NO BRITAIN, NO TALKS
The international pressure, meaning pressure from the western countries, India and Japan, is on again. I am not referring to the episode involving Kumaran Pathmanathan or KP, the arms dealer for the LTTE. It is not known how the Thai government acted in this episode but it may be that some western country applied pressure and gave a large sum of money to some officials to get KP released assuming of course that KP was arrested by some Thai officials not necessarily the Thai police. However, it seems that the official position as far as the Thais are concerned is that KP was never arrested. We have to remember that those who know the whereabouts of KP are of the opinion that the latter is in Thailand. The way things happen in the so called South and South Eastern Asia it could be that Thais arrested not knowing who he was but later released once they knew who he was, under pressure including that of foreign currency.
Though the release of KP would have been a tremendous loss to Sri Lanka, assuming that he was arrested in the first place, it is not of the same magnitude as that of pressure brought to change the constitution according to the whims and fancies of the so called international community that includes India. It is said that some Tamil parties are applying pressure on India to intervene to see that the Northern and the Eastern provinces are merged. This is something on which the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka has given an order recently. The Supreme Court is of the view that the Northern and the Eastern provinces should not have been merged. Of course, it could be argued that the Supreme Court has arrived at this particular decision based on the present constitution, and to overcome that a new constitution could be adopted. However, as we have argued there is no revolutionary situation in Sri Lanka to frame a new constitution, and all that we can do is to amend the existing constitution making use of the provisions contained in the constitution itself.
The merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces needs a two third majority and a referendum according to experts in Constitutional Law, and this requirement is something that cannot be fulfilled, even if the major political parties agree. There is a difference in Sinhala nationalism and Tamil nationalism that is forgotten by most people. Whereas Tamil nationalism follows the Tamil political parties, in the case of Sinhala nationalism it is the other way around. The so called Federal Party which in Tamil meant Lanka Tamil State Party gave the leadership in Federalism and separatism and is responsible for the present bloodshed, while the Sri Lanka Freedom Party had to follow Sinhala nationalism. Chandrika Kumaratunga who is more a Kumaratunga than a Bandaranaike in politics tried to change this aspect of the SLFP with dire consequences. Mangala Samaraweera who has not learnt a lesson is going along the same direction but it is known that by now he has lost his bearings and has no political future, as the UNP is due to throw him away at the right moment. Those SLFP MPs who advocate a united state instead of a unitary state are only echoing the views of the NGOs including various foundations that organise trips and other pleasures for the politicos.
What the NGOs do not understand is that though they may be able to buy some SLFP MPs they are not in a position to buy the Sinhala people. Thus they should understand that referenda are out and the western countries would not be able to achieve their ambition of weakening if not destroying Sinhalathva. When it comes to nationalism, it is the Sinhala people who lead, and not the political parties. Though the NGO activists in the SLFP may not understand it the President seems to be aware of this situation. Thus not only the merger of the Northern and the Eastern Provinces but even Federalism is out as it needs not only a two third majority in the Parliament but approval at a referendum. India may not know how the Sinhala polity behaves and the majority Buddhists probably need no leaders in certain matters at least, to make up their minds.
In the case of Tamil Parties that give leadership to merger and federalism, they have no valid reason to do so. As we have argued if they base themselves on the so called discriminations against or injustices to the Tamils then the solution has to be for all the Tamils and not only for the Tamils living in the Northern and the Eastern Provinces. If the Tamils are discriminated against then the solution has to be based on ethnicity and not on territory. Ethnic problems, if there are any such problems, cannot have territorial solutions, unless territories correspond to distribution of population on an ethnic basis. The Tamil leaders in order to overcome this fundamental difficulty in formulating the problem and giving a solution have been talking of Tamil aspirations for sometime now. However, constitutions need not be amended to satisfy the aspirations of a few Tamil leaders who have misled the ordinary Tamil people. It is nothing but the aspirations of the Tamil vellalas in the Jaffna peninsula that these leaders want to satisfy, in the name of aspirations of the Tamils in general. These aspirations of the Tamil elite, as we have argued, stem from the loss of the privileges of the Vellala leaders that they enjoyed with the help of the British governors. The British are at the bottom of the problem and it is clear that they want to enter the field with new vigour that they have found against Sinhalathva.
British now want to be facilitators of so called peace talks and they want to displace their proxy Norway and to have a say in the so called peace talks between the government and the LTTE. To begin with we do not want any more peace talks with the LTTE. There have been so called peace talks for about twenty five years and nothing has been achieved. However, within the last two years or so the LTTE has been weakened considerably, proving that as far as the terrorists are concerned there is only one solution, namely their defeat by military means. In the process the armed forces liberate the ordinary Tamils from the clutches of the terrorists, and I am sure that Mr. Ananda Sangaree would not object to such liberation. The ordinary Tamils were driven into the hands of the LTTE by the Vellala elite who in the decades after independence sowed the idea of a Tamil State through the Federal Party first, and then that of a separate state after the seventies through the TUF and the TULF, among the people, having manoeuvred with the British to have privileges over the Sinhala leaders in the pre independence era. If not for the false propaganda of the Tamil Vellala elite there would not have been a LTTE, and the Vellala annas cannot disown the Karaivar thambi as easy as they think. In any event it is no secret that the terrorist thambi is maintained by the westerners and the Vellalas living abroad. It has to be mentioned that India was instrumental in maintaining the fascist thambi before he decided to kill Rajiv Gandhi.
It appears that the government is not interested in Britain coming into the picture directly as the facilitator. It may be that the government of Sri Lanka is suspicious of the British who created the problem in the nineteenth century. However, there is no reason to invite Norway as the facilitator in order to avoid Britain. After all Norway is primarily the agent of Britain, though the two countries may have differences over certain details. The government of Sri Lanka has to take up the position that there would be no further talks with the LTTE. Though the LTTE as well as the other parties that contain the word Eelam in their names are creations of the Tamil vellalas, there are differences between the terrorists and the other Tamil parties. The terrorists have not taken up the path of negotiations after disarming themselves, neither have they have been decommissioned. They continue with their armed struggle against the state. Further they have not given up the demand for a separate state and would insist on Eelam. The other Tamil parties which are also creations of the Tamil elite vellalas in the final analysis, have at least given up both the armed struggle and the separate state, though they insist on a territorial solution for what they call an ethnic problem.
Clearly there is a contradiction between the formulation of the problem and the solution that is demanded and there is no reason that power should be devolved on an ethnic basis. However, power may be devolved even up to Pradeshiya Sabhas, Urban Councils and Municipalities for development as in the case of eksesath rajya in ancient times within a unitary state.
Note : A reader wants me to explain the difference between the figure I quoted for the percentage of the Tamils in the Northern and the Eastern Provinces, namely 10% and the percentage of 25 for the Tamil speaking quoted by somebody else. The difference is mainly due to the inclusion of the Muslims most of whom are Tamil speaking, in arriving at the latter figure. The reader also wants to find out the origin of the Muslims in this country. It is certainly not the Arabic speaking Arabs who are supposed to have got married to Sinhala speaking Sinhala women, who are the ancestors of the Muslims in Sri Lanka, as there is no way that their progenies throughout the island should be speaking neither Arabic nor Sinhala but Tamil. The Muslims in Sri Lanka are most probably descendants of Tamil speaking Muslims who migrated from South India not very long ago.
Professor Nalin de Silva
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