A ceasefire with mutually agreed rules of conduct between the government and the LTTE is now in place in Sri Lanka. The government hopes that this will lead to more positive political developments.
ON that hot afternoon of February 22, as Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe stood on the edge of no man's land separating the Sri Lankan forces from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Vavuniya, he could not have seen too far into the other side.
Sri Lanka's peace process is a bit like that - a step at a time, without an idea where the staircase is leading. Wickremasinghe recalled the lines of a hymn to describe his, and perhaps all of Sri Lanka's situation: "Lead kindly light, the night is dark and I am far from home."
A proper ceasefire with mutually agreed rules of conduct between the government and the LTTE is now in place in Sri Lanka for the first time since April 1995, and this replaces the informal truce that both sides were observing since December 24, 2001.
Wickremasinghe gave his Vavuniya visit a dramatic climax by handing over the letter accepting the terms of the truce to the Norwegian Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Jon Westborg, at the humble district secretariat.
Norway is the official facilitator of the peace process, and the ceasefire announcement came from Oslo. The leader of the LTTE had signed the agreement a day earlier, after Westborg made a trip to Kilinochchi in LTTE-controlled northern Sri Lanka in an Air Force helicopter to collect the document.
As the flashbulbs popped, Wickremasinghe struck a cautious note. "We have no illusions. The silencing of guns is not peace. It is only a first step. But it is indeed a step that renders negotiations for a settlement more likely, and more likely to succeed. It is a process designed to prepare the ground for negotiations which will deal with the substantive issues," he said.
The ceasefire was immediately welcomed by the international community that has been pressing the two sides to begin talking. India and the United States were among the first to put out statements welcoming the truce and Wickremasinghe got a shot in the arm when U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called him to express his support.
But at home, opposition to the agreement had begun even before the ink dried on the signatures. President Chandrika Kumaratunga, who, as the leader of the People's Alliance (P.A.) heads a government of uneasy cohabitation with Wickremasinghe's United National Front (UNF), fired the first shot within minutes of the ceasefire announcement by Norway. In a strongly-worded statement, she accused the government of violating the spirit of consensual functioning by not submitting the final document to her. By Wickremasinghe's own admission, Kumaratunga had been shown the agreement only after the LTTE leader had signed it, preventing him from giving her a few days to study the agreement as she had wanted.
Kumaratunga reiterated support for the ceasefire and the peace process, but that did not stop her from voicing her concerns on the agreement other than the violation of procedure. One of her main reservations was that by drawing up a line of control to demarcate territory under the LTTE, and leaving the interpretation of this boundary to a foreign ceasefire monitor, the agreement gravely undermined the sovereignty of Sri Lanka.
The ceasefire monitors, who will be based in six districts of the northeast, are to report to the head of the monitoring mission, a retired Major-General of the Royal Norwegian Army, Trond Furuhovde, who arrived a week after the agreement was signed to take his place in Colombo. General Furuhovde in turn is to report to the Norwegian government.
Drawing a parallel with the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir, Kumaratunga pointed out that this was the first time in the history of independent Sri Lanka that a foreign government was being authorised to draw demarcation lines on the soil of Sri Lanka. She asked for an amendment or modification of the role of the head of the ceasefire monitoring mission as the interpreter of the ceasefire agreement. Kumaratunga also expressed surprise that the role of Norway had changed from that of facilitator in the peace process to mediator or arbitrator in the resolution of disputes that would arise between the two sides in the ceasefire. "I was not aware that the nature of the Norwegian government's mandate had changed to such an extent as to make it incompatible with the sovereign status of Sri Lanka," she noted in a detailed letter to the Prime Minister that listed out her concerns.
The other issue raised by President Kumaratunga was that the agreement did not tie down the two parties to a time-frame for talks, making it seem as if the ceasefire could continue indefinitely without any pressure to resolve the underlying conflict through negotiations on substantive issues. Another reservation related to the absence of a specific provision in the agreement enabling the Sri Lanka Navy to intercept suspicious vessels in order to prevent the LTTE from smuggling in weapons during the ceasefire period. Hours before the ceasefire was announced, the Navy had intercepted a flotilla off Mullaithivu, where the LTTE's sea wing has a base. An exchange of fire followed in which the Navy lost three men, and the boats got away to berth safely on the coast. It did not affect the signing of the agreement, but intelligence reports said that it was the LTTE's fourth logistic run since both sides began an informal truce in December 2001.
Wickremasinghe has said that the agreement does not undermine national security and that even though the armed forces cannot carry out offensive operations, they had the right to intercept illegal weapons and protect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country. But Kumaratunga has questioned the legal validity of a right that has not been written into the document.
But more than the President, it is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) that has taken an openly hostile stand against the agreement, describing it as the "greatest betrayal" of Sri Lanka and accusing the government of turning the country into a "colony" of Norway.
Making an impassioned plea for support to the ceasefire in Parliament, Wickremasinghe asked his opponents not to repeat the mistakes of the past. This was not the first time a foreign country had tried to bring the two sides together, he pointed out. India had done so in 1987, and even sent its Army to help keep the peace, but Sri Lanka had sent it away. Don't do the same with Norway, he appealed.
But with local government elections scheduled for March 20, the ceasefire is fast becoming a campaign issue. The JVP dramatically burnt a copy of the agreement at one of its public rallies days after the truce was declared.
Notwithstanding the opposition and the political uncertainty it has created around the peace process, the ceasefire agreement has given the hope that more positive developments might follow.
Meanwhile, what of the LTTE? A videotape sent out by the Tigers on the day the ceasefire was announced, and aired on the television networks, showed Velupillai Prabakaran, wearing middle-age glasses and civilian clothes, signing the agreement. The image seemed to reaffirm what many want to believe - that the LTTE is finally ready for a political settlement to the conflict.
But developments in the northeast are sending out conflicting signals about the LTTE's real intentions. In Vavuniya, the LTTE mobilised more than 20,000 people for a public rally at which participants swore allegiance to the organisation declaring freedom and Tamil Eelam to be their goals. Among those who took this oath, upraised hand and all, were most Tamil members of Parliament, including a Cabinet Minister and leader of the plantation Indian Tamils, P. Chandrasekhar, who called for a similar rally to be held in the tea plantations in the central hills of Sri Lanka.
Led by university youth and schoolchildren, Pongu Tamil, as the event was called, was chilling in the delirious frenzy that it induced in its participants as they chanted "Prabakaran" and "Tamil Eelam". The "organising committee" of the rally had issued a diktat a week earlier, ordering every building in Vavuniya to fly a red-and-yellow flag, the colours of the LTTE. On the day of the rally, every shop, school and office in Vavuniya was closed in order to ensure maximum participation. School principals themselves led large contingents of students and teachers to the venue.
With the ceasefire in place and political talks looming, the LTTE seems now to be concentrating on projecting itself as a mass movement for Eelam, a people's struggle in which everybody is united as one behind the Tigers.
Indeed, through the ceasefire agreement, the LTTE has managed to achieve very easily something it has been trying hard to do all these years - get rid of every single political rival. Four parties are already under its belt as the Tamil National Alliance. Under the agreement, the others have also been taken care of. The government has undertaken to disarm Tamil "paramilitary" groups within 30 days of the ceasefire. The Eelam People's Democratic Party, which has two representatives in Parliament, the People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam, which has one MP, and the Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front of Varadharaja Perumal, have been told by the government that the weapons that had been given to them for protection against the LTTE, will now be taken back. The government has instead offered to absorb their cadres in the armed forces and post them in places outside the northeast. The pleas of these groups, which have been in the democratic mainstream since the time of the July 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, that they are registered political parties, not paramilitaries, have not met with success. The parties have said that none of their cadres will join the military, and have instead asked for police protection to carry out their political work in the north.
But how far they will be successful in this, no one knows, especially as the ceasefire gives the LTTE cadres, in unlimited numbers, freedom of movement in all areas of the northeast, including those under the government. The agreement specifies that such LTTE cadres should be unarmed and out of uniform, but the leaders of the other groups remain suspicious.
In the east, the freedom of movement to LTTE cadres has created fears even among the civilian population, who fear that the group will intensify recruitment and "tax collection". Wickremasinghe has said that he hopes to begin substantive talks with the LTTE in three months, once the ceasefire has been fully implemented. The question is, is the LTTE ready to play ball?
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