Asia Times: Sri Lankan factions playing politics with peace


	February 7, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Sri Lankan factions playing politics with peace
By Jehan Perera

COLOMBO - With Norwegian peace-making facilitators expected in Colombo this week in a fresh bid to move the peace process forward following discussions with Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan (LTTE) negotiators in London, well-informed sources within the diplomatic community continue to insist that progress is moving faster than anyone expected.

The issue of de-banning the LTTE by the Sri Lankan government continues to be a question mark over the commencement of direct peace talks between the two parties. But in the face of the present momentum in the direction of peace, even this major problem is not likely to stand in the way of the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) being drafted by the Norwegian facilitators.

With the prospects of direct peace talks still on the horizon, the content of the MoU to be signed takes on special importance. The most important aspect of it will be a jointly-agreed ceasefire that would replace the existing unilateral ceasefires, but there will have to be other aspects to it as well. The MoU will need to provide evidence that the peace process is going to be beneficial to the people at large.

The signing of a MoU that consolidates the ceasefire and installs human rights protection mechanisms would also be an antidote to anti-peace talks propaganda. At present, those who are dissenting against the ongoing peace process, such as the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and nationalist sections of the Sinhalese majority, are unable to mobilize the people behind them. After 18 years of costly war, the people are unlikely to be active in supporting such anti-peace forces. But it is important that confidence-building measures be employed to keep the people undivided behind the peace process. The JVP has put up posters warning the people to beware of false peace, and are campaigning against the lifting of the ban on the LTTE.

There is another looming threat to the present social tranquillity that accompanies the peace process. The upcoming local government elections scheduled for the end of March provide an opportunity to those who might wish to exploit the emotive issue of the ethnic conflict for partisan political gain. This has been the unvarying pattern at every election for the past five decades. Every effort should be made to ensure that this pattern does not receive encouragement on this occasion.

So far it has only been the JVP and Sinhalese nationalist groups who have been trying to agitate against the peace process. The two issues of Norwegian facilitation and the removal of the LTTE ban form the centerpiece of their campaigns. On the other hand, the People's Alliance (PA), which has a mass base several times larger than the other opposition parties, has been cautious in registering its opposition on these issues. It has still not decided whether it should openly express its opposition to what the government is doing.

The PA's assessment of the present status of the peace process is likely to be that the majority of people are supportive of the peace process and want it to proceed in an undisrupted manner. Given that the peace process has so far taken place without any serious incident, the PA would not wish to be perceived as having contributed to its breakdown. The PA leadership's current position on the peace process is to be publicly supportive of it and to advocate caution. This has been the public stance of both President Chandrika Kumaratunga and former foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, who continues to play a key policy role within the PA regarding the peace process.

However, there are others within the PA leadership and rank-and-file who would probably not wish to see the new government succeed in holding onto the peace process (sometimes the desire to see others fail where one has also failed is an irresistible human instinct). Besides, there are considerable political benefits that would accrue for the opposition in the event of a failure of the peace process. Apart from the loss of confidence in the government's judgment, its plans for the economic revival of the country would suffer a major blow. This would strengthen the hands of parties such as the PA and JVP that give priority to economic redistribution over economic growth.

The local government elections provide an opportunity for the opposition to campaign against the peace process. In a replay of the strategy followed by both the PA and JVP at the general election, which denounced the United National Party (UNP) for having a secret "elephant-tiger" pact, the JVP is pasting up posters in all parts of the country depicting the UNP's elephant symbol with the stripes of the tiger. The PA leadership might not wish to be publicly identified with such a low-grade campaign. But there is a possibility that at the grass-roots level there could be cooperation between the PA and JVP on a campaign strategy that would discredit the peace process.

However, this anticipation of negative practices during the elections is still not a reality. It is likely that a large majority of the electorate will not be induced to change their support of the peace process on account of anti-peace propaganda. Certainly they rejected the PA-JVP propaganda regarding a secret UNP-LTTE pact during the general election just two months ago. The electorate is much better educated on peace and conflict issues than it has ever been in the past 50 years. Besides, the powerful state media is no longer in the hands of the PA, as it was during the general election when it was used relentlessly to discredit the UNP's promise to relaunch the peace process.

Furthermore, the positive dimensions of President Kumaratunga's leadership should also not be discounted. It is likely that she is smarting at the manner in which her government fell after defections engineered by the UNP. But it must not be forgotten that it was she who earlier fought for a political solution to the ethnic conflict when nationalist Sinhalese sentiment was much stronger than it is today.

In 1987, as an opposition politician, she supported the devolution arrangements of the Indo-Lanka Accord when hardly any government or opposition leader was prepared to do so. In 1994, she defied a nationalist Sinhalese election campaign carried out by the then-UNP government and prevailed on a peace platform. Finally, in August 2000, she presented a draft constitution to parliament that provided more devolution of power than anything proposed so far, and endured the heckles of a hostile opposition. The new government must determinedly seek to find ways to make the president a true partner in the peace process. Civil society and opinion leaders must continue to insist on bipartisanship in the quest for a negotiated peace.

(EelamNation)