by Rajan Philips

It would be stupid to lose sight of any war, but the bigger folly is not to realize that war itself is stupid. War is not a public good; it never was. It may have been a necessary evil in times past, but nothing less than avoidable madness at the present time. It creates more problems than it solves, and wherever it is being waged it is causing public misery while producing private or corporate gain. War is promoted and prosecuted almost always in grand terms associated with state, sovereignty, national self-determination and national security. These categories, in spite of their medieval and modern grandeur, are increasingly irrelevant to the existential challenges of our times and the survival needs of most people. Waging war in the name of outdated categories does not enable people’s security but endangers their survival.

War is no longer a continuation of politics, but a failure of politics. It is an illustration of the evolutionary shortcomings of those who decide to wage war and others who urge and spur the decision makers. Crass political calculations rather than genuine consideration of public interest underlie most eruptions of war. Along the way, it draws and benefits the scumbags of society who have no shame in profiting from the business of killing. The social and economic costs of war are huge and diverse, and the benefits few, if not nil. Those who die fighting are involuntary subalterns; they join the army because they are poor, or are conscripted to a political group under one pretext, or another. The civilian victims, who are caught in the crossfire or suicide bombings, are forgotten after the initial ululations.   

Sri Lankans have seen all of this in one form or another, through the ebb and flow of war for the last thirty years. The people are hurting but the leaders on all sides have become “worser and not wiser” (to borrow Muhammad Ali’s memorable coinage during his opposition to the Vietnam War) for the experience. The current phase of fighting began after the Presidential election in 2005. It began as if the principals on both sides had got tired of the vacuous peace process that was going nowhere, and wanted to exercise their idling war muscles. It began with each side’s cockiness that it could beat the other side and dictate an unfair (government) or disproportionate (LTTE) political solution to end the military conflict.

All the plans of the government and the LTTE have gone awry. First, the Tigers got more than their tail cut in the East, and now the Sri Lankan army is leaping from one quagmire to another in the North. When the Tigers showed off their assembled air planes in Colombo, the government began hammering Tamil areas with aerial bombing. While the army makes incremental advances on the battlefront, the Tigers hit back on buses and trains in the public space. 2008 was heralded as the year of the Tiger annihilation, at least the verifiable destruction of its military apparatus. Six months later, cocky deadline predictions have given way to loud sermonizing about the need for the government to be resolute, stay-the-course, ignore West’s warnings about human rights, cultivate the non-West as a counterweight to the West, intimidate and harass independent journalists and critics of war as infidels, and to keep fighting to the finish. The Tigers, on the other hand, are conditioned to keep on fighting regardless of what the finish might be. By all accounts, the Tigers appear to have been irretrievably weakened. But despite all assertions, the army does not appear to be getting any stronger after 18 months of fighting. 

Neither the government nor the LTTE has the will or the willingness to stop this war of attrition. Worse, they do not seem to know how to stop it even if they want to. There is no avenue or mechanism to bring to bear public protest and political pressure on the two warring entities. The current stalemate of violence and the inability to break out of it are also the result of the flawed and failed peace process that tottered around for three years before the Rajapakse government and the LTTE put it out of misery even as they put all the Sri Lankan people into misery. It was the flaws and the failure of the peace process that let the Tiger off the hook and brought Rajapakse to power.

The peace process really began in 1994, and not in 2002, although the latter version had the longest ceasefire on record since the so called Eelam Wars began. Both phases of the peace process fatally suffered from specific ‘constituency deficits’. The first phase, under President Kumaratunga, could not keep the LTTE engaged for long, as the LTTE broke loose and broke the ceasefire. In the second phase, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe stunned many Sri Lankans by bringing the LTTE into the peace process, but only at the expense of the more nationalist sections of the Sinhalese. They and important sections of the armed forces felt thoroughly betrayed and thought that Ranil Wickremasinghe had sold out to the Tigers. The Kumaratunga-Wickremasinghe tug-of-war did its part to undermine both phases of the peace process. The coup de grace was delivered by Kumaratunga when she dismissed the Wickremasinghe government on the spurious grounds of national security, and turned to the JVP for political support. Rather than producing anything positive, her precipitous actions only accelerated her exit from the presidency.

The political and social undercurrents beneath these palace games need to be highlighted. The unfortunate upshot of the state-led flowering of Sinhalese nationalism and the uplifting of the Sinhalese under-classes has been the state-alienation of the Tamil and Muslim minority nationalist aspirations and economic expectations. This was the meaning of 1956 and has been its legacy. The question is asked even now as to what the minority grievances are. The simple answer is that there are no Tamils or Muslims among the celebrated ‘children of 1956’. 1956 separated the Tamils and Muslims and left them ‘officially’ less than equal. It is no accident that many supporters of the present war in the South consider themselves to be the children of 1956. Equally, the LTTE considers itself to be constituted by the ‘other’ children of 1956.

It is farfetched and revisionistic to suggest now that the B-C Pact that was intended to partially redress the imbalance of 1956 foundered on S.J.V. Chelvanayakam’s description of it as an interim adjustment. The Pact itself embodied the interim spirit, a quid pro quo for the Federal Party to call off its Satyagraha campaign. J.R. Jayewardene who led the march against the Pact, noted in his diary after its abrogation that Prime Minister Bandaranaike should never have abrogated it! Go, figure!!

Thirty years later, as the first elected President, Jayewardene reluctantly brought in the Thirteenth Amendment to provide the redress that the B-C Pact had envisaged. The fact that the LTTE did not endorse the Amendment is no reason why the Rajapakse government should have reneged on it. What was unimplemented as 13^th Amendment, was reduced to 13-minus, and is now being promised to be rendered into 13-plus, whatever it might mean.  

Tamil attempts to achieve equality through total separation have clearly backfired, but crushing the only remaining separatist organization by itself will not provide the final answer to the question of 1956. War, or no war, the question of 1956 continues to beg for an answer. That answer has to be of a political and structural nature, and not a hectoring advice to Tamils that they should follow a co-opted Tamil politician, who in turn has been following three Presidents and is all ready to follow more.