How the Tigers blew it

In the heady spring of 2003, it seems that after nineteen years of horrific war, peace was finally at hand for Sri Lanka. A cease-fire was in effect and it was holding. The Tigers had dropped their demand for a separate state, while the government seemed genuinely committed to a negotiated settlement. The A9 road was reopened, and Tamils from around the world visited their homes and families for the first time in decades.

Now, war and death once more stride the island. Bombs and shells strafe Tamil villages, thousands of homeless refugees huddle in camps, and suicide bombers blow up shopping malls. How did it come to this? How did the hope of 2003 turn into the despair of 2007?

Four words: Interim Self-Governing Authority.

During the 2003 peace talks, the Tigers refused to talk about the long-term political plan for the island. Instead, they wanted to set up the ISGA. This body would not be a separate state, but would have nearly all its powers - land, law and order, water resources, courts, control over central government spending, even the power to borrow money abroad and regulate external trade. Furthermore, it would not be an elected body, but ruled by an appointed council with a majority of members being LTTE appointees.

Read the proposal yourself if you don't believe me. Do a search for the word "election". There isn't one. The Tigers basically proposed making the North and East a dictatorship under their control.

Had they the political acumen of fleas? Had not 50 years of dealing with Sinhalese nationalists taught them anything? If the Tigers were really serious about a peace, they had to have realized how totally unrealistic their plan was. One cannot but wonder if, in fact, they knew perfectly well what reception they would get, and actually wanted peace talks to fail.

More than 50 years ago, the elements of a peaceful solution for Sri Lanka were laid out in the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957. That agreement called for regional autonomy. The North and East would have elected councils which would exercise devolved powers. It was the Sinhalese side that rejected that pact - Prime Minister Bandaranaike had to withdraw his signature under pressure from nationalists, and was assassinated for his pains by a radical Buddhist monk.

Now, in 2003, it was the Tamil side that was proposing a much more sweeping set of powers to an unelected council! Sinhalese nationalists predictably went berserk. President Kumaratunga, sidelined since her party's defeat in the 2001 parliamentary election, seized her chance. A state of emergency was declared and the defence ministry put under the control of her SLFP party. Elections in April 2004 saw the defeat of the peace-minded Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and the UNP party.

From then on, peace was doomed. After the revolt of the eastern-based Karuna Group in the spring of 2004, the Sri Lankan military pushed hard to resume war, believing (correctly, as it turned out) that Karuna's presence would push the army into a decisive tactical advantage. The tsunami of December 2004 hit Tamil regions of the island much more heavily than Sinhalese ones, and weakened the Tigers further.

The logical course of action for the Tigers was to avoid a war they could not win (and are now, in fact, losing). Their actual actions defy explanation. President Kumaratunga, once she had regained power, became more conciliatory, and even concluded the P-TOMS agreement with the Tigers for the distribution of foreign aid for the tsunami victims. The government actually collapsed over the issue, with the hardline-chauvinist JVP deserting the president. Did the Tigers do anything to salvage her position? Hardly; their next move was the assassination of Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar in August 2005.

The Tigers have complained for years that foreign governments regard them as nihilistic Al Qaeda-style terrorists rather than as a national independence movement. The trouble is that if you don't want to labeled a terrorist, you should take the trouble not to act like a terrorist. It is hard to see what, if anything, the Tigers gained from the killing.

But the greatest and most tragic act of mindless Tiger stupidity was yet to come. The presidential election of 2005 was a contest between two men: Mahinda Rajapaksa, who held the endorsements of the JVP and the bhikkus and pushed for a hard anti-Tiger line, and Ranil Wickremasinghe, who wanted to continue trying for peace. The election results show that, in regions which held large numbers of Tamil and Muslim voters (Colombo, the hill country, and government-held parts of the East) Wickremasinghe won. In the largely Sinhalese south and rural southwest, Rajapaksa won.

What did the Tigers do? They ordered Tamils not to vote, and threatened death to those who did. While 47% of Jaffna voters had cast ballots in the 2004 election, barely 1% did in 2005. Similarly huge drops in turnout can be seen in Vanni, Trincomalee, and Batticaloa districts. The government was no help (polling places were often miles away from remote villages) but that hadn't been an insurmountable barrier in 2004, when a pro-Tiger party was competing. What Tamil votes were cast went by over two-thirds to Wickremasinghe, who in the end lost by just two percentage points. The mathematics is decisive - the low-turnout Tamil regions could have carried the day.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam made Mahinda Rajapaksa the President of Sri Lanka. They made a man president who campaigned on a platform of fighting them. This goes beyond political stupidity. It is suicide. Such was the Tigers' faith in themselves and their destiny that they apparently believed that, despite the destruction of the tsunami, despite the loss of their eastern cadres, despite the war-weariness of the civilian population, they could apparently return to war and win.

The price has been terrible. The Tigers' gamble has failed. They have gained nothing from the return to war. Instead, they have lost the whole of Eastern Province and may lose the North as well. Villages are destroyed, people uprooted, and the cycle of pain and heartbreak goes on. Far from getting an Interim Self-Governing Authority, the Tamil people have only seen Incendiaries, Soldiers, Guns, and Air raids.

Even if the Tigers were to have a change of heart and offer to return to the ceasefire, it would do no good. The government is confident it can win the war by purely military means. It has no incentive to negotiate a peace when it can win by pure force. The best case for the Tigers now is the dreary, endless conflict of the years 1983-2002 happening all over again. And in the worst case - total military defeat of the Tigers - what then for the Tamils? It is hard to imagine any government, victorious from war, giving devolution or any kind of concession whatsoever to the Tamils.

The future for the Tamils of Sri Lanka now looks very dim. Outright genocide is unlikely, but de facto ethnic cleansing - being scattered over the island, so that they constitute a majority nowhere - is a distinct possibility. The Tamil people now have to face the bitter irony that the group they trusted to protect them from Sinhalese nationalism - the Tigers - has now left them at its mercy.