Page 1 of
2 Clouds
on the Sri Lankan horizon for
China By Peter Lee
China's relationship with the regime of
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa is rock
solid. Chinese arms were instrumental in the
defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009 that brought
their insurgency to an end after 27 bloody years.
China is the largest provider of foreign aid and
investment to the island.
And on March 22,
when the United Nations' Human Rights Council
(UNHRC) considered a resolution censuring Sri
Lanka for shortcomings in its investigation of
possible violations of international law during
the war, and a deficit of credible post-conflict
reconciliation initiatives, Beijing voted "no" -
while India voted "yes".
Thanks in
significant part to India's vote and example, the
resolution - which the Sri Lankan government was extremely
anxious to see fail, and
had dispatched a 72-person team to Geneva to lobby
against - passed.
Sifting through the
wreckage, Sri Lankan media noted that, if
abstentions were counted with the "no" votes, the
resolution had carried by only one vote - India's.
As for China, as the Ceylon Daily News put
it - albeit reporting on remarks of the less than
influential "Listeners Association of China Radio
International in Sri Lanka" - "China's support at
UNHRC highly appreciated". [1]
By a
calculus that was made with considerable frequency
in the Indian media, the UNHRC vote was an own
goal by India, needlessly antagonizing Sri Lanka
and pushing it even more closely into the arms of
China.
Some characterized the vote as
little more than rather ignoble truckling to the
Congress Party's coalition partner, the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), whose power base is the
ethnically Tamil state of Tamil Nadu - the
motherland of Sri Lanka's Hindu Tamils, who have
often been at loggerheads with the indigenous,
Buddhist Sinhalese who make up 74% of Sri Lanka's
population. [2]
Supporting the narrative
of Indian dithering was a letter from Prime
Minister Singh to Rajapaksa stating that India had
insisted that the resolution had been watered
down, or as an Indian briefer told the media:
"We have always had a problem with
the Western approach of telling countries that
they 'must accept' or 'must do' something." That
is why India insisted that the language of the
resolution be changed to remove that element,"
he added. "Once we got that, we voted for it."
[3]
However, this picture of apparent
Indian fecklessness is belied by the fact that the
UNHRC resolution was tabled by the United States,
which is eager to promote Indian interests in
South Asia. The United States insistently lobbied
India to vote for the resolution. The Tamil factor
is virtually non-existent in American politics, so
it can safely be said that the United States was
not heedlessly hoisting India on a cleft stick in
the service of some other American agenda.
The US initiative appears to have been a
calculated effort to wean India away from fear of
its neighbors playing "the China card" to extort
diplomatic and economic concessions from New
Delhi. What we seem to be seeing is New Delhi,
under American tutelage, employing the Barack
Obama administration's preferred tactic for
dealing with problematic regimes: identifying weak
points to exploit, ratcheting up international and
multilateral pressure on those points, and then
balancing the pressure with occasional concessions
and positive initiatives.
In other words,
the old carrot and stick, with the stick coming
first. It means that, in a rather risky
move, the United States and India are threatening
to put Sri Lankan government's intensely fraught
relationship with its restive Tamil minority into
play if Colombo does not direct its politics and
diplomacy into channels that Washington and New
Delhi deem appropriate - and Beijing regards with
utter dismay.
Rajapaksa - and China - are
to a large extent victims of their own success in
utterly crushing the Tamil Tigers insurgency.
In 2009, the Sri Lankan army did not
pursue an objective of defeat of the Tamil Tigers.
Its goal was absolute annihilation.
In the
end-game of the war, the Tigers - and hundreds of
thousands of ethnic Tamil civilians - were
cornered on a tiny spit of land on the northeast
coast in the region of Vanni. Military targets,
civilians and hospitals were pounded with
artillery; then the army moved in from three sides
and, according to credible reports and evidence,
fought their way in with little if any regard for
civilian casualties, resulting in perhaps as many
as 40,000 deaths.
Vellupillai Prabhakaran,
the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Talim
Eelam, or LTTE, and most of the top cadres died in
battle or shortly afterward. For some, surrender
does not appear to have been an option. Captured
Tamil fighters and members of the Tiger political
and bureaucratic apparatus - because the Tigers
had exercised de facto control over a significant
swath of territory at one time - were summarily
liquidated. Victims included Prabhakaran's
12-year-old son, who was apparently executed by
the Sri Lankan army, together with five escorts
who were trying to deliver him to safety or
surrender.
The Western world and India
were willing to turn a blind eye toward the bloody
excesses of the Sri Lankan army in 2009 because
the Tigers were a truly nasty bunch that had worn
out its geopolitical welcome.
In the early
years of the movement, Tamil self-determination
had developed a significant international cachet
along the lines of the Palestinian Liberation
Organization. In 1987, India parachuted food
parcels into the Tamil stronghold of Jaffna in
order to help rebels withstand a Sri Lankan army
siege.
India's Research and Analysis Wing
(RAW) trained Tamil fighters - including the
Tigers and five other groups that RAW, in its
wisdom, decided it could play off against each
other - in camps in southern India as part of a
strategy to project Indian power into Sri Lanka.
Instead, the Tigers assassinated the
leadership of the pro-Indian Tamil militants and
absorbed their fighters into the LTTE. In 1987,
India - with Sri Lankan consent - sent a
peacekeeping force into northern Sri Lanka that
quickly came into conflict with its erstwhile
clients, the unrepentantly militant Tamil Tigers.
India fought a bloody and unsatisfying
campaign against the Tigers before withdrawing in
1990. Subsequently, Prabhakaran ordered the
assassination of premier Rajiv Gandhi. The killing
- ironically carried out by a militant trained in
a RAW camp - guaranteed the hostility of the
Indian government toward the Tigers.
The
LTTE allegedly pioneered the use of the suicide
vest, engaging in almost 400 attacks over 20
years, including attacks that killed Gandhi and,
in 1993, the president of Sri Lanka, Ranasinghe
Premadasa. The LTTE ethnically cleansed the Muslim
population of the areas it controlled, expelling
an estimated 72,000 people.
In a notorious
incident, LTTE cadres bound, blindfolded and
executed 600 Sri Lankan police officers who had
surrendered to them on the instructions of the
Colombo government in a confrontation in 1990
during a ceasefire period. The LTTE's sympathizers
explained these incidents as matters of military
and revolutionary necessity, but the fact remains
that the LTTE, a militant organization organized
along Leninist principles, were not loathe to take
the bloodiest path out of their challenges.
European powers, especially Norway, still
tried to broker a peace deal. However, after 9/11
armed struggles of national liberation were passe
and the Tamil Tigers were slotted squarely in the
terrorist category, classified as a terrorist
organization by 32 nations including India, the
United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the
European Union. Their sources of funding and arms
were attacked and, when the end came, the UN and
the Western powers made only the most ineffectual
efforts to broker a settlement that would
forestall the utter destruction of the LTTE.
However, it was China and not the West
that played the crucial role in supporting the
final Sri Lankan army campaign against the Tigers.
Major Neil Smith, Operations Officer of
the US Army and Marine Corps Counter-insurgency
Center from 2007 through 2009, rather enviously
described the no-holds-barred "Rajapaksa Model"
and the Chinese support that it relied on:
Beginning in 2005, China stepped in
to provide an additional $1 billion of military
and financial aid annually, allowing the LTTE to
sever the strings attached to Western aid
regarding the conduct of anti-LTTE operations.
In exchange for the aid, China received
development rights for port facilities and other
investments ...
China's aid enabled
the Sri Lankan government to attain the military
superiority needed to defeat the LTTE. The Sri
Lankan military budget rose by 40 percent
between 2005 and 2008, and the army's size
increased by 70 percent, an addition of nearly
3,000 troops per month.
China provided
more than simple financial support. It and
several other states furnished the government
with crucial political cover in the United
Nations. Western countries long demanded that
Sri Lanka respect human rights and avoid
civilian casualties as a condition of continued
aid. The government viewed these conditions as a
hindrance to its ability to defeat the LTTE. The
substitution of Western military aid with that
from China enabled the government to disregard
Western concerns about human rights and pursue
its campaign of attrition unimpeded. China
prevented introduction of resolutions at the
United Nations critical of Sri Lanka's renewed
offensive, giving it a free hand in the conduct
of its operations despite the protests of human
rights groups and Western governments. [4]
Cornered in Vanni in early 2009, the
LTTE used the over 200,000 civilian refugees on
the peninsula as human shields, stationing cadres
to shoot those who tried to escape and forcibly
impressing children as young as 14 into the Tigers
for use as front-line cannon fodder.
The
last weeks were a nightmare as the Sri Lankan army
advanced behind barrages of artillery fire that,
among other locations, apparently targeted the
makeshift hospitals that, at the beginning, may
have had wards for Tiger fighters but at the end
were scenes of total chaos and undifferentiated
horror as doctors, without antibiotics,
anesthetics, or transfusion supplies, and no other
means to treat many wounds other than amputation,
hacked off limbs of shrapnel victims with butcher
knives and stacked the arms and legs in piles.
Rajapaksa made the ludicrous claim that
the final battle against the Tiger stronghold was
"the biggest hostage rescue operation in the
world".
The Red Cross, whose attempts to
deliver aid were largely frustrated by the Sri
Lankan government, described the final days at
Vanni as "an unimaginable humanitarian
catastrophe". [5]
Post-war, the dominant
picture has been of Sinhalese dominance and Tamil
subjugation.
After the fall of Vanni,
250,000 traumatized Tamil internally displaced
people (IDPs) were herded into a gigantic camp
called Menik Farm under miserable conditions for
detention, screening, and, for the particularly
unlucky, designation by balaclava-clad Tamil
turncoats for harsh interrogation.
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