Font size: 
It is likely that the defense secretary's views are shared by a sizeable proportion of the population who have no confidence in the LTTE's peaceable intentions. As these declarations were made at a nationally televised event in Trincomalee and in the presence of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, this could be considered to be government policy.
Apart from the ethnic conflict, Sri Lanka has gone through two attempts to overthrow democratically elected governments by means of revolutionary political violence. These failed revolutions were undertaken in 1971 and 1988-89 by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People's Liberation Front, which sought to establish a socialist state and sever the country's dependence on the world capitalist system.
The JVP utilized a strategy of political assassination and armed insurrection to achieve its objectives, quite like the LTTE in the ethnic conflict. The periods of these insurgencies were considered periods of national terror. The failure of the insurrection of 1971 to fundamentally change the injustices that gave rise to it, led to the follow-up insurrection of 1988-89.
Sri Lanka's past experience of military solutions indicates that the impetus for political reform ends once the government defeats its opponent. At the height of the JVP insurrection in 1989, President Ranasinghe Premadasa pleaded with the JVP to talk with him and share power with his government. But once the government militarily defeated the JVP there was no more talk of power sharing or of fundamental political reform.
Today the richest 10 percent in the country continue to receive more than 40 percent of the national income, and the Western Province gets over 50 percent of the national income, keeping alive the truth of the JVP slogan that the rich milk is for Colombo while the watery cucumber is for the rural areas.
The resistance to a political solution that is acceptable to the Tamil people goes back to the 1950s, much before the LTTE was formed. Time and again, enlightened Sri Lankan government leaders of the caliber of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, Dudley Senanayake, J.R. Jayewardene and Chandrika Kumaratunga tried to offer political solutions that they believed were fair to the different ethnic communities, and good for the country, but they were thwarted by racist elements in the country.
The LTTE too has been at the forefront of dealing death blows to democratic institutions and leaders on all sides. The LTTE has physically eliminated the democratic leadership of the Tamil people. The failure of successive governments to address the grievances of the Tamil people served to weaken and discredit Tamil leaders who placed their trust in democratic values and in the Sri Lankan political system. But it was the LTTE's assassins who eliminated them from the political system that they tried so hard to reform and transform.
Today, the LTTE needs to take responsibility for escalating the military confrontation with the government and for taking the war to the point of irreversibility. The LTTE's repeated ambushes of government troops in the early days of the president's assumption of office and the closure of the Mavil Aru irrigation canal in the east provided the government with ample justification for its counterattack. The government has now felt empowered by its military successes to take its response beyond a defensive posture to one of full-scale military assault.
A military crushing of the LTTE would enable a political solution to be offered on terms that are acceptable to the government. At present it appears that the LTTE's fortunes are at a low ebb, and it has suffered a series of severe reversals at the hand of the government, losing territory, ships and its reputation as an invincible fighting force. Whether the LTTE will be able to stage a military comeback in the end of the year with the onset of the monsoon rains that are favorable to its guerilla strategies remains an open question.
Accordingly, the best time to come up with a political solution to the ethnic conflict is now, when the government has an incentive find such a solution and is pledging to do so. If the government is able to produce a political solution that is acceptable to the moderate majorities in the ethnic communities, there will be immense pressure on the LTTE from both the Tamil people and the international community to decommission their weapons and end the ethnic war for all time.
On the other hand, if the past is to be any guide to the future, the defeat of the LTTE by itself is unlikely to lead to a just and negotiated political solution, which has been resisted by racist elements in the polity for the past 50 years.
--
(Dr. Jehan Perera is executive director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, an independent advocacy organization. He studied economics at Harvard College and holds a doctorate in law from Harvard Law School. ©Copyright Jehan Perera.)
