On the other hand, many Tamils, not all, are dejected by the defeat of the LTTE. Almost all Tamils, even those who are not supporters of the LTTE, are concerned that the Rajapakse government will use the defeat of the LTTE to deny them their equality. Sri Lankan Tamil politics has never been as rudderless as it currently is. Nor has it been as existential – their land has been scorched, tens of thousands of civilians are caught in the crossfire, and several more are living in a virtual state of nature in the North and East.

[Tamil Demonstration in Toronto - January 30, 2009-more pics by: TricotTreat]

The Sri Lankan Tamils in the Diaspora are not extricated from the goings-on in the old country. They are often considered to be a big part of the problem because of their support of the LTTE, and by the same token they will have to be part of the solution too. No one has the right to tell them to find federalism in Canada or settle down in Tamil Nadu. Their stakes in their natal land will not be removed regardless of where they are and what happens in the war. The age of globalization has ensured that.

Besides the Sinhalese and Tamils, Muslims and Upcountry (or Kandyan) Tamils have their own political silos. The Muslims are no longer the group to be tagged on as “Tamil speaking people” by Tamil political leaders at their pleasure, dispensed with by the LTTE in its arrogance, or used as vote banks by the Sinhalese political parties at their convenience. The Muslims are a democratic force to reckon with and will be a formidable presence at future constitutional tables.

The Kandyan Tamils, finally citizens after fifty years in political purgatory, are coming free of the old paternalistic and now corrupt yoke of the CWC. They sit atop what is still a vital sector of Sri Lanka’s economy, and have issues to be addressed and voices to be heard that cannot be substituted for by some inept backbench presence in an oversized cabinet of ministers.

The results of the recent elections in the Wayamba and the Central Provinces show not only the sheer dominance of Mahinda Rajapakse over Ranil Wickremasinghe among the Sinhalese, but also the voting cleavages along ethnic lines. About 70% of the Sinhalese including a solid proportion of Sinhalese Catholics in Wayamba have voted for the Rajapakse government while about the same proportion of Muslims and Kandyan Tamils mostly in the Central Province voted against the government.

These cleavages were there before the LTTE was born. It was their exacerbation over thirty years following independence that produced the LTTE. By its method and its madness the LTTE made itself the problem and created the illusion that merely by eliminating it Sri Lanka would solve all its pre-LTTE problems. The prospect of eliminating the LTTE has also given rise to facile economic expectations that the mere defeat of the LTTE will propel the Sri Lankan stock market to go through the roof and carry the real economy with it!

The outcome of the war will not by itself lessen the task of resolving the pre-LTTE political problems, and the economic costs of war will stifle Lanka for a long time to come. Comparers of Sri Lanka’s ethnic war and the American Civil War should rather than a cowboy reading of the military history of the US Civil War undertake a more serious study of the constitutional and economic histories of the United States.

North and East as Garrison Provinces

More likely to happen is what is being bandied in government circles as the need to consolidate the military victory in the name of national security and in the name of forestalling future challenges to national sovereignty. This approach is neither new nor wise. It is the extension of the old approach of N.Q. Dias, Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s Permanent Secretary, in the 1960s, about whom Neville Jayaweera has recently been writing in these columns. The application of Dias’s method now would be to go beyond establishing military outposts in the Northern and Eastern Provinces and turn them into garrison provinces where suspect Tamils will be kept under surveillance, even in camps if necessary, by Sinhalese soldiers while Sinhalese civilians are induced to settle to change the ethnic composition of these areas. Ethnic surveillance and settlement is what is reportedly happening in the ‘liberated East’.

If this is what is being planned for the North after its ‘liberation’, it would mean that the government has learnt nothing and forgotten everything from the LTTE experience. The Dias initiative of planting a military outpost in every other town or so in the North and the East to keep the Tamils in their place only ended in provoking the rise of Tamil militancy. It took almost two decades before organized violence broke out because Tamils at that time had more to lose than gain from violence given the ‘middle-class’ nature of their society based on human capital and their fine-grained system of family properties. That is no longer the case.

Thirty years of violence has broken and brutalized the Tamil society. People living in the Northern and Eastern Provinces have been displaced multiple times, have little to lose and are quite used to receiving and returning violence. Constant military poking of them will eventually produce violent reactions. They may not have the organization, the resources and the fire power of the LTTE, but they will have the rage and the resourcefulness that Palestinian teenagers showed in their first intifada using sticks and stones against Israeli military tanks. A revamped Dias approach will turn the North and East into two restively lawless provinces that will not make life there any worse than it is now, but will impose a permanent drag on the rest of the country.

A second likely development is on the political front. What is being talked about is a condescending approach that recognizes the need for a political settlement but insists that the military defeat of the LTTE has set limits on what the Tamils can and cannot ask for as well as the manner in which they could ask for it. The Thirteenth Amendment is the most what the Tamils will get, it has been asserted, but they should not expect all of it, only parts of it. The debate over whether the Thirteenth Amendment is sufficient or not will go on endlessly, and a military outcome is not going to put an end to it. What is more important is whether there is the political will and commitment to bring about a constitutional change at this time or in the near future. Political will and commitment are two attributes that have been sorely missing in the shaping of Sri Lanka’s constitutional development.

I say this because both the Donoughmore Constitution and the Soulbury Constitution would have worked and much of our grief would have been avoided if rightwing Sinhalese political leaders had even half-faithfully adhered to the letter and the spirit of the two constitutions in regard to minority rights and sensibilities. Indeed, Lord Soulbury believed that he and his Commissioners had given minority rights the best protection that “the wit of man could devise”. What he did not account for was the electoral opportunism of rightwing Sinhalese leaders to deliberately violate the constitution that his Commission had prepared based on the proposals of the Board of Ministers comprising the self-same leaders. Sinhalese constitutional violations before and after independence, respectively precipitated the Tamil demands for Fifty-Fifty and Federalism. There is no need to revisit the fiascos of the 1972 and the 1978 Constitutions that were virtually drafted, enacted and adopted as if Tamils, Muslims and the Kandyan Tamils did not live in Sri Lanka.

The Thirteenth Amendment, reluctantly introduced at India’s insistence, is far more comprehensive and specific than the Soulbury Constitution. Along with changes to the Citizenship laws the Amendment provides the framework to address three of the “four basic demands” that was formulated by the Federal Party in 1957 and formed the basis of the B-C Pact: in regard to language, regional autonomy and citizenship. The fourth one calling for the stoppage of “state aided colonization” (not to be confused with voluntary internal migration) in the North and East could also be addressed if the government abandons the surveillance and settlement approach that it now seems ready to implement in the North and East.

But the Thirteenth Amendment has had no willing and committed executor. It has been stymied not only by the intransigence of the LTTE but also by the equally vehement opposition among Sinhalese politicians. The present President went further and for once listening to the Supreme Court delinked the North and East even though the Court gave him the option of legalizing the merger of the two Provinces through a parliamentary resolution. Artfully, Rajapakse also arranged New Delhi’s acquiescence after the fact. Notwithstanding the neighbourly goodwill, New Delhi is still unable to get a forthright and public commitment from the Sri Lankan President that he would faithfully implement even what is left of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Nam-arkum kudiyallom

Nor have Delhi and other powers been able to prevail on the government and the LTTE to stop fighting and prevent the humanitarian tragedy involving the civilians in the combat area. The international community sat on its hands for too long and is now unable to do anything to prevent a tragedy escalating into a disaster. International institutions and their highly paid officials stand helpless and exposed of their ineffectiveness. Reduced to basics and stripped of the grand language of sovereignty and self-determination, the failed role of India and the international community in the situation in Sri Lanka is no different from the inability of a civilian police force to stop two fighting gangs going at one another in the middle of a city, town or village. The difference is that globalization and the post-coldwar ‘imbalance’ of powers have transformed local conflicts into modern war pits using weaponry that by any rational assessment should be beyond the means of most of the conflicting state and non-state parties.

The Government of Sri Lanka has been accused of taking cover under its sovereignty to deny the international community its competence to protect the war affected civilians in Sri Lanka. The accusation is not without merit but it is incomplete in that it lets off the LTTE despite its abominable record of ignoring every international plea to respect democracy and human rights while claiming the right of self-determination. The right of self-determination loses all meaning and the claim for it is rendered sinister if it is not intertwined with the principles and practice of democracy.

Self-determination can be experienced in many ways. Tamils steeped in the tradition of their psalms and poetry, know the immortal words of their seventh century savant, Tirunavukarasar (Appar): “Nam-arkum kudiyallom” - we are not subjects of anyone. That sums up better than anything else in Tamil ethos the essence and the defiance of individual self-determination.

In its far better known and more materially sustained European origins too, the principle of self-determination began as an individual development before being usurped, some times positively but many times perversely and atrociously, not only by the building block of modern society – the nation state, but also by non-state actors wanting to become states. In the long history of national self-determination the notorious location of the LTTE is quite widely acknowledged. What is not equally realized is that in taking on and defeating the LTTE at its own game, the state of Sri Lanka is emulating the LTTE and is establishing its own notoriety.

During the dark days of 1983, Narasimha Rao, then India’s Foreign Minister, flew to Colombo and personally delivered a stern message from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to President Jayewardene. The latter though taken aback kept his composure and responded: “You may occupy us but you cannot conquer our spirit”! Nothing less should be expected of the Tamils of Sri Lanka.