The military defeat of the LTTE has, far from demoralizing, galvanized the Tamil Diaspora to express its support for the LTTE more strongly than ever before. In delivering the LTTE its biggest military defeat the government of Sri Lanka has also given the organization its greatest political significance. Brazenly rallying behind the LTTE, the Tamil Diaspora has ratcheted up its demand to the highest – a separate state if possible, confederation if necessary – at the very moment the LTTE’s military significance is at its lowest.

This maximalist Tamil demand is a dead end too, useful only as a counter to the government’s dead end of doing nothing politically. So long as the government insists on archaic notions of sovereignty and the unitary constitution and frames the Tamil political problem as nothing but LTTE terrorism, the Diaspora will, in chorus, insist on Tamil self-determination and accuse the government of genocide. One set of extreme claims counter-posed by another set of extreme claims.

Living far flung and away from the horrors of war, isolated from the ignominy of defeat, and enjoying the kind of freedoms abroad that the Sri Lankan government is denying its critics at home, the Tamil Diaspora can afford to keep the dream of Tamil Eelam alive for a long time. That Eelam as separate state is now impractical or unrealizable is immaterial. And it makes no sense to ask the Tamil Diaspora to give up Eelam because there is nothing to give up. Objectively, the Eelam dream is the separatist counter to the Sri Lankan government’s ‘unitary’ intransigence, while as ‘a state of mind’ Eelam will keep the political batteries of the Diaspora constantly charged.

If there is to be any positive movement away from these dead ends, it has to start with the government. Of the two it is the only one that has some thing to give up, or change – give up the unitary constitution and regionalize the power structure. It has also the excuse to show magnanimity in victory, as it used to be said. So far it has given no indication that it is about to do anything different, new or positive. On the contrary, the signs are that the government is going back to the same old, same old ways of the past.

The war has made the Tamil Diaspora a new force in Sri Lankan politics and the Sri Lankan government in turn has been forced to realize that despite its military victory in the Vanni it has to deal with the Sri Lankan Tamils abroad if it is to resolve the Tamil problem in Sri Lanka. But rather than putting out a substantial political proposition to address the Tamil problem and engage broad sections of the Tamils, the government has decided to go fishing to find nondescript Tamil counterparts in the Diaspora to its cohorts of Tamil supplicants at home. Technically, fishing for minority supplicants is called political co-option.

Tamil political co-option has never worked in the past and it is not going to work now – either within Sri Lanka or in the Diaspora. From Sir Arunachalam Mahadeva to Lakshman Kadirgamar, including many third rate Tamil hacks not only now but also in the past, the practice of political co-option has always been fruitless and counterproductive. With the exception of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and, to a lesser extent, Dudley Senanayake in 1965, every Sinhalese leader tried to co-opt Tamil supplicants only to come a cropper.

Mutual dilemmas

It is unethical and unwise for the present government in spite of all the past experience to go fishing for spineless Tamil support in the Diaspora without offering anything to change the political system. Instead, the government should take the moral high road of offering something very substantial that would be acceptable to broad sections of the Tamil people and win the insuring endorsement of the international community.

But the government cannot abruptly take the moral high road after going too far down the low military road. Not with the government controlled by its current militaristic leadership and supporters who cannot understand that the defeat of the LTTE is not the end of the Tamil problem.

At the same time, the government needs the support of the international community to deal with the mountain of economic difficulties and reconstruction challenges, and the international community is already insisting on a political solution as a precondition for economic help now that the bogeyman of LTTE terrorism has been put to rest by the government itself. This is the government’s dilemma and it is its own making.

With the excuse of the war over the government has to demonstrate how capable it is in dealing with so far neglected but constantly accumulating problems of balance of payments, plummeting exports, the petroleum hocus-pocus, growing unemployment, never ending electricity uncertainty, and the country’s only growth industry – Colombo’s garbage! In addition, it has to deal with the direct consequences of the war.

It has to provide, as it has promised, long term compensation to tens of thousands of Sinhalese families whose young men either perished in the war or returned home minus their limbs in need of lifelong care. As the Sunday Island editorialized sometime ago, no one begrudges the promised compensation to the soldiers and their families, but the question is whether government would find the wherewithal to make these payments at all. The demobilization of the army after the war, unless the government decides to keep the hugely expanded army intact and pay for it, will create a new army of the unemployed.

The families of the LTTE fighters who died unwept and unsung have no assurances of compensation, but Sri Lanka will be poorer if these families become destitute for want of help and support. The plight of the Vanni civilians displaced many times and finally caught in the eye of the war is now under international spotlight, and the Sri Lankan government has to deliver on the promise to rehabilitate them – a promise that it ought to make to international agencies to qualify for their assistance it so desperately needs.

In sum, the war has created more problems for the government than it thought it would solve by defeating the LTTE. This is analogous to the US predicament in Iraq and internationally after getting rid of Saddam Hussein, with two significant differences. Unlike the US leaving Iraq, the Sri Lankan government cannot walk away from its own country; nor does Sri Lanka have the resources necessary to put things right on its own. All the bravado about getting help from China only means that Sri Lanka is headed in the direction of Burma.

The dilemmas facing the LTTE and Tamil Diaspora are of equal and opposite kinds. The Diaspora has been able to use the humanitarian crisis and the concerns of the international community to put the Sri Lankan government politically on the defensive despite its military offensives in the war. But it is far fetched to assume that by persuasion and protests and by self-serving and geo-politically naive legal opinions the Tamils could get the support of the international community to create a new state in Sri Lanka. Why wasn’t this thought of earlier?

While the Diaspora, certainly the overwhelming majority of it, cannot be faulted for rallying behind the LTTE and recognizing it as the ‘authentic’, if not the sole, representative of the Tamils, that solidarity by itself is not enough for the world governments that have banned the LTTE in their countries to lift those bans. The LTTE was banned for certain specific reasons and not because it lacked support among the Tamil people. It is therefore incumbent on the organization and those who speak for it to address those specific reasons and enable its entry into open and democratic politics. At the end of the day, so to speak, the LTTE or its accredited representatives have to be at the table when the terms of a political solution are negotiated.