected the CFA and washed their hands off the fate of those under him. UNICEF was silent. The abject and treacherous massacre of scores of children under Karuna is now history (Bulletin No. 36).
One must condemn in the strongest terms the Sri Lankan Government’s weakness and complicity. One also marvels that a seasoned diplomat could put forth such a perverse interpretation to the CFA as to legitimise Prabhakaran’s corruption of international law, assault on civilian welfare and common decency, not to mention his deadly exploitation of children. According to Solheim’s logic above, Prabhakaran was simply restoring order in his own state – ‘an internal matter for the North-East’.
It did not take many more equivocations to transform Karuna from being party to an internal dispute within the LTTE to one among a bunch of ‘paramilitaries’. In March 2004, the Norwegians took a categorical position in Prabhakaran’s favour, making the fate of everyone else in the North-East his internal matter. Today Balasingham and other LTTE spokesmen rave about paramilitaries while their agents target all and sundry opponents. The Norwegians stand by silent and impassive. This is not something the Norwegian people are going to be proud of.
At the root of the problem is the fundamental tragedy that the Tamils have no home where they have self-respect, freedom and dignity within. It is understandable for anyone fighting against a superior adversary to seek or accept help (within certain inhibitions). That does not deligitimise a cause, or turn its advocates into paramilitaries. The LTTE was once quite happy to act as President Premadasa’s paramilitaries without any inhibitions to hunt down Tamil dissidents and other groups. Some of the latter did the same for their survival when Premadasa and the LTTE fell out. Their’s is a social tragedy and any worthwhile peace process must seek to rehabilitate them.
Today, under the ceasefire, people staying at home without arms or protection are being killed mercilessly for such things as trying to be a municipal councillor. It is utterly wrong to insult their memory by pinning on them a paramilitary label. Moreover, it is remarkable that thousands have perished in this way without offering any resistance. That is certainly not a situation that can last forever. Under these circumstances the LTTE would view a sizeable section of the population as Karuna supporters, real or potential opponents -- hence the rationale behind its loose use of the term paramilitary.
Were the Norwegians competent peacemakers, they would have addressed this problem with compassion. But to exacerbate it and allow themselves to be used as pawns in the LTTE’s schemes does not improve their reputation. We now examine the subtle workings of this Norwegian approach.
The disease in the country was evident a long time ago in the partisan manner in which the State’s violations against Tamil civilians were covered in the Colombo media. Once appeasement of the LTTE became the norm accepted by the Colombo-elite, the LTTE was able to manipulate the same attitudes of frivolousness and indifference to their advantage. TamilNet has been a leading player in this game.
Alagiah Kirubeswaran (38) of Batticaloa, who was shot dead by the LTTE on 8th March, was a married man with children. He had been in the PLOTE, and later for a time in a section of the group that worked with the Army. He got out of it before or about the time the ceasefire agreement was signed in February 2002 and wanted to go abroad. Meanwhile he ran a passenger van to support his family. Taking alarm when the LTTE abducted three key EPDP leaders just after the Oslo agreement, in December 2002, he finally went to work in Qatar. His family lived in Thiruchenthoor, Kallady, where the tsunami carried away his daughter and wife’s parents. Kirubeswaran felt compelled to return to see his family who were refugees at the Paddy Marketing Board store house, where another refugee Dayanithy had been shot dead on 28th February.
Subramanaiam Dayanithy (42) was shot after nightfall just outside the TRO office next to Paddy Marketing Board store in Batticaloa and succumbed to his injuries in hospital. A report in the Island said that before he died he identified his killers as the LTTE. Here was again a man who was militant by nature but wanted to live a peaceful life looking after his family. Dayanithy was a pioneer freedom fighter from Batticaloa in the group called the Cobras that stole weapons from the Batticaloa Fort in August 1984. He was arrested and went to prison with fellow Cobras Benedict and Sri Pathmanathan. They were all released following the Indo-Lanka Accord in July 1987. Those who were with him in prison said that he was by nature friendly and always ready to help, but was a fighter who would not take injustice lying down.
Under the North-East Provincial Council (1988-89) Sri Pathmanathan was employed as public relations officer under provincial minister Mano Master. After the Council collapsed when the Indian Army withdrew, Sri Pathmanathan was killed by the LTTE. Dayanithy, a native of Kaluwanchikudy, first joined the TELO and subsequently the Razik group, which was absorbed into the Sri Lankan Army, but left before Razik was killed in 1999. He then went to Colombo, and returned to Thiruchenthoor on the Batticaloa coast, where he worked as a fisherman and raised his family, until he was hit by the tsunami.
The TRO office next to the refugee camp regularly interfered with the refugees by appointing TRO officers from among them to wrest control, telling them where they should resettle and appropriating donations sent to the refugees. Dayanithy who would not put up with nonsense soon got into trouble with the TRO, which in turn would have pried into his past. After Dayanithy was killed his wife, we are told, complained to the SLMM of LTTE threats to the family.
LTTE gunmen shot dead Kirubeswaran early morning on 8th March when he waited for a bus opposite the Batticaloa Police HQ, to take him to Colombo and then to fly to Qatar. It was another totally callous and unwarranted routine action of the LTTE’s killing machine.
The TamilNet report of 8th March began: “A paramilitary cadre waiting to board a bus to Colombo in front of police head quarters in Batticaloa town was shot dead by unidentified gunmen around 5.10 AM”. TamilNet then went on to report the killing of another ‘paramilitary’ in the Eravur area.
The Island (9 Mar.) reported the same story under the headline ‘LTTE kill two paramilitaries’: “A paramilitary cadre waiting to board a bus opposite Batticaloa police head quarters had been shot dead by LTTE gun men at 5.10 AM”.
The second is a replica of TamilNet except for the switch of ‘LTTE’ for ‘unidentified’. Ironically the editor of TamilNet was a leading member of PLOTE, now whitewashing the murder of his former comrades trying to lead ordinary civilian lives.
One sees regular examples of journalists in Colombo having become comfortable with the LTTE–TamilNet line, often encouraged by the security forces. Take the case of the young victim Sathahsivam Kamalanathan (26) of Ariyampathy, Batticaloa. He was attached to TELO, which had historically a strong local following. The group dispersed after its local strong man Varathan, who had previously worked closely with the security forces, was killed by the LTTE in early 2003. Kamalanathan then drifted to the EPRLF(V) and EPDP, and became a correspondent for the EPDP-owned journal ‘Thinamurasu’. The LTTE abducted him in the afternoon of 7th March and killed him that night near the Manmunai jetty.
TamilNet was quick to report that a military informant was shot dead by unidentified gunmen, adding suggestively that he was living close to the STF camp. The Daily Mirror then followed with the killing of ‘a man believed to have been an army informant’. The Mirror report quoted the Kattankudy police inspector that the victim was an army informant who escaped an attempt on his life some months ago.
The Sri Lankan security forces seem too ready with this kind of information on their ‘informants’. It is true that cadres in groups opposed to the LTTE either fled or were cornered into working closely with the security forces to protect themselves and were sometimes used for counterinsurgency work. The CFA should have enabled them to go home and live in safety. On the contrary, even political parties opposed to the LTTE have been condemned by the CFA and the ineffectiveness of the SLMM to seek even closer protection from the security forces, although they are redundant as informants (if they ever were informants). It is the duty of the security forces to protect those who seek their protection, and not to label them informants after they fail in their responsibilities.
Sometimes the business can become almost comically anarchic. The Government recently categorically denied LTTE accusations that paramilitary forces continued to function alongside the Army. Meanwhile the state-owned Daily News reported on 7th March: “Six civilians were shot dead in tit-for-tat attacks between the LTTE and paramilitary groups in the North-East.” Is it confusion of message or of terminology? Getting Colombo circles, to whom ordinary Tamils were always alien, to embrace the concept of unidentified paramilitaries battling it out in the East was too easy a coup by Norway and the LTTE. Just who was involved, or what was meant by the term hardly mattered.
What is being lost in this misreporting are two important facts. First is the safety of tsunami refugees, leave alone the fair distribution of resources, when the TRO is given a hold on these refugees. The TRO-LTTE has been responsible for the murder of two refugees above in Batticaloa. The TRO office next to the camp identified former militants whose families were victims of the tsunami and kept LTTE intelligence informed.
The second is the canard about paramilitaries. Until the split in the LTTE there were no groups militarily opposing the LTTE. None of the other groups was functioning as a paramilitary outfit (doing irregular military service as a subsidiary of the State) after the ceasefire, which is after February 2002. TamilNet regularly refers to former members of the Razik group killed by the LTTE as paramilitaries or army informants. That is incorrect. The Razik group was absorbed into the regular army in the 1990s. They are now in barracks in Batticaloa town and visit home under army escort.
On 1st March in the wake of LTTE accusations against the Government, President Kumaratunge appointed a commission comprising two judges to probe attacks on LTTE personnel. Whichever way one looks at it, it is a belated and intriguing exercise in accountability. To begin with the LTTE’s complaint is not new. It has regularly blamed the government forces for all killings of political activists and civilians in the ‘government controlled’ areas. The number is above 150, nearly all of them opponents of the LTTE. Not only was the Government too cowardly to investigate these, it lent complicity to covering these up. Early in the peace process, the Defence Minister under Prime Minister Wickremasinghe dismissed well-founded reports of child conscription by the LTTE as gossip. Following the assassination of senior EPRLF(V) leader T. Subathiran in June 2003, strong evidence was produced identifying LTTE’s Nallur ‘political commissar Easwaran as the chief operator in the assassination. The Police did not even question him.
Matters did not improve when President Kumaratunge, after criticising Wickremasinghe’s management, took personal control of defence. The same month, on 28th November 2003, the LTTE brutally hacked to death 3 Muslim farmers near Kinniya. One survivor escaped to reveal the facts. Trincomalee’s police chief SSP Upali Hewage dismissed the atrocity as a land dispute between Muslims and Tamils.
Most bizarre was the Government’s attitude to the suicide assassination attempt on Minister for Hindu Affairs, Mr. Douglas Devananda on 7th July 2004. The suicide attack during a peace process was a clear revelation of the LTTE as an institution. The plot involved a woman who had a long association with the EPDP introducing the bomber to Devananda as a supplicant for a job. The bomber was a former LTTE woman cadre who tried to return to civilian life and became very upset after a marriage was arranged and the bridegroom’s party pulled out at the last minute.
Following the failed attempt,
President Kumaratunge’s untimely spokesman Harim Peiris went public to say in
effect that the failed attempt was an internal matter, to say nothing of the
five policeman killed when the bomber blew herself up: "It is the
LTTE going after a political opponent”, he said. "It is that and
absolutely nothing else. It [the LTTE] is resorting to violence to kill an
opponent; it is not reverting to hostilities.”
The opposition UNP spokesman Ravindra Randeniya found in the suicide
blast “evidence that President Chandrika Kumaratunga should take the peace
process seriously”. In getting this hapless girl to blow herself up the
LTTE was evidently resolving a legitimate internal matter or was working harder
to find a settlement along democratic federal lines!
As for the UNP, it has continuously played the game of thwarting all attempts at a permanent solution, feeding off chaos and anarchy. While gloating over the fact that the Karuna split had weakened the LTTE, the UPFA government had meekly allowed the Vanni faction to make a bloody conquest of Batticaloa, doing nothing to protect the people and children. Tamils killing Tamils was good news. For the people of the East it was the worst of all worlds.
The new priority for the Government and the security forces was to make a show of being very impartial as regards the two LTTE factions. The Government and the STF chief Nimal Lewke have tried to impress the Vanni faction by repeating umpteen times the incident where the STF shot dead a Karuna man after he killed Vanni faction’s Jude in Akkaraipattu. One wonders what the Judges on the commission would make of that.
The Tamil people have complained since 1984 that the STF did not know the law. There was never any suggestion that the Karuna man who shot Jude posed a threat to the STF. The STF’s brief was to arrest him and charge him in court, not murdering him to score brownie points with the LTTE.
President Kumaratunge’s appointment of a commission to look into attacks on the LTTE is a caricature of accountability against the record of a systematic cover up of attacks on all others. The people of the North-East have since the 1970s demanded accountability from Colombo. Hopes that were raised when Kumaratunge came to power were dashed in 1995 when the LTTE unconscionably restarted the war. When Air Force bombing killed about 120 refugees in the Navaly church precincts on 10th July 1995 and 45 civilians including about 24 school children at a gathering in Nagar Kovil two months later, accountability was rudely denied. The LTTE was not blameless in the two incidents. But what stayed in the people’s minds was the Government’s arrogance. The same trend continued, such as when the STF in 1996 detained two innocent youths in Kalmunai, murdered them, claimed credit and were rewarded for ostensibly preventing the assassination of visiting ministers.
Arrogance had its price. Today imagination has failed; the institutions of state, the Government and the Opposition have been reduced to the Ludicrous.
What can the new presidential commission do? Find out that one military intelligence official or the other kept links with Karuna contrary to orders that were not seriously meant? The perspective is all wrong. The Government must be accountable first and foremost to the people of the North-East, not to the LTTE. The handling of the Karuna split was scandalous from the very beginning.
As an institution the LTTE’s existence hinges on celebration of personal sacrifice to the Leader’s will and military glory, as means to the imposition of absolute control. The deaths of thousands of young and children has been honoured as martyrdom, and peddled as a stimulant to excite the nationalist ego. Prabhakaran rules largely through fear -- fear of external enemies, real or invented, and more importantly at this point fear of LTTE retribution for disloyalty. This fear is projected by constant demonstrations of violence, violent rhetoric and exhibitions of his power over those below him -- most dramatically, his ability to compel suicides. The LTTE’s strategy is to maintain the Tamil population in a state of unrest that prevents dissent. During the peace process itself two Sea Tigers were ordered to commit suicide when the SLMM searched their vessel, and another distraught girl was manipulated into the suicide assassination attempt on the EPDP leader.
Whatever the illusions of peacemakers, the people of this country whose lives are on the line understand this reality. The very nature of the LTTE, which is strung together by fraud and deceit, will cause it to crack and crack again, and with every crack comes renewed violence.
The prime movers of the present peace process expect everyone else to cooperate in their unrealistic mission to keep Humpty Dumpty together. Everyone is asked to embrace the appeasement scheme at the core of their crisis management strategy to ensure that the LTTE remains the LTTE, the sole negotiating partner. In reality everyone will take steps to protect themselves, their institutions and to minimise losses against the next outbreak of war or localised violence, whatever the public posturing imposed on them.
This is why an honest approach to the Karuna question and to dissidents in general, placing the interests of the people and their rights first, would be the most honourable and least damaging. The alternative we are seeing now is murky, shameful, costly to the people, endless and extremely dangerous. What are the practical steps that can be taken?
16. An honest approach to the dilemma
In the name of a peace, we have accepted for three years as virtually legitimate and unavoidable, rampant child conscription, unrestrained and unchecked murder of political opponents, institutionalised terror and one party rule and now a full-blown counter-insurgency in the East. The last in Solheim’s logic is an internal problem of the North-East being resolved by the LTTE’s chief of international intelligence! While the CFA allowed the LTTE to open political offices in government-controlled areas, it is an open secret that these premises have become dens of armed killer squads and torture chambers as the recent scandal in Vavuniya reveals. The one thing they were not about is democratic politics.
How slavish and unimaginative this approach to peace can be is evident in an argument put forward by some leading peacemakers to place the LTTE in charge of tsunami relief in the North-East because ‘they are in control’. Here is a suggestion that control usurped by terror should be rewarded with resources to enhance it. The LTTE’s access to tsunami camps in Batticaloa through the TRO cannot be separated from the murder of two breadwinners of tsunami-affected families.
The recent detention in the Vanni of Jeyadevan, the leading LTTEer from London, an unsuspecting dissident, brings into focus the extent of the LTTE’s success in commandeering the religious lives of Tamils living overseas, their institutions and the incomes of these. Extending the logic, we may ask governments of countries with large Tamil communities to channel all social services and benefits to them through the LTTE, because ‘it controls them’.
There is something clearly wrong in this line of reasoning. The main plank of appeasement is the contention that this grotesque state of affairs is a worthwhile price for avoiding war. Indeed, we were on the verge of war last Christmas Day, hours before the tsunami struck. The temporary reprieve at such terrible cost owed nothing to the ingenuity of peacemakers (see Bull.No.37).
It has been our contention throughout that the situation cannot be rectified or peace restored without placing the people foremost and to insist on the primacy of certain basic values. The people look to the State to ensure this and to start being a responsible state. For too long has the Sri Lankan State been a thuggish state. Because of it the State has lost the initiative to such an extent that the West and Japan dangle 4.5 billion dollars at us, while their experts experiment their discredited theories as through we were a zoo.
While the President’s commitment to federalism is reassuring, it would not be a solution amidst anarchy and without cementing the will of the people to live together, a will that was amply in evidence during the tsunami. We need not search for federalism as if to reinvent the wheel. The hard won 13th Amendment is there to be implemented and reformed. Why it has not been used all these years to devolve power to the North-East and to identify the problems, is one aspect of the perennial disease of lack of timely will and wisdom in the South. Cementing the will of the people to live together means restoring a sense of justice, and accountability for wrongs past and present.
The immediate problem of accountability is to stop the killings. A commission should be appointed, not one to score brownie points with the LTTE, but to probe all killings under the CFA. The Commission should be one with credibility, having international members of standing who understand the byways of Sri Lankan politics. For too long has the international community turned a blind eye to Ceasefire killings not wanting to know who is doing what. Pretending that one cannot know has enabled, for example, the International Working Group to commend the LTTE for its meaningless commitments, and go on pretending that one cannot know. If one is interested enough one can know with fair certainty and time will make matters clearer. (See Appendix II for some examples).
In the absence of an institutional framework to check the killings, we need to form tentative conclusions and make them public. While killings by the Karuna group have brought a new element of uncertainty to the East, they are an outcome of killings that were already going on with impunity. When one has in the name of peace rationalised unarmed politicians, ex-militants, their supporters or journalists being gunned down, and legitimised an undemocratic approach, gun-law becomes the only means, ultimately futile, of assertion and deterrence. This evil must be reversed.
For the ordinary folk
there is no difference between the cadres of different groups. They are
negihbours and even siblings. Through the appeasement of one party, the peace
process has demeaned and rendered sub-human all the rest. These are the very
evils the hard fought international conventions and covenants tried to put
behind us. It is time to give killers notice that they cannot carry on business
as usual behind farcical denials. Political freedom must be guaranteed to all
on the same footing. To this end we welcome, although belated, remarks of the
EU Commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner in Colombo on 8th March,
when she called on the LTTE to: