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crisis com Selected Politi Mervyn.
edited by E. Vijayalakshmi
 

NTARES all Writings of de Silva

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Crisis Commentaries: Selected Political Writings of Mervyn de Silva

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Crisis Commentaries: Selected Political Writings
of Mervyn de Silva
Edited by E. Vijayalakshmi
International Centre for Ethnic Studies

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International Centre for Ethnic Studies 2 Kynsey Terrace, Colombo 8, Sri Lanka
Copyright (C) 2001 by International Centre for Ethnic Studies
ISBN 955-580.058-8
Printed by Unie Arts (Pvt) Ltd. No.48 B, Bloemendhal Road Colombo 13

Contents
Introduction
Part One
Sri Lanka: The End of Welfare Politics
2. Survival of the Fittest
3. April Anniversaries - I
Revolutions & Insurrections
4. April Anniversaries -
Sri Lanka and the New Global En vironment
Part Two
1. The Marooned Elite
2. External aspects of the Ethnic Issue
3. The Roots of Violence - I
4. The Roots of Violence -
5. The Roots of Violence - III
6. Third World's Encounters
of the Third Kind
yi
28
36
44
55
68
79
87
94
105

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Part Three
10.
11.
12.
13.
Pa
1.
The Left's Last Hope
Lanka Polls: Premadasa in the Limelight
India in a Fix
Dominance of Elite Ends
"Outsider" Takes on Elite
The New Approach
Lessons to be learnt from the IPKF Operations
Baiting India?
The Making of a National Crisis
Other Divisions in Lankan Society
Lamkan Buddhism
The Second Eelam War
The Age of Identity
Nonalignment and the New Information Order
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114
119
123
128
132
138
143
147
156
160
164
168
179

Introduction A Tribute to Mervyn de Silva
"Blessed is the nation which in its moment of greatest challenge and peril can produce a moral and intellectual leadership that has the vision and the courage to meet and overcome both." So wrote Mervyn de Silva, editor Lanka Guardian in the late 1980s. Mervyn de Silva was the greatest journalist that Sri Lanka ever produced. He was, and is, un paralle led in his ability to analyse the facts, present scenarios and predict outcomes. Unlike the journalism of today that often merely retells facts and gossip, Mervin de Silva engaged in hardcore analysis based on a deep understanding of history and the power of social forces. He was more than a journalist. He was also a political scientist and a critical analyst. His English was succinct, sharp and witty: his perceptions, acute and incisive.
Twenty years ago I would never have written a tribute to Mervyn de Silva. I was fuming at the man and spent a weekend in Kandy wanting to tear his hair out. I had just returned from the United States after my student years to work at The Marga Institute. Under the visionary guidance of Dr. Neelan Tiruchelvam, Shirin Cabraal and I helped develop a programme on law and development. Mervyn de Silva who was then editor of The Sunday Times heard of this and came to interview us with a photographer. He took a picture of us on a decorated couch and then the next Sunday, displayed it on the front page with some reference to beauty and brains. Shirin and I were furious at this "commodification" of our programme and our talents and wrote a letter to the editor along with others and claimed that his reference to our sex was frivolous. The next Sunday he published the letter again on the front page with the caption "Sex is Frivolous" and then

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lambasted us and our sense of self importance. He did the Sri Lankan thing. "He put us in our place.".
As the years went by, I began to appreciate Mr. De Silva and the role he played in Sri Lanka's intellectual politics. Despite his need to be a masculine chip off the old block, it was the Lanka Guardian that first published many of the first Sri Lankan feminist tracts of the 1980s. The column Cats Eye that is present today in The Island was first published by Mervyn de Silva in the Lanka Guardian. This was true for many other social causes. That is when I realized that for all his cynical veneer, Mervyn de Silva had his heart in the right place. All the important social causes, whether it was trade unions, human rights, anti racism, women's rights or the environment, Mervyn de Silva gave young writers space and encouragement. In the 1980s, The Lanka Guardian was the mainstay of the English speaking intelligentsia. The journal was the forum for the articulation of dissent and alternative visions of the future. Many of the ideas we take for granted in the 1990s were first mooted in The Lanka Guardian in the 1980s. Despite his empathy for the correct political causes, Mervyn de Silva's main contribution to journalism and Sri Lankan intellectual life was as a political analyst. He dissected political reality and he was very incisive in recognizing the social forces that determined our history. No-one was more aware of international affairs than Mervyn de Silva. As one of the pioneer intellectuals of non-alignment, he took a major interest in international and regional affairs. It was for this reason that he, more than any other Sri Lankan commentator, recognized the importance of our relationship with India. When Mr. Jayawardene charted a different course in the 1980s and turned Sri Lanka away from the special relationship with India, Mervyn de Silva warned against this course of action. From the beginning he argued forcibly that this would be Sri Lanka's ruin. Research into that period, into the training camps

and the Indo-Lanka Accord point to the consequences Sri Lanka faced for not heeding his advice. Our relationship with India is the clue to maximizing our sovereignty. Anyone who flouts this rule does so at our peril. Unfortunately Mervyn de Silva and Shelton Kodikkara were the last of our international specialists who were also experts on our relationship with India. Their demise will seriously affect our knowledge and analysis of our most important bilateral relationship.
Mervyn de Silva was also one of the first generation of post independent Sri Lankans who enjoyed an international reputation. Bilingual at home and savvy abroad, they held their own with the brightest talents of the West. In addition they made easy connections with intellectuals in other Third World countries, Together they pushed for the New International Economic Order, The New Information Order and The Charter for economic Rights and Duties. Neoliberalism and the power of markets destroyed their ambitions but they were the nationalist generation that was acutely aware of colonialism, dreamed the impossible dreams while engaging with global politics. Their bilingualism made them aware of international developments and new ideas while keeping abreast of local realities and energies. Tissa Abeyesekere argued in a recent speech at The Gratian Awards, that with the passing away of this bilingual elite and the emergence of monolingual elites, we lost our creative regeneration. Mervyn de Silva was then like the Sarathchandra of Sri Lanka's international relations. He reached his zenith in Sri Lanka, before we painted ourselves black with ethnic fratricide and human rights abuses. Mervyn was of the era when Sri Lanka along with Kofi Annan's Ghana was the darling of the international world; where we took the lead and where people like Gamini Corea fashioned international economic policies. Rooted in third world realities but confident of meeting the West as equals, this generation of Sri Lankans were not only national heroes but international

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figures.
However, even at home he played an irreplaceable role. It was after all in the pages of the Lanka Guardian that the first modern debates on the ethnic conflict were made available to the general reading public. Before the Lanka Guardian opened its pages, the ideological struggle in Sri Lanka's small intellectual community was between the Marxists and the nonMarxists. Decades were spent in this intellectual confrontation. However, after 1983 and the growth of the ethnic civil war, intellectuals from both groups began to analyse the current crisis. In that dialectical process, new fault lines appeared- those between nationalists and secular, social democratic thinkers who were skeptical and critical of nationalism. In the late 1980s, the Lanka Guardian became the primary vehicle for the latter group of intellectuals. The Committee for Rational Development, The Social Scientists Association and many others debated the public in the pages of the Lanka Guardian. Many of the seminal works on the crisis were the product of that period and were first mooted in the pages of The Lanka Guardian.
In the last decade of his life, Mervyn de Silva became one of few, sober voices of sanity in a country gone made with hatred and violence. His death, a month before Dr. Neelan Triuchel vam's assassination and a year after Charles Abeyesekere's death, left Sri Lanka bereft of a towering intellectual personality whose ideas wielded influence and whose writings could guide the political leadership in new directions. Many people will miss Mervyn de Silva in the corridors of power and in the press briefings, asking the unaskable questions and providing a coherent analysis of our turbulent political reality. This volume is an attempt to keep his voice alive so that the next generation will have the benefit of his analysis. Thanks to the indefatiguable efforts of his son Dayan Jayatilleka, the ICES librarian Mr. Thambirajah and

the ICES library staff we are proud to present this volume to the public to coincide with the second death anniversary of Mr. Mervyn de Silva.
Radhika Coomaraswamy

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Part One

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1.
Sri Lanka: The End of Welfare Politics
A conspicuous feature of Sri Lanka's condition of crisis has been the failure of the old Left,
represented in the ruling coalition of the United Front, to satisfy the aspirations of the young,
educated unemployed who were the main force in
the insurrection of 1971. Only a year previously,
in the election of 1970, the victory of the United Front had seemed to confirm the capacity of the
existing political system, characterized by the
etiquette of British democracy and sustained by distributed welfare, to bring about dramatic and progressive change. The failure of that system to accommodate forces which it had itself created leaves Sri Lanka looking for a new mode of transition.
A 'Silent Revolution"?
Post-election euphoria produced many self-gratifying judgements on the United Front's spectacular victory on
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May 27, 1970. Though some had more points to sustain their judgement, none was more popular or proved more durable than the phrase "the silent revolution" - until, that is, the "silence" was shattered by the rude sounds of insurrection in April, 1971. A Ceylonese society, which is yet to recover from that seismic shock no longer takes kindly to the word "revolution", and even soi distant revolutionaries use it now with a new circumspection designed to dissociate their kind of revolution from the frightening realities of that time. So the word returns to the language of propaganda and romance, which is where the Ceylonese psychology has always preferred it to be, and where modern political practice had up until the insurrection contrived to confine it. But May, 1970 was another time. Perhaps, another country too.
The almost universal appeal of the phrase "the silent revolution" reveals much about the Ceylonese political experience, and about attitudes in a country where a large, sprawling and articulate middle class is an effective opinionmaker. It is this class - constantly drawing into its lower strata through the operation of educational opportunity, social welfare and relatively high wages - which stands between the ruling class and the masses. But it is more than a buffer. The middle class - the teacher and the trade union leader, the ayurvedic physician and the monk, the mudalali (village businessman) and the clerk - is both a shaper and filter of opinion. And it is on this class that the rulers for the most part depend for psychological sustenance and confirmation of the moral authority to govern.
If the term "silent revolution" gratified the vanity of the victors in the election, it had some solace for the vanquished too. It flattered an assumption cherished by the middle class that dramatic, even drastic, political change could be effected without bloodshed or the disruption of democratic processes. And that Sri Lanka was the soil in which had grown a uniquely successful transplantation of British parliamentary democracy, an institution thought to be robust and resilient,
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enough to absorb all the challenges posed by political and economic transition. What could be more reassuring to the loser - especially a loser who had had his moments of being a winner too, than a guarantee that the contest would continue under the old rules?
If the word "revolution" had socialist overtones, comfort could be taken from the fact that in emergent societies engaged in the task of nation-building, nationalism, expressing itself in particular ideals and forms of political action, is a stronger force than dogma. There would be no need for the Ceylonese revolution to take the increasingly assorted but familiar paths to fulfillment forced on other Third World nations in basically comparable predicaments; ideological communism, the oneparty state with an omnipotent "redeemer", or the march behind some Bonapartist liberator.
The Politics of Welfare
The reasons for these beliefs were many, and most of them were sound. Universal franchise had come to Ceylon early, in 1931. The people, who had already had some introduction to democratic practices through an ancient system of village councils (gansabhas), were fairly well-schooled in representative governance when independence came in 1948. Even before independence, there had been serious efforts to reduce social inequalities, particularly in education. The national languages had replaced English as the medium of education in schools. Education itself had become free, and now a nation-wide network of central schools was leading to rapid expansion of educational opportunities.
Free medical care in state hospitals and dispensaries were also part of a burgeoning social welfare system under which the staple food, rice, was soon subsidized to both, the consumer and the producer. A more than adequate ration was provided to urban consumers at a price far below what the
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country paid when it imported well over half the island's needs. And the paddy grower meanwhile, was getting a guaranteed price. The Ceylonese had gradually become the most subsidised creature in the world.
There had also been a steady growth in the trade union movement resulting in, and then flourishing under the protection of a corpus of liberal labour laws of which any advanced western country would have been proud. With a high literacy rate (now 89 per cent) and an expanding middle class, Ceylon seemed to justify the high expectations of the British, who had always regarded it as a model, manageable colony.
Were these policies, in fact the humanitarian response of a ruling class, which was not as mercilessly exploitative, backward and stupid as the oligarchies under which some other poor countries had to suffer? Or were they - especially the expensive apparatus of social welfare - the shock absorbers of extremism and violence consciously introduced into the political machine by sagacious rulers? Or were they the gifts with which the political parties beckoned or rewarded the mass vote? As usual, the truth is probably a combination of these, and in the event what matters today is not so much the precise nature of the motivating impulse, as the implications of the result.
From Welfare to Crisis
That result is national economic crisis. What brought it into being was politics, and politics conducted with scant respect for economic considerations or any attention to the harsh price, which the future would undeniably extract. That future has now arrived. Ceylon has come to the end of the road of social welfare-ism; common sense plainly spells out that the welfare system must be abandoned or gradually dismantled. It is a predicament, which is primarily the government's. In a parliamentary variation on the old game of musical chairs, it
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is the man who has leapt into the seat who is in a fix when the music stops. The music in this case is the balance of payments and external assets.
When tea, rubber and coconut prices were good, it was pleasing. When rubber price shot up during the Korean War boom, the Ceylonese upper class danced to it with gusto, but when there was a sudden increase in the price of rice in the world market, a harshly discordant note became audible. Mr Dudley Senanayake removed the rice subsidy, and the mass disturbances which followed forced him out of the premiership, and out of active politics for five years. This first taste of mass anger and violence in which six died, frightened Ceylon's leaders, and taught them that what had been given could not, without grave risk, be taken back. The subsidy was restored. (When, in 1967, Mr Senanayake was pressured by International Monetary Fund to administer a similar pill, he sugar-coated it by halving the ration but giving that portion free; more coating than pill, actually).
Lessons of 1953
There are other substantial lessons to be learnt from the hartal of 1953, chief of which was that politics should not be the first and paramount business of a politician in Ceylon. Economics is not only the ultimate dictator, but it can make sudden interventions, which disrupt the best calculations of governments. This was particularly true of Ceylon because, as a simple import-export economy, it was completely at the mercy of external factors. If the price fetched abroad by just one of the island's three export commodities (tea, rubber and coconut) dropped, there was a foreign exchange crisis in Ceylon or a hole in its budget. Moreover, the economy was exposed at both ends. (For a decade and more now, Ceylon's
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import bill has been in excess of its export earnings, and more than half this bill has been for consumer essentials, mainly rice, flour, sugar, onions, lentils, dried fish and chillies).
The main political parties, preoccupied with the parliamentary contest, and the upper classes, accustomed to conspicuous consumption and under the belief that mass misery was adequately cushioned by subsidies and social welfare, gave no immediate sign that they had taken these lessons to heart. When it defeated the pro-western, conservative UNP in 1956, Mr. S.W.R.D.Bandarnaike's SLFPled People's United Front followed the old path of all-round wage increase in response to trade union pressure. Additionally, generous special allowances were granted. This was effected in both the private and the public sectors. Once again, socialism in Ceylon was interpreted as a system of redistribution and scarcely a thought was given to productivity and increasing the nation's wealth. But this was a time when clear thinking was, in any case, difficult for the government. Their attention was divided between a variety of disasters - strikes, floods, Tamil protest, race riots, and finally, the assassination of the prime minister.
Mr Dudley Senanayake returned to lead a minority government, which was compelled to go to the polls in three months. Just before the elections he reduced the price of rationed rice again, but this did not save him. Mrs. Bandaranaike was voted in.
Mr. Felix Dias Bandarnaike, a young finance minister of her government installed in 1960 proposed a reduction not in the price of rice, but in the ration. He was rapidly hurried out of office, and he left the cabinet swearing never to return, "even to plant grass". (Quickly educated in realpolitik, and presumably impervious to irony, he did return, to become minister of agriculture). But the government soon saw that some belt-tightening had to take place, so the import bill was
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pruned. Out went luxuries, semi-luxuries and inessentials, in that order, but the balance of payments problem did not go away. It has remained stuck to Ceylon's economy like an everlengthening shadow.
Aid Givers to the Rescue?
Returning to power in 1965, having "saved democracy from the totalitarian threat" of a new SLFP-LSSP coalition formed the year before (the coalition that tried to take over the press), Mr Dudley Senanayake thought that western aid would prove a saviour. His advisers apparently forgot that in these days, and in what the economists call "the present foreign aid climate", it was too much to expect the United States to send the Seventh Cavalry to organize the last-minute rescue of a small country's besieged economy. (Ceylon in any case has never been a high political priority in the overall strategies of the big powers. China's current concern for this island, arising out of Bangladesh, the intensification of big power interests in the Indian Ocean and emerging patterns of power in Asia, is a new development). A new group of aid-givers, sponsored by the World Bank, was in fact established, but this effort, though helpful, was too modest to make any impression on the country's deepening exchange crisis. In the first year of the UNP government there was a debate on economic policy between the party's right wing led by Mr J.R. Jayewardene, and the so-called moderates.
Backed by big business, the right-wing group argued for an all-blooded free exchange, and the dismantling of the huge state corporations and their replacement by joint stock companies with 50% private capital. But if Ceylon, encumbered by social welfare commitments, could not give Straightforward Socialism a chance, neither could it give an opening to capitalism. Mr. Jayewardane lost the debate, and
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official policy continued along the middle of the road. Too frightened to reduce living standards and disturb patterns of public consumption too sharply, the government tried to hold the line with foreign loans (which trebled the foreign debt). And when the next elections approached, it chose as its banner, the green revolution.
Too late and too unequal
The green revolution in Ceylon, concentrated principally upon rice and potatoes, began in 1967, too late to make a significant beneficial impression on rural life by election year, 1970. But short-term effects were becoming apparent, and they were politically and socially adverse. Production had gone up, but the wealth remained in the hands of the rural affluent, or was drained off to the towns. A new class of kulaks had been created and an opening made for get-rich-quick village middlemen, colourfully personified by a new tribe of "tractormudalalis". The gap between the rich and the poor in the rural areas had visibly widened. In the rural constituencies, Mr Senanayake's UNP and its allies were virtually destroyed. More than 50 members, including eleven cabinet ministers, lost their seats. (The present government has, however, been wise enough to push forward the general plan of the new agriculture).
Political forces up to 1971
At this moment of the "silent revolution", and before the thunder of a real revolution had sounded, there had been, in the first 25 years of parliamentary politics in Ceylon, three broad forces. There was the UNP on the right, the SLFP at the center and the LSSP-CP (Moscow) representing the Left establishment. For reasons that will be clear later, I exclude
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the Federal Party, which is Tamil, and the Tamil Congress, which provide a sort of sub-plot to the main parliamentary drama.
A study of the general elections since 1947 show that the anti-UNP forces had to be united if they were to be certain of defeating the right. The convergence of anti-UNP elements had been a long-drawn-out process. No-contest pacts and other electoral arrangements led to the SLFP-LSSP coalition of 1964 and finally in 1967 to the United Front, which was based on a common program publicly presented. But even when this program became an election manifesto, not only did each party maintain its independent personality, but inherent differences and conflicts also stood in the way of a clear, purposeful policy, particularly in economic matters. The uncertainties and vacillations were not yet eliminated when the insurrection of April 1971 made its destructive contribution.
This summary of attitudes to Ceylon's material situation is offered not as an economic analysis, but as evidence relevant to my main purpose in this article, which is to indicate a basic approach to society and politics in Ceylon. It is my purpose also to mark the nature of the political processes at work and to delineate the general characteristics of a condition that every observer agrees is one of profound crisis.
Students of political science will certainly shudder at the insouciant impressionism of this essay. But I in turn am aware of, and disconcerted by the fragmented and sometimes. grotesquely distorted picture of Ceylonese politics, which can, emerge from more specialized modes of inquiry and observation. For instance, many commentaries place a disproportionate emphasis on the Marxist Left. Its Trotskyist ideology seems to induce in sympathizers abroad, a quaint mixture of nostalgia and desperate hope. It also continues to attract an assortment of Marxists to this "not-quite-lost paradise'. Undeniably, the Marxist movement is important in the evolution of Ceylonese politics, especially in the events that led up to the 1971 eruption of extra-parliamentary
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activism. But I shall argue later that the movement in its old orthodox form has now run its course.
Present Tests
The question, which now faces Ceylon is whether the conviction that there can be a peaceful, democratic transition from the old structure of society to a new emancipated social order remains tenable today. Have the country's political institutions the capacity to meet popular aspirations, particularly the urgent demands of a new, frustrated generation, without a violent rupture with the past? Will the economic crisis engulf these institutions, or have they in any case become an impediment to the solution of Ceylon's problems, which must be removed, whatever the price? The United Front is faced with finding answers without too much loss of time, and its enormous parliamentary majority, 120 out of 151 elected members, makes its task harder rather than easier. The very magnitude of its victory has destroyed the old excuses which governments use to obscure inaction. With its two-thirds majority, it was even able to amend the constitution. With the senate abolished, appeals to the privy council stopped. And with the new constitution promulgated, the power of the present parliament amounts to a legitimized dictatorship, under which the whole parliamentary way of life in Ceylon is now on trial.
It is necessary to put in historical perspective, the elements which make up this scene, if one is to measure accurately the danger in which the country stands. Reverting to the silent revolution, if the first word both expressed and confirmed cherished certainties, the other did not at that time arouse serious fears; in the popular vocabulary, a Ceylonese revolutionary was a respectable middle-class, trousered person, a familiar feature of the political landscape for some decades. The Left seemed like part of the establishment.
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Origins of the Left
The LSSP, the first Marxist party (and still the largest) was founded in the 1930s by a group of young Ceylonese on their return from universities abroad. They chose Trotskyism as their ideology, which has given them a slightly museum-piece air throughout their history. In the West, Trotskyism may have an intellectual appeal as a purist school of thought, but it has little connection with mass movements.
In Ceylon, despite it being the mainstream of communism, this held true. Isolated by doctrine from the international movement, and by the same token, from the realities of world politics, the LSSP's cosmopolitanism (in any case an alien quality) combined with its ideological puritanism, to separate the party from all but those sections of the masses which it chose as its power base. It had an elitist leadership. Rigid recruitment procedures helped to guarantee a narrow exclusiveness, which gave the party absolutely no equipment with which to lead the masses into serious struggle, Soon, energies were being dissipated in esoteric doctrinal debate, and in internecine squabbles, which resulted in party splits. Out of the LSSP came the USP (Stalinist) and then the official Communist Party (Moscow), which in the 1960s broke in two when Mr. N. Sanmugathasan formed the CP (Peking): this, in turn, has now split. (The TampoeSamarakkody faction, which also broke away from the LSSP in the 1960s has now split again; Mr Tampoe leads the LSSP(R) and Mr Samarakkody the (R) LSSP, a typically Trotskyist refinement of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Mr. Tampoe is the official representative of the Fourth International in Paris. Mr. Samarakkody denounces Mr Tampoe for having accepted from the Asia Foundation, an alleged CIA conduit thrown out of Ceylon by Mrs Bandaranaike's government in 1970, a grant to attend a Harvard seminar. These weird intimacies are recorded here to show how huge is the gap between the thoroughly bourgeois
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manners of the Marxist salon in Ceylon and revolutionary mass politics - an impression foreign readers would be unlikely to glean from what is written abroad by friends of the local revolutionary Left.)
Isolated by Language
If absolute insistence on ideological purity formed a barrier between the party and the masses, what made it impenetrable was language. In a colonial society, language is a phenomenon which can confound both the conventional methodology of western scholarship and the ordered simplicity of Marxist class analysis. The extent to which a foreign ruler draws the upper class of the ruled into his cultural orbit varies according to several factors, among the most important of which is the size of the colony. What might be true of India or Indonesia was unlikely to be true of small, compact Ceylon, in which a fair section of the indigenous upper class had already been "softened" by 300 years of Portuguese and Dutch rule.
As a result, in the early period of Marxism, the intelligentsia, including the new radicals, thought and spoke in English, a language unknown to 95% of their fellow countrymen. Here in fact were two nations, and it might have been thought that welding them together was a revolutionary task. But Marxist leadership, drawn inevitably from the inbred world of the English-educated, for all its efforts to "move with the masses", remained as aloof from them as were the landed gentry. It is indicative that 40 years of Marxism did not produce either the scriptures or the main exegesis in Sinhala.
Lost Opportunities
This is not to say that the LSSP was without admirers and sympathisers. Later, because of its exclusiveness and concern
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with theory, it lost its great historical opportunity to overthrow the nerve less conservative first-generation leaders of independent Ceylon. But it had by then made some mark on the imagination - if not the political will - of fellow members of the intelligentsia, and in a much vaguer way, on a broad swathe of society. People outside the urban areas saw in the young rebels a refreshing courage beneath the iconoclasm of their outlandish ideas. But urban opinion, especially the students and the radicalized middle classes in the southern coastal belt, took warmly to what they saw as adventurous idealism, ignoring the rigour that went with it. This was fostered when the LSSP made enough of a nuisance of itself at the outbreak of war for the British military authorities to feel it necessary to lock the leaders up. The support for them strengthened when they made a jailbreak and escaped to India or went underground.
It did not seem to have occurred to the British that the Leftists were already such fast prisoners of their own ideology that they were incapable of engineering the kind of militant nationalist movement, which, in other colonial countries, had coincided with the pre-independence phase. When they failed to seize their moment after independence, it was not just because they were alienated from any possibility of a mass base, although they were far more intelligent and had much more active consciences than the Ceylonese leaders of the day, but because they were misled by their own apparatus of analysis. Their faith, formulated to preserve the 'truth' from pollution by Stalinist renegades, told them that the "imperialist war" would become simultaneously a social revolution. But Ceylon was by no means ready for any sort of revolution at all, particularly since the Marxists had made little serious attempt to educate the masses. Propounding abstract ideas clothed in rhetoric was no substitute. It is true that they had made pleas for socio-economic justice, which had impressed
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many of the young. But it was left (and left for a long time) to non-Marxist socialists of the center to translate the substance of these pleas into an acceptable popular idiom.
The LSSP and Communal Politics
Persisting in doctrinaire error, the LSSP demanded, in the name of the international proletariat, the free flow of Indian immigrants into Ceylon. In this, they were fanatically ignoring the clear lesson that history had already taught when the British imported Tamil labourers to work in the tea estates after the transformation of the agriculture based economy into a tea plantation economy. That policy had resulted in the ruthless ejection of the Sinhala peasants from their ancestral plots in the Kandyan heartland of the island, and turned them into the most backward and impoverished social group in Ceylon. (The change that tea wrought upon Ceylon is a major cause of today's problems, both economic and social. But to make the point in full here would, though relevant, be to divert space from the more immediate issues).
The living conditions of the Tamil labourers were no less wretched than those of the Sinhala peasants. But they were nevertheless identified in the Sinhala mind as privileged appendages of the hated planter raj, and a clear link in the chain of foreign exploitation which included the Tamil village storekeepers (long established in Ceylon, but still loathed) and the Indian traders in Colombo's business bazaar.
After independence, the Tamil plantation workers were the government's first target. The Citizenship Act of 1948 disfranchised a vast number of them. India did not want them either, and so in a single barbaric stroke, they were rendered in effect stateless. The intention was to cripple this minority as a political force, and it was successful. In 1947 the estate population voted six members to the House of Representatives. Today, those plantation workers - between 120,000 and
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150,000 - who remain on the electoral register are so scattered that they can exercise only the most marginal influence in elections. And there is one MP nominated to represent estate workers. India agreed in 1964 to take some Tamils back, and repatriation is going ahead, but an estimated 150,000 have not been allocated a country. However, to acknowledge the injustice to these workers is not to deny the even greater injustice done so long ago to the Kandyan peasantry.
Having made a bad psychological mistake in their declaration on this subject, the Marxists found themselves confronted with a formidable check in the shape of successive constituency delimitations which whittled away the value of the urban vote in favour of the rural vote. The villages, said the government, were being compensated for years of neglect, but it so happened that the political establishment, the conservative UNP, was in the process much strengthened. Backed by the British and by commercial interests, it drew its mass support through landowners and a network of politically influential and pliant village headmen, all administrative tools inherited from the British. When Mr S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike left the UNP and formed the SLFP in 1951, this was where he attacked, and where he won enormous ground. By 1956 he had been embraced as an ally by the rural middle class, led by the monks, teachers and native physicians, as well as by a more widespread bourgeoisie and a rising Sinhala-educated intelligentsia angry at the monopoly of the westernized elite.
Mr. Bandaranaike's Alternative
The Marxists were hopelessly ill-equipped to perceive, let alone comprehend, the workings of these forces, either below or on the surface. They continued to believe that from their feckless advocacy of free immigration from India, and their espousal of Sinhala urban labour and the Indian plantation worker, a working-class revolution could spring. They dwelt
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upon dreams of a unified proletariat, and ignored the peasant, though a modicum of political common sense would have told them that the path to power ran through paddy fields and not factories or tea plantations. Their lack of feeling for realities was demonstrated again when the Left leaders, in the face of the Sinhala-Buddhist movement then burgeoning under Mr Bandaranaike's encouragement, demanded that Tamil be given parity with Sinhala as an official language.
In parliamentary terms, the LSSP's strength had begun to decline in 1947. The transfer of power was a blow, plunging them into yet more fierce internal debate. (How could imperialism voluntarily withdraw? For years the Trotskyists argued with virulence about whether this independence was "real" or "fake"). Then came Mr Bandaranaike's departure from the UNP and his founding of a moderate socialist party. The UNP was losing popularity fast, but until then to throw them out would have been to admit a Marxist coalition, which if its pronouncements were to be believed, would use the parliamentary system as a tool with which to demolish parliament. Mr. Bandarnaike was an alternative who was not only credible but also comfortingly democratic. For all his aristocratic background and Oxford education, he had a far surer grasp than the Marxists did of the mood and aspirations of the Sinhalese masses. Mr Bandaranaike had a true politician's resilience. He had a magnetic personality and was a compelling orator. And he had a ready-made cause in the underprivileged state into which the Sinhalese had sunk under colonialism. The British had as a matter of conscious policy favoured the Tamils and the Christians, and in both jobs and representation, the Sinhala-speaking Buddhist masses were at a great disadvantage. Now the masses were throwing up their own middle class to act as their spokesman, and they had a champion.
Mr. Bandaranaike entrenched his support by becoming a Buddhist, shedding his western clothes for the national dress, stressing on the Buddhist ethos and proposing Sinhala as the
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official language. He also sought the revival of indigenous arts, crafts and cultural traditions. Mr. Bandarnaike also offered radicalism in economic issues (the immediate nationalization of public transport and the ports, rapid expansion of the state sector, the accent on industry and the new concept of a mixed economy), and an international modernism in foreign policy (non-alignment, Afro-Asianism, the establishment of relations with the Soviet Union, China and other socialist countries, and the closure of British naval and air bases).
The UNP's policy had been one of timid dependence on the British, a colourless adherence to the status quo. Mr. Bandaranaike was perceptive enough to detect that he must serve two seemingly contradictory desires in the public mind; the nationalist longing to celebrate and identify with Ceylon's rich past, and the radical impulse towards a new, socialist pattern. Seeing this clearly, he was able to appropriate the most attractive items in the Trotskyist propaganda package and market them in a fine new wrapper.
This is probably one reason why the Left was implacably opposed to Mr Bandaranaike; this, and the adroitness with which he had moved in to fill the vacuum left by the UNP. The Marxist parties had not been able to achieve even a modicum of power in 20 years. Mr. Bandaranaike was in full control in less than five. The Left, bravely holding aloft its banner of non-communalism, was swamped by the tide he had released. Its leaders were abused as traitors, and its meetings broken up by Sinhalese extremists, usually led by Buddhist monks. But the feature of Mr Bandaranaike's middle path policies ("middle path" is a direct adaptation of a central Buddhist concept of virtue) which most seriously undermined the left was their effect upon the status of organized labour.
Nationalisation, and the expansion of the state sector through the mushrooming of state corporations (still a basic feature of socialism here today) turned the urban worker, especially the state employee, into a civil servant, with
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benefits like an incremental wage structure, special allowances, overtime, bonuses, fringe benefits, holiday pay, provident fund schemes and uniforms. Even a Scandinavian country would have been proud of his status. The Ceylonese Marxist, already in a position of ambivalence in class terms, was now faced with the clearest possible evidence that there can be total separation of identity between the political man and the economic animal.
The Left's Last Bid
In 1960, the LSSP made a last bid for power, and put more than a hundred candidates in the field. The communists put in another fifty or so. Both were humiliated. It was an illustration that the LSSP in particular had just not done its homework in the simple arithmetic of parliamentary power. Both the Marxist parties, pointing to their record of support for the plantation workers, contested seats in the Tamil provinces only to find that the Tamil voter wanted Tamil candidates from Tamil parties. Whatever admiration the Tamils may have had for the Left's stand was not reflected in the ballot box.
From Socialism to Welfare
Acerbic young Trotskyists today mark this as the moment at which the LSSP threw away its ideological virtue and went in search of a partner. Undermined in both the towns and the plantations, it finally faced the bitter fact that it could not come to power on its own. Moreover, it was the SLFP, the hated party of the national bourgeoisie, which had established relations with the Soviet Union, kicked the British out of their bases and adopted non-alignment as its foreign policy. The LSSP issued a declaration accepting the principle of a multiparty system and free periodical elections. Then came the "no
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contest" pact with the SLFP, followed by a coalition with them in 1964, a common SLFP-LSSP-CP front in 1968, and a United Front government of the three parties in 1970. In other words, the dilution of Marxian socialism, and its conversion to social welfare-ism.
Today, for the first time, the Marxist parties share power. Their old cadres and professionally qualified sympathizers are in positions of authority in ministries, government departments, corporations, banks and boards. Even old deserters have come back to accept high positions. The cultural cohesiveness of the western-educated coteries guaranteed the party leadership a secure place in the political establishment if it wanted it. And the party was quick to perceive some longterm advantages in accepting it if it could use the SLFP alliance as a way of getting access to the rural peasantry and the village middle class and at least some of the levers of the administrative machine. It was a fairly safe assumption that the LSSP could amply compensate for its comparative weakness in popular support by its intellectual capacity and disciplined, educated membership. However, with only eighteen members in a government parliamentary party of 120, and three in a cabinet of 21, it is still not likely to be effective, even if it does come up with a program sufficiently dynamic to meet present national needs.
The Children of 1956
Against this background, the surprising thing about the insurrection is not that it happened, but that people outside Ceylon should have been astonished that it happened. But consider the context. Ceylon's educated youth was already restless, with many radical enough to believe, and even teach, that socialism had well-prepared answers for all the anxieties in their troubled lives. The massive electoral victory of 1970 brought full-blooded Marxists, the political gurus of the
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young, into places of authority for the first time. The old reactionary elements seemed to be in full retreat. Surely now the roadblocks on the path to socialism would be peremptorily removed, and the revolution would come. When it did not, the patience of the young - and this is a young country, with more than half its population under 30 - quickly got exhausted.
To some extent, the JVP (People's Liberation Front), the party which led the insurrection, may be seen as the angry children of the "revolution" of 1956, when Mr Bandaranaike's victory had swept away much of what at least the upper classes in Colombo had believed to be impregnable. It had represented a great leap forward in participatory democracy. The act of defeating an old established government is, I suspect, as critical a point in the growth of mass political consciousness as a country's first initiation into democracy. (Indian democracy is still to face this important test). Much of what had been underneath - Sinhala, Buddhism, and all that they meant in terms of national tradition and pride - was brought to the top. The sense of identification between government and people, which was achieved then is still the great strength of the SLFP. But the very fact of its dominance carries seeds of the danger that if it fails or seems to fail, there may be a slump in popular confidence in the effectiveness of the parliament as an institution. Some of the young dramatically demonstrated that this was not a danger to be lightly dismissed.
Tamil Fears Revived
With the economic crisis deepening and the educated Sinhala youth in revolt, the government is confronted with yet another political challenge, and one from an old quarter. Last October 2, the Tamil United Front, an organization initiated by the Federal Party and supported by other Tamil parties and groups, held a one-day hartal to protest against the new constitution of May, 1972, which like the old one, did not contain explicit
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safeguards for minority communities and religions. The Federal Party leader resigned his seat, and the TUF announced that its struggle would continue until Tamil rights - particularly equality for the Tamil language throughout the island - was restored.
Tamil bitterness has been nurtured by the fact that since the Colebrooke proposals of the early nineteenth century, it had a built-in advantage over the Sinhala majority; a system of communal representation quite deliberately weighted in favour of the Tamils. The advantage was, it is true, gradually eroded, but it was not finally eliminated until the Donoughmore recommendations of 1928 gave the country universal franchise and non-communal representation. The Tamils, naturally enough, bitterly opposed the Donoughmore proposals. They claimed that communal hostility and tension had been increased by these proposals, and they set up and sustained an agitation with a large anti-Sinhala element in it. They were still claiming it as late as 1939.
In 1944, the Soulbury commissioners were confronted with a demand that there should be a distribution of seats, which guaranteed equal representation to the Sinhalese majority and to the combined minorities. Allegations were made of the existence of a policy of discrimination against the minorities, but the commission found them unproven. It did, however, include in the constitution it drew up, a section prohibiting parliament from passing any law restricting the free exercise of any religion, or conferring or imposing disabilities on any community or religious group. This is the section which no longer exists.
In the 1950s and 1960s there seemed to be a prospect that the Tamil parties might regain some power by holding the balance between two Sinhala parties of more or less equal strength, the UNP and the SLFP. The Federal Party, controlling at least 20 seats, would align itself for a price with one or the other, in order to secure that particular party a parliamentary majority. The price, naturally, would be the restoration of
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Tamil rights. Between 1958 and 1960, the UNP, resorting to the first refuge of the defeated in Ceylon, communalism, launched a campaign of virulent racial propaganda, and the FP sided with the SLFP. But the SLFP got a clear majority and did not need FP help, and consequently, in the 1965 election, the FP worked with the UNP to try and defeat the SLFP-LSSP coalition. The result seemed to be a happy one for the FP. It won sixteen seats, the UNP won 66 (nine short of a clear majority), and Mr Dudley Senanayake signed a "secret pact" with the FP leaders promising to grant most of their demands.
Meanwhile, however, the defeated parties were making anti-Tamil propaganda to such good purpose that when the government introduced special regulations on the use of Tamil, the police in Colombo had to fire on demonstrators. A monk was shot dead, and an emergency was declared. That was as far as the Federal Party got. It was left with the leisure to reflect upon the curious arithmetic by which an ally can be more influenced by his defeated rivals than by his useful friend. The regulations which caused the demonstration were incorporated in the constitution, however, and the new constitution has a chapter on fundamental rights; facts which comfort some Tamil politicians, but not the Federal Party. In their view Tamils remain in practice second-class citizens, and will continue in this humiliating position until Tamil is made an official language alongside Sinhala.
The Tamils and the United Front
The presence of the Marxist parties in the present United Front can bring them some comfort, if they choose to take it. The left has been able to soften the SLFP's traditional militancy on Sinhalese-Buddhist questions, and has gradually been able to convince the SLFP that economic issues must be given priority, and that national unity is a precondition for successful
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planned development. Though the cleavage in national politics still persists (the Tamil parties concentrate in the northern and eastern provinces, leaving the seven others to the Sinhala parties), the United Front is trying to build some bridges. Several ministers regularly visit Tamil areas, and since the LSSP and the CP do have small, but sound pockets of support in these areas, the United Front has so far managed to behave like a national, rather than just a Sinhala government.
But the Federal Party's di lemma remains. As unemployment grows in the arid north, where education has been even more the password to a job than it has in the fertile south, a young Tamil will listen most attentively when he is told that it is all a result of discrimination by a Sinhalese government and a Muslim minister of education. So the pressure builds up upon the Tamil leadership, and the FP is helpless to provide remedies because its leaders come from the professional classes whose wealth, as well as the income of many smaller Tamil businessmen, traders and civil servants, comes from working in the Sinhalese areas. Unless there is active intervention from South India - there are connections between the FP and the DMK in Tamilnadu, and on October 2, there was a demonstration on behalf of the TUF in Madras - the new Tamil militancy cannot become a cause of serious political instability. But it shows how bitter this large minority has become and how intransigent are the communal problems that will have to be somehow settled if the larger question of national integration is to be resolved. Without such integration, it is doubtful if Ceylon can contrive anything like the dynamic effort that is needed if the economic crisis is to be prevented from growing and overwhelming the nation.
Frustrations of the Sinhala-Educated
The extent to which Ceylon's troubles have been exacerbated by its educational system have been discussed in most of what
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has been written about the country in recent years. Longestablished free schooling has without question vastly widened opportunity. But the manner in which it has operated has produced some very serious anomalies. Swabasha, the mother tongue as the medium in schools, is a case in point. Robert Kearney observes, "The growing numbers of the vernaculareducated...found few careers open to them. They were excluded from the bureaucracy, the principal source of nonagricultural employment, because English remained the language of government after independence and public service employment at all but the bottom levels remained a monopoly of the English-educated.... However, as English language education was largely in the hands of private, mostly Christian schools which were concentrated in the south-west and north and were expensive to attend, access to this education was markedly unequal on a regional, religious and class basis". (In 1962 there was an abortive attempt at a right-wing coup in Ceylon. Every single one in a list of 26 put on trial afterwards was Anglican or Catholic, and most had been educated in Colombo's best missionary-run schools. What it demonstrated was that the highest ranks of the army, navy and police were virtually monopolized by a Christian community, which was less than 10% of the population).
Kearney also shows why the initial anti-English bias in the language controversy was displaced by an anti-Tamil bias. He says, "The language movement was almost entirely a Sinhale se movement. Christian missionary schools, established early in the Tamil areas of the north, had made English-language education available there, and with the paucity of alternative employment in the arid north, Tamils had entered the colonial bureaucracy in numbers substantially exceeding their proportion of the population".
There are still glaring disparities between schools, disparities that are perpetuated by the scarcity of resources for buildings, teachers, laboratories and libraries. Little has been done to modernize curricula, and to replace or supplement
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the old traditional "liberal arts" subjects, which prepare pupils for clerical and administrative jobs, but not much else. Children study Indian history, Pali, Buddhist civilization, Sinhalese, perhaps economics, and if they are very good they might just get into universities and get degrees. But what does this enable them to do? To become teachers, most likely of Indian history, Pali and Buddhist civilization. And while the base of the educational system is now broad, the point of entry into university remains narrow.
Fuel for the JVP
It is here that frustration starts to build up and curdles into anger. It is also here that the activists of the now proscribed JVP have been thrown up. Nat Turner cursed the day he was taught the Bible and learned that men are equal. In their innermost thoughts, these young Ceylonese may perhaps curse the day they were educated and their eyes opened to a new world. They qualify, they have a certificate, which they feel has conferred upon them a moral right to stake a claim among the elite. But there is no job, aspirations are thwarted, and self-esteem wounded.
In 1971, official statistics placed the number of unemployed at 650,000, and Dudley Seers, who headed the ILO mission to Sri Lanka, put the figure at 750,000 when he revisited the country in July 1972. Of this, a monstrous 64% belongs to the 19-25 age group. This coincides ominously with statistics produced by an official analysis of the 16,000 detained on charges of complicity in the April insurrection, of whom 80 per cent were between 20 and 25 years of age. But the apparatchik came from the 25 - 30 age group (and these, interestingly enough, have mostly had a job, sometimes several).
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The JVP predictably enough, has been heavily criticised by the old left, which describes their ideological platform as a vulgar caricature of Marxist thought, the result of ill-digested ideas. Behind this valid criticism is the complacent sneer of an intellectually sophisticated elite pointing to the sad consequences of a difference in the quality of the education that they and their Sinhala-educated challengers received. Paucity of political literature in Sinhala, and the absence of much of all that the phrase "a good education" implies, has indeed fashioned the thinking of, in Burckhardt's phrase, les terribles simplificateurs. (The JVP is also regarded in some left quarters as an immaculate force unsullied by the old vices of establishment politics. This is a mistake shared by foreign Marxist analysts making Procruste an efforts to fit the movement into various orthodox moulds, and by Ceylonese bourgeois radicals who find in the idealization of rebellious youth an agreeable mode of escape from the fact of their own alienation).
The Response of the Old Left
The insurrection has had far-reaching effects on all the parties with any pretensions to being socialist, the SLFP as well as the Marxist groups. As the traditional areas of LSSP support gradually become repopulated by restless youth turning towards militancy that is unsuited to the LSSP's present position in the government, the CP (Moscow) is wondering if the time is not ripe to try elbowing the LSSP out of its trade union bases, and taking over leadership of the radicalized young who, since the JVP went out of action, are without a rallying point. The CP has been undergoing an internal crisis. Its general secretary, Mr Pieter Keuneman, who had held the office since the party was founded, has been ousted with some of his faction, and a new, more critical leadership has risen. It remains a faithful ally of Moscow, and despite its
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disappointment with trends forced upon the United Front by its need to retain friends in the West, it has to respect the Soviet Union's anxiety to sustain good relations with a Bandaranaike government that has excellent relations also with China. The party's new secretary-general Dr Wickremesinghe, has recently been in Moscow, perhaps trying to find a way to reconcile the contradictory pulls now being exerted on the party.
Meanwhile, the United Front is faced with the fact that the insurrection has, among its many ill effects, rendered Ceylon's internal weaknesses distressingly visible to an outside world in which it has become increasingly difficult, anyway, for the country to maintain its brave but precarious stance of non-alignment. Since the Public Security Act was passed in the early 1950s, rule by emergency laws has been a feature of almost every administration. Mr Dudley Senanayake's government extended the emergency for more than 1,000 days in the years 1965-1970. Ceylon has now again been put under emergency rule since April 1971, and this is likely to be extended every month. It does not justify Lord Avebury's grotesque description (in The Guardian) of Ceylon as "an island behind bars", but the phenomenon of extended emergency does dramatise the severe strains being placed on the national institutions.
Adherence to the parliamentary form of government, still on the face of it, seems secure. It was indicative that at four by-elections held last October the poll conformed to the national average of 80%, but there is no escaping from the conclusion that this is a society in deep crisis. The nature of the crisis has put the political institutions, the ruling class, the elite, and a whole generation, on trial for Ceylon's life.
(This article was published in the January 1973 issue of South Asian
Review.)
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2
Survival of the Fittest
May Day, 1977, summed up in just 24 hours the developments of the recent past in Sri Lanka, while it also provided a revealing insight into the new constellation of political forces. "The river of humanity flowing before me gives the lie", said Prime Minister Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, "to opposition propaganda that we have lost mass support". With only three months remaining before the election on August 15, the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party's (SLFP) procession was, as anticipated, an extravagantly planned show of strength, taking eight hours to cover its four-mile route to Galle Face Green, the attractive esplanade in Colombo.
How real, though, is this capacity for instant mobilisation? Will support fade as state power begins to slip away from SLFP hands after the dissolution of parliament on May 22? A charge levelled by Nanda Ellawela, MP, one of the SLFP defectors who now leads the People's Democratic Party (PDFP), suggests that these questions are not academic. He claims the state transport board allocated 2,000 buses to the SLFP for its May Day procession, 600 to the United National Party (UNP), but none to his own party.
The government, however, accentuated the positive. Expensively constructed by state bodies, the colourful floats
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dramatised seven years of achievement, in particular, land reform, the takeover of British plantations, the Mahaveli River diversion, a new merchant fleet, fisheries development and co-operative youth farms. Unfortunately, in a land notoriously superstitious, one of the fishing crafts carrying SLFP supporters to the procession capsized and several people were drowned.
Putting on its own big show, the UNP was clearly on the offensive, its placards and floats often degenerating from the savagely satirical to the obscene. Making liberal use of everything from stale bread to police batons, contraceptives, Sanjay Gandhi, and the "big lady" (Mrs. Bandaranaike), the piece de resistance was a spreading "family tree" symbolising party leader J.R. Jayewardene's promise to destroy "feudal and family power" and establish a "just, democratic government". New voices in the UNP, which say it is no longer a party of vested interests issued eager appeals to the powerful youth vote. But R. Premadasa, Jayewardene's newly appointed deputy and the party's rising star, smartly spotted the mixed blessings of the vast influx into the party's ranks of jobless, disaffected and alienated youth. In an obvious reference to the 1971 insurrection, which came only eleven months after Mrs. Bandaranaike's United Front Government came to power, Premadasa said, "Those young hands applauding us now may manufacture the bombs that will kill us if we, too, do not change our ways of living and leadership".
May Day also marked the formal baptism of the Socialist United Front (SUF), an alliance of the Lanka Samasamaja Party (LSSP), the Communist Party (CP) and the People's Democratic Party. Former industries minister T.B. Subasinghe leads it. Although it drew a smaller crowd, the SUF demonstration was genuinely trade unionist, broadly representative of organised labour, and disciplined.
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The rival meetings of May Day highlighted one certain fact - Sri Lanka's general election will be a triangular contest, a situation which encouraged the UNP's green banners to cockily announce: "1977 is OUR year". And if past elections are any guide, the UNP could well be right - which would mean dim prospects for Mrs. Bandaranaike's survival. For in the 30 years since Sri Lanka gained independence, the UNP has always won at the polls when the parties opposed to it were not in coalition.
Before the political carnival of May Day, there were the ritual observances and domestic duties of the long stretch of the Easter and Sinhala-Tamil New Year holidays. Although these were performed with practised piety, middle-class hopes for an old-style spasm of self-indulgent merrymaking turned sour. Finance Minister Felix Dias Bandaranaike's boast that the consumer would quickly reap the rewards of his 20% revaluation of the rupee proved just another sunshine story. Backing up an exercise, which the Opposition had publicly denounced as dubious law, reckless economics and blatant electioneering, the finance minister badgered the state corporations into offering an all-round reduction in prices.
And although full-page advertisements announcing reductions poured into the newspapers, cooperatives' shelves remained bare: no Mysore dhall (lentil soup), maldive (dried fish), cheap textiles, canned fish or flour. Even the rice was of a poor quality. Cakes yes, but not enough bread, and the ale could not be moved because of a strike at the State distilleries corporation. A go-slow hit the harbour, too. Predictably, the ministries concerned blamed each other, with the chairman of the cooperative wholesale establishment suggesting that an unscrupulous "gang of four" importers may have "sabotaged" the measures.
Together with unemployment (the conservative figure is 1.5 million), high living costs and scarcities will remain the chief issues at the election. Prime Minister Dudley
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Senanayake, trounced in 1970, recognized too late that he had been "slaughtered in the kitchen". So Felix Bandaranaike, who has announced that he will contest Colombo West against Opposition leader Jayewardene, will have to make sure that all his clever fiscal initiatives actually lighten the average housewife's unbearably heavy load.
As desperate as the economic situation is, other specters are hovering around Mrs. Bandaranaike's throne. The most daunting is the uncertainty, which surrounds the base on which her political power has rested. The rural voter is the great imponderable. Controlling at least 100 of the 168 seats at stake in the poll, he is ready to talk about the rain, his sick child, the trials of purchasing textbooks, and about the fickleness of the gods. However, he is not willing to talk about his vote. He is, in fact, a stoic and a snob, living each day as it comes and pretending to prying strangers that he is less poor than he is. Since Sri Lanka has had universal franchise from 1931, he has a sense of quiet power fortified by the knowledge that he has ousted five administrations in a row. And now he waits, patiently.
Mrs. Bandaranaike's SLFP, with its nationalist, Buddhist lineage, relies on the Sinhalese peasantry, the village middle class, a newly-emergent intelligentsia educated in the Sinhalese language, and a burgeoning rural-based business community spawned by protectionism and import-substitution, and baptised by state capitalism. This last group is more genuinely indigenous in outlook than the Colombo-centered commercial and professional elite, which guides UNP thinking.
The radical impulse that attracted the rural intelligentsia and youth to the SLFP has been blunted. However, Mrs. Bandaranaike believes that the SLFP's nationalist appeal is still sufficiently strong to allow the people to differentiate between the UNP and her own party. The village-educated
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young Sinhalese voter, once the assertive, advance guard of the SLFP, is not impressed. For the young, the Bandaranaike "revolution" has run its course.
The new class of businessman, a genuinely homegrown entrepreneur, as distinct from the cosmopolitan, denationalized UNP backer, was once a strong SLFP asset. But it is now showing diminishing returns. Tax concessions and the very special privilege of CRA (convertible rupee account) has bred an extravagant lifestyle, which has become an uglier eyesore than the beggars who are periodically swept off the streets to mollify the tourists. (Significantly, this exchange rate offered is higher than the official one offered for dollars and sterling earned by non-traditional exports such as shirts, shoes, batiks, seafood, fruit, cut-flowers and handicrafts, gem-dealers, and investors in the tourist trade).
Fifteen years after the imposition of a total ban on the import of private cars, and after sevens years of Mrs. Bandaranaike-United Front "Socialism" there are more airconditioned Mercedes Benz, Ford Capris and Toyotas lined up at golf courses and five-star hotels than under the earlier "capitalist" UNP rule, which the socialists had denounced for wasting foreign exchange. Thanks to CRA, the daily press can advertise French and Australian wines, Tom Piper corned beef and pork pies, and imported beers, while at the same time armed police must keep order in cooperative queues for weekly rations of sugar, coriander and dried fish.
As this new "CRA-pitalist class" becomes a hate-symbol, particularly for an educated youth exasperated by exhortations of austerity, both the UNP and the Socialist Front go for their propagandist guns against the ruling SLFP. The UNP has the advantage, as the Left was a partner in this "progress". The LSSP leader Dr N.M. Perera, was finance minister in the Bandaranaike cabinet for five years and T.B. Subasinghe, who now leads the Socialist Front, was industries minister for seven
years.
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Pirating the title of a book by Djilas (The New Class) with little concern for its contents, the UNP's Madison Avenuestyle image-makers and gimmick-manufacturers have fathered the phrase "the new class" on the new rich the Bandaranaike regime is said to have created. The UNP threatens to destroy these social "pests' by using the business acquisition act, which gives the government of the day power to nationalize any enterprise. It is the one law, which the entire private sector regards as the devilish reward of Marxist infiltration in Mrs. Bandaranaike's United Front administration.
For her part, the prime minister instinctively scurries to her old nationalist trench. Of the trousered leaders of the Left and the tuxedo-clad tycoons of the UNP, she asks: "Does an enterprising businessman become a filthy capitalist only when he wears cloth-and-banian (the garment usually worn by nonWesternised Sri Lankans)?" But the offensively ostentatious scions of the SLFP's new class are now ready recruits for the new-look socialist UNP. They have become linked to businessmen backing the UNP through inter-marriages and joint membership in interlocking company directorates - evidence of a growing confluence of old and new wealth. This development raises the question whether there may not be a merger of the SLFP and the UNP after the election. In 197073, when he was involved in a bitter quarrel with his leader, Dudley Senanayake, Jayewardene urged such a compact if only to dilute leftist influence in Mrs. Bandaranaike's United Front. Today, Jayewardene leads the party and calls the shots.
The collapse of the 10-year old SLFP-Marxist alliance has altered the balance of forces - multiplying the UNP's chances of winning the election from a nearly unassailable position. It has also led to a general weakening of both partners, the SLFP and the Left, for it was this combination that worked, in terms of parliamentary arithmetic at least.
Which of them has suffered the greater loss? Alone and dispirited though it may be, the SLFP is still confident that
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when the trumpet is sounded, traditional loyalties will ensure that the battle-lines will be drawn up between the SLFP blue and the UNP green, with the red banners only a noisy diversion.
Mrs. Bandaranaike's assumption is that it was the United Front alliance, which helped the Left to a respectable place in Parliament and ultimately a share in power. The Left's appraisal is just the reverse. It argues that the supplementary or critically marginal support of the Left gave the SLFP the edge over the UNP. This thesis is more plausible. The Left argues that the masses (or a large segment of the electorate) have reached such a point of radicalization that they have no further use for the Centre (the SLFP). The SLFP's progressive potential is exhausted, its historical task completed. As the campaign gets underway and issues become clearer, the politically conscious voter will identify a simple Right-Left option. The SLFP will then drift into third place. So runs the Left's argument.
When allies quarrel and go their separate ways, mutual recriminations make the new relationship more abrasive than the enmities of ancient foes. The war between the centre and the Left takes the form of a bizarre spectacle as the SLFP and the Left gloat over each other's manifold troubles while Jayewardene's UNP, the much-fancied favourite for the election, plays the amused onlooker.
With the new "socialist" image, the UNP, a latecomer to trade unionism, now boasts an affiliated federation. Its ranks are being steadily swelled by the less ideologically inclined, disaffected labour, who are opportunistic enough to move under the umbrella of a prospective patron. And with no alternative program of any real worth, the UNP is delightfully vague on policies and extravagant on promises.
It is satisfied that relentless propaganda on mass privations, corruption and nepotism, and the exposure of the inevitable excesses of repressive emergency rule for six years will see it home and dry.
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Since family power and family favouritism are already two of its most venomous weapons, the Congress party debacle in India has gifted the UNP with a poisoned dart of high potency. Ironically, the 'ammai-puthai' (mother-son) parallel was so eagerly established in the mass mind by the government's own mythmakers that the opposition's target was ready-made. It is true that Mrs. Bandaranaike's son Anura, has announced his candidacy, but he was never as arrogant (nor as powerful) as Sanjay Gandhi. Mrs. Bandaranaike is right when she says, "Sirimavo is NOT Indira". In the popular mind, though the parallels and the personal identification are not easy to erase.
While Mrs. Bandaranaike struggles to retain her position as premier, the SLFP's fortunes at the election could be vital to the country's future. In voting an opposition into office, India reached a watershed in its parliamentary history. Sri Lanka, another former British colony, negotiated this critical turn more quickly and smoothly when in 1956, Solomon Bandaranaike led a motley People's United Front to a Janatastyle victory.
The populist, nationalized, but essentially bourgeois SLFP thrust itself between the rightist UNP, and the Marxist left to emerge Her Majesty's loyal opposition. Since then, the parliamentary system has worked so impeccably that the two major parties could count on an almost equal number of years in office and on an equal number of defeats.
The SLFP's electoral fate and its customary role as a strong, credible democratic alternative is in doubt. Should the SLFP be eliminate, Sri Lanka will be offered the irreconcilable options of a right (the UNP), and a Marxist Left that does not believe in the parliamentary road to power.
(This article appeared in the May 20, 1977 issue of "Far Eastern Economic Review'.)
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3
April Anniversaries-I Revolutions & Insurrections
We are in April, 1981, a month that marks the anniversaries of two significant events in the social and political history of this country. We are also in the midst of celebrations, marking 50 years of universal franchise.
In the conventional wisdom of political scientists, historians and commentators, both local and foreign, and in what one may call the folklore of the intelligentsia, a quarter century ago we witnessed the "revolution of 1956", albeit a silent revolution. And then exactly fifteen years later we had the April Insurrection; not a revolution and by no means silent. Such is the aura that still surrounds April 1956, a date which has become a mystical moment, and the unquestioning reverence it still evokes that we often forget we are speaking of a parliamentary election. We have had many of them since then (1960, 1965, 1970, 1977) but none has earned or been dignified by the awe-inspiring term of 'revolution'. I think the word was used in order to convey a sense of dramatic change, of a sharp and radical break with the past. Yet, the student of electoral behaviour and change (and I don't mean the mere counting of heads, the study of poll statistics, seats
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percentages, swings etc) could argue that July 1977, if not, 1970, represented a dramatic change.
1956, the counter argument may then run, was not just an electoral or political event, but a "silent, cultural revolution". Silent, because the revolution was ushered in through the secret ballot, thus orderly and peaceful, and cultural, because the event signified something far more profound than the victory of one political party over another. Looking back after 25 years, some of us may feel that the basic judgements which are encapsulated, however loosely or untidily, in these catch-phrase descriptions need only to be refined or modified, rather than abandoned altogether.
A reassessment of 1956 is certainly not the task I have chosen for myself today. It is only a point of departure, a convenient one, leading hopefully to my main area of interest, i.e, what is happening in Sri Lanka today, and trying to understand these developments in relation to the regional and international environment.
I shall pose a question which I don't believe has beeň posed before. Does July 1977 constitute an even more radical rupture with the past than 1956? The shock effect of the crushing defeat suffered by the self-confident, often overbearing UNP, which had ruled since 1947, at the hands of the SLFP, which had been formed only in 1951, must surely have coloured contemporary reaction and judgements. Did such first impressions tend to exaggerate the actual content of the change? Was there such a great divide, a great leap forward? The point is that such opinions appear to have stayed with us, inviting us today at the end of a quarter century to reflect on the need for re-appraisal.
By this, I don't seek to minimise the importance of the event. On the contrary, I am arguing that "the rupture theory' may be guilty of attaching a misplaced importance, and that the significance of 1956 may lie elsewhere.
Let us start with the obvious. The victory of the SLFP, and its subsequent performance, meant the arrival on the
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electoral scene of an acceptable parliamentary alternative. A credible option, it will be readily granted, is indispensable to the natural evolution and operation of the British system we inherited. In short, far from constituting a system-change, the nearest American equivalent to 'silent revolution', what we had in 1956 was an important and necessary stage in the process of growth of that system. India offers a striking contrast. It was only in 1977, that a political organisation, albeit a motley coalition, was able to break the thirty-year monopoly of the Congress party. The chaotic events, which marked Janata rule, its rapid disintegration and the widespread turmoil today underline the special strains which have been placed on the Indian system by the absence of a nationally acceptable alternative.
In 1978, the new constitution introduced a new system in place of what had been operational for 30 years. The new Gaullist system is yet to be tested. But could we, even at this point of time ask whether this change constitutes a more radical departure from the past than anything that occurred in 1956?
In another sense, 1956 sought to meet the challenge of an abnormality in the Ceylonese experience as a newly independent nation. In the first phase of de-colonisation, national independence movements generally had a popular character, often involving mass agitation, direct action and even armed struggle. Whatever form the struggle actually assumed, the movement was fervently anti-colonial and : nationalist in temper.
Not so in Ceylon, where the transfer of power was negotiated with the orderly civility of a garden party. A latedeveloping anti-colonialism or anti-westernism found expression in the SLFP just as the rural middle class, with monks, teachers and native physicians found an ally in Mr Bandaranaike. But if slogans appealed and were meant to
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appeal to a Sinhalal-educated intelligentsia angry at the monopoly of privilege held by the westernised elite, they had another, less pleasing face.
Perhaps in the absence of a truly national and unifying pre-independence movement, the Ceylonese nationalism, denied a natural birth, acquired mongrel features with the departure of the foreign ruler. Inasmuch as it was against foreign domination and foreign symbols (British bases, British economic interests, the English language, western dress et al) this nationalism historically speaking, was normal. But when it focussed on the Tamil minority, a community identified as the favoured child of colonial policies, it was racist.
Now 25 years later, we must pause to ask: How has the Sri Lankan leadership, the leaders that is of both the Sinhala and Tamil peoples, a leadership that belongs to what is still demonstrably a fairly homogenous elite answer the challenge of that racial cleavage, which became so transparently clear in 1956 and soon remained to plague this society, as one of its major political discontents?
Nobody, who spares a moment to consider the implications of the recent incidents at Neeravelli only 15 months after "terrorism and all its forms" had been eliminated in the north, will seriously contest the fact of failure.
What else is there to say about 1956? Marxist analysts see 1956 as heralding the advent of the national bourgeoisie, as distinct from the compradore which had integral links with the old UNP. External factors now play a part in the maturation of this emergent class through the satisfaction of its basic desires.
If you study the relevant statistics (trade, balance of payments, external assets etc.) you will note that from independence to the Korean rubber boom and after, Ceylon could well afford to maintain a fairly free import policy. And at the same time, pay for an extensive welfare program, which included education, health, and food, for a population of little more than half the present size. In a way, this was a grand
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illusion, but an illusion, freely nourished by the ambitions of the main players in the highly competitive game of parliamentary politics. A game, in which success or failure was periodically decided by a people who had been slowly initiated into the sport and tutored in its peculiar rules about half a century ago, with the introduction of universal franchise. Soon these welfare programs were to become an apparently inextricable part of the Sri Lankan system. Were these policies the humanitarian response of a ruling class much less exploitative than the oligarchies under which many Third World peoples have to suffer? Did universal franchise make these politicians sensitive to popular pressure and fearful o any over expressions of mass anger?
The hartal of 1953 over the withdrawal of the rice subsidy, the high point of Left-inspired activism, gave the Sri Lankan leadership its first taste of popular indignation, and some useful political lessons. By 1967, when the international agencies pressed the Senanayake government to stop the subsidy, the government cut the ration by half, giving the other half free - a characteristic compromise. But objectively speaking did these policies act as shock absorbers of violence? That has remained a widely shared conviction. The April insurrection was to demonstrate that the system was not, in fact, completely insular from the convulsions to which other Third World societies are prone to.
Slowly, but inexorably, the base of this relative prosperity, which helped the retention of this welfarism, was being eroded, as the vulnerable import-export economy of the plantation was exposed to external factors.
For this achievement in distributive justice, we continue to receive high ratings from foreign organisations, which use measurements like the Physical Quality of Life. While this record is the result of an investment that belongs to another era, the question now is how much has survived the drastic policy changes of 1977 and after? President Jayewardene
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concedes that the food stamps scheme helps 7 million people, half the population, to live at subsistence level.
The constraints of worsening external conditions in the 1960s found expression in policies, which imposed exchange restrictions and import curbs. In such a climate, atleast one stratum of that nascent or "potential class', in Samir Amin's phrase, whose aspirations were articulated in the 1956 revolution, flourished and matured. Import substitution, tax holidays, and active state and party patronage, fostered the growth of a group of industrialists and businessmen (or mudalalis) whom the UNP propagandists in 1977 were to castigate as "new class' and 'new rich', and threaten with dire penalties.
These were supposed to be the financial backers of the SLFP, then in office. Through UNP propaganda they were made into hate-symbols, as repellent as the "bus mudalalis", the UNP patrons before 1956. The "bus mudalalis" were wiped out when public transport was nationalised but nothing untoward seems to have happened to the new "mudalalis". In fact they continue to prosper as investors in joint ventures with foreign collaborators in the Free Trade Zones, and outside. Inter-marriages and interlocking directorates see a closing of ranks between the families of these two groups in the present generation. While this closing of ranks, this new cohesion transcending earlier political antagonisms suggests the arrival of this entrepreneural group at a new stage, a parallel development is equally noteworthy.
Behind protectionist walls, many of these industrialists in the old days made super profits, often selling sub-standard goods to a captive market. With the post '77 policy of liberalized imports, and the dismantling of protectionist barriers, some of these national industries have gone into voluntary liquidation (manufacturers becoming importers) or been driven to the wall. According to a newspaper report, 177 industrial units have closed down during the last three years. So what is the impact on employment, one of the main causes
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of the present discontent and certainly the single issue, which brought a massive youth vote to the victorious UNP? The di lemma acquires a certain irony because the ne w industrialists, the leading participants in the new exportoriented growth, are facing the problem of protectionism in the West, and quotas are being cut.
For a far wider segment of our society, the rural lower middle class and Sinhala educated youth, 1956 held out a rich promise, which remained tragically unfulfilled. In a very real sense the youth rebels of 1971 were the embittered and angry children of the '56 revolution. Most scholars who have written on the insurrection have stressed such factors as the expansion of educational facilities, the demographic explosion, rising unemployment, rural landlessness and debt. While all that is true, it is equally important to remind ourselves of the bouyant hopes raised by 1956. The expansion of educational opportunites, reinforced by the Sinhala Only act, was expected to end the dominance of the English educated Sinhala and Tamil elite over the public service and the status-carrying professional jobs. Certainly, in a fair, typically Ceylonese imitation of the British habit of accommodation, 1956 did open the doors of social and economic privileges to the new, politically assertive groups. But it was only a minority that was allowed to enter.
I turn finally to another aspect of 1956, the internationalist modernism in Mr Bandaranaike's foreign policy, as evident in his adoption of nonalignment, his total identification with the Afro-Asian resurgence, the closing of British base in Trinco and Katunayake and the opening of embassies in Soviet Union, China and other socialist countries. This contrasted sharply with the last phase of UNP rule. True to his publicly declared faith in the British, "our trusted friends", Mr D.S.Senanayake made Ceylon's 'foreign policy' such as it was, an extension of Whitehall thinking. His son Dudley Senanayake did not effect any substantial changes.
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But Great Britain, its empire gone, was already retreating into "little England". A new 'pax Americana' was being installed to ensure order in the post-war world. The scaffolding of American policy was multi-lateral military alliances and bilateral security pacts, which involved not only America's , western allies, but Third World countries too. The objective was the containment of communism; that is, physically and ideologically stopping the spread of communism from beyond the borders of the Soviet Union and its allies, and China. This alliance system, the physical underpinning of US strategy, was the establishment of CENTO in the Middle East and SEATO in South East Asia. It dragged Third World countries into the vortex of the cold war, even as the new leaders of Asia and Africa were meeting at Bandung again in the month of April 1955.
Ceylon was represented at Bandung by Sir John Kotelawela, a brash anti-communist crusader perfectly attuned to the spirit of the Dullesian era. Ceylon was on the doorstep of CENTO when 1956 rescued our foreign policy from what would have been a disaster. And now we are back in a new cold war, with military budgets soaring, new alliances and new bases being established, and the Indian Ocean emerging as the main arena of confrontation and tension.
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4.
April Anniversaries-II Sri Lanka and the New Global Environment
The subject that the organisers of this seminar assigned to me obliges me to place the Sri Lanka situation in its regional and global environment, both economic and strategic. In doing so, I intend to follow my general approach of seeing the past in the light of recent developments. Of course, I simplified this procedure by isolating certain events, perhaps a bit arbitrarily to suit my convenience, in order to identify significant changes, trends, and processes, which these events are taken to dramatise. These events are the ushering in of universal franchise in 1931, the 'silent revolution' of 1956, the youth revolt of 1971, and finally, the unprecedented electoral victory of the UNP in 1977 and the radical changes it ushered in.
The deep-ranging influence of external forces on the destinies of nations, particularly the poor and the weak, is now a commonplace fact of international life. In the first instance, and in the most obvious way, this impact is usually felt in the economic sphere, for it is in this domain that the essential vulnerability of the Third World is most evident and invites attack.
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This influence or impact of outside forces can of course operate in the diplomatic and military fields too and find other forms of expression, be it open or insidious, crude or subtle, or in the exercise of conventional diplomacy, pressure, coercion and interference. Generally speaking, the economic factor is the major factor where vested interests have to be . protected or new interests acquired. Nations that have been accustomed to run the world use the military option only in the final analysis. Whatever the degree of visibility, economics is present in their strategic doctrines as the core concept.
The cosmopolitan exhibitionism and vulgarity of the pre'56 Kotalawellian phase of the UNP made it an ideal target for the resurgent nationalism, which fuelled the "cultural revolution" of 1956. An equally sharp confrontation was seen in the field of foreign policy when Mr S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike's "Afro-Asianism" and "non-alignment" offered a striking contrast to Sir John's pro-American lurch at Bandung. (This was a marked deviation from the essentially pro-British policy of the Senanayake-controlled UNP). 'Pax Britannica' had collapsed and a few years later Mr Harold Wilson was to make the formal announcement of Britain's total withdrawal east of Suez.
SEATO had been established in order to "contain" communist China. It was an American creation but with local and regional recruits as members in this openly military alliance. But by the late 1960s, it was clear that SEATO had failed. China was already a major power. Yet it was no longer perceived in Washington as a vital arm of the Moscow-based global communist conspiracy. In fact, China's relations with the Soviet Union had moved from friendship to distrust and then to intense hostility. By the beginning of the next decade, the US, still trapped in the Vietnam imbroglio, achieved the great reconciliation with China.
It was these trends in the 1960s which prepared the ground for ASEAN - a group of countries intensely anticommunist (some with strong communist movements, both
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open and underground) and all of them terribly apprehensive of Chinese influence be it in the form of revolutionary propaganda, support for liberation movements or the overseas Chinese communities. These countries also had rapidly expanding economic links with Japan. Another thing they had in common was the nervousness about the consequences of America's physical withdrawal from Indo-China in light of the fast-diminishing prospects of an American victory in Vietnam.
The United States, a Pacific as well as an Atlantic power, had made a strong comeback into this resource-rich region to combat Japan's advance into this area. Japan, Asia's first economic colossus, had tried to carve out its own area of economic penetration and zone of influence, concealing its expansionist ambitions under the disarmingly cooperative slogan of "co-prosperity sphere".
Defeated in war, Japan has not abandoned its economic designs. Its post-war constitution limits its military capabilities to self-defence, although this concept, one must know is accommodatingly flexible. However, military power apart, its economic strength makes south-east Asia its terrain. So much so a Japanese prime minister some years ago ran into angry demonstrations in almost every south east Asian capital, such was the anti-Japanese nationalist sentiment in these parts.
ASEAN is the product of these longstanding US and Japanese interests in the area and the changing power relationships - the US-Japanese alliance, the Sino-US reconciliation, the Sino-Soviet enmity, and the Soviet Union's friendship with Vietnam and the smaller Indo-China socialist states. With the exception of Indonesia, ASEAN's biggest member which is still strongly suspicious of Chinese aims, ASEAN fits into the general pattern of US-Japanese political and economic dominance of the area.
This is the situation in the eastern neighbourhood. What of south Asia and south west Asia? US strategy in the Indian
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Ocean area assumed a new seriousness with the then impending British withdrawal from the east of Suez. The Anglo-US deal in Diego Garcia was made then, and the construction of this base (at that time described as a communications facility) is an important landmark. The introduction of Polaris missiles in US submarines in this area, missiles which were aimed at vital Soviet targets particularly in Central Asia, accelerated the Soviet Union's own long-term plans to create a five oceans, blue water navy. W
The Soviet Union's "threat perception" and its response to this new US challenge started the process, which converted the Indian Ocean into the main arena of confrontation. This is clearly pointed out in the study prepared for the United Nations by three experts - Prof. Barnaby of the Swedish Peace Institute (Cipri), Mr. Subramaniam of the Indian Institute of Defence Studies and Admiral Navavi of Iran.
US military plans which have found increasingly clearer definition and expression in what is now called an Indian Ocean strategy was certainly not provoked by the Soviet Union's military intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, although that event has manifestly intensified conflicts in these regions. The Afghanistan issue props up the notion of new "Soviet threat" which in turn serves the propagandist needs of US policy makers and the US industrial-military complex, which must call upon the American public, and the European and Japanese allies, to bear the burden of enormous increases in military expenditures.
It was perhaps no coincidence that the CIA produced a study that was immediately made public in which it was argued that the Soviet Union, the world's biggest oil producer, will become a net importer by the mid 1980's. The purpose of this publication, the basic claim and statistics of which was challenged by authoritative journals like Petroleum Weekly and by prestigious European Institutes, was to make the "Soviet threat" real. That is, Afghanistan was only Moscow's
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first move to grab the industrialised nations of the western alliance at their economic choke-point, Gulf oil.
In fact, US military thinking, which has now matured into a policy, was a response to several critically important events, which threatened or seriously damaged western interests. The Vietnam war had not only undermined America's global power and prestige but drained its resources which by the 1970's the United States had come to realize were not limitless. The collapse of the dollar, the totem of American dominance over the post war world economy, and the oil price hike of 1973 were two such events. The oil price hike was the first successful attack of a producers' cartel and it threw an industrialized world, which had flourished for decades on cheap energy sources into a state of crisis and near hysteria. While the world strove to absorb the consequent shocks to the international order, the global economy, the monetary system and so on, it never really recovered from what it now recognised as a permanent threat to its vital interests.
But the Vietnam war was still not over. American politicians and public were soon dragged into another mire, the Watergate scandal. So we had what Professor Stanley Hoffman called, "the internalisation" of US politics and foreign policy, mistakenly described as neo-isolationism. In this condition of semi-paralysis, Washington watched, helplessly as national liberation movements in Africa, led by Marxist or Left-inclined organisations advanced into the final phase of armed struggle in their bid to win independence from the last colonial power, Portugal, a NATO member. Unable to commit American troops or to intervene openly, Dr Kissinger and his "40 committee", unknown to the US Congress, released funds for a secret operation in Angola. Its aim was to stop the MPLA from installing itself as the legitimate government. Two other fronts FNLA and UNITA were actively supported by South Africa, Israel, China, the US and Zaire, which was in fact the main operational base for
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President Mobutu's brother-in-law Holden Roberto, one of the leaders of these US supported fronts.
When a South African armoured column actually crossed into Angola and was advancing towards its capital, the MPLA leader Dr Neto, who had been receiving arms support and supplies from the Soviet Union, GDR etc, called for Cuban assistance. Helped by the Cubans, the MPLA crushed the South African force and the two "fake" fronts. A few months later Dr Kissinger was to say, "there must never be another Angola". The Western media meanwhile began the ballyhoo about "the Cuban threat" to Africa
The importance of this Angolan experience and the US reaction is that today Washington is seriously considering reactivating the same "liberation fronts" of Messrs. Savimbi and Roberto at a time, when South Africa is conducting open cross-border raids with regular troops and mercenaries into both Angola and Mozambique, another Portuguese colony which gained independence through armed struggle. The issue today is the independence of Namibia, which is on the border of a South Africa that is determined to frustrate the resolutions of the United Nations and is actively and publicly supported by the US, Britain, West Germany, France, Israel etc. SWAPO, the liberation movement which led the struggle for Namibian independence is fully recognised by the NAM, the OAU and Socialist countries. It receives material support directly from the neighbouring state of Angola and from other front-line State S.
Iran
The third critically important event was the Iranian revolution. Learning from the lessons of Vietnam, the United States fashioned a new doctrine variously called the "Nixon doctrine' and the 'Guam doctrine'. In essence it meant that the US would not get physically involved in Third World crises but would
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help construct and fortify regional power-centres where a strong medium size local power would "manage" any localised conflict that is a threat to US interests and the interests of its allies. In short, the concept of the regional policeman was being proposed.
The Shah of Iran served this end by policing the Gulf. This took the shape of supporting Pakistan and the Sultan of Oman against liberation movements and insurgencies, and financing the Kurdish rebel leader Barzani against the Baathist regime in Baghdad. Suharto of Indonesia performed the same function when he crushed the liberation struggle in East Timor. Mobutu of Zaire tried to do the same but failed in Angola. In fact, after the Angolan war, it was Zaire which was threatened by internal revolt. And elsewhere, particularly in Ethiopia, Washington watched US power and influence receive blow after blow. But no blow was more devastating than the overthrow of the Shah.
Finally, Somoza, a small Shah, another dynastic despot placed in power by the US marines, was ousted in an area, which President Reagan has chosen to call "our frontyard". The domino theory, once fashionable in the Vietnam era, is now being revamped as the age-old problem of economic exploitation, social injustice, oppression and backwardness.
The new US strategy is a response then to the cumulative impact of all these events, which are perceived as a deadly threat to US interests. In the broadest terms, this response affects two basic relationships, which are of course interactive: (a) The super-power relationship, i.e, détente, and (b), the attitude to the Third World. In 1979, the foreign relations committee framed the foreign policies and the military objectives of the US in the Indian Ocean. The objectives were five in number, and "balancing Soviet forces" came fifth in the list. Topping it were, (a) to protect US economic interests in the Gulf region and (b) to employ or use the threat of force in support of US diplomatic objectives.
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In a study prepared for the Rand Corporation, Prof. Guy Pauker wrote, "The North-South conflict should not be perceived as a temporary clash of interests produced by the fourfold increase in the price of oil since 1973, but as the expression of a much deeper conflict. It is the present stage of the political mobilization of the Third World, following several centuries of western dominance. Its expression is most visible in the General Assembly of the United Nations, where more than a hundred new countries that did not have sovereign status at the end of World War II are now in control in accordance with the principle of majority rule".
"This group of countries, which includes almost all of Asia, Africa and Latin America, does not consider the process of decolonisation completed by the achievement of political independence, believing that the economic dominance of the world market by the industrial democracies creates for them conditions of economic dependence and exploitation to which they refer as 'neocolonialism".
"An increasingly determined campaign is being waged by the Third World through a variety of overlapping groupings, for the establishment of a 'New International Economic Order. Although its articulated demands are economic, the general thrust of the power relations between the former colonial powers which are at present the most advanced industrial societies and the former colonies, which are still in the early stages of modernization and industrialization".
"The Third World movement has many similarities with the growth of trade unionism in the West in the nineteenth century. Its dynamism is reflected in the fact that the number of participating countries has increased more than three-fold in the last two decades. It is also a sign of its strength that recently some of the more moderate and pro-Western leaders of Third World countries are endorsing the position of the radicals. As neither the Soviet Union nor the People's Republic of China is involved in this Third World movement,
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it would be misleading to interpret its manifestations as mere episodes in the cold war".
"What the North-South conflict actually involves is a struggle for the world product, which is not merely to be resolved by a few brief summit meetings. The struggle will probably continue for a long time, with periods of negotiations interspersed with crises and confrontations. Nations, like individuals, do not divest themselves voluntarily of their accumulated wealth and of their sources of income merely in response to moral appeals. If they have the power resist demands on their assets, the American people will probably expect their government to negotiate from a position of strength and if they lack the power needed for the protection of their interests, they will hold their government accountable for having failed to maintain its preparedness".
(Both the April Anniversaries' articles were talks delivered as part of the Teilhard de Chardin seminar in April 1981.)
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Part Two

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The Marooned Elite
My subject has been announced as, "The Ethnic Issue - International Dimensions". Although I would have preferred the title to read, "The Sri Lankan crisis - International dimensions", I am certain there will be general agreement that the ethnic conflict is the core issue of that crisis. At any rate, in our acute consciousness, the sense of crisis is a post-July '83 phenomenon.
My point of departure is a natural one, and readily at hand - a statement published in yesterday's papers. It is an observation of the National Security Minister, Mr Lalith Athulathmudali, the occupant of a new cabinet post, itself a by-product and a symbol of this crisis.
Mr. Athulathmudali has said that in July '83, "the whole world teamed up against us". That is not an accurate statement of fact, of course, and I don't believe Mr Athulathmudali expected us to take it literally. It remains however quite a graphic and terse description of our state of mind in the aftermath of the July violence.
Naturally, none of us can claim to speak for the "vast faceless and silent majority'. We can only rely on sentiment and opinion publicly expressed at different levels of our society, and filtered through the mass media.
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Let's note straightaway that this media, given both its collective character as well as the editorial policy of each component unit, is no passive spectator or an unemotional recorder of events. The media and the personnel who guide and influence its day-to-day operations are very much a part of our society; committed rightly or wrongly to its views, governed by its own beliefs, values, and attitudes, and greatly concerned about its commercial interests. And frequently it is tempted to play up, or play up to, certain opinions and prejudices.
Judging by that reflected opinion, Sri Lanka appears to have felt isolated, lonely and friendless in a hostile world. Whether the large mass of Sri Lankans - and we are now speaking of course of the majority Sinhalese - shared such feelings, I really cannot say and there's no reliable opinion surveys to support this or that view. Without too much hesitation, however, we can speak of the state of mind of 'dominant, opinion-leading groups'. What emerged from the flames and smoke of July was the image of a confused, helpless and petrified elite; the picture of a political leadership psychologically marooned in a desert island, which only the previous week had been an island of paradise.
This state of mind found ready expression in the confusion, which prevailed in the aftermath of July. And that too at the highest levels. Though expressions however muted or oblique, of sorrow, horror, shame and guilt were to be heard later, the immediate reactions produced a mighty credibility gap between the leadership and the people. When such declarations were not pure hysteria, they were flights of a fevered imagination. Nothing carried conviction.
An able and experienced politician, only recently honoured with a doctorate of literature by a local university actually claimed that "Black July" was a thesis written in blood by three university lecturers. The people were next informed of a Machiavellian three-stage master plan; an attack on Tamils
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first, Moslems next (and nobody had spoken of interest sections then), and Christians last, followed by a state of anarchy and a bloody revolution aided and abetted by sinister foreign forces, unnamed but easily identifiable in thinly veiled official pronouncements.
Between the official utterance and what the people knew or strongly suspected, there opened a yawning credibility gap. These suspicions have surely been fortified by the failure to hold an independent public inquiry. If an explanation and an accounting were necessary and vital, evidently no attempt at investigating and revealing the truth was possible.
While a communication gap opened between the power elite and the people, the self- same Sri Lankan elite (and to some extent, the whole country) became the casualty of the modern communications revolution.
Sri Lanka experienced an instant, worldwide exposure in the international media. Americans like to call Vietnam their "television war". The Sri Lankans, thanks partly to the technological benefits of the "open economy", went through their first 'television crisis'. Feedback followed instantly. There was extensive media coverage, particularly images on TV screens and newspaper articles and dispatches. Information was disseminated also through private phone calls, accounts of demonstrations abroad, frantic messages from our embassies and trade missions. Severe moral censure in press and parliament in more than a dozen countries, and the disconcerting tales brought home by Sinhalese expatriates returning (and some fleeing in embarrassment) to Colombo told us more tales about the fallout of the crisis. The world was bombarding us with queries, demands, rebukes.
The message, if harsh, was clear. Were we, the Sinhalese, no better than any of those "outside-the-pale-of-civilization" Third World peoples, so prone to bloodletting and butchery? Were we, in terms of our own assumed moral and cultural
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superiority, now being lumped together with some savages from the African bush 2
A communications-dominated world system had created yet another gap, perhaps the most painful to bear, of the large, vacant space between our cherished self-image and the image now reflected in the mirror of world opinion.
That self-image has been fashioned and sustained by both heritage and modern achievement. It was a self-esteem supported by the felt approbation of the international community. We had a rich cultural heritage, an orderly transition to political independence, a lively democratic system, an admirable scheme of social welfare (the fashionable PQLI criteria made us necessary beneficiaries of donor countries and aid agencies). All this was apart from an impeccable record in nonalignment and a relatively untainted performance in diverse fields such as social peace and military spending. The crippling blow to this self-image shattered the self-confidence of the power elite, robbing many other segments of our society of their long undisturbed sense of security.
July had "internationalized" our ethnic discontent and the deeper crisis of which it was a manifestation. We were rudely awakened to the world outside and jolted into a compelling awareness of our environment, the neighbourhood and the geo-political realities.
Yet, all our initial responses exposed an inability or unwillingness to grasp the ugliness of July and its grim implications. We found ourselves incapable of taking a firm grip on the problem, its dual nature, that is, the internal and the external, and the integral connection between the two. 3. Sri Lanka's "tarnished image" was all that our collective mental effort could yield by way of conscious recognition. Since that appeared to be the basic problem, all that was needed was to clean up a muddied image. And for that exercise, who better than an internationally known advertising firm
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which had made its mark on the global public relations market by hawking the charms of the "Singapore Girl" or the political virtues of Maggie Thatcher
The problem was not the incidents that had occurred. The problem was that these incidents had been exposed to the world. Unable to summon the full resources of its vaunted intelligence or its political will to meet the formidable challenges issued by an unprecedented crisis, the elite presented other bizarre exhibitions of helplessness, bewilderment and naivete that were soon to be imitated by the middle class intelligentsia. Various theories were put forward like, "The Pakistanis are sure to help us...", "The marines will come....", "For God's sake give them Trinco...", and finally, "The Chinese are bound to come..."
As we now know from an unimpeachable source, nobody was ready to respond to the SOS of a governing class that had suddenly lost its sense of security, both psychological and physical. So we found a refuge of the last resort, now under censorship, the sacrosanct Unmentionable... The headline of a commentary of those weeks will surely remain memorable. It read: "Nonalignment has left us naked...."
Behind the ennobling and evocative trace of Wolseyan remorse was a line of argument which taken to its logical conclusion would have had Sri Lanka serve the Cowboy God with at least half the zeal it had served the nonalignment King. Then we would not have been left naked to our Injun enemies, poor Bashir Gemayel and Beirut, notwithstanding.
Windows of Vulnerability
If the first dramatic signal to the Sri Lankan leadership that it would soon have to cope with the modern phenomenon of terrorism or what has now developed into "the guerilla warfare in the north" in President Jayewardene's phrase, was Mayor
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Durayappah's murder, let us then note that a decade has passed by. Secondly, let us not also ignore two unalterable facts of our modern political history.
Major initiatives to reach a negotiated settlement on the national question were thwarted in 1958 and 1966 by the crass irresponsibility and opportunistic politicking of our leading political parties. At the same time, let's remind ourselves that the UNP's election manifesto openly admitted "the long standing grievances" of the Tamil minority and having spelt these grievances out in the most frank and explicit terms, promised a Roundtable Conference. What happened? We had the post-election violence of 1977 where the UNP's vanquished opponents took the brunt of the beating and then the 1979 eruption where the victims were Tamils of both communities, the so-called Jaffna Tamil and the plantation worker.
Having beaten all known and likely opponents into submission including the students, workers, trade unionists, opposition activists, intellectuals etc, the UNP turned its attention and those special techniques of coercion and regimentation which it had perfected in three years of haughty rule, to a Tamil North. But unlike the Sinhala South, Tamil North had stood up to the UNP on the battleground of the ballot, free and open. I refer to the DDC elections; that is, the elections to those popularly elected councils that was the UNP's answer to the demands of devolution. However inadequate, however limited in its reach towards genuine grassroots participation and participatory democracy, however "disappointing to the Tamils with their long standing grievances", the DDC was the UNP's own chosen instrument of policy, its own solution.
What happened? The JSS juggernaut and the gauleiters went up north. A senior Minister told parliament that the police mutinied after terrorists killed some policemen. Then followed more killings, the burning of the Jaffna library, the
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disappearance of ballot boxes. Thus did the UNP destroy its own child, the DDC.
Terrorism
In short, "terrorism of all kinds" and from different sources is the consequence of policy failure and peaceful parliamentarism and ultimately, the failure of political leadership.
As recent as early this year, the government's most authoritative spokesman on the subject, the defence secretary was quoted by a foreign correspondent as placing the number of armed Tamil militants, at "not more than three to four hundred". Hardly a serious threat to a State or its armed forces IF, and this is the big "IF", policies over the years had not alienated a whole community.
This fact together with the immediate and proximate causes of the July anti-Tamil eruption must be steadily borne in mind before we consider the external aspects which are inseparably linked to the internal crisis and are in fact an extension of that crisis.
What has come to be popularly termed "Black July" was NOT a Sinhala uprising. It was NOT a Sinhala-Tamil clash. Those who seek to present it in such terms in order to safeguard their vested interests or serve their ideological prejudices, do a great disservice to the Sinhala people. The guilt does not fall on the Sinhala masses but on those racist goon squads who took to the streets in July. And their connections are too well known.
But there is another, deeper cause for this eruption, the most shattering breakdown of law and order this country has witnessed. The best explanation for that fearful fact was offered by Prof. Gananath Obeysekera who wrote of "the institutionalization of political violence" in the recent past.
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July produced over 150,000 refugees. Of this number, 30,00040,000 are now in Tamilnadu.
Nonalignment
Nonalignment and a foreign policy centred on friendship and mutual understanding and respect with our neighbours, almost all of them much bigger and stronger than us had constituted our forward defence perimeter. The environment was secure; nobody in our neighbourhood was hostile to us. At no stage in the past thirty five years did the people of Sri Lanka feel that their security was threatened. Only a rash or neurotic person ever uttered the words "invasion" or military intervention. To argue therefore that our post-July sense of insecurity is the result of Sri Lanka's pursuit of a nonaligned foreign policy is to make a mockery of ordinary fact and logic. Despite any atavistic fear, in a history punctuated by armed incursions and interventions from across the Palk Strait and despite any "small island syndrome" or big nation fixations and phobias, the post-independence period produced no moment when feelings of real and immediate danger invaded and occupied our minds. Whatever the changing nuances in foreign policy under successive regimes and fluctuations in this or that phase, the basic commitment to nonalignment was never abandoned.
If that is regarded as the realm of "abstract theory", as the acting foreign minister Mr Tyrone Fernando was seeking to establish the other day, then let's dwell on what is undeniably real. We did not invite hostile attentions of any neighbour or of any major external power hostile enough, that is, to pose a "threat". For this singular achievement, the people of Sri Lanka owe a debt to the post-independence leadership and the group of officials and diplomats, which despite limited
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resources strengthened the policy-making process with a commendable professionalism.
Judging by the tenor of post-July debate it would appear that our foreign policy was in total disarray. Those who share such a view are obliged to seek the causes, and in doing so, face up to the obvious questions.
An independent nation enjoys the sovereign right to take its own foreign policy decisions in what is commonly called its "enlightened self-interest". But that hoary maxim does presuppose "enlightenment" - an intelligent recognition of what is helpful and advantageous, and what is harmful and likely to prove self-defeating. As in family and social life, so in the community of nations; as in the conduct of our affairs in the particular neighbourhood in which we have chosen to live or are compelled to live, so in the geo-political environment which is not of our choosing but ordained by geography.
The weaker and the more vulnerable the individual
nation, the greater surely should be the care and intelligence with which choices of action and courses of conduct that incur suspicion and hostility, or are perceived by more powerful neighbours as hostile to their "self-interest" are followed. It is "enlightened self-interest" which dictates such commonsense in our approach to our foreign policy problems and options.
Deviation
The question, which then invites the closest attention of the student concerns recent trends in foreign policy. Has Sri Lanka in any way deviated from the traditional path of nonalignment? Has a single act or a series of acts raised doubts and fears in others and adversely affected traditionally cordial relations or are such misgivings, if they exist, the result of
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misunderstanding and misperceptions on their part? Has there been a change of direction? Has there been an erosion of our "impeccable non-alignment", for which we were once respected by the international community?
A prominent government politician has said that postJuly foreign policy was "real" whereas Sri Lanka's foreign policy before July was "abstract" and "theoretical". Right or wrong, the Statement is a direct admission of a break, a rupture from the nonalignment of the past. Are these questions abstract, or purely academic? I doubt if that is so.
My impression is just the opposite. They are very real, acquiring a keener edge and a demanding urgency in view of one undeniable, overwhelming reality - one of the primary causes of the current crisis (the ethnic conflict) has been externalised. True, it is a domestic issue involving the felt grievances of the island's biggest minority. But its spill-over effects, its external entanglements (Colombo-Madras), and the foreign policy interaction (Colombo-Delhi) are so visible and so large that the question can no longer be confined within our borders or within the contours of the domestic debate.
A recent United Nations University-Lanka Guardian seminar report concludes: "While the asymmetries of size, population and economic power in the regional context imposes on India a special obligation to help ensure the independence and integrity of each neighbour, and the stability of the South Asian sub-system in general, any failure to reduce the growing misunderstanding and friction between Sri Lanka and India could only endanger Sri Lanka's own stability, advancement and social progress".
"In conditions of instability, other conflicts and rivalries, both regional and superpower, could intrude in a manner that would further complicate domestic issues, weaken Sri Lanka's declared resolve to resist all forms of foreign interference and its political will and capacity to seek national solutions to national problems".
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"The widely and publicly stated view of influential sections of Sri Lankan opinion that domestic conflicts have led to greater US involvements in Sri Lankan affairs, and a supportive Indian conviction that such involvement, director indirect, would be hostile to India's interests have tended to aggravate the island's present discontent and thus undermined any united effort at seeking a political settlement of the ethnic issue". (LG-July 15, 1984)
Nodal Position
The island's "nodal position" in the Indian Ocean and of course, Trincomalee, nourished the comforting conviction that Sri Lanka was the hub of the universe, and we ourselves a coveted prize that major external powers (external to the region) with their substantial global and regional interests, will be only too eager to pacify even at the risk of their demonstrably larger interests.
Trinco, the Indian Ocean, the Indo-Soviet Treaty, the Afghanistan crisis, the Gulf war - chanted our middle class intelligentsia. Their innermost thoughts of security, their confident and cherished assumptions of timely rescue and ultimate salvation, voiced with a rowdy exhibitionism by the new exponents of "real" foreign policy and a new-look nonalignment a la Kirkpatrick, have now been revealed as naive assumptions. These were yesterday's grand illusions.
All our requests for the kind of assistance we thought we urgently needed were turned down. Quoting his favourite hero, Napoleon, President Jayewardene spoke of "nation of the shop-keepers". India, after all, said Mr Jayewardene, is a 700 million market. If President JR put economic interest first - and rightly so - a myopic intelligentsia, which was given an
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instant education in geopolitics, seemed to need a lesson also in elementary geography. Sri Lanka is not in America's backyard and military aid of the Central American kind is out of the question.
Is our foreign policy "real" as the ruling party stalwarts are now informing us? It is so "real" that we saw an unprecedented move by the censor - a total blackout of news, views and articles on the Israeli issue (except favourable reports and comments of course) and on the agitation it provoked in another local community. Time will show how "real" the economic consequences of this decision will prove in terms of trade, aid and employment prospects.
If Sri Lanka had been a "closed" society like Burma, for instance, the instant, worldwide media exposure about which I spoke at the outset would not have created that "tarnished image" which was to become our immediate obsession. The "open economy" has made us even more dependent on the outside world. It is no more a question of only trade, but official aid, loans from international agencies and commercial banks, foreign investment, and of course our new hope, tourism. Tourism is of course competing with the remittances of migrant Sri Lankan workers, for the number two spot as a foreign exchange earner.
In those countries where public opinion and electoral considerations constitute significant foreign policy input, NGOs, women's organizations, human rights and church groups are a formative factor of policy. It is these self-same countries which are Sri Lanka's principal aid constituency. Black July made a tremendous emotional impact on many of these societies and finance minister Mr Ronnie de Mel is the best witness to that fact. Our dependence has now been extended to a new sphere, the area of security assistance, arms expertise, technology and training.
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Militarisation
As lack of progress at the political level becomes palpably plain, there may well be a serious shift from the political to the military in a broad strategy, which is still defined as "politico-military". We have a new ministry of National Security, a move not difficult to understand. But will our thinking and our idiom be "militarised" too? One observes certain trends. If this trend persists and fortifies itself, then "national security" can emerge as the all-pervasive factor in both internal and foreign policy. Latin America has given birth to the concept of "the State of National Security". Will Lanka acquire at least some of its structural characteristics? The "open economy" and the ethnic conflict have combined to open new "windows of vulnerability", to borrow a Kissingerian phrase. −
Cut away from its moorings, Sri Lankan foreign policy is adrift. Its self-assurance shattered, the Sri Lankan elite seems to have lost its bearings. The "security" that it thought it saw, was just a mirage in the desert. It now gropes for security, eyeless in Gaza.
(This article appeared in the October 1984 issue of Centre for society and Religion publication titled 'Sri Lanka's Ethnic Problem.)
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2
External aspects of the Ethnic Issue
This evening's topic is in fact an invitation to discuss the foreign policy issues involved in what is popularly called our ethnic problem but now, more properly termed, I think, our national crisis. The shocking events of July 1983 suddenly and rudely awakened the Sri Lankan intelligentsia to the realities of our immediate environment and the world outside. In short, we were, psychologically speaking, taken by the scruff of our necks and forced to face up to and come to terms with a host of harsh realities that constitute the pith and substance of foreign policy. Therefore, they present themselves as constant challenges to our diplomacy, in varying degrees of importance and urgency.
Quite suddenly, a generally self-confident Sri Lankan elite appeared to bear the new emotional and moral burden of what the press, in an over-worked phrase called "our tarnished image abroad". While this left our national self-esteem deeply wounded, our material interests and well-being came underthreat too, principally in the high-investment area of tourism, where many a hope for a brighter economic future rested. A heavily and increasingly aid-dependent country now appeared to be exposed to the danger of reduced assistance. If not from
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all, then at least from those governments which are (or claim to be) sensitive to the pressures of human rights groups in their domestic constituencies, and to whom the human rights issue itself is an important input in the making of their foreign policy. Soon we were being assailed by atavistic fears, and words like 'intervention' and "invasion' became common expressions in the media and in our own everyday conversation. It was not just our territorial integrity and sovereignty, which were threatened but our secular, pluralistic democracy, and social fabric. The Sri Lankan elite, hopelessly confused, helpless, beleaguered, saw their country as isolated and friendless in a hostile world.
Did all this add up to a gross over-reaction? Was this a grotesque exhibition of hypersensitivity of the notoriously insular elite of an island that had lived so long under the blessings of benign deities which had protected it from the ravages of war, famine and other disasters? Or, was it also a historic and a monumental failure in foreign policy? A failure of both our opinion-framers and our rulers?
A self-image of our English-educated class in particular was a reflection from the mirror of western opinion. Western approval and approbation were given readily and freely, and doubtless, justly. The peaceful transition to political independence, the effective transfer of power to a well-tutored political and professional elite, the growth of a robust and resilient parliamentary democracy, the introduction of a broadbased social welfare programme, and a relatively sturdy nonalignment made Sri Lanka a conforming Third World exception in western eyes. Is it because this world turned upon us so sharply and roughly that we had to witness the callow, frenzied collective behaviour of our elite? Part of the truth, perhaps even much of it may lie in these initial questions I have raised and their implicit answers.
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Yet, at the risk of seeming to enjoy myself astride my hobby-horse I should like to quote here a passage from a book written a quarter century ago, a book which remains the most comprehensive account of Sri Lanka's post-independence politics:
"Apart from a few individuals in the democratic parties, some articulate Marxists and a handful of journalists, few seriously debated foreign policy alternatives" (wrote Howard Wriggins, adding,) "There appeared to be a notable unconcern with foreign affairs for a people so much affected by developments abroad".
My purpose in quoting these remarks is to draw your attention to the fact that this attitude of mind, this 'unconcern' has been converted, and elevated into a fashionable school of opinion that is broadly identified with a particular political party. Basically, its thesis is that foreign policy is a luxury for smaller, poorer countries, which should, while defending sovereignty, independence and integrity, concentrate their energies on domestic matters, notably economic development. The propagandist extension of this line of argument maintains that Sri Lanka's active involvement in the nonaligned movement was the self-indulgent pre-occupation of a rival political party, and indeed, of a prominent political family.
The choric lamentations, the collective breast-beating and the frantic search for scapegoats which marked the behaviour of the English-educated middle-class in the aftermath of July '83 led finally to a soothing, tranquilising discovery. It was our foreign policy that had reduced us to this state of helplessness and isolation: nonalignment was the villain. To recall a dramatic headline of those times: nonalignment had "left us naked'.
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The exact opposite is closer to the truth. From 1977, or more correctly, from 1988, when the government had gladly shuffled off the uncomfortable responsibilities and constraints of nonaligned chairmanship, Sri Lankan foreign policy looked more like a clumsy strip-tease act. Piece by piece, the protective clothing of Sri Lanka's traditional nonaligned foreign policy was stripped away. Sri Lanka was intent only on catching the eye of and seeking recruitment in the glamorous ASEAN cabaret.
Commenting on this only last Sunday, the National Security minister said that a basic disability stood in the way of our ASEAN membership. His point was that we were in South Asia, not South East Asia; a fact he had learnt in school. Evidently the school for politicians which the new regime so enterprisingly established did not include geography in its curriculum
My flippancy I trust will be excused when I raise a fairly serious question arising from this otherwise absurd and aberrant foreign policy gesture. How could a nation of educated people, proud of its 2,000 year civilisation, seek to establish its identity in the world outside, blithely unmindful of who we are, what we are and where we are? The answer may tell us something about the making of foreign policy, not so much about the known, easily recognized formative factors, but the less tangible.
The ideological pro-west orientation of the regime and the steadily unfolding imperatives of the newly introduced "open economy" policy may certainly explain the excited lurch towards the ASEAN. But, there is also, I suspect, another driving force - the psychological make-up of the dominant elite. Feeling imprisoned in the closed economy of the past, the upper class saw Singapore as the most accessible Shangrila of its escapist dreams. Conversely, the temper, the aspirations and values of this class made it feel squeamish in identifying
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itself with the mess and the multitudes of the Indian subcontinent, the Forsterian 'chaos'.
What Sri Lanka's national crisis - and it is clear that the unresolved ethnic issue is the core of that crisis - has ultimately achieved is that it has compelled us to come to terms with our identity. Questions like who we are (the products of a history of migrations from India, what we are (a multi-ethnic society), and where we are (an island separated from continental landmass by a 25 mile expanse of water), have been raised and answered. So it was not nonalignment that left us naked. It was the gradual rejection of all the basic premises of that traditional nonalignment, of which the cornerstone was the relationship with India, that left us naked to our enemies, real or fancied, internal or external.
In any case, the argument that a poor or small country cannot afford the extravagance of devoting too much time and energy to external affairs, e ven if te na ble in other circumstances, is in fact meaningless in today's conditions. Ironically, the architects of the "open door" strategy should be the most sensitive to that fact. By definition, an open economy is more open to the world outside and therefore more dependent on external circumstances, and thus vulnerable to external pressure. Figures which I quote now, will speak for themselves.
In 1978, 62% of the overall budget deficit was met by foreign financing. It was 48% in 1979, 42% in 1980, 55% in 1981, 43% in 1982, 50.6% in 1983 and again over 50% in 1984. The trend is clear. While Sri Lanka's external debt keeps mounting, a significant feature is the rise in the ratio of external baik öcrrowings to the total foreign debt: only 0.6% in 1979, but as much as 15% in 1980, 16% in 1981, 24.3% in 1982 and 24.8% in 1983. Furthermore, the Debt Service Ratio has also risen steadily. The overall ratio (including IMF transactions) rose from 13% in 1979 to 16% in 1981, and 21% in 1983. Income from tourism dropped by 25% to 30%, a drop
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from the 1982 figure. The estimate from 1985 is 40% less. Meanwhile, private remittances especially from migrant workers in the Arab Middle East and I stress the word Arab for obvious reasons, reached 6 billion rupees in 1983, and 7 billion rupees in 1984, outstripping both, the earnings from the traditional crops of rubber and coconut, and tourism, the great white hope.
The fact of external dependence, which in turn conditions and sometimes determines political and foreign policy choices is then undeniable in Sri Lanka's case. And nothing illustrates this more strikingly than the Sri Lanka aid group, which met yesterday in Paris.
In his concluding remarks last July, the World Bank's Vice President for Asia, Mr David Hopper not only lectured us on the budget and sound economic management but warned Sri Lanka that unless political stability and business confidence was restored, the cordial relationship between Sri Lanka and her donors may have to be reconsidered. The Finance Minister based his case for continued aid at old levels on two confident predictions: First, Sri Lanka will end the year with a modest balance of payments surplus, thanks to the boom in tea prices (itself, the result of pre-election Indian government restrictions on tea exports) and secondly, that the APC would produce a political settlement. We all know what happened to the APC.
The Anuradhapura massacre was on May 14; the Aid group meeting was due on June 20. Mr. Gandhi who had returned from Moscow where he discussed Sri Lanka with Mr Gorbachev, was leaving for the US on June 5. The most hurriedly arranged summit in recent times, at our urgent request, was squeezed in between Mr Gandhi's visit to the two superpower capitals. That had everything to do with the events I just mentioned, because the finance minister had been robbed of both his 1984 arguments. One, tea prices had collapsed and
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two, there was no settlement of the ethnic issue. In fact, violence was more widespread, more serious.
The Minister correctly anticipated two questions; when are you negotiating a political reconciliation with the Tamils (the US State Dept. phrase) and when are you mending fences with India? For in April, the President on a visit to Pakistan was talking of the right of self-determination of the people of Kashmir, and later Sri Lanka had decided to boycott the SAARC foreign ministers' meeting.
One may well ask whether the World Bank, or the donors, have the right to discuss anything but aid and economics; whether their behaviour was not a gross interference with the internal affairs of this country. Of course, it is interference but we must suffer it, since the paymaster calls the tune. This stark fact touches on a crucial question about foreign policy.
To amend Orwell, all countries are equal and sovereign but some more sovereign than others. While in principle all nation-states enjoy equal sovereignty, the effective exercise of such sovereignty is contingent on several factors, some permanent and un alterable. These include the size and population of a country, its economic resources, its industrial and military strength and most of all, is geographic location and therefore the geo-political environment.
A poor country can discover oil or uranium and become rich. The radical transformation of an economy can make a country self-reliant while an economically weak nation can have a strong army, like Israt or North Korea. Geo-political realities, which cannot be changed, may aggravate political and ethnic uouflicts in a given country. For instance, Cyprus, which is divided between the Turkish minority and the Greek majority. The Turkish minority looked for and received support from nearby Turkey while the Greek Cypriot majority also had Greece close by. But that is not the case with Sri Lanka. If this island were located next to Papua New Guinea, the Palk
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straits and Tamil Nadu's fifty million people would not be a source of anxiety. So any sensible Sri Lankan foreign policy has to be centred on an axiomatic factor: the nearness of our huge and powerful neighbour.
Does this mean that a small nation must necessarily be subservient to its big neighbour, that it cannot pursue a policy independent of its big neighbour, or even hostile to its neighbour? Not at all. It can. But it must recognize and be ready to face the consequences of such a hostile relationship. We have a perfect example in Cuba, with whom we can draw parallels. Cuba, once a tropical tourist paradise, is a small Caribbean island with a population our size, located next to the mightiest economic and military power in the world. From the very day of its birth, revolutionary Cuba came under attack from its powerful neighbour. A total embargo was placed on Cuba's main export, sugar. There is an American base on Cuban soil and pressure on Cuba was both physical, diplomatic and economic. There were three attempts on Castro's life (seven, according to the Cubans) and an abortive invasion in 1962.
Yet, last week when the US opened a new radio station (Radio Marti), to beam propaganda broadcasts to Cuba and Nicaragua, Cuba tore up the only agreement it had with the US, which related to immigrants and travel. Cuba is not just hostile, it is defiant. What is the logic behind that, one may wonder.
A popular answer but a false one would be the economic and military support from the Soviet Union. But no Soviet soldier will die for Cuba in the case of an US invasion, which will probably result in the capture of Havana, the capital, in two or three days. So what is Cuba's strength'? Castro gave the answer to American reporters last year, the 25th anniversary of the revolution. "In the event of an invasion", he said, "five million Cubans are ready to die, and the revolution will take to the Sierra Maestro mountains". That is
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not just bluff. The US believes him, and believing him, every American president knows that he will not survive a week if se veral thousands of American soldiers are killed in the invasion. That is Cuba's policy of deterrence, its defence, and it is founded on self-reliance, the total confidence of the people in the leadership and the total commitment of the people to their country's defence.
Nicaragua is an in-between case. Under tremendous US pressure of all kinds - economic, military via contras, sabotage, and blockage - Nicaragua had to compromise. The regime still survives, but with great difficulty. Grenada, like Afghanistan, paid the price for serious discord within the leadership, factional feuds and popular discontent in the countryside.
Therefore, Sri Lankan foreign policy must be centred on a non-hostile relationship with India. This was so, from the mid-50's to the late 70's. For reasons, which had little to do with us, we drew large dividends.
First, varying degrees of unfriendliness and tension marked India's relations with all her neighbours, including the Bangladesh it liberated. Sri Lanka was its only friendly neighbour. Second, Sri Lanka was not part of what Indian analysts call 'the strategic schism' of the South Asian subsystem; that is, India is closer to Moscow than to the US, while the rest of South Asia, is closer to the other Superpower. Thirdly, India's threat-perceptions are focused on its land borders - China in the east, Pakistan on the west. But it had a friend on the southern flank, Sri Lanka, and this flank is the Indian Ocean. If you read Indian writers on strategic affairs from Pannikar to Admiral Kaul to Subramanyam and others, you will note that the Indian political and military establishments share what one might call an imperial vision, a British legacy. The Indian ocean is the only ocean named after a country and hence, the sea-lanes, entrances and exits must be guarded. All external naval powers are intruders. This is India's unwritten Monroe Doctrine based on an undeclared
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Manifest Destiny, the destiny of nation that, like China, will be a Great Power in the 21st century. Lastly, Sri Lanka had the same democratic political system as India, the other neighbours being military dictatorships or monarchies.
Sri Lanka had two disputes with India, one regarded by all governments as a major irritant, and a cause for deep concern - the 'alien' presence of a million persons of Indian origin. India accepted the repatriation of 600,000 under two agreements, and conceded sovereignty over Kachchativu. Each took place under the rule of Mrs Bandaranaike. Two Tamil youths espousing separatism who escaped to India were sent back, tried and jailed. Yet, Sri Lanka did take a stand different from India on Bangladesh war, proving that friendship does not always mean subservience.
Indian attitudes however hardened from around 1980. Mrs Gandhi was displeased about the return of the Asian Foundation and the Peace Corps; trifles, really. She was deeply suspicious of American designs on Trinco and infuriated by Sri Lanka's position on Diego Garcia, in particular, and the Peace Zone Conference in general. She was also troubled by the VOA agreement and gravely worried about the Israeli interests section. From 1983 she flatly denied Sri Lanka's allegation about the existence of separatist rebel training camps in Indian soil.
The new Indian perception of a hostile Sri Lanka led finally to the moving of India's Southern Command to Trivandrum. Whether this perception was right or wrong, justified or not, is immaterial. Policies and strategies are based on such perceptions.
A small country can run the risk of pursuing a hostile policy towards a big neighbour if it has a countervailing protection power, a reliable one. I stress reliability because during the Bangladesh war, a US task force led by the USS "Enterprise' did move into the Bay of Bengal, evidently to help
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Pakistan in her hour of distress, but the "Enterprise' did nothing.
As in other fields of policy-making, choice is the essential question; not only the choices open to us, but the choices likely to be taken by others. If by our pro-American policy we had fondly imagined that the US would take our side against India, that has proved a grand illusion. After the advent of Mr Rajiv Gandhi's government, the US is even keener on improved relations with India as his recent visits show. Even a marginal improvement in that relationship would enhance the possibilities of an Indian foreign policy more equidistant between the superpowers. And for that, the US is almost ready to grant India recognition of her regional preeminence, a fact accepted by the USSR since the mid-fifties. The US's response to Mr Gandhi's initiative on Sri Lanka is a tacit acceptance of India's regional responsibilities, and this would imply an admission of the prerogatives of pre-eminence.
Firstly, an ally of the Congress rules Tamilnadu. After the early March state elections, it is the Congress party's only ally in the South of India where state leaders are trying to form an anti-Centre alliance. So Sri Lankan policy ignored geo-politics, the implications of the geo-strategic importance of India vis-a-vis the superpowers, and the significance of internal politics in India, especially in the South.
Now we are paying the price of this folly in a three-act play, dramatically symbolizing our dependence. Sri Lankan lawyers led by the President's brother are consulting Indian constitutional experts, Sri Lankan trade officials are trying to stabilize tea prices through tripartite talks, while Delhi awaits Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike (and her son, the Leader of the Opposition).
(This was a lecture delivered at the Marga Institute in 1985.)
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3
The Roots of Violence - I
In his brief but characteristically fluent introduction to this seminar, Mr Athulathmudali opened on a cautionary note. Our present preoccupation with terrorism should not be allowed to lead us into confusing other forms of crime and violence with terrorism. In Jaffna today, he said, there are no ordinary crimes. If you stole a bicycle there you may be taken for a terrorist, whereas if you steal a vehicle in Colombo you are regarded as a thief.
For my part I would argue that the distinction is still finer. If you steal a bicycle in Jaffna you may be taken for a thief. It is when you ride it that you risk being taken for a terrorist or earn the nicely legalistic newspaper description, "terrorist suspect". I do appreciate though, the basic distinction he made about different forms of violence, and the need to bear this steadily in mind when discussing this topic.
Nonetheless, there is little point in pretending that "terrorism" and the conflicts which produced this phenomenon and all the efforts and energies now devoted to its eradication is not a current preoccupation. After all, it has invaded our lives; its presence in our society is so pervasive that it often colours and shapes our thinking. It threatens to compel the government to reallocate resources. And in this city at least,
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(perhaps in many a town too), it has become the most common topic of conversation, insidiously infiltrating into a discussion which may not at the outset have the remotest connection with terrorism, violence or even politics.
The sponsors of this seminar, an august body representing all the best established professions in this country, have chosen a sub-title: "Identifying causes and suggesting remedies", a truly daunting task. Obviously one cannot undertake the second without having tried to accomplish the first.
So unprecedented and profound is the crisis, which is now upon us that I would imagine that this intellectual exercise is the duty of every Sri Lankan who is aware of its gravity and must therefore be deeply troubled about the future of this country. For you, the professionals, whatever the exact nature of your calling, the responsibility is moral and binding. After all, your standard of life, your self-esteem and social standing, all rest finally on your education, on acquired aptitudes, on the skills you use in the practice of your profession. All those taken together constitute a sort of moral debt; an obligation owed to the people and the country, which made personal attainments such as yours possible.
Blessed is the nation which in its moment of greatest challenge and peril can produce a moral and intellectual leadership that has the vision and courage to meet and overcome both. Human history has been gloriously enriched by the examples of nations, much younger and smaller, which have confronted far more awesome challenges only to produce precisely that sort of inspiring leadership. Examples abound of peoples, with nothing of the splendour of the heritage that we so proudly possess - and so ceaselessly and clamourously proclaim - who have faced their own hours of maximum danger by summoning to their cause unsuspected reserves of selfconfidence, intelligence and fortitude. But we se em
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determined to remain captives to the past and make ourselves hostage to an uncertain future.
Trying not to be too overawed by the professional eminence of my colleagues on this panel, and mindful of the special character of this audience, may I introduce myself as a student of literature who happened to become a journalist writing mostly about politics - local and international. It is from such a background that I shall draw the material which has gone into the making of my own contribution this evening.
The nature of social and political conflict, primarily in the Third World, and the violence generated by the failure to find ways to resolve such conflicts - that will be my basic approach.
The Older Terror
Let us, however, start with "terror". This is a passage from Mark Twain, popularly known as a humourist and wit but actually one of the finest writers of modern times. Mark Twain, here, is writing about the French Revolution:
"There were two "Reigns of Terror' if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted more months; the other lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons; the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors' of the minor terror; the momentary terror so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by the
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brief terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by the older and the real Terror".
Mark Twain unbares the often unseen terror, which lies in the evils and injustices of society and what that means to the faceless multitudes of all poor impoverished countries. As we recognize the social, economic and institutional roots of violence, one can almost hear the voice of the worldly-wise sceptic with his eternal "yes, but". Yes, but what does one do about law and order while these inequities are being gradually eliminated?
It is a fair and serious question. The wise and the humane ruler will agree that the gross inequalities and injustices, which manifestly exist in their society, must be removed. The same wise ruler will also argue, this time somewhat defensively, that the eradication of these long-inherited evils, that is the process of reform and progressive change, will necessarily take time.
But history also shows that mankind has a disconcerting habit of losing his patience with what he perceives to be wrong and unjust. There is such a thing as the limits to human tolerance, although neither astrologer nor computer can tell the ruler when exactly the threshold of tolerance will be crossed. Losing his patience, he begins to lose his temper when the ruler fails to initiate change and reform; change that is not truly effective, change which is not felt or which is not meaningful to the governed. Or reform that is not introduced speedily enough.
While these remain the commonplace lessons of history, we must recognize here the presence of a fundamental problem. First, the conflict between popular aspiration and the ruler's response. Second, how well, if at all, these are matched over a period of time, years or decades. In other
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words, the question of historical time. In the gap (everwidening usually, in the Third World) between the two, between mass expectations and the adequacy of the response, and in the time-gap which separates them, lies the incipient causes of violence.
Popular dissatisfaction over the insufficiency of the response (i.e. the content of change) and ever-prolonged neglect (i.e. the pace of change) finds various forms of selfexpression - from mere grumbling to bitter complaint, from criticism to protest, from organized and spirited protest to open and organized opposition. This is as true of the behavioural response of vast, impoverished and discontented majority angry with the material conditions of day-to-day life as it is of aggrieved or embittered national minorities, concerned about their rights as a people, and angry about what they perceive to be discrimination, or any felt loss of self-respect and dignity. Broadly speaking, it is these two categories of conflict, which breed violence in Third World societies and introduce violence into Third World politics.
Frequently (and most often, suddenly), there is a dramatic break in this chain of protest and opposition. At what particular moment does this occur? If there is a methodology, Eastern or Western, Marxist or non-Marxist, which makes prediction possible, I am not aware of it. Over long historical sweeps, and certainly with the vantage of hindsight, it is easier to identify the crisis and trace the process of its maturation to the final moment of explosion.
At some point of time, the opposition movement is even ill-organized and inchoate, and opposition forces, constitutional and non-violent, leap into violent protest. Quite often these are sporadic outbursts, related to ad hoc issues, or created by high-pressure situations. Generally of short duration, despite their evident volcanic intensity, such eruptions may soon be extinct fires. On the other hand, from
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the dying embers may come new, powerful flames of revolt, now related to stated long-term goals.
Again, there are numerous examples, contemporary and current, even from the First World, from which we can learn very useful lessons. Be it from Quebec (more a success than a failure), from the Basques in Spain (now, under the new socialist government of Felipe Gonzales, encouraging signs of success) or from Ulster (a fundamental failure and yet manageably marginalized), we can imbibe new truths.
But before we draw any lessons we must first rigorously differentiate that which is basically similar to our situation from that which is totally dissimilar. The human intelligence, for all its vaunted gifts, has a certain propensity for selecting those lessons which are comfortingly supportive of its own cheerful assumptions while remaining wilfully blind to that which is not so pleasing or not so adaptable to its own neat calculations. For instance, the whole matrix of West German society and politics is such that whatever we may learn from studying "urban terrorism", an aberrant feature of that affluent society that can only be understood in terms of that specific context, can be only minimally helpful.
This also holds true for Third World examples though here the similarities outweigh the differences. Consider the oft-quoted example of Malaysia, specifically the "success story" of the British-led counter-insurgency operation in Malaya. This is doubly important because the Americans in Vietnam often modeled their campaign on the British plan, notably the "strategic hamlet" concept. Pointing out that this parallel was fallacious, Eqbal Ahmed in his excellent (1970) essay on counter-insurgency, wrote, "Their (the communists) support was limited to a minority of 423,000 Chinese squatters, who were ethnically distinct from and distrusted by the majority of Malays, and popular grievances were not acute enough to make the guerillas look like liberation to the Malay peasants".
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While the military operation is hailed as a triumph, it is often forgotten that the British were smart enough to remove the root of the popular discontent which gave the Chinese insurgents a support base. Not only did the British re-settle the Chinese squatters in less squalid areas but "provided for Chinese participation in government and above all announced plans for the independence of Malaya. "Even then", notes the Pakistani scholar, now at the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, "it took thirteen years and a total of 260,000 soldiers and police (80,000 British and 180,000 Malays) to put down 8,000 guerillas (a ratio of 30:1)".
The point being made here is that the Americans drew the wrong lesson. And the lesson for us today is not to be greatly impressed by foreign "expertise", especially the expertise of those who have a string of outstanding failures than successes to their credit
If the reminder is necessary, it is because one notices that our dramatic advance into "modernization" is making us a little too childishly fascinated by the mystique of technology, gadgetry and weaponry. The Americans relied on massive firepower (mainly air power), a dazzling deployment of gadgetry and new techniques (military and psychological) fashioned in the finest academics of the US. And then there certainly was no dearth of brainpower. When Robert S McNamara, the prototypical whiz kid became defence secretary, he said he would "computerize" the Vietnam War and he came out with scintillating ideas like "electronic fence". When Pham Van Dong was told this, he turned to the French reporter Francois Sully and said, "That's good news...since they (the Americans) don't understand us or what this is all about, the computer will only multiply their mistakes..."
Confronted by a totally novel and un precedented challenge, it is only natural that our elite should so quickly degenerate into a "bits-and-pieces' intelligentsia. What they are doing is, borrowing a bit of an idea from here and taking a
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piece of experience from there, a page or two from some outlandish book on terrorism, a passage from a commentary on counter-insurgency, a clipping from some glossy magazine on the latest weaponry put out by some arms salesman. With these bits and pieces they are striving desperately to construct a grand "counter-strategy".
In identifying causes before suggesting remedies, the computer is no substitute for human understanding. An understanding, that is, of human motivation and social crisis, the major factors in the violent conflicts that ravage the Third World. Tito, the master of "partisan" warfare, who held six crack divisions of the Nazi German army - at the time, the finest fighting machine in the world - at bay for years, exploded another popular myth about "jungle warfare" when he talked about "the unfavourable terrain in the region of Srem". "What a first-class example of the relative unimportance of geographical factors..." He placed 'the attitude of the mass of the people' as a top priority along with political work and fighting leadership.
One can be sure that the "terrorism" which is not rooted in popular sympathy and support will slowly wither away. It is equally clear from contemporary history that a regime's counter-violence or "counter-terrorism" can sometimes give the terrorist that which he does not have at the outset and so badly needs - popular sympathy.
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4
The Roots of Violence -II
In the attempt to identify the causes of the violence, which social and political conflicts breed so widely in the Third World, a steady recognition of what we have called the "dramatic break" in the chain of protest, is crucially important. Violent methods, rather than constitutional or non-violent means, quickly become the rule, not the exception.
Unhappily, such recognition does not necessarily lessen the burden of governing groups in any given society, nor for that matter, the perplexities, which face the student of its political processes. Both discover that there is really no science, eastern or western, nor any method, Marxist or any other, that can predict with reasonable accuracy, the moment of sudden transition, which in time proves irreversible. If such a body of knowledge was readily available, the evidence of history would suggest that scores of despised and despotic rulers had little access to these prophetic insights before the storms of revolt engulfed their kingdoms and regimes.
This esoteric knowledge lies in the realm of the metaphysical. Perhaps in the science of Sai Baba? Or even in the wisdom of one's neighbourhood crystal gazer? This may or may not account for what some of my newspaper colleagues swear is a hyper boom in the astrological and allied trades,
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thanks largely they suspect to the anxiety neurosis that has seized our upper classes.
It doesn't signify. Let the exact moment in time remain a mystery. The nature of the processes at work, however, need not always elude our grasp. This fact too is extremely important. For, it offers the intelligent ruler an array of interventionist opportunities - the chance basically to intervene in the process before it has advanced to the stage where all democratic, non-violent options have been abandoned as hopeless and new forms of organized violence are consciously adopted.
The wise ruler can take preventive action in time. Often the choice, challenging, bold and not without attendant risks, depending largely on the timing of the intervention, spells itself out as the imperative need to pre-empt the transition from the non violent. Or even when the violence has not become chronic.
Well-timed compromises and concessions can break the back of organized violence and the leading agencies of protest can be co-opted. This is in fact the classic liberal-reformist reply to true-to-type Third World crises, though the supportive techniques of co-optation may belong more properly to traditional statecraft and its cynical strategies.
One of the main aims of these pre-emptive counterstrategies is to prevent at all cost, the democratic, non-violent moderates from aligning themselves (or being compelled to do so by the logic of polarization), with the radical or extremist forces which increasingly turn to other courses and choices, including the gun.
Such an aim, first of all, imposes the need to strengthen the constitutionalist moderate and not weaken, render irrelevant or destroy him by robbing him of the legitimacy he enjoys in the eyes of his constituency, through your own tactics and political manoeuvres. The opposite course may be
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dangerously shortsighted, perhaps even suicidal. That it is counter-productive is beyond dispute.
Philippine Crisis
No historical parallel is of course perfect. But from certain broadly analogous situations, one can draw lessons useful to the resolution of one's own problems - in this instance, the problem of political violence. Take for example the crisis that has now gripped a once stable Marcos regime, a crisis, which has sent alarm bells ringing in Washington. High-level expert predictions (the State Dept., the CIA and the US Pacific Command) suggest that the Marcos regime has entered a "terminal stage". The Philippines, which witnessed the declaration of martial law in 1970 may be overrun by Maoist insurgents, these analytical studies say, within the next ten years, unless (and the qualification is terribly important) the Marcos regime introduces "basic reforms - social, economic and democratic".
"Most disturbing", reads the report presented to the Senate is the fact that the insurgency - the rationale for imposing Martial Law 14 years ago - is "stronger today than ever before". In 1970, there were 500-armed men. Today "there are 12,500 guerillas countrywide, and growing". The career of one Filipino politician (now a martyr) offers a striking illustration of the general point we have made about timely intervention.
In the mid-50's, the Philippines faced the threat of a communist insurgency, the Huk revolt. The country's greatest president of modern times, the much loved liberal reformer, Ramon Magsaysay realized that this incipient revolt would gain ground only if it took root in the impoverished rural countryside where powerful landowners, much in the manner of the Latifundias in Latin America, ran vast plantations on the toil and sweat of ill-paid, exploited farmers.
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Magsaysay introduced land reforms, promised to impose strict controls on the private armies of the oligarchs and end the abuses of the military and the police. He then offered an amnesty on the condition that the Huks surrendered their arms and came down from the mountains. The man whom he sent into the jungles to negotiate with Luis Taruc, the Huk leader, was the country's youngest elected governor, a man called Benigno ("Ninoy') Aquino. Magsaysay died quite young. If he had lived perhaps he may have extended these reforms to make a radical economic transformation possible.
Arming himself with the sweeping powers under Martial Law in order to create the conditions necessary for his reelection and a second term that has now seen him rule the Philippines for 19 years, Mr. Marcos justified his extraordinary action on the grounds that he required such. powers to, (a) curb violence, and (b) guarantee the stability needed for foreign investment, more Japanese than American. Certainly the Philippines was not free of violence. Attending a seminar in Davao City, this visitor from a then peaceful and leisurely Ceylon thought he had not quite recovered from jet-lag when he saw his neighbour Max Soliven (we were seated in alphabetical order) the country's most influential columnist ("the James Reston of the Philippines") bring out from among his seminar documents, a 007-type pistol, and quietly placing it in his pocket. Some nights later, this film buff and lover of "westerns" watched a little more calmly, a Filipino entering a nightclub after dutifully obeying the instructions written in a notice on the wall - "Hang your holsters on the rack"
Crime and Violence
Yes, crime and violence were widespread. Did Martial Law cure it? Certainly, the country appeared to be stable. Mr Marcos'
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patrons, the Americans thought so, as they did in Iran and Nicaragua. Only two years ago, Vice President George Bush, a highly cultivated and intelligent man, paid Mr Marcos a compliment that now strikes most Filipinos as fabulously ironic. He told Marcos, "We lo ve your adherence to democracy".
Bitter experience is a good tutor. Today, the Americans appear to understand the nature of social crisis in the Third World a little more surely. Not that the Soviet comprehend Third World complexities any better, as the examples of Egypt and Iraq demonstrate.
The Aquino assassination - the killer was a soldier, as the Commission of Inquiry, unable to do a cover-up has disclosed - was the flashpoint. The Americans forced a general election on Marcos. Whatever the truth of opposition with regard to allegations about rigging and strong arm tactics (in these matters too, patterns are familiar), it is still far more critical and vigorous than our own pathetic apology for an opposition.
Washington has not stopped there. Deeply worried about the future of its strategic interests in the country (the two biggest air and naval bases outside US territory) the US Congress and State Dept. have warned Marcos of the "widespread resentment over corruption, cronyism and economic inequality". Will Marcos reform? And even if he does, which is unlikely, would it prove a weary repetition of the old story of "too little, too late".
Third World Responses
The behaviour of the Marcos regime conforms to the general Third World pattern of response. The average Third World regime says: "Here we are, engaged in the noble task of eliminating social evils, here we are embarking on the great
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endeavour of economic development, and what do we find? We are being thwarted and frustrated, our task is being made more difficult and complicated by an irresponsible opposition, by anti-social dissident elements determined to de-stabilize us."
Your typical Third World regime then seeks to contain, disrupt, suppress or destroy these opposing forces. To anybody who has studied Third World politics, the next stage is inevitable. The regime, in what seems a defensive reflex, begins to arm itself with new powers, centralizing all authority, and in the process, paralyzing all forms of a once flourishing participatory democracy. Since centralisation and devolution are fundamentally contradictory, it follows that all forms of popular participation at the local and regional level are also paralyzed.
If those measures do not prove effective enough, extraordinary laws are passed, and the apparatus of law enforcement is re-shaped and reinforced. But even as society and politics move from ever expanding restrictions to selective and then open repression, the chosen "solution" gradually becomes part of the "problem". With dissent restricted or suppressed and constitutional paths closed, the oppositional forces are compelled to find non-parliamentarist forms of expression from the legal to the illegal, from the non-violent to the violent. Society is now caught in an endless spiral of violence.
Of course, the dilemma also runs much deeper. Reform if it is to be really meaningful, implies a change of the status quo. By definition, the status quo represents power and privilege, the concentration of ownership and wealth in a small minority. Reform demands the sharing of that wealth, the diffusion of power, the reduction of privilege. Which Third World governing class is prepared to do all this?
The sources of potential conflict and violence can then be located in a series of contradictions. The centralization of
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power is justified as the pre-condition for economic growth. But does growth mean "development"? If, for instance, development leads to a greater concentration of wealth, a widening of the rich-poor gap, where then is your economic reform?
We speak in a month in which Mr James Grant, the PQLI standard-bearer, has expressed great disquiet over increasing malnutrition where the World Bank says the poor are getting poorer because the food stamps have lost their real value. Here, inflation has been described as the highest in Asia and a daily paper has published some shocking (official) statistics on urban poverty. Yet another newspaper has reported the anguished cry of a young Sinhalese man whose hopes of getting a job in Kuwait have been dashed because of a new Kuwait restriction on visas for Sri Lankans and he wonders whether this will soon be true of other Arab employers too. This has also been a week where it has been reported that the problem of malaria in the dry zone cannot be tackled effectively because the authorities have no money to buy slides, and peasants are protesting about eviction from lands given to agri-business, joined in by monks protesting about temples and temple lands.
A few basic questions, then, could lead us to a better understanding of the phenomenon of violence in the Third World. What kind of "development" are we talking about and for whom? Can one reconcile "stability" with change? Again, whose "stability"? Every word, every vivid image of Mark Twain is an insight into the day-to-day living drama of Latin America.
As part of the Third World, we share with it a history of colonialism, and present day realities best expressed by the Uruguyan writer Eduardo Galeano who titled his well known study of the continent as "The Open Veins of Latin America", meaning the wealth of Latin America produced by the sweat and blood of its people, draining into the blood banks of Wall Street.
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5
The Roots of Violence - III
As Central America, the U.S. "frontyard" in Mr. Reagan's phrase, was caught in what seemed an ever-tightening grip of violence, the American elite, particularly the foreign policy establishment appeared to be seized by the convulsions of a painfully divisive debate. Under furious attack by the Congress, area specialists, academics, former US diplomats, CIA analysts and influential voices within the US armed forces, the Reagan administration gave the dangerous impression of being incapable of coping with the crisis.
There is little cause for surprise, though. For, if the current pre-election debate has not led to any serious erosion of Mr Reagan's immense popularity, it has nonetheless confirmed what many non-American students of US politics have suspected these past years; that foreign policy is not Mr Reagan's forte. In a world of confusing and often cataclysmic changes, honest-to-goodness, unrepentant conservatives make poor foreign policy makers.
Yet, the manifest policy failure in Central America cannot surely be attributed to the personal frailties of one man and his ideological idiosyncrasies? And that too, in one area of the world where any US administration can count on
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a wealth of experience accumulated over a century of interventions and direct political involvement in the region.
Answers had to be found elsewhere. And the main issues which emerged from the public debate, pointed to more useful lines of inquiry. Were the violent conflicts raging in Central America rooted in socio-economic causes like the disparities between the rich and the poor, between ostentatious wealth and grinding poverty, in illiteracy, malnutrition, and squalid housing, or in purely political-ideological causes? Were the principal factors domestic (the social and economic structures) or were they exogenous (imported ideas, external forces of subversion, arms and equipment)? What were Washington's policy options? Was a military solution possible and if so, how far must such possibilities be pursued? If a military solution was impossible, what initiatives should the US take in favour of a political settlement? What processes of change, if any, must it support? Should the US encourage internal political and economic reforms? Should the US take independent action or should it support regional efforts at mediation? Or both?
Bi-Partisan Commission
President Reagan appointed a bi-partisan commission headed by Dr Kissinger, now an "outsider" to the political establishment. He was asked to submit a report in six months. Bi-partisan commissions are frequently handicapped by their own inherent need to accommodate bi-partisan views and interests. It is also true that it is a rare presidential commission, which openly repudiates the basic premises of a presidential policy. And finally there is the problem of the peculiar limitations of Dr Kissinger's own world outlook, however formidable his intellect and his widely recognized achievements as a modern Metternich.
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The Metternichian thinker has his own neatly ordered concept of world power, with the superpower capitals and the chancellories of the major industrial nations as the principal centers of that power. The Metternichian diplomat strives to bring his contending interests into the 19th century European style 'concert" so that conflict-resolution, the contemporary American equivalent in the art of diplomacy bears as close a symmetry as possible to the pre-conceived Kissingerian construct and grand design.
The neo-Metternichian has a self-confessed distaste for the Third World, a messy world with its exasperating and stubborn disorderliness and unmanageability. The distaste seems as much aesthetic as intellectual. "Nothing important can come from the South. The axis of History starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington and then goes on to Japan. What happens in the South is of no importance".
Vietnam Lesson
Dr Kissinger didn't mention Beijing but one of the central aims of his successful secret diplomacy was to recognize China's status as a major player in the global game and thus impose on that country the international responsibilities of this new role. This would simultaneously ser ve Washington's imperative need to get Mr Nixon off the hook in Vietnam by "bringing the boys back home" before the presidential polls. This he accomplished but he failed in his effort to achieve the complementary objective of containing the revolutionary process in Vietnam. Vietnam was the moment of truth for Mr Nixon's Metternich. The politics of the "unimportant' South (the Third World) have their own laws of motion that do not necessarily respect Kisingerian formulations.
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So when the former Secretary of State undertook to chair the bi-partisan commission, he was already a man humbled by partial failure. Perhaps this made him more willing to reexamine the fundamental nature of conflict and violence in a "South" which had earlier suffered the benign neglect of the foremost foreign policy pundit of the United States.
The same can surely be said of the American intelligentsia, or at least that segment which had pressured President Reagan into making a conciliatory move like the appointment of a bi-partisan commission. True, the commission of inquiry was itself just an intellectual exercise and if the architects of the policy were so inclined, would remain just that.
Even so, the readiness of the intelligentsia to engage in such a re-appraisal, i.e., questioning its own sometimes comforting assumptions and to search for the facts of the situation as they really are, rather than the facts which only buttress a self-serving propaganda, is surely commendable? To face the reality however unpleasant is surely a sign of a mature, socially responsible intelligentsia, which is prepared to meet its moral obligations to the community?
If I refer to these matters it is not only because I am conscious that my audience is the highest representative body of this country's profession, but also because of my introductory remarks on Kissinger and the Kissinger Commission.
Role of the Intellectual
Last October, the National Committee on American Foreign Policy awarded the coveted Hans Morgenthau Memorial Prize to Dr Kissinger. Described as the first authentic intellectual to become Secretary of State in 150 years, the guest speaker of the evening, Arthur Schesinger Jr., the Albert Schweitzer
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Professor of Humanities in the city University of New York and the winner of several Pulltzer prizes, reminded the distinguished audience that Morgenthau, the founding father of foreign policy studies in the US would not agree with Goethe who said, "Let us leave politics to the diplomats and soldiers". ... On the contrary, Morgenthau wrote that the responsible and "genuine' intellectual must sometimes be the 'enemy of the people', who tells people what they "either do not want to hear or cannot understand". The genuine intellectual must speak the truth especially to those in power who are finally the policy makers.
It is now our turn to ask ourselves, whether Henry Kissinger's "unimportant" South is not our own "unimportant" North. In our intellectual scheme, has not the north' of this little island suffered the same sort of "benign neglect"? Although the government of the day must bear the burden ultimately, there is no need here to be partisan politically and blame this or that regime. That "benign neglect" (many may quarrel with the word "benign") has been the shared attitude of not just the post-independence political establishment or more accurately the leadership of the past two decades or so, but of the Colombo intelligentsia, both Sinhala and Tamil.
Have we not also been guilty of a monumental. Kissingerian lapse, the expression of a fundamentally flawed perception about the "unimportance" or "insignificance" of the northern "backyard"? Have we not persisted in the error of treating it, at best, as a kind of sub-plot in the national drama of politics, only important in the run-up to the elections for post-election deals, pacts, and other dubious contracts and arrangements? This, of course, with the active cooperation of the traditional northern leadership, now itself a hapless victim of that history.
But are they the only victims? The Kissinger commission was neither appointed out of moral considerations nor out of
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some generous impulse to rescue the people of Central America from their present discontents and agonies. It was a conscious act of policy planning motivated wholly by selfinterest, enlightened self-interest if you like, of the United States, and its self-evident need to re-construct foreign policy. Here, in Sri Lanka, many hopes rest on the idea that it is possible to isolate and physically restrict the northern problem, particularly the violence. Sometime ago I used the term "Ulsterisation". But Brighton darkens the once bright vision of physical containment and marginalisation.
Malign Neglect
If the northern situation is no longer a northern problem but a profoundly national crisis, it is equally clear that the still unresolved problem has been 'externalised" and taken beyond our borders. Thus, it has become a foreign policy issue too, underscoring each passing week the tremendous importance of foreign policy, a special area of malign neglect in recent years.
Noting that the crisis won't wait, Kissinger wrote, "Experience has destroyed the argument of the old dictators that a strong hand is essential to avoid anarchy and communism, and that order and progress can be achieved only through authoritarianism. The modern experience of Latin America suggests that order is more often threatened when people have no voice in their own destinies. Social peace is more likely in societies where political justice is founded on self-determination and protected by formal guarantees".
Dr Kissinger was invited by President Reagan to head this bi-partisan commission primarily because of the five-year civil war in El Salvador, which had introduced political turmoil and increasing violence into the region. In a letter to:
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Mr Reagan, Kissinger said, "the crisis is so acute that the timeframe is limited". What are the limits of our own time-frame? Like the Philippines, Washington worked fast and hard to avoid another Nicaragua. Marcos had "closed" the political system with his martial laws and his rigged elections, justifying these utterly unpopular actions as necessary preconditions for economic stability and growth and the eradication of violence. It was also ostensibly for the 'containment' of the two rebellions - the Moslem secessionist revolt, geographically confined to the Moslem areas and the NPA Maoist insurgency. But economic instability and unrest grew, the political situation worsened and the two insurgencies spread.
The US presence, again motivated by strategic considerations, has brought the Philippines some breathing space and bought Marcos a little more time. He has been forced to hold elections, perhaps not entirely clean but open and fair enough to create a new parliament more obviously reflective of moderate opposition opinion. The pressure has been so strong that a commission of inquiry into Aquino's assassination has pointed to a high-level military conspiracy, involving it is said, General Fabian Ver, a leading Marcos crony.
A similar US-inspired "opening the system" exercise has been conducted in El Salvador. Despite chaotic conditions and improper electoral practices, President Napolean Duarte does enjoy today a far greater measure of popular legitimacy than any of his predecessors.
The Americans argued and the Kissinger Commission broadly agreed that a regime which has no such legitimacy or which rests on a narrow, rapidly shrinking political support base, lacks the self confidence either to seek a genuine settlement or to fight an insurgency effectively.
Apparently President Duarte has sufficient popular support and political will to take the first choice, although he runs the risk of alienating the hard line Right, and perhaps
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the risk of a coup or assassination. Earlier he had offered to talk to the guerillas on one condition - a readiness to participate in the democratic process after they had laid down their arms. He would not negotiate with "guns on the table". Addressing the UN recently, he made a new offer after the FMLN has rejected the previous one. A negotiated settlement is now "on track" though the difficulties ahead may be insurmountable.
North-South Divide
In every Third World country, there is an enormous "NorthSouth" divide between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the disadvantaged. There is also another divide, which is political - between the government and the opposition, whether the opposition is permitted to function freely or not. There can also be a third 'divide', North-South or any other, which is ethnic, and this conflict also can be either non-violent or violent.
What is crucial is whether such a conflict, if it has assumed a violent form, has been 'externalised', with ominous possibilities of being 'internationalised'. If that is the case with our own crisis, then the chances of a 'Sri Lankan solution' to a Sri Lankan problem are gradually diminishing with our policy options getting more and more circumscribed. Precisely because of this 'externalisation', there are several experiences from which we can draw useful lessons in our general effort at "conflict resolution".
The France dictatorship did not solve the Basque problem, which got worse. It is only after the recent political initiatives of the new socialist Felipe Gonsales government that there has been a dramatic drop in Basque violence and terrorism. Again, De Gaulle's "Algerian amputation" did not make things worse, as his extremist opponents predicted and
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some like the OAS tried to stop. There's much to be learnt in a comparative study - here, the lesson concerns the time-frame and timely intervention - of the British success in Kenya and the end of the Mau nationalist revolt and the different and far more trying and costly exercise in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia). We should also study the Cyprus situation in terms of both President Kiprianou's recent offer of constitutional reforms as well as the UN mediation effort, especially what in UN-ese is styled the "modalities and mechanisms" of negotiation.
Press and Crisis
Early in this talk I tried to impress on you, the members of this distinguished body of professionals, of the special responsibilities that are undeniably yours in a crisis of the kind that is now upon us. If war is too serious a matter to be left to the generals, then the peace, which this nation now so desperately seeks, is plainly too momentous a matter to be left to the politicians.
Of course, this reminder obliges me in turn to see how the press has fulfilled the self-same responsibilities.
At a Marga symposium on the ethnic issue, Mr Reggie Siriwardena, commenting on the role of the media, made kind reference to a paper I had written on that problem many years ago - in fact, for the same Davao city seminar I just spoke of. That discussion on "Reporting communal tensions: the responsibilities of the press", brought reports on race riots in Notting Hill, Malaysia, Chicago, Ahmedabad and Ceylon. While the focus of my own paper, entitled "The Three Voices of Lake House" was the 1958 violence, the performance of the Opposition press was also evaluated.
I chose "Lake House" as my subject not only because I enjoyed ready access to its files but because its audience, its vast range of readers, came from different social and language
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groups. Besides, any contrast in approach, in the presentation of news and views, between one paper and a companion from the same stable, would naturally be all the more striking.
A few of my "discoveries" fascinated the audience. In one instance - this was after the Bandarnaike-Chelvanayagam pact and in the run-up to the 1958 riots - the editorial in a Sinhala paper looked suspiciously like a faithful translation of the same day's editorial published by its English cousin. And everybody in the office knew that the policy guidelines were given by the same person. But there was a difference. The Sinhala editorial had emotionally charged words absent in the English and turns of phrase, with distinct racial overtones. It was to put it mildly, deliberately provocative.
In general, the group behaviour came out something like this. The English paper was a study in fair-minded moderation and the editorial voice urbane, self-assured, almost a caricature of the British "umpire" laying down the rules for these messy, communal games of the "natives".
The Sinhala papers with five times the circulation assumed meanwhile, the self-righteous role of a fervent champion of race and religion. The Tamil paper maintained the low profile proper to the poor relation in the prosperous Lake House family.
A point in favour of the media managers (or is it?) was that their motivation was by no means racial. It was political, Machiavellian, if you wish. The occasion allowed Lake House to use heavy artillery in softening up the Sinhala electorate, as its favoured ally and patron, the UNP prepared to launch a "holy march" to the Temple of the sacred Tooth. In today's idiom, Lake House gave us an early, pioneering essay in destabilisation.
Are these words too hard? Without any fear of reprisal this mid-level journalist read out his paper in the presence of a director of the company, and one of the most distinguished editors produced by that famous institution, Mr. Tarzie
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Vitachchi. There was no censure at all; in fact, only some compliments
The tolerance and enlightened liberalism of Lake House, in some matters at least, mirrored the tolerance of a far more self-assured and secure power-elite in the easier days of a much less troubled era. Now intolerance is the badge of the tribe. And the scribe. A papier-mâché patriotism is the last refuge of a petrified elite that has lost its nerve, and is alarmed at the prospect of losing its power, its privilege and whatever else it has accumulated. In the name of keeping faith with the past, our undoubtedly fine heritage, this self-centred and nervous elite is now capable of betraying the future, the ultimate treason.
Looking back on these times of distress and confusion, some Sri Lankan historian of the next century may, I fear, place the burden of guilt not only on the politicians but on the shoulders of our professional elite who failed in their historic duty of offering enlightened leadership to their people:
"O dark dark dark/They all go into the dark/ The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant/The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters/The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers/Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees/Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark." (From Four Quartets:East Coker by T.S. Eliot)
(The "Roots of Violence" articles were lectures delivered at a seminar organized by the Organization of Professional Association.)
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6
Third World's Encounters of the Third Kind
In the grip of a harrowing ethnic conflict, the five-year old separatist insurgency, Sri Lanka has learned to live in a blaze of unwelcome publicity. The story of the Tamil "boat people", 155 refugees abandoned by a West German ship off Newfoundland, attracted almost too much worldwide
exposure.
"We are not a refugee-producing country," protested foreign minister Shahul Hameed, stung by a Western newspaper comment. Most European governments, including Britain, have tightened visa rules for all Sri Lankans, despite Sri Lanka's claims as a Commonwealth member. If the refugee and guest worker become insidious carriers of the virus of racial prejudice in Europe, the revenge of the old colonies on erstwhile masters may appear complete. Yet, such a process will not be free of an irony that mocks the third world. Race, language, religion and tribe, the badges of group identity, have been the most fecund sources of third world unrest. And often it is the one on exile abroad who is the promoter of separatist struggles and terrorism at home.
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Race more than class, identity rather than ideology are the favourite modes of mobilization of alienated national minorities. As Prof. Wyndraeth H. Morris Jones, the British political scientist, has noted, two kinds of demands are made. If the group is concentrated, these are likely to be territorial, if dispersed, the demands are for "proportional" participation of power-sharing. Sri Lanka's problem, the conflict between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority in the north, belongs to the first category but the Government hopes a solution can be based on the second.
Ethnicallegiance is no respecter of state borders, which have often been arbitrarily drawn. The struggle for cultural identity is now the world's most potent anti-systemic force, the great destabilizer. The violence it generates defies the neat categories of "class war", of Marxism-Leninism just as it makes nonsense of the Soviet-sponsored global terrorism theories of Reagnism-Thatcherism. The phenomenon also confounds countless third world regimes, as was demonstrated this month at the non-aligned summit meeting in Zimbabwe. While it was easy to condemn "state terrorism" (South Africa and Israel) and support liberation movements, semantic skills were severely strained to achieve consensus on terrorism and separatism, especially movements receiving external help. The outgoing chairman of the Non-aligned Movement, Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi of India, accuses Pakistan of promoting Sikh terrorism and separatism. But only last month, he conceded statehood to Mizoram and installed the leader of a 20-year insurgency as its chief minister.
In no region of the world is the "identity crisis" so evident as in South Asia, and no country is a more striking victim than Sri Lanka, once a "model" third world democracy and welfare state. Time and space - the rapid acceleration of the crisis in so small a geographic compass - account for the intensity of the demonic forces that now threaten to tear us apart.
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India's Role
More than 100,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees live in camps in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, the home of 50 million Tamils. Madras, the state capital is the base of former Tamil parliamentarians and, more crucially, guerillas. This refugee presence allowed India to claim a stake in resolving Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict.
Help, direct and covert, from Pakistan, Israel, China, Britain and the United States could not match Indian pressure, and the pressure of the worsening situation on the ground. Terrorist bombs in Colombo, soaring defense spending and economic setbacks, threats of aid cuts by donors, and the partial failure of a major military operation in the north, pushed the government to the negotiating table with the Tamil moderates.
But the guerillas say that their minimum non-negotiable demand is a North-East merger that would combine the predominantly Tamil north with large areas of the ethnically mixed east, where Tamils say they have lived for centuries. President Junius R.Jayewardene cannot concede that or be seen to consider it. Already opposition forces led by the former Prime Minister, Mrs Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and supported by the influential Buddhist clergy argue that "autonomy" really means "federalism", a sinister word in the Sinha lese vocabulary, rousing fears of separate "kingdoms".
The Tamil moderate negotiators returned to India, only to find their leaders branded a traitor by the militants. Two of their parliamentary colleagues were assassinated in the Tamil north last year. The moderates dare not make a unilateral deal with Mr Jayewardene.
Only India can bridge the gap, but how much leverage does Mr Gandhi have? Tamil Nadu was the first state in postindependence India to raise the separatist banner. Nehru's formula of linguistic states with some border adjustments,
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helped cope with separatism then. It would be an irony of history if the Sri Lankan Tamil issue rekindled Tamil Nadu separatism.
This is the 10th anniversary of the death of Mao Tsetung. He wrote, "Countries want independence, nations want liberation, people want revolution". As the Zimbabwe meeting testified, countries have got freedom and nations have won independence. But third world regimes are now drawn into close encounters of the third kind.
(This article appeared in the 'New York Times" and "The Island" newspapers in 1986. The exact date is not known.)
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Part Three

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The Left's Last Hope
The motorcycle murderers who gunned down Vijaya Kumaratunge, the super-star son-in-law of the former prime minister, Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, killed more than the heartthrob of the Sinhalese screen. They may have snuffed out the last flickering hopes of Sri Lanka's non-communal Left movement to remain a credible "third force" in the island's increasingly polarized, race-and-religion dominated politics. Last week, the socialist (originally Trotskyist) Lanka Sama Samaja Party, the pioneer Marxist party, had teamed up with its closest and bitterest foes, the pro-Soviet Communist Party and a new revolutionary Trotskyist Nava Sama Samaja Party (HNSS), a breakaway faction of the LSSP. The fourth member of the new United Socialist Alliance parading under an inappropriate acronym USA, the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party, (SLMP), was the most important.
The leader of the SLMP was the 43-year old Vijaya Kumaranatunge, the dashing and handsome movie idol and husband of Chandrika Bandaranaike, one of the very few in
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the world who can claim that both her parents were prime ministers. Besides his own immense popularity and the respect he had won for transparent honesty in a profession not reputed for such virtues, Vijaya's connection had made him the rising star in the political firmament. Thus, on Sunday, February 21, 1988, the USA was to announce at its inaugural rally in Colombo that Vijaya would be its candidate at the presidential polls due by the year-end.
Man of Conviction
By marrying the Sorbonne-educated Buddhist Chandrika Kumaranatunge, the poor catholic boy whose ambition was to be a policeman, straddled more than the class-and-religion barrier. If his wife, a convinced socialist, spurned racialism, Vijaya's heart was free of the slightest trace of racial prejudice. At seminars and public meetings, he used to turn to his uncle, Dr Carlo Fonseka, Professor of Physiology at Colombo University, and ask him if he could make a laboratory test of the specimen of his blood.
It was his readiness, often quite rash and naive, to "live" his beliefs that won him admiration while inviting the wrath and envy of his rivals. He led an abortive mission to Jaffna to arrange an exchange of prisoners - Sinhalese soldiers held captive by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and three "Tigers" in the custody of the army. He went to Madras for talks with chief minister M.G.Ramachandran whom he had known as a movie star for many years. His wife Chandrika and he shocked Sinhalese, especially upper class opinion when they were photographed with young Tamil militants, in a seamy boarding house in Madras.
Vijaya, who was a key official of Mrs. Bandaranaike's Sri Lanka Freedom Party, campaigned vigorously for Mr.
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Hector Kobbekaduwe, the party candidate against president Jayewardene at the presidential polls in October 1982. For his troubles, he was shoved into jail for several weeks, and falsely accused of a "Naxalite plot" to murder Sri Lankan leaders, including his mother-in-law and brother-in-law, the opposition leader, Mr. Anura Bandaranaike. As a result, he could not campaign in the controversial referendum to postpone parliamentary polls two months later.
Challenge to J.V.P.
Vijaya who left the SLFP to form his own SLMP, was soon the target of bomb attacks especially at rallies in and near Colombo. He accused the Janata Vimukti Peramuna, the island's most powerful leftist party, of trying to "bury" him and his movement because it was a spirited challenge to the JVP and its new pro-Sinhala-Buddhist line. Certainly, his charismatic personality and his ideas had a special attraction to an important segment of Sinhalese youth, whose radicalism would not permit an accommodation with chauvinism. While President J.R. Jayewardene has said that the whole country would react with "horror" at this "act of terrorism", government supporters who have been recently targeted for terrorist attacks, along with Communist Party and SLMP activists, will hope that the killing of Vijaya will help isolate the JVP from its vital youth constituency. The United Socialist Alliance has pointedly charged the JVP with the murder, which, police say, is the handiwork of the expert "hit-squad" that gunned down the ruling United National Party Chairman, Mr. Harsha Abeywardene, in late December and Mr. Terrance Perera, the head of the counter-subversion unit, a few weeks earlier. Both daring operations were committed in broad daylight in the heart of the city. (This article appeared in the Feb. 18, 1988 issue of Deccan Herald" newspaper)
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2
Lanka Polls: Premadasa in the Limelight
Sri Lanka's prime minister Ranasinghe Premadasa runs a tight operation. As an author, pamphleteer, orator and enthusiastic patron of the theatre, he bows to the supremacy of the word, spoken and printed, and to the maxim that the media is the message.
From Hongkong, on his way to London after a week's visit to China, Mr. Premadasa, the ruling United National Party's presidential candidate, stole the headlines from the Tigers and the Indian Peace Keeping Force. A professionally packaged question-and-answer encounter between Mr. Premada sa and a group of Sri Lankan expatriates was telegraphed to both the privately-owned and state-run press. The headlines announced Mr. Premadasa's proposal for an Indo-Sri Lanka treaty, based on the Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty, which would guarantee "the reciprocity" that the peace accord and its annexes have failed to ensure.
The idea is of course not new. In fact, it was the first carefully conceived response from Mr. Premadasa who was in Japan when Mr. Rajiv Gandhi and Mr. J.R. Jayewardene signed the accord on July 26, 1987, and
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exchanged "letters". These "letters" had to do with issues like the use of Trincomalee by foreign military vessels, the Trinco Oil Tank project, the use by foreign broadcasting stations in Sri Lanka of their transmitters for purposes other than public broadcasting, and the "relevance" of Sri Lanka employing foreign military and intelligence personnel.
Alarmed by a week-long Sinhalese uprising, which converted Colombo into a city under siege, Mr. Premadasa, who had taken a strong anti-India stance from the days of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, argued that there was a way to roll back at least the foreign policy concessions. He realized that every educated Sri Lankan considered these compromises an abridgement, if not surrender, of the island's sovereignty. Only reciprocity would restore Sri Lanka's position as an equal, sovereign neighbour of India, he said. A duplication of the Indo-Soviet treaty was his practical answer.
Mr. Jayewardene took it up and extended the idea. He would sign similar treaties with all neighbours, he said in reply to opposition critics as well as the local and international press. In spite of the cold silence in New Delhi, Mr. Jayewardene's legal advisers, with some help from the foreign ministry, worked on a draft, which came to be loosely termed a "defence treaty" by local commentators. There were so many versions of the "draft" floating about in Colombo (and evidently in New Delhi) that a spate of different versions began to circulate during Jayewardene's visit to New Delhi as the chief guest on India's Independence Day. -
The draft was handed over to the Indian authorities, and nothing has been heard of it since. The impression among diplomats here is that India is perfectly satisfied with the understanding reached by the "exchange of letters".
The pledge to recover Sri Lanka's "limited sovereignty" (interestingly the Brezhnevite term is quite popular among Sri Lankan academics), makes sound electioneering, and Mr. Premadasa, who works 18 hours a day on his job, is
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campaigning even when abroad. The same applies to his answers on the thorny issue of the North-East merger, now made more real by Mr. Jayewardene's recent proclamation. The prime minister was reminded that he had "prayed the merger would not materialize". He agreed that only a oneyear merger had been announced but "when I am elected president, I shall provide for the people of the eastern province the earliest opportunity to make their decision".
Answering a question on the rival Sri Lanka Freedom Party's position, he agreed that the Bandaranaikes had "pledged to abrogate the accord and expel the IPKF within 24 hours". But the SLFP "now promises only to discuss matters with India and come to some practical arrangements". The two candidates, Mr. Premadasa and Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, are both unrepentantly anti-accord. But the sobering effect of possible presidential responsibilities makes them restrain gut reactions. Yet, the competitive spirit also affects the tone and temperature of the debate.
Responding to a question on discrimination against Tamils, Mr. Premadasa claims that the Government sought to "settle these issues". Gone are the days of indignant denial of any cause for Tamil grievance. The most striking feature of this attitudinal change is the new approach to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Mrs. Bandaranaike persists in saying she wants to hold direct talks with the LTTE to find out "exactly what they want". Mr. Premadasa welcomes the decision of some militant groups to participate in the provincial polls but maintains, "I am keen that they (the Tigers) also come into the mainstream. We must not stop building bridges of goodwill. If we are to maintain our unitary character it should be our endeavour to cater to the just aspirations of all our people".
The vote of the minorities (Tamils in the north and the Sinhala south, the Muslims and Indian plantation workers) will certainly play a decisive role. The reality of foreign
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intervention has produced a Sinhala awakening, however tragically belated. The Jaffna Tamils coined the term "our boys" for the LTTE. Middle class Sinha lese do catch themselves calling the Jaffna Tamils "our people", meaning not Tamil Nadu's or India's.
The Tigers, hunted once more by Gen. Kalkat's troops, seem to have time to study these shifts in Sinhala opinion and the changing character of the UNP-SLFP debate. The LTTE's routine demand for an unlimited cease-fire and for direct talks between Mr. V. Pirabhakaran and "the Indian leadership" have brought no rewards. Instead, New Delhi scored a point by extending the cease-fire to 10 days and exposing the congenital inability of the LTTE high command to participate in meaningful negotiations. If it is more than a psychological problem, it is surely a time-buying tactic.
The latter makes more sense. There are two crucial elections in the offing - in Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu - and both can mean changes of Government. In Sri Lanka, even a Premadasa victory can represent a change in policy. The whole New Delhi-Madras-Colombo equation may be radically altered. So, why make final, irreversible decisions now. The Tigers have only to keep fighting a few more months to plan strategy in a new situation.
Forty-eight hours after the cease-fire ended on September 25, the Tigers were back in business in style. The explosion of a Claymore mine halted an IPKF patrol on a road leading to Trincomalee. The Tigers pounced on the patrol, killed three soldiers and wounded four. The same day the Sri Lankan army said that three jawans had been kidnapped, but Indian diplomats in Colombo could not confirm it.
The essentially militarist LTTE can be easily faulted for its lack of tactical flexibility and opportunism. In an instant response to the stand now taken by the two Sinhala aspirants to the presidentship, an LTTE spokesman was reported to have said that "talks" with Sinhalese leaders to resolve the Tamil
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question could prove more productive than those with New Delhi. Right now, Mr. Premadasa is keener on talks with the Janata Vimukti Peramuna. w His remarks in Hongkong must have stunned Mr. Jayewardene who continues to accuse the Bandaranaikes of colluding with the "terrorist JVP". Mr. Premadasa said that the JVP has not publicly admitted guilt to any political crimes and until a prominent JVP member is found guilty by the courts, he will not accuse the organization. But the JVP appears to have ignored his conciliatory gesture. The Opposition leader, Mr. Anura Bandaranaike, told the press on September 29 that the JVP has agreed to support Mrs. Bandaranaike as a "common opposition candidate", with a common symbol other than the SLFP's usual one.
(This article appeared in 1988 issue of Deccan Herald" newspaper)
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3
India in a Fix
India's Sri Lanka policy-makers have another messy problem on their plate. And it is none other than President J.R. Jayewardene, Rajiv Gandhi's co-signatory to the India-Sri Lanka peace accord, who has done the serving.
He has picked prime minister R. Premadasa, the most powerful conscientious objector to the pact, as his successor when some of the vital provisions of the agreement still remain unfulfilled, and presidential elections are barely 100 days away. On September 16 the ruling United National Party's Working Committee, all nominees of the president, unanimously chose the 65-year old prime minister as its candidate. Mr. Jayewardene himself nominated Mr. Premadasa while lands minister Gamini Dissanayake and national security minister Lalith Athulathmudali jointly seconded the motion. Nobody missed the political significance of this unusual procedure.
Opposite Views
The two younger men were the only other aspirants. Not only are they natural contenders for party leadership but represent
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contrary views on the peace accord. Mr. Dissanayake was intimately associated with the secret negotiations, which led to the July 1987 accord, and remained, along with finance minister Ronnie de Mel, its most outspoken defender. The national security minister on the other hand had staked his career on a military victory against the LTTE. When Operation Liberation, the final offensive, was launched in early 1987, Mr. de Mel nicknamed Mr. Athulathmudali "the poor man's McNamara".
With India's "benign intervention" - the air-drop of food supplies over Jaffna - Mr. Jayewardene read New Delhi's signal correctly and called off the operation, denying Mr. Athulathmudali the political rewards of a military success. Since then, Mr. Athulathmudali, still holding on to his national security portfolio, found himself blamed by the Indian authorities, generally off-the-record, for placing many a roadblock on the path to peace. The Indian press went further and even suggested sabotage.
Forced Unity
President Jayewardene's selection of seconders, with the approval no doubt of Mr. Premadasa, was nothing less than a shotgun wedding of rival contenders and opposing tendencies to the peace accord. The public demonstration of party unity does not however settle the crucially important issue of the party's official stance on the accord in the presidential campaign.
Mr. Premadasa will be sorely tempted to take an antiaccord, and therefore anti-India "line". To do so, he must more than distance himself from Mr. Jayewardene, especially because his challenger, Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, will also be attacking the accord. Her main target will be the merger of the North and East, which remains the most emotional issue
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for Sinhalas who identify "the traditional homeland" concept with a separate Tamil kingdom. She will also call for the withdrawal, probably "phased", of the lindian Peace Keeping Force. She will talk of negotiations with New Delhi, but for the need for friendship with India founded on a return t Bandaranaikist non-alignment.
In substance, however, the public debate will take the form of each candidate striving to outbid the other on an antiaccord line, with the propagandist fury rising as the day of decision approaches. This is hardly a situation that marks a success for New Delhi's diplomacy. What it does emphasize is how recklessly India over-estimated its power of persuasion vis-a-vis the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan regime, while remaining wilfully blind to the obvious - that Sri Lanka is a democracy. Whatever its recent dictatorial deformities, it was a functioning democracy that permitted the possibility of a change in Government.
Flawed,
This is yet another reason why the facile Afghanistan analogy was fundamentally flawed. If India intervened because it perceived, as defence minister K.C.Pant argues, a security threat on its southern flank, New Delhi should have known that it could not possibly undertake to protect a repentant Jayewardene regime. The Vietnam parallel looks less flawed, since India is a vibrant democracy, with as combatively vigorous a press as the American.
What is happening in Sri Lanka's North and East and what the IPKF is doing may not appear on Doordarshan but the press reportage is steadily casting doubts on the IPKF's claims of "pacification". What would happen if such reportage and editorial questioning of the rationale of the IPKF's prolonged stay alters Indian public opinion? What, more crucially, if there is a change of regime in Tamil Nadu, if not
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in New Delhi itself? India's Sri Lanka policy will be in shambles.
What went wrong of course was the timetable, itself based on an exaggerated assessment of the Indian capacity to deliver the LTTE. The Tigers are still fighting, at least up to the recent unilateral IPKF cease-fire. In Sinhalese eyes the point is that Mr. Pirabhakaran is still alive, a fact understood to mean that the India does not really wish to kill or even capture him.
Poser
Why not? That is the commonest question in the Sri Lankan press and it does reflect opinion from Mr. Premadasa and Mrs. Bandaranaike to the man in the street. The educated guess is that New Delhi does not wish to destroy the LTTE, the principal tool of its coercive diplomacy, more so with the postJayewardene political situation so uncertain.
Mr. Premadasa, an accomplished orator, is a master of innuendo. He fired his first shot only 24 hours after his nomination. On September 17, President Jayewardene's birthday, the new supreme court complex constructed by the Chinese, was formally opened and the magnificent building, he said, had a lesson for all. It was an example of how powerful countries could win the hearts and minds of people in small nations through genuine friendship and generosity, not by flexing of muscles and aggressive threats, he said.
Mr. Premadasa was in Japan when the Indo-Sri Lanka accord was negotiated. He left for China soon after he became the right-wing UNP's first "man of the people" candidate for the highest office.
(This article appeared in the Sep.22, 1988 issue of Deccan Herald" newspaper.)
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4
Dominance of Elite Ends
The crowning achievement of Prime Minister Ranasinghe Premadasa's 30-year political career has been a major sociological breakthrough for the Sri Lankan system.
Even before independence in 1948, the island's political establishment was totally dominated by an exclusive casteand-class "set" drawn from certain schools. That included Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike's St. Bridget's Convent. Mr. Premadasa has now broken that monopoly. He is a genuine commoner.
In terms of political history, Mr. Premadasa's victory is an irony wrapped in a paradox. When Mr. S.W.R.D.Bandaranaike, the Oxford-educated aristocrat quit the ruling United National Party (UNP) in 1951, he was convinced that Prime Minister D.S. Senanayake would keep the party leadership within the Senanayake family, though, as leader of the House, he was the natural successor. By 1956, Mr. Bandaranaike's Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) had put together a new coalition of social and political forces to form the People's United Front or the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP).
His accommodation with some sections of the less doctrinaire Marxist left gave the MEP a radical character, and its program an egalitarian outlook. More crucially, his coalition articulated the aspirations of newly emergent
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forces-the Buddhist clergy, the small trader, the Sinhala schoolteacher, the native (ayurvedic) physician and other spokesmen of the rural middle class.
Revolution
After Mr. Bandarnai ke trounced the UNP, the bastion of the propertied elite and the Western-educated privilegentsia, "1956" came to be known in popular political sociology as "the cultural revolution" and "the era of the common man".
From the very start of his campaign against the formidable Mrs. Bandaranaike, Mr. Premadasa, who had come up from very humble beginnings to become the candidate of the rich man's UNP, presented himself as "the common man". He understood, he said, the needs and hopes of the poor and the underprivileged. He did not steal the clothes of the 1956 "revolution". He was already wearing them from childhood.
By this very posture and personality, however, Mr. Premadasa now finds himself pitted against the authentic offspring of the 1956 revolution, the one-time Marxist, now ultra-nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). After 1956, Sinhala replaced English as the island's official language. The dominance of the Christian schools in the educational system was broken.
Frustration
A new republican constitution recognised the "pre-eminent position" of Buddhism, the religion of 70 per cent of the people. The monk, the village schoolteacher and indigenous medical practitioner were treated with a new respect. A nascent national bourgeoisie, acquiring a new self-confidence, moved upwards to dislodge the old rich.
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If, after three decades, the political-cultural aspirations of all these social strata were fully or partly fulfilled, a new generation's hopes for rapid upward mobility remained thwarted, in a typical Third World economy which could not grow fast enough to satisfy these ever-rising demands. The new, post-1977 export-dependent industrialization strategy introduced by the Jayewardene regime, in an uncongenial global environment, widened the schisms in Sri Lankan society, making the contrast between affluence and privation more glaring. Mr. Premadasa, the small man's president, symbolizes the partial and temporary success of 1956.
The unfulfilled promises of 1956, and the impact of the post-1977 economic policies created a new generation of angry, embittered youth, an ideal constituency for the JVP, which was unjustly proscribed by the UNP Government for alleged complicity in the July 1983 anti-Tamil riots. In the 1950s and 1960s, the struggle was to enter the university. Now, a university degree was no guarantee of a decent job.
A new expanding constituency was waiting for leadership. The JVP seized the day, smartly unfurling the old banners of the 1956 revolution - the Sinhala-Buddhist identity. Reacting to an aggressive Tamil nationalism, spearheaded by the stunningly successful and ferocious LTTE, a seemingly helpless Sinhala-Buddhist community reasserted its own special identity.
The Buddhist clergy and the middle-class Sinhala intelligentsia were the ideologies of the burgeoning revival. The JVP was its vanguard. The Indo-Sri Lanka accord of July 1987 and the humiliating presence of 50,000 Indian troops resulted in an exponential growth of this new radical nationalist constituency. And big neighbour India is to Sri Lanka what the US is to a small, Latin American country - the historic enemy.
And now, Mr. Premadasa and the JVP confront each other. Hence, the natural sympathy and the poorly suppressed
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aggression, the mailed fist in the kid glove, that marked Mr. Premadasa's victory speech.
Mr. Premadasa's message presents an acute dilemma for the JVP although the election result has fitted in with its plans rather neatly. Its spectacular campaign of disruption, terror and sabotage in the past few months was escalated in November until the civil administration had come to a virtual standstill. Few neutral observers could have expected the Government to hold presidential elections. But a postponement would have meant an "illegal" presidency after February 4.
Crackdown
President J.R. Jayewardene then timed his military offensive when popular dissatisfaction, especially among the poor and the lower middle-class, worst affected by hartals, the dislocation of the transport system and all business, had reached the limits of tolerance. The toughest army crackdown since Mrs. Bandaranaike's anti JVP onslaught in 1971 was concentrated in the deep south, the JVP's main base, and in towns surrounding Colombo. The hard-core JVP rebels fled into the jungles to re-group and relocate while watching political developments.
If a demoralized SLFP moves from disarray to disintegration, its radical youth supporters will join the JVP. Up to now, the JVP guerilla swam quite freely in a friendly SLFP-pond. But the pond could turn into a lake, if the SLFP leadership is torn by conflict and weakened by low morale.
The parliamentary polls on February 15 are a last hope. In one of his wisest moves, President Jayewardene reduced an unusually high cut-off point in new proportional representation system from 12.5 to 5 per cent.
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Chances
This will not only help the Tamil militants (except the LTTE) now in office in the North-East Provincial Council to enter the national mainstream but also tempt the JVP. It can easily win 10 to 15 seats or more, if it makes a deal with the UNP or the SLFP. Like the LTTE leaders, will the JVP's top rank take the risk of not coming into the open?
When he takes office on January 2, Mr. Premadasa will release over 1,000 JVP suspects. He will end the Emergency on January 15. Responding to the relative calm, the army has suspended operations. Will the JVP take the bait or will it prepare for a longer "war" as the economic situation (especially inflation) gets worse? Much depends on the SLFP's staying power as a separate party.
Another part of the Premadasa paradox is that the fiercest anti-India, anti-accord critic had to rely on Indian (plantation) Tamil votes and on the Tamil and Muslim minorities for his slim majority. Since Mrs. Bandaranaike's rhetoric on the accord and Indian military presence grew more and more strident, India was greatly relieved by the result.
Nonetheless, by the same logic, the pro-Premadasa vote of the minorities is more grist to the SLFP-JVP SinhalaBuddhist propaganda mill. If the SLFP "centre" cannot hold, 1989 will be an even more harrowing year for Sri Lanka. Acknowledged as the regional policeman after the Maldives intervention, India may find itself like Syria and Israel, with a messy Lebanon at its doorstep.
(This article appeared in the Dec. 29, 1988 issue of "Deccan Herald newspaper.)
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5
"Outsider" Takes on Elite
Under the leadership of Mr. D.S.Senanayake, "The Father Of The Nation", the conservative United National Party (UNP) won the island's first parliamentary elections on the eve of independence in 1948. At the 1947 polls the only credible challenge came from a Marxist left, led by the revolutionary Trotskyists. There were more independents than opposition MPs from recognized parties. In the 44 years since independence, the UNP has governed Sri Lanka for all but 16 years.
Never in its history has the UNP, the authentic spokesman of the 'establishment', the propertied and the professional elite, looked so utterly disunited. It has become the stark symbol of the divisive forces that have been threatening to tear the country apart in the past decade. Whereas the ethnic conflict undermined communal coexistence and threatened physical division, the current crisis is an even more ominous sign of societal fissure and fragmentation. It has the makings of a civil war in the Sinhalese south, comprising seven of the island's nine provinces. It is all the more dangerous because of the inevitable introduction of another divisive factor - caste.
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First Elected Leader
President Premadasa is the first elected leader from outside the ranks of the Goigama (farmer) caste in this predominantly agricultural society. Like Tamils, Muslims, and Christians, representative personalities from the so-called "lower castes' have always been accommodated by the main political parties. But never has a non-Goigama member from the "lower castes" become leader of a major party, let alone prime minister or president. In this semi-feudal society where traditional stratification tends to associate institutionalised oppression with caste, which is unalterable, rather than class, Mr. Premadasa's election as presidential candidate of the conservative UNP was a sociological break through.
Fully conscious of this fact, Mr. Premadasa is now using this argument as an aggressive weapon, against his two main challengers, leaders of the so-called "gang of eight" UNP rebels. The UNP leadership, that is president Jayewardene and the rest, chose him as presidential candidate, he keeps reminding the people, only because he could face up to the Sinhala extremists.
He could win the presidential contest against Mrs. Bandaranaike only because he represented "the poor and the oppressed", and was opposed to the presence of the IPKF. Nobody else, Mr. Premadasa argues, could have polled so many votes in the violence-torn south and crushed JVP barbarism. Having used him, the upper class and westernised elite are now determined to recover their lost hegemony by dumping him, he protests. Despite this mounting crisis, Mr. Premadasa spends four-five days a week addressing islandwide rallies to charge the English-educated upper class, including the Bandaranaike-led opposition, of a "conspiracy" against "the man of the people", the "outsider", the "upstart". With such subterranean stirrings, and primordial allegiances erupting, the parliamentary scene strikes the
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dispassionate observer, (if such a privileged posture is at all possible) as the cunning scene-shift of some mischievously and satirical director-producer. In a parliament, where Englishspeaking lawyers still dominate the debate, the front-bench spokesmen come and go, talking of Erskine May, and the constitution's para two, section four. In a way, this may be the last salute to the British inheritance in the empire's model colony.
The attorney general has ruled that the impeachment motion has lapsed because the president did not place it on the order paper before the prorogation of parliament on August 30. The impeachment motion, the attorney general has said, needs now to be re-introduced after the House is re-convened on September 24. He has also said that any attempt to place the motion on the order paper will violate the express provisions of the constitution. President Premadasa conveyed the attorney general's opinion to the Speaker on Friday, September 13.
With the sword hanging over his head removed for the moment, Mr. Premadasa wielded an equally strong weapon, which the average government MP has reason to fear. Dissolution of parliament now would mean that the government MP, loyalist or not, will have to do without all the comfortable perks of office - a car, a driver, a secretary, traveling allowances and trips abroad. Besides, this parliament has another three years left of its six-year term.
Divided UNP
Besides, a general election before the end of the year would see a divided UNP face a united SLFP-led opposition. Even if the dissidents under the leadership of Mr. Athulathmudali or Mr. Dissanayake fight the polls under the UNP's familiar symbol of the elephant, Mr. Premadasa would surely form his own party and appeal to grassroots UNP supporters to vote
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for his candidate. Such a situation can only be avoided if Mr. Premadasa is eliminated permanently from politics, by the supreme court on the impeachment motion, or the hard way. On most platforms these days, Mr. Premadasa asks the people not to be surprised if they hear that he has been assassinated.
The spotlight has turned on the armed forces. Some weeks ago, the army commander General Hamilton Wanasinghe talked tough when he summoned an emergency meeting of regional commanders and other senior officers. The provocation, evidently was the unscheduled visit to Colombo of a high-ranking officer from the eastern theatre. The Sunday Times said he had visited "a top UNP dissident". With the speaker remaining adamant, and the constitutional issues getting maddeningly convoluted, the floor of the House or the supreme court may be the next locale for the final confrontation.
(This article appeared in 1989 in Times of India' newspaper. The exact date is not known.)
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6
The New Approach
Rarely has Sri Lanka celebrated an independence day on such a strikingly sober note. On a direct order from president Ranasinghe Premadasa, festivities on February 4 were reduced to the barest minimum and the accent was on religious ceremonies, emphasizing once again the new President's persistent public theme - communal harmony.
The English-educated privilegentsia has already started to groan - temple, mosque and church are taking up far too much television time. During the 40 years of independence, the westernized elite, a pampered class, has always imposed its values and tastes on the press and the radio, and of late, on TV. Both its channels cater heavily for the urban Englishspeaking middle class and Mr. Premadasa has even threatened to drop such popular extravaganzas as Dynasty and Falcon Crest.
Mr. Premadasa is an "outsider" who does not share the values and attitudes of the Sri Lankan establishment that has governed the island for four decades. Besides, he has the natural assurance of a self-made man, and perhaps an instinctive mistrust of the traditional power-elite. Yet, Dr Neelan Tiruchelvam, Director of Colombo's Centre for Ethnic
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Studies, a former Tamil MP and a Harvard-educated lawyer, may be right in seeing much more to the new Premadasa "style".
Reconstruction
"The British transferred power to a self-assured, fairly wellintegrated Sinhala-Tamil, Buddhist-Christian-Muslim professional and propertied elite. The British project worked well until this decade. Now it has collapsed. Mr. Premadasa, the self-styled "common man is trying to reconstruct a united nation, bottom-up, with our religious traditions as a new foundation", observes Dr Tiruchelvam.
He could be right. Sri Lanka's political system and society are being ripped apart by two youth revolts, which for all their sharp ethnic antagonism (Sinhala and Tamil) have much in common. Both the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were products of radical student activism of the mid-Sixties with the high school and university campuses acting as recruiting centers and battlegrounds. The future leaders came from poor rural or semi-urban Sinhala or Tamil-speaking homes.
The generous post-independence investment in social welfare - subsidized basic foods, free education and free health facilities - produced youth aspirations that a narrow tearubber-coconut based economy could not match. The sole path of self-advancement was a university degree. The mounting demand for admission to the island's only university, and the pressure for secure, decent jobs by those who had obtained degrees produced the JVP-led insurrection of 1971. The rebels were mowed down.
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Grouses
Student agitation had already sown the seeds of youth rebellion in Jaffna peninsula. The imposition of Sinhala as the official language (1956), and a new scheme of "standardizing" university entrance examination marks (1973) were perceived as acts of deliberate discrimination in the Tamil-dominated areas. The Sinhalal-educated JVP rebels also saw themselves as victims of an unsympathetic Sinhalese ruling elite that monopolized political power by wielding a magic kaduva (sword) - the English language.
The JVP's 1971 insurrection was an angry "vote of no confidence" on the post-independence political establishment dominated by two major parties, United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, as well as on the Marxist Left, whose leaders came from the same social class. The formation of the LTTE, out of the student movement, was an equally clear "no faith" vote on the propertied, professional, Englisheducated Tamil parliamentary leadership that failed to alleviate grievances that arose from a sense of being discriminated against by the majority.
These socio-political circumstances and the psychological conditioning account for the fanatical commitment as well as the destructive fury of both these movements. Both wish to destroy the existing administrativepolitical order, no matter what the consequences. Compromise is impossible.
But there is a difference. The LTTE became the protector of the Tamil people against the Sri Lankan forces. The JVP had no such ennobling cause - until the historic enemy, the invader from the north, the Indian army turned up. Now it has assumed the powerful role of "patriot" defender of the Sinhala people.
While neither the LTTE nor the JVP has outlined in plain language what kind of alternative "model" they have in mind,
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Mr. Premadasa understands the anarchic passion that motivates them. The common target is the old elite and its value-system. What Mr. Premadasa, in the absence of a clear counterideology, is seeking to do has a two-fold aim.
By his personal conduct, and the new style of government, he strives to dissociate himself from the immediate past (the imperious, aristocratic Jayewardene style) and from the westernized, over-privileged upper class. Meanwhile, he tries to reconstruct the Sri Lankan system in terms of traditional religious values. By this he also hopes to repair the immense damage of the past and weld together a grie vously and dan gerously divided nation. Will Mr. Premadasa's perestroika work when it is put to the test?
Time is running out. The problems of the moment are pressing hard, and his immediate concern is the stability and survival of his Government. With the lowest turn-out in 40 years (just 55 per cent), Mr. Premadasa got just over 50 per cent of the votes polled in the presidential election against Mrs. Bandaranaike's 45 per cent.
Prospects
Mr. J.R. Jayewardene, blessed with a five-sixths majority in a first past-the-post system, amended the Constitution 15 times in ten years. The parliamentary election, scheduled for February 15, has a highly complicated system that makes it difficult for any party to get a clear majority, let alone twothirds. Yet, that is the demand Mr. Premadasa has placed befor his party.
To make his point, he dropped over 30 MPs, including several ministers, from his party's nomination list. On the basis of past figures, the UNP can win over 100 of the 225 seats, perhaps up to 125. The major opposition party, Mrs. Bandaranaike's SLFP should win between 65 and 80 seats,
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leaving 25 to 30 seats for the minorities (Tamils, Muslims) and the minor parties.
If the UNP wins a clear majority (115 seats), the government will not need to rely on the pro-accord, pro-India northern Tamil coalition. Yet, if such dependence becomes inescapable, both the SLFP and the JVP will dub the new Government pro-India. The dangers of this are obvious.
Meanwhile, "the phony peace is over" says communist leader Pieter Keuneman. The JVP and its military wing, the DJV, held their fire for less than a month after Mr. Premadasa took over. Violence has now erupted once more in the deep south, the JVP stronghold. Two daring operations last month suggested that the JVP-DJV combine is back in business.
Violence
Political violence has claimed over 300 lives. Mr. Premadasa withdrew the emergency, released thousands of "suspected subversives", and put the army back in barracks. But a few days ago, the cabinet invoked the prevention of terrorism act and introduced tough new security measures. As the election campaign reaches its climax, candidates and active supporters are being gunned down freely. The principal victim is the SLFP.
Mrs. Bandaranaike says that her candidates are under fire from both the DJV and "state-supported militias". "A twothirds majority can be won only at our expense", she observed after bombs were flung at a meeting she addressed. However, the December 19 defeat has demoralized the SLFP. If the party fails to win (or is forcibly denied) 70 seats, it may begin to disintegrate. Its radical Sinhala-Buddhist youth base will shift JVP-wards, the sole "patriotic" anti-India spearhead. The JVP can then prepare for the July 27 referendum in the mixed Eastern Province. The Muslims and Sinhalese, a majority in
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the province will outvote the Tamils and the North-East "merger" will end. The Tamil North-Eastern Council (and perhaps the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam) will press New Delhi to persuade Mr. Premadasa to postpone the referendum. That will allow the JVP, with SLFP and Muslim support, to launch the "final battle" for withdrawal of the Indian army. That will open the road to another Afghanistan, with the LTTE and the JVP, mutually antagonistic and acting at crosspurposes, fighting for a common cause.
(This article appeared in the Feb 10, 1989 issue of "Deccan Herald' newspaper)
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7
Lessons to be learnt from the IPKF Operations
"Dos, tres, muchos Vietnams" (two, three, many Vietnams), cried Che Guevara. Will there be two, three or many "Eelam" type "wars" on Indian soil in the coming decade? The many sacrifices - human and material - of the peacekeeping operations in Sri Lanka would have been in vain if the correct lessons are not drawn and profitably used.
A necessary prelude to that is a searching, unsparingly objective and, if need be, self-critical assessment. From Indian press reports and commentaries available here, there seems to be little of that.
On the contrary, there appears to be a general Indian reluctance to grasp the nettle. Or should one say bite the bullet? Though Gen. A.S.Kalkat is the last person one can expect to see in sackcloth and ashes, especially at a farewell ceremony, he did seem to lose his cool when journalists, many of them from india, kept prodding him with questions.
In General Kalkat's view, the IPKF operations had achieved its two main objectives - safeguarding the island's territorial integrity and persuading the Tigers to open a dialogue with the government before joining the democratic process.
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Restructuring Needed
By now, the Sri Lankan experience should have become an argument, pro rather than against, in the current Indian debates on the need for a national security council, or a restructured cabinet committee for political affairs. The astonishing lack of clarity and coherence in Delhi's overall post-accord strategy is an opinion strongly shared at the highest levels of the Sri Lankan defence establishment.
This is my impression at the end of a series of privileged conversations with General Sepala Attygalle, defence secretary, throughout the 1980s. (He has now been rewarded with an appointment to the Court of St. James). I have also spoken to other generals, and to a few combat commanders who led the campaigns in Sri Lankan army's own long-drawn bitter and unfinished war with the Tigers, apart from several area commanders in the northeast in charge of intelligence operations and at least one foreign military attaché.
In their view, the IPKF did not commit any major blunders, yet it was guilty of many, serious avoidable mistakes that were to prove rather costly. Some of these mistakes need not have been made if only the institutional rapport between the two armies was better or as good as the personal, officerto-officer relations. Regrettably, what accounted for the absence of such rapport and active liaison was an Indian misreading of a single shocking incident, and more importantly, a mistaken view of the Sri Lankan army's attitude to the India-Sri Lanka accord.
It is widely believed in army circles that the attempt by a single hot-headed marine to kill Mr. Rajiv Gandhi with his rifle butt, while he was inspecting a guard of honour was "over interpreted" both by Indian military intelligence and by Mr. Gandhi's entourage. Posters that appeared on many city walls hailing the sailor as a "heroic patriot" may have led to comparisons with the murder of president Anwar Sadat. And
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therefore, led to an Indian suspicion that the Sinhala sailor was a hardcore JVP extremist, a possible pointer to large scale JVP infiltration of the army. As we now know, infiltration of an army that butchered the JVP was probably much less than Islamic fundamentalist penetration of the Egyptian army.
No Sabotaging
"There may be many soldiers, including senior officers, who were unhappy about the accord, but we are a disciplined professional army and we obey orders", said a brigadier. "There was never any question of sabotaging the IPKF operations. The Indians had presumed that the north-east would resemble conditions to which they were accustomed in some Indian states, like Assam or Punjab or Andhra Pradesh. Even if the conditions were similar, we knew the terrain much better. We could have helped in many ways", commented one of the best known combat commanders.
In fact, the IPKF, received warmly by the Tamil population, quickly alienated itself in both, towns and villages. As a result, the information flow was negligible. "The IPKF had no idea at all of the unusually high educational-cultural level of the Jaffna Tamil, who are also the most conservative among Sri Lankan people. The use of a heavy armoury together with poor public relations a few weeks after the cease-fire collapsed alienated a friendly community". The Tigers were the immediate beneficiaries. This confirmed what Mahattaya, the LTTE military commander, had told me in an earlier interview.
The IPKF's biggest mistake, according to a major general, who has served in Jaffna in the mid-80s was to ignore the persistent advice of Sri Lankan senior officers not to fight the Tigers in the company of the EPRLF, ENDLF and the so
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the persistent advice of Sri Lankan senior officers not to fights the Tigers in the company of the EPRLF, ENDLF and the socalled TNA (Tamil National Army) cadres trained and equipped by the IPKF.
It was impressed on the IPKF that these militants should be used only for intelligence-gathering work or for "spotting" LTTE militants. (The LTTE and the EPRLF militants could spot a hard-core "rival" in the street or in crowded bus or shop since many of them had gone to school together or came from the same village). But these pro-Indian militants fought alongside the IPKF and the consequences in this politicalmilitary struggle were both predictable and disastrous. The pro-India groups were branded "traitors" or "quislings" and the people shunned them.
The evident lack of trust, which inhibited closer IndoSri Lankan cooperation in operational planning, tactical support or intelligence sharing may have had other origins too. The former Lankan President Mr. J.R. Jayewardene, has said in a press interview for the first time that he feared an army coup soon after the accord was signed. Did he share these dark doubts with Mr. Gandhi and others in his team, including the top Indian generals? "The IPKF at first appeared to find it difficult to believe that we were professionals and would carry out government orders".
"Landmine War'
A study of the casualty figures prompted a Sri Lankan writer to call the conflict in the north "the landmine war", since 63% of Sinhala casualties were from land mine explosions. It took the jawan many months to adjust psychologically to the horrors of this invisible enemy. The IPKF paid for the excellent training given to the Tigers by RAW instructors.
Now a Tamil Nadu MP has urged the government to wind
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up RAW operations in Sri Lanka, another question that surely must come within the purview of some well-coordinated oversight committee. At many points, I got the distinct impression that the IPKF and RAW were working at crosspurposes. This was certainly true sometimes of the Indian high commission as against the army and the covert agency. The Tigers of course will have none of that. They believe it is all part of a grand deception, a hydra-headed monster at work, or the grand strategist performing the dance of Shiva.
It was Mr. Mani Dixit, a key policy-maker and architect of the accord, who described the Indian exercise in a lecture to a defence institute, as a "projection of Indian power" to demonstrate to neighbours that they cannot undermine Indian security interests and hope to get away with it. Thus the popular Indian claim that this was a benign intervention that has served its basic objectives is spurious debating society logic. India has not imposed its military will and disarmed the Tigers and it has not forced the president Mr. R. Premadasa to yield. The "intervention by invitation" is a see-through, moral dress. The invitation card was printed in India and airdropped by Mirage fighters that invaded Sri Lankan airspace. Besides, the intervention began in the early '80s when Tigers were trained in RAW camps.
This intervention does the greatest damage by casting doubts on what remains of modern India's finest diplomatic triumph, its successful reconciliation of realpolitik with the moral imperative. India has played the world's conscience keeper while pursing its own national and regional interests - from Kashmir to Bangladesh, Sikkim to Goa and Sri Lanka - with a cold blooded efficiency that has earned the secret respect of the neighbourhood. Until its potential attributes of power were realized, the moral dimension, nonalignment, helped it acquire a world role. In Sri Lanka it lost its balance. (This article appeared in the Mar. 31, 1989 issue of Times of India' пеиуspaper)
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8
Baiting India?
President Premadasa's peremptory 'quit notice' to the IPKF and its two-month deadline, has placed Sri Lanka on a diplomatic confrontation course with India now that Mr. Gandhi has declined to accept his time-table. Delhi's polite but firm "no" should have put Mr Premadasa out on a limb. It hasn't. Talking to him on the phone, watching him on TV and studying his speeches, I got the distinct impression that for him the game is far from over.
But first, what is his game? Mr. Premadasa is certainly not Mr. Jayewardene. Nor is he cast in that mould from which came the Senanayakes or the Bandaranaikes, the families that have governed Sri Lanka. He has only one constituency - the Sri Lankan voter - and he is both a master and servant of that constituency. Diplomatic rules and decorum, lndian or international opinion, the judgement of the island's westernized elite that has really run Sri Lanka's affairs for half a century, come a poor second. This is the impression he left on me at the end of an extraordinary encounter, without aides, that lasted two hours and forty minutes.
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Legitimacy
To put it bluntly, if my reading of his mind is correct, he would be delighted if the Indian Government (or the Indian press) attacked him or Delhi did something to "punish" him for his bad manners or cocky impudence. The more he is chastised, treated shabbily or lectured, the more he will feel strengthened, vis-a-vis his constituency. He will be the symbol of a small nation standing up to "the big bullying neighbour". Mr. Premadasa is after legitimacy, especially the legitimacy that the JVP's vicious campaign against his "puppet regime" has lost.
Already, things are moving his way. Mrs. Bandaranaike, his main rival, has won the first round in an election petition that seeks to have the presidential poll declared null and void by the Supreme Court. A five-judge bench rejected his preliminary objections and fixed June 19 to hear the case. Mrs. Bandaranaike packing her bags to leave for Yugoslavia for medical treatment felt she had to take a stand publicly before she left the island. The statement blamed the UNP's policies under Mr. Jayewardene for straining relations with India and attacked Mr. Premadasa's own conduct but extended her party's unqualified support on Mr. Premadasa's demand for a total IPKF pull-out before July 30, the peace accord's second anniversary.
The Left parties, communist and Trotskyist, the Centrist SLMP, the Muslim League, the organization of professional associations, and most crucially, the influential Buddhist prelates have all lined up on his side of the divide. And so, predictably, has the LTTE, which is playing its little game very, very smartly. By the same token, this has completed the isolation of the EPRLF and its Tamil allies, and underlined their total identification with India.
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Eelam
EPRLF's appeal to Mr Gandhi for Indian help for a "UDI" exercise (the proclamation of an independent Eelam) has alienated Sri Lankan opinion as never before, coming perilously close to being denounced as "treachery". If the LTTE had also objected to Mr. Premadasa's "quit order" or even remained silent, then the dividing line would have been the old familiar demarcation - pro-Indian Tamils versus the Sinhalese and the Muslims. Significantly, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, which had a working relationship with India, has maintained a discreet silence. Its pro-IPKF leanings put the leaders in a tight spot during the recent disturbances in the Eastern Province. Once again, the dividing line was pro and anti-IPKF with the Sinhalese and Muslims on one side.
The name of the game then is nationalism-patriotism versus the "big bully". By asserting his presidential authority quite demonstratively, (however maladroit his initiative by diplomatic norms, and however foolhardy it may seem to the English educated elite) Mr. Premadasa the "Puppet", has taken the winds out of the JVP's sails. That of course was the object of the exercise once the JVP had launched its new anti-India campaign.
Boycott
The JVP has called for a boycott of Indian shops, banks, business houses and asked Sri Lankans not to purchase Indian goods.
Vehicles of Indian manufacture have been stopped on the road and set on fire. The JVP's "patriotic appeals" are usually backed up by threats, and reprisals are "swift". At least one large firm that imports Maruti has announced that it would in future import the Suzuki direct from Japan. Indian nationals
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who have become "distinguished citizens" of Sri Lanka have been ordered to go home. The campaign reaches its climax on June 14, the JVP's 25th anniversary.
Mr. Premadasa has other serious worries, notably the economy. The IMF and the World Bank, have yet to decide whether they are satisfied with the promises given by the central bank and the treasury to cut waste and corruption, put the tea industry back in shape, and to devalue.
By the end of the year, inflation may start a strike wave, just what the JVP that has no control over the major unions, is waiting for.
(This article appeared in the June 9, 1989 issue of Deccan Herald" newspaper.)
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9
The Making of a National Crisis
Until quite recently, an invitation to speak on the political situation in Sri Lanka, was understood by most Sri Lankans as a request to discuss the island's vexed communal problem. Not any more. Many a Sri Lankan, including leading politicians, prefer not to talk any more of the "ethnic problem," or "racial conflict" and speak instead, in terms of a 'national crisis'. Given to a greater analytical rigour, Sri Lankan scholars favour terms like "compound crisis" and "organic crisis".
This change in descriptive terminology reflects a growing recognition that the "explosion" of July 23, 1983, was only "detonated" by the previous day's events - the killing of 13 Sinhalese soldiers by Tamil separatists in the north. That incident was not the real or the main cause for the vicious anti-Tamil riots which spread from Colombo to other urban and semi-urban centres of the Sinhalese South.
An appreciation of two salient facts has led to this new awareness of deeper, wide-ranging causes. Firstly, that 'July 83' on its own, could not possibly have resulted in the dramatic transformation of the ethnic issue into an all-pervasive national problem. That too a problem, which has now invaded every sphere of political, social and economic life and has
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thus threatened not just the country's territorial integrity but its social fabric and state structure as well. Secondly, that the rapid, almost uncontrollable acceleration of the crisis points to the existence of many other sources of social tension, not just the ethnic.
Both, the narrow time frame and the small compact geographic space in which these developments have taken place contribute to the acute intensity of a crisis that is placing a severe strain on the absorptive capacity of the Sri Lankan society. A comparison may be made with the 1971 youth insurrection when several thousand Sinhalese youth, including some monks, were mercilessly killed. That crisis of state and society was in every sense over in a few months. One might also find a contrast in the Baluchi insurgency and its impact on Pakistan or in different circumstances, the Punjab crisis on India. Telescoped in today's Lankan crisis are problems of a different order; problems basically Third World, some peculiarly South Asian, and many quintessentially Sri Lankan. Since Sri Lanka, once regarded as Britain's model colony, grew up to become, in western eyes, a conspicuous and comforting Third World exception, questions like "whatever happened to Sri Lanka?", or "who lost Paradise?" could therefore yield answers that offer unusually rewarding insights into those Third World political processes which so often confound conventional western methodologies.
First, the question of nationalism, persistent and revivalist, especially the nationalism that is region-based. (In Sri Lanka's case, the problem of borders, arbitrarily imposed, artificial or irrational, is not really part of the problem). Second is the question of democracy and the abridgement of human rights, popular participatory processes, the concentration of power at the centre as against decentralisation and devolution at the periphery, and lastly, the instruments and mechanisms of imposed change - new systems, such as the presidential, and capricious constitutional amendments,
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the reliance on emergency and extraordinary laws, and special devices such as the referendum. In Sri Lanka's case, we broke with the Westminster model in 1978 to adopt a presidential system variously described as "Gaullist" and "Gaullist - Bonapartist".
In 1980, a report of a special Presidential Commission, supported by a parliamentary resolution, led to the expulsion from the Assembly of Mrs Bandaranaike, who was deprived of her civic rights for 7 years - an indigenous essay in "internal exile". In 1982, two months after President Jayewardene was re-elected and seven months before the July explosion, a referendum held under emergency regulations, extended the life of the parliament, where the ruling U.N.P. had a five-sixths majority, for another 6 years.
In the eyes of a large segment of the very aware electorate, parliament is thus denied the legitimacy granted to the presidency. Mrs Bandaranaike's main demand today is no different from that of the opposition in Pakistan or Bangladesh: a general election.
Next arises the question of development and the choice of growth models with its relative success or failure in reducing inequalities. The inequalities not just between the rich and the poor and between classes, but also between regions and communities. In Sri Lanka's case, what is of very special importance is the impact of the failure of economic policy on a new generation with high expectations nurtured by pre-independence and post-independence social welfare programs, notably, free state education. The phenomenon of violent generational or youth revolt, first from the majority Sinhalese community in 1971, is now manifesting itself among the minority Tamils of the north. They too seem to perceive their situation in terms of a double discrimination and deprivation, both class and race. Both revolts, in my view, represent defiance and a total rejection of the respective
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political leaderships, Sinhala and Tamil, and of the political system itself.
In 1971, a radical, left-inclined section of a predominantly rural middle-class Sinhalese youth declared war on the UNP-SLFP two-party system. A decade later, the equally embittered Tamil youth of the North announced, with weapons in hand, its complete loss of confidence in the conservative Tamil leadership and its brand of politics. This politics was largely governed by the cheerful conviction that "concessions" can be extracted from the Sinhalese government, whatever its hue, by capitalising on the competitive interests of the rival Sinhalese parties. This Tamil tactic of "balance of power" proved disastrously unproductive. In 1958, the Tamil Federal party, prepared to accept much less than federalism, signed a pact with Mr S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. But that agreement on regional councils was torn up in the face of Sinhala-Buddhist agitation and racial disturbances. The opposition campaign was spearheaded by the UNP deputy leader, Mr J.R. Jayewardene. In 1966, an apparently wiser Federal party signed a preelection pact, this time with the U.N.P. Yet, a bill based on that pact had to be withdrawn when a Buddhist monk was shot dead by the police during an opposition-sponsored demonstration at the parliament led by Mrs Bandaranaike. .
In 1977, pre-election talks between the UNP and the main Tamil party, now fashionably re-styled the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), re-armed with the rhetorical election slogan of an independent "Eelam", prompted the U.N.P. to include what it called "the long-standing grievances" of the Tamil minority as an item in its election manifesto. With remarkable candour, the UNP enumerated these grievances - language rights, educational opportunites, state jobs, land distribution and colonization. The manifesto promised an allparty roundtable conference to discuss these matters.
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But the UNP won a 5/6ths majority, making the TULF expendable. In fact, a quirk of the first-past-the-post electoral system made the TULF the second largest party and its leader Mr Amirthalingam, the leader of the opposition. So, for the first time in Sri Lanka's parliamentary history, the dividing line in the House was ethnic rather than ideological. In hindsight, a timely warning which went unheeded. The allparty conference promised in the manifesto was to be convened six and half years later, only after what the national press now calls the "Black July'.
In the racial stereotypes common to a multi-ethnic society, the Tamils have been known for their mathematical prowess. Yet, in playing the numbers game, the calculations of the Tamil political elite relied too much on the simple arithmetic of the electoral contest. It ignored the higher algebra of communal politics, which dictates that no Sinhalese party, unless possessed with a death wish, will expose itself, to the charge of treachery by its Sinhalese rival.
For the vast majority of Sinhalese and Tamil youth, education (a degree) was the passport to a well-paid secure job, the sole path really to upward social mobility. Even more than subsidized food and health care, free education was the key change-agent of contemporary Sri Lanka. And social welfare, in turn, was the foundation of the island's exceptionally robust and resilient democracy, the sustaining force behind the pre-independence ideal of a modern, secular, pluralist system.
But that welfarism was made possible by a relatively congenial economic environment and fairly favourable terms of trade. By the 1970's, Sri Lanka, like other under-developed countries, was caught in the vice-like grip of the global economic crisis.
In Sri Lanka's case the integral connection between two of the basic issues I have just raised - democracy and development - is easy to identify. As early as 1966, Mr
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Jayewardene, the UNP's deputy leader told the Academy of Sciences that he, speaking for himself if not his party, stood for an executive presidency which was, "free from the whims and fancies of parliament". Only such a strong government could adopt, he said, "those harsh unpopular decisions" so necessary for economic development in a Third World country. The break with the British parliamentary past in 1978 followed an equally sharp rupture with the economic policies of the past - a change from the social-welfarist model to a World Bank supported "growth-oriented, market forces dominated" economy. The 1982 referendum, which postponed elections and 'closed' the political system, marked the second (and harsher) phase of this new economic strategy. All of which leaves us with this question to answer about the introduction of particular developmental models. Do these growth processes increase dependence externally, while promoting unequal and uneven development internally? Certainly in the critical field of education, the system evidently cannot match the demanding expectations that the system itself has created. Current developments show that there are subsurface tensions which have little to do with the ethnic conflict or separatist revolt.
A prolonged student agitation, with the active participation of student monks and the support of the teaching staff, has compelled the government to close all the campuses indefinitely. Even pro-UNP student unions have joined this campaign which has spilled into the streets of Colombo and at least two of the major provincial capitals, Kandy and Galle. The several weeks-long agitations are a spirited protest against the new Universities Act, a singularly ill-timed move to "privatise" university education. This exercise is understood by the students, the teachers, and by the middle class and poor parents as an attempt to slaughter the sacred cow of free education to propitiate the new gods of the World Bank.
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When Trotsky said that youth was the barometer of the
revolution he may have been guilty of a characteristically romantic error, but youth and student unrest in Sri Lanka has often been an early warning signal of unsuspected and hidden ills of the body politic. It is not surprising that the external aspects of the island's crisis have lately received as much attention as the domestic factors. In a South Asian perspective, the following invite serious attention:
(1)
(2)
The general break with the past - economic,
constitutional and political - was also true of foreign policy. Sri Lanka's traditional non-alignment was celebrated at the 1976 Colombo summit as "impeccable'
by fellow members, and highly commended by the
superpowers. At least as meaningful as that virtue was
the political reality that Sri Lanka was India's friendliest
neighbour. The ideological outlook of the new
government and more so its much greater reliance on
aid and investment in its export-oriented, dependent
industrialisation strategy, chartered a new course for Sri
Lanka's nonalignment. This directional change also
brought it closer to India's other neighbours, whose
foreign policy is perceived by the predominant regional
power as tilting to the West, while India in turn is seen
by the rest as tilting the other way.
The ancient Sinhala-Tamil conflict, a pre-colonial chronicle punctuated by South Indian invasion, has always had an external dimension, at least in the minds of the majority Sinhalese with their atavistic fears of intervention and division. Under the pressure of Tamil demands for autonomy, or in the face of manifest physical threat, such fears surface suddenly, or can be easily re-kindled by Sinhalese demagogues. In today's
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context, this external dimension is termed "Tamilnadu factor'.
Once again, migrations, ethnic overflows and across the border cultural affinities create problems common to India's neigbours. At the same time, it confronts India with what has: been termed "an extra-internal dimension' to Delhi's foreign policy problems vis-a-vis its neighbours.
Those who have watched the fitful advances of SAARC, the new regional group, will concede the importance of the two matters I have just mentioned. I refer to SAARC because there are influential Sri Lankans who believe that SAARC could play a useful role in the resolution of the Sri Lankan conflict. Some think of it as a potential pressure group - pressure on India, or as a possible South Asian variant of the "Contadora group.
The "Contadora' analogy is a tenuous one. If Sri Lanka's "Gaullist-Bonapartist' government does not enjoy the Gaullist option of an Algerian amputation, neither does it have the choice of a general election, the course taken by El Salvador's Napoleon Duarte. Nor for that matter can it deal with the Tamil Tigers the way the new government in Spain has handled the Basque problem.
A general election would mean that Mrs Bandaranaike's civic rights have to be restored, a demand now placed on the agenda by the Buddhist clergy. But the UNP's next line of leadership (all the leading contenders at least 20 years younger than the president), would rather take their chances with the Tamil Tigers in the remote north than with a caged tigress let loose in Colombo ! The ironies generated by the geo-political realities and current politics of the sub-continent are not of course lost on the Sri Lankan public or the media.
The Indian prime minister alerts his people to external forces of de-stabilisation, warns Pakistan not to foment trouble in Punjab and appeals to foreign governments to restrain
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expatriate Sikh separatists. Pakistan, which last year saw the sinister de-stabilising hand of India in the mass agitation in the Sind, flatly denies it is training Sikh extremists. The Sri Lankan prime minister (more so than his president) argues that the Tamil revolt is a much grander foreign conspiracy to de-stabilise his country and government. The Sri Lanka government, anyway, urges India to crack down on Tamil separatists operating from Indian soil.
These, and similar ironies hint strongly at problems intensely peculiar to South Asia and the post-colonial nationstates of this area. However, a cautionary warning on the temptation of regimes to convert an external "factor' to an external 'threat' seems in order. For immediate electoral or other short-term purposes, regimes confronted by problems of national cohesion and assorted domestic disequilibria, use the 'external threat' for internal mobilisation. This is especially true of economically embattled regions and alienated, imperiled elites. Just as the concentration and arbitrary use of power is rationalized as the imperative needs of 'economic development' and 'national unity', so too new state-sponsored ideologies founded on race and religion seek to legitimize the authority of a regime with an increasingly narrow power-base.
(This was a talk delivered at the India International Centre in 1989)
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10
Other Divisions in Lankan Society
A smoke bomb exploded at the first meeting addressed by the rebel UNP (United National Party) group. Panic threatened to disrupt the huge rally held in Nugegoda, a few miles from Colombo, but calm was swiftly restored.
The "star" at the show, the first test of strength by the dissident group, was the former minister of education and higher education, Mr. Lalith Athulathmudali, who had served president Jayewardene for ten stormy years as his powerful national security minister.
An able orator, the former Oxford Union president, has successfully edged out Mr. Gamini Dissanayake, Mr. Jayewardene's minister of lands and irrigation, who presided over the massive Mahaveli River Diversion Scheme, the showpiece development project of the Jayewardene decade. President Ranasinghe Premadasa dropped the far more popular Mr. Dissanayake from the Cabinet.
Pointing to Mr. Richard Nixon as an example, Mr. Athulathmudali said that president Premadasa should have emulated the US leader, who had resigned in the face of serious charges levelled in the press and Congress against him. Since this had not been done, "impeachment was the only way to charge a president."
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Nobody should be treated as above the law, said Mr. Athulathmudali, a lecturer in law in Singapore and Israel, who returned home to practice law and take to big-time politics as a member of the right wing UNP. Instead of facing the serious charges levelled against him, President Premadasa was "trying to obtain character certificates," Mr. Athulathmudali charged.
The "Small Man"
A character certificate was certainly issued that same day but far away from Colombo. A high ranking Buddhist monk blessed the president for his "devotion to the cause of the small man." This was at a ceremony a 100 miles from Colombo, connected with a "village re-awakening" scheme that Mr. Premadasa had inaugurated when he was prime minister and minister of local government under president Jayewardene.
The "small man" has many interesting connotations in Sri Lanka's political sociology, emphasized by the fact that Mr. Premadasa himself is a man of humble beginnings, and the first prime minister to belong to one of the so-called "low castes".
All party leaders, even of the Marxist Left, are members of the high "Goigama" (farmer) caste. Mr. Premadasa represents a sociological breakthrough, and he knows it. The Jayewardenes, the Bandaranaikes, the Athulathmudalis and the Dissanayakes, all hail from the ruling caste, and the caste factor sometimes transcends class and race.
While the "Gang of Eight' has concentrated their antiPremadasa campaign in the capital, Mr. Premadasa himself spends most of his time out of Colombo, where he has been blessed by the higher Buddhist prelates (the Buddhist priesthood is also divided on a caste basis). The Catholic Bishops' Conference as well as the Muslim elders have also
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issued statements broadly supportive of the presidency, and emphasizing the need for political stability.
The minorities, as a rule, have found the Premadasa presidency exceptionally receptive to their "special interests" and demands. More than any other national leader, he has openly advocated the need to be at all times sensitive to the multi-ethnic character of the Sri Lankan society. Together with his natural concern for the "lesser" castes, his deliberate attention to ethnic groups is a major political electoral advantage. How will this help him meet the extraordinary challenge from within the conservative UNP?
Numbers Game
Messrs. Athulathmudali, Dissanayake and other ranking party members who have introduced the impeachment motion believe that Mrs. Bandaranaike's SLFP will make common cause with them. In this, they are right. But what of the numbers game? In a house of 225, Mrs. Bandaranaike can contribute only 65 at best. The pro-India EPRLF can add 4 more votes, and the rest of the smaller opposition parties another 5 or 6. With the exception of the EPRLF, the other Tamil and Muslim parties will vote with president Premadasa's loyal band.
The Speaker is sympathetic to the opposition but he needs to see 113 hands go up or hear voices say "Aye" to submit the impeachment motion to the Supreme Court. And that means there must be at least 40 UNP MPs ready to defy the whip.
The "Gang of Eight" claim that 60 to 70 will vote for the motion if it was a "secret ballot". However, the legal pundits hold that there is no provision for a secret ballot. Will 40 to 50 UNP numbers stand up and be counted? The vote on the impeachment motion has to be taken before September 24.
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The "rebels" are confident that they can have the resolution passed. Then the Supreme Court can take up to two months to rule on it. If parliament wishes to see president Premadasa out, two-thirds of the 225 will have to support such a move. Actually, the "dissidents" would not be too disappointed if they failed in that attempt. The supreme court hearing will leave the president, they feel, greatly weakened. Power will flow back to parliament.
At the Nugegoda meeting, Mr. Lalith Athulathmudali accused his leader of alienating and abusing the intelligentsia of Sri Lanka, meaning most of the English-educated, westernized elite. An erosion of the traditional power of this class has certainly taken place in the past three years.
To what extent then is this a battle between the high caste and the rest, the English-educated versus the Sinhalaeducated? A divided nation on ethnic lines may now have to suffer other divisions too.
(The exact date of this article is not known.)
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11
Lankan Buddhism
After the withdrawal of the IPKF, another Indian export, Buddhism, now engages Sinhalese attention so totally that even the trouble brewing in the north of the island causes little anxiety.
The deviant, yet palpably inconsequential conduct of a single, little-known Sinhala monk has produced a furious and bitter battle. In a matter of days the debate has brought into the open fundamental issues such as the nature of the Sri Lankan state, church-state relations, human rights, the role of religion in politics and most critically, the question of Sinhala identity.
Sangha Sabha
The venerable Pelpola Vipas si was summarily "excommunicated" from the Sangha Sabha of which he had been a member for nearly twenty years for committing the apparently heinous offence of joining the Japanese (Mahayana) Shingon sect while living in Japan.
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Mahayana Buddhism permits a monk to marry and to own property, practices strictly taboo in the far more rigorous Theravada practised in Sri Lanka. The Mahanayakes (the four highest ranking prelates) and the Maha Sangha (the Buddhist "bishops') protested to president Premadasa on this matter, while all the lay Buddhist societies denounced the "rebel" monk for having brought disrepute upon the clergy. What was at stake, they all said, was Sri Lanka's role as a custodian of "pristine Buddhism".
Pilloried in the press, the monk was roundly accused of trying to "contaminate" Theravada Buddhism, the only pure, undefiled Buddhism, by spreading a polluted "Mahayanism". President Premadasa was reminded that Article 9 of the constitution required the state to 'accord' Buddhism the "foremost" place "and to protect and foster" its scriptures and the clergy. He was asked to prohibit public receptions to the dissident monk on his return to Sri Lanka. In a rejoinder from Tokyo, the Ven Vipassi Thera reminded Mr. Premadasa of Article 13 of the constitution, which guarantees every citizen the fundamental right of "freedom of conscience and worship". While lawyers argued the apparent ambiguities in the constitution, which on this particular matter had all-party endorsement, Mr. Premadasa, in accordance with the declared presidenti al credo of "consultation, compromise and consensus", consulted the Maha Sangha and compromised. No official would participate in the reception ceremonies, which would be treated as private affairs. He allowed the state-owned TV and radio to present all points of view from the Buddhist hierarchy and qualified spokesmen of reputed Buddhist organizations.
As the debate advanced, it was clear to the non-partisan that Sri Lanka was neither a theocratic state nor immaculately secular. A firmly established, almost reflexive "when-indoubt-blame-the-British" editorial habit has been partly replaced by an equally instinctive "when-in-trouble-indict-the
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Indians" tactical maneuver. In this instance, however, the antiBritish maneuver was readily available. While the earliest colonial powers the Portuguese and the Dutch, did leave behind Catholicism and Dutch reform church, they were in effective control only of the maritime provinces. It was the British who finally conquered the Kandyan Kingdom of the central highlands.
By the Kandyan convention of 1815, the British pledged that "the religion of Boodhoo professed by the chiefs and inhabitants of these provinces is declared inviolable. And its rites, ministers and places of worship are to be maintained and protected". It is the word "inviolable" and the promise of special protection that have found their way into the constitutions of sovereign Sri Lanka. All religions are equal but Buddhism is more equal than others.
Since the Buddhists are 70 per cent and the Sinhalese 75 per cent of the population, the Sinhala-Buddhists dominate parliamentary politics. But does the Sangha control the votes? Not really. Yet, the clergy cannot be alienated. It is too important an intermediary. After the predominantly Buddhist "cultural revolution" of 1956 which propelled the Christian born S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to prime ministerial office as the improbable champion of Sinhala-Buddhism, the Sangha simply cannot be ignored.
At the height of the anti-LTTE war, a swelling chorus of Sinhala elite opinion demanded a "Sinhala-Buddhist coalition" to wage "the holy war" to preserve the territorial integrity of the "dharmadeepa" (the land of the doctrine). Mrs. Bandaranaike was willing to join a "national security council" but not under tile chairmanship of Mr. Jayewardene, then president and defence minister. Thereupon, a venerable Mahanayake volunteered for the post. Mr. Jayewardene agreed promptly to step down as defence minister, adding that he had a problem of conscience as a Buddhist. How could he hand over charge of the infernal weapons of death (he called it
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"cannon') to a monk? For such a mortal sin he would suffer eternally, he said sweetly.
Favourite Temple
Of the four Mahanayakes (archbishops), Madihe Pannaseeha Thera presides over the Vajiraramaya, the favourite temple of Colombo's uppercrust. Replying to the rebel monk, he held that neither an individual's rights nor a country's constitution can prevail over Sri Lanka's responsibility to safeguard Buddhism. To permit this to happen would be "breach of trust". The Sri Lankan scholar Lyn Ludhoyk explains how Buddhist legend gave migration from India of a "totemistic tribe a special significance and endowed it with the qualities of divine election".
Buddhism places the highest value on reason, nonviolence, tolerance and compassion. Yet, those societies, which share the Buddhist heritage have become the world's most brutal killing fields. If Tibet and Tiananmen are to be regarded as scenes of cold-blooded massacres, the bloodletting and bestiality in Cambodia and Sri Lanka make even Burma look a mere miscreant. Yet, these Asian conflicts defy settlement. The pundits say the explanation lies in a psyche fashioned by myth, legend and paranoid fears. The Sinhala mind has been bettered by the northern Tamils, Hindu Indian and the Christian (aid-giving human rights conscious) West. The war within is the endless war.
(This article appeared in the May 29, 1990 issue of "Times of India' newspaper.)
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12
The Second Eelam War
Sri Lanka's "Eelam war" has begun but it is a different war in some ways. After a band of teenage "Tigers" had taken 600 policemen hostage and then lined up a hundred or more and mowed them down, the third LTTE-government truce was broken and the war started.
The LTTE is aggrieved that it has not been able so far to assume the administrative power and the legitimacy that control of the North-East Council gave to its rival, the EPRLF The Tigers want a new election but this requires a constitutional amendment. The LTTE did succeed, however, in persuading the government to close down many police stations and reduce military presence. Thus, the LTTE sought to fill the security vacuum in the East. What emerged were two parallel authorities on the ground, the government and the LTTE. This was a situation fraught with obvious dangers. Mr. Premadasa is now under heavy fire from the opposition for his folly in presuming rationality in what his critics regard a bunch of psychopathic fascists with no interest whatsoever in democracy. Mr. Premadasa, the opposition argues, allowed himself to be taken for a ride. The "Tigers" meanwhile prepared for war, and last week they sprang a surprise by attacking some 20 police stations and army camps all over the East and the Jaffna Peninsula.
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Shift in Posture
Last Monday's monthly debate on the emergency did see an interesting shift in the opposition posture. In the past, the opposition had protested against the routine extension of an emergency that gave the government blanket authority for human rights violations and excesses. The SLFP led at the moment by Mr. Anura Bandaranike abstained. The TULF, the moderate Tamil party, and the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) voted with the UNP. The SLMC is East-based and the Eastern province is the main theatre of war.
"We made every effort to bring the LTTE into the democratic process. We were trying to solve a problem that has been festering for a long time. The talks brought a measure of peace", said Justice Minister Shaul Hameed, the president's special negotiator, who served for ten years as foreign minister. He added, "Some say it gave the LTTE time to re-group and re-arm. Others say it helped us to get the IPKF out. We won international confidence, even the tourists returned".
Apart from the new voting pattern on the emergency, the talk in the lobbies of a "national government" and "a national consensus" (in effect a bipartisan Sinhala consensus) mirrored current political thinking more sharply than the headcount. Nobody objected to a massive Rs. 5 billion ($ 125 million) supplementary vote for the defence ministry. It will buy weapons, aircraft, and patrol boats.
Meanwhile, the Sinhala populace remains calm - to confirm an old untested theory that Sinhala mob violence has invariably been planned explosion rather than spontaneous combustion, with thousands of "goons" used as shock troops by the ruling party. In any case, the average Sinhala who has watched in the past the mutilated corpses of Sinhala youth burning on the roadside may be permanently anaesthetized into a truly Buddhistic stoicism.
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The LTTE onslaught has revived an old debate, the wisdom of getting the IPKF out. In the course of seven long conversations, president Jayewardene has tried to convince this writer that the "accord" was not merely his smartest decision, but getting the IPKF out was his successor's most costly mistake. He may be right on the first count but the second is debatable. New dramatic evidence makes it so.
Newspaper articles that present the "inside story" of the army's anti-JVP operation reveal that president Jayewardene's only son, Ravi who was also his security adviser, had a top JVP leader released from jail. Ravi and a group of his intimate friends were then to make common cause with the JVP in waging a "holy war" against the occupation army, the historic enemy. This extraordinary coalition, transcending class and ideology, suggests the depth of nationalist feeling. And such sentiment was to be found in the bureaucracy, the business world, the professions and even in the armed forces, as evident from the sailor who attempted to kill Mr. Gandhi, becoming a hero.
In such conditions, it was the future of the Sri Lankan state which was in danger. Mr. Jayewardene was right in realizing that his army could not fight a two-front war. But Mr. Premadasa was correct to assume that he had to get the IPKF out to deny the JVP its powerful rallying cry of "liberating" the country from a foreign army and a puppet regime.
Tactical Decision
While Mr. Premadasa's diplomacy may have been gauche and theatrical, the tactical decision was right. The LTTE made a deal of course for its own reasons. It has used the time to recruit thousands and to train them. But it would be a mistake to think that the Sri Lankan army has been idle. The danger,
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says a senior military officer from a neighbouring country, is that both the LTTE's new cadres and the Sinhala soldier may be too easily intoxicated by their respective "legends".
The LTTE has seized or overrun police stations and camps in the East, but can it hold ground? While the battles will decide future politics and diplomacy, professionalism has taken charge of the foreign office as it has the Sri Lankan army. The Sri Lanka high commissioner was instructed not only to keep the authorities in Delhi fully briefed but also to call on the Tamil Nadu chief minister. The Sinhala establishment has finally grasped the full international, regional, diplomatic and economic dimensions of civil war in the present era.
In November the defence vote was Rs. 10 billion, about ten per cent of the national budget, and five per cent of GDP. In 1983, it was only one per cent of GDP. A militarisation process familiar to the region is having a steady impact on Sri Lankan society, once a conscious third world exception. Sri Lanka's endless wars have introduced the army as a new, more professional and assertive actor on to the political stage. With party politics having to adjust to the war, the very shape of Sri Lankan state and society may be recast in the fires of the battleground.
(This article appeared in the June 22, 1990 issue of Times of India' newspaper.)
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13
The Age of Identity
It was just the other day that Dr Ponna Wignaraja reminded me that the "Lanka Guardian' was closely associated with the United Nations University (UNU) South Asian Perspectives project from its inception. That is correct. Professor Shelton Kodikara, I recall, was the other Sri Lankan who joined this 'task force' on nation building together with many other distinguished representatives from the region.
Needless to add, Dr Wignaraja's reminder was part friendly persuasion, part polite blackmail. I was asked to look back, pick up some of the main strands of the ongoing discussion, and put down something on paper - which I did, almost overnight. So much by way of explanation and apology. Anyway, it's the next two days' exchanges that really matter.
1978 and After
The coincidence was fortuitous. The 'Lanka Guardian' was launched in 1978, the year in which the new constitution established an all-powerful Executive Presidency.
Mr J.R. Jayewardene, leader of the United National Party (UNP) had assumed office as prime minister in July 1977
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The conservative UNP, the strongest party in the island, had won an massive 5/6th of the parliamentary majority, albeit on 52% of the popular vote. Using that overwhelming majority, he installed himself as the first executive president of Sri Lanka, a former British colony that since independence in 1948, had earned itself a reputation as a comparatively stable and lively democracy, with a high PQLI rating. Prof. Jeyaratnam Wilson, one of the best known Sri Lankan constitutional pundits, described the new structure as "Gaullist".
The declared rationale for this unusual politicalconstitutional exercise, described by some critics, as a "constitutional coup" was "instability". Political stability, it was argued, was a prerequisite for "rapid economic development". The model was Singapore, the target a "second Singapore". Though the opposition denounced the exercise a "constitutional coup", the vision of a second Singapore on a larger scale did excite the popular imagination. Yet a Gaullist president did not deliver. The Singaporean ideal proved elusive. Why?
For all its parliamentary strength, and the executive power and "emergency powers" it soon acquired, the Jayewardene regime failed. One of the major reasons being state policy and party politics, but most of all because of the mishandling of a fundamental problem - the inter-communal relations. It was an experts' symposium in Singapore, which concluded, "Yet, as elsewhere around the world the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union have swept like an eraser across the blackboard of South Asia's security equations, the only exception being Sri Lanka's bitter feud between Tamils and Singhalese".
At the I.I.S.S. conference in Seoul, Prof. Sir Michael Howard said in his keynote address, on 'Old Conflicts and New Disorders', "In South Asia, the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir seems no nearer a solution, and
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racial tensions still tear apart Sri Lanka apart. No doubt you can think, we shall be hearing of many more."
My focus is therefore on the Sri Lankan crisis in which the ethnic conflict is the defining issue. It was the presence of Tamilnadu, the South Indian state, which forced us to broaden the discussion and our perspective. Hence we took a sub-regional approach. If the arrival of a 60,000 strong Indian peace-keeping force did nothing else, it certainly did compel us to widen the range of inquiry even further. Now we speak in the dark shadow of Ayodhya. A regional perspective is inescapable given the sub-continental cultural matrix and history. At a time when national borders are vanishing, the borders in our own mind need to be erased in the interests of serious inquiry and discussion. After the slight detour, I return to the 1978 constitution.
That constitution, its supporters argue, did represent an unparalleled concentration and centralisation of power, but it also performed a necessary and urgent national task - accelerated development. The 1971 Sinhalese youth insurrection was a warning; now, the Tamil youth had taken to violence and the incipient Tamil terrorism in the north-andeast had to be stopped. Only rapid economic growth and an expansion of job-opportunities could pre-empt a Tamil (separatist) insurgency.
The "Lanka Guardian' did not agree. It warned that the "Gaullist constitution" could become the scaffolding of the authoritarian State. In any case, the concentration and centralization of power was surely the anti-thesis of devolution and decentralization, which were regarded as the most hopeful pre-emptive courses?
The question is, do we need therefore to dismantle the post-1978 structure? Or does that constitution have, in the light of our current tribulations, some virtues that need to be preserved? 1993 and 1994 will see provincial, parliamentary and presidential polls. So the question will remain an important item on the agenda.
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My own approach to the core issue - the harrowing Sri Lankan crisis - betrays, I admit an internationalist bias. But in this age of ethnicity, break-up of nation-states, steady erosion of national sovereignty, preventive diplomacy, humanitarian intervention and a global communications system that steadily shrinks the world, I do not need to apologise for this line of inquiry.
What we witnessed after Ayodhya is interaction of a much vaster canvas. It involved India's two largest neighboursBangladesh and Pakistan. The emotional fall-out was so alarming that the prime minister of India, the second largest nation in the world and the most populous democracy could not travel to Dhaka for "security reasons". The SAARC summit had to be postponed twice. So, even the formal ceremonies of SAARC, the world's newest regional organization, have to be abandoned on account of a dispute concerning the history of a temple and a mosque. -
The question is, how would this post-Ayodhya crisis impinge on the politics of India's neighbours, especially those neighbours with a large or sizeable Muslim population? But for better or worse, we are once more confronted by the centrality of India. Neither the student nor the policy-planner can discuss an on-going project or a new proposal without reference to this socio-political context and the highly charged Indian situation.
Wider Terrain
By a fortuitous coincidence, the post-Ayodhya events have extended the perimeters of the South Asian discussion. The Islamic factor extends the perimeter both ways - Moslem countries in South-East Asia, but more decisively in West Asia. The West Asian angle is the more crucial since Pakistan has
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now joined a new group that not only involves Iran and its Arab neighbours, but the Central Asian Moslem republics of the C.I.S. (former USSR) which includes at least one republic that has access to nuclear weapons. The new complicating regional factors are made more complex by the increasing involvement of non-regional major powers with new security concerns - the US and Russia are both disturbed by a resurgent Islam, and nuclear proliferation.
The generic Kashmir conflict, the war in Afghanistan, Islamisation of the Palestinian struggle, the establishment of Indo-Israeli relations, the advent of E.C.O. (a new regional organization) and President Yeltsin's visit to India are all of a piece. Islam, oil, ethnic and other conflicts make the region the most important in geostrategic terms. Poverty, identity conflicts and the free flow of arms make it the most explosive region.
Sri Lanka Crisis
The dimensions of the Sri Lankan conflict were dramatized by a single incident recently. The Indian navy seized an LTTE vessel on the high seas. It was carrying sophisticated arms, including anti-aircraft guns from Burma to Sri Lanka's Tamil north. On board was the London-based Kittu, one of the LTTE's top military commanders. He committed suicide while some of his comrades were arrested by the Indian authorities. The LTTE claims that the ship was in international waters. The Tigers have sworn that the Indian leadership will pay for Kittu's death. Assassination attempts and retaliatory terrorist actions in both Tamilnadu and Delhi, the capital, are doubtless on the LTTE's latest agenda. A separatist movement in the north of a tiny, off-shore island, is now a serious security threat to India and its government.
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Cost of Conflict
The enormous economic price that Sri Lanka has paid and continues to pay is the most disturbing outcome of the continuing low-intensity conflict.
The Tamil revolt was not the first generational challenge to the state. In 1971, the JVP, a romantic Guevarist movement launched a quixotic insurrectionist adventure hoping to overthrow the newly elected government of Mrs Bandaranaike who had the island's two major Marxist parties as her coalition partners, and the left leaders as cabinet ministers. It was . swiftly snuffed out by the army and the police.
We live in the age of 'identity'. In its next attempt at seizing power, the JVP was not Marxist or Guevarist but intensely "nationalist or Sinhala-Buddhist", the majority Sinhala answer to the Tamil separatist LTTE. Its Marxist camouflage made it Pol Pottist, not Guevarist. More significantly, its popularity and its appeal to more than just the Sinhala youth, lay in ultra-nationalist challenge to a regime that could not crush the Tamil "Tigers" and had handed over the task to Indian troops. The JVP revolt was a "patriotic war". It is economic dissatisfaction however, which explains the current popularity of the JVP, and on the campuses, of "Jathika Chintanaya', an ultra Sinhala-Buddhist ideology described by its Leftist critics as "neo-fascist". Led by supporters of this movement, student unions have forced the government to close campuses.
In an article published in the "Lanka Guardian', Eduardo Marino, an expert on Latin American insurgencies, observed, "The old JVP quest for revolution found in the Indo-Lanka accord a new opportunity - nationalist than social".
The Indo-Lanka "accord" brought to Sri Lanka an Indian Peace Keeping Force (60-70,000), much larger than the Sri Lankan Army. In the hope of mobilizing Sinhala nationalist,
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the JVP now reappeared in the garb of Pol Pottism, say its orthodox Marxist critics.
A far more important example of mobilized identity, that is of a re-assertive ethnic or religious identity, responding to an immediate challenge, is the emergence and quite spectacular rise of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress. The Muslims hold the balance in the strategic eastern province where the Tamils are 42% and the Sinhala-speaking constitute 25%. Since the LTTE insists on a North-East merger ("the traditional homeland"), the east is the most vital issue in this "war" over land with rival historical claims.
The Tamil separatist advocates presumed that language not religion would compel the Tamil-speaking Muslims to join their struggle against "the common enemy"- the dominant group of the Sinhala-Buddhists.
Islam, however, is one of the most dynamic mobilizing forces throughout the world. The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, a new political party, answered Muslim aspirations while providing also an autonomous platform from which the Muslim elite could advocate the distinctive Muslim causes and pursue Muslim interests. And now the region itself lives under the long shadow of Ayodhya.
Last year, Gerald Segal of the I.I.S.S. ranked Sri Lanka 3rd among 22 Asia-Pacific defence-spenders. Sri Lanka spends 5.9% of its GNP on defence. Only development, distributive justice and participatory democracy can together help prevent another Sinhala generational explosion.
To marginalize the rural and semi-rural youth from either the developmental process or the participatory democratic process is to invite disaster, especially when the short-term burdens placed on the lower income groups by IMF's structural adjustment strategy (whatever its long-term benefits) are certain to be quite oppressive. Growing unrest among these groups is already visible. Through effective de-centralisation and power and resources devolved to provincial councils, it
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may be possible to head-off the next threat, which may be more anarchic than an orderly challenge to the elected administration.
The devolution of power should be matched by new economic growth areas. Although the current agitation on the campuses and some rural, semi-urban sectors is politically motivated and often engineered, it would be foolish to underestimate the crisis, which is in many ways a multidimensional crisis.
(This was a talk delivered at a United Nations University seminar in 1993.)
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Part Four

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Nonalignment and the New Information Order
The compulsive needs of self-expression and the compelling urgencies of responding to external challenges have governed the non-aligned movement's broad patterns of behaviour in its 21-year history. From its formal baptism in Belgrade to its coming-of-age this year in this city, Baghdad, we also discern the impact on the movement's collective conduct of the singular fact of its steady expansion in numbers and the accompanying infusion of diversity.
But whatever the preoccupations of the movement at any given time or in any definable period, the non-aligned community has held on steadfastly to an aim, which we must accept as its central or core value: an end to domination. Nothing illustrates this better than the basic documents, which punctuate the movement's history. "Domination" and associated ideas like "subordination" and "dependence" together with connected phrases such as "in all its forms", "in any form" and "in all its manifestations" have been worked and re-worked into the movement's literature until these terms, have entered the liturgical lexicon.
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The ultimate goal of course, in this projected path of progress is the total emancipation of our peoples and their liberation in all spheres - political, economic and cultural. Although we must at all times caution ourselves against the artificial and arbitrary demarcation of these areas - and in truth, the history of the movement is also the history of our increasing awareness of the interconnections rather than the separateness of these spheres - the movement has perforce seen new concerns and shifting emphases.
In that sense, political, economic and cultural are categories of convenience, especially to the student of nonaligned affairs. Political independence and the process of decolonization made the strongest claim on our attention and energies initially. But even as that process was reaching maturity, with only a few remaining enclaves of colonialism and racism defying the judgement of history, it was already painfully clear that such independence was incomplete, and would never be truly meaningful without the secure material foundations of economic self reliance.
So, at the 4th Summit in Algiers, the ground was laid for the New International Economic Order. And soon, a new banner was unfurled; a new front opened, with the nonaligned or Third World launching a new campaign for justice. But not, I repeat, because politics was abandoned or laid aside. On the contrary, the Third World, at the highest levels of ccnsciousness, had understood the multi-faceted character of the global power structure, had grasped the politics of the world economic system, and had successfully mobilized its political will to launch its demand for radical change.
The clamour for change, the act itself, caused immediate tremors in the international system, and near-convulsions in key institutions like UNCTAD, World Bank, IMF etc. The issue was economic, but the challenge was political, as were the consequences, because the non aligned, the majority in the United Nations, were seeking to use the managerial
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mechanisms of the global status quo to transform the existing order. In doing so, the Third World was attempting to democratize the international institutions in a conscious bid, ()ne sincerely hopes, to democratize international relations and international society itself.
It is in this perspective that the information issue should be discussed. Fortunately, such a mode of approach is a natural one, at least historically speaking. It was at Algiers that the issue received special attention when the nonaligned placed, albeit tentatively, the information issue on the international agenda. By the next summit in Colombo, another battle-cry, "New International Information Order" had been raised.
The pattern of response of those who saw themselves under siege was suggestively similar to that, which accompanied the demand for a new economic order. Here too, the battles are intense and acrimonious. The sheer ferocity with which UNESCO, the institution, and its Director-General, in person, have been assailed by western media and western spokesmen does suggest that the information issue has touched a raw, exposed nerve of long-entrenched vested interests.
When we proceed to reflect on prospects in the 1980's - the general theme of this symposium - we have to ask: What is the nature of the struggle we have undertaken? What are the forces pitted against us? How best can we harness our own resources? What are our limitations and in which direction lie the best opportunities for progress?
Even if one had the competence to do so, I doubt whether all these questions can be adequately answered in a brief presentation. However, if we are to at least face up to these problems squarely we need to be armed with some knowledge of the history of this issue in the evolutionary context of the movement, the fundamental nature of the problem and its wide ramifications today, national and international.
In a declaration of several thousand words, less than hundred words were devoted to the subject of "mass
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communication" at Algiers in 1973. The relevant passage which called for "concerted action in the field of mass communications...in order to promote a greater inter-change of ideas" appeared in the "Action Programme for Economic Cooperation". We need to note the exact location of this passage in the declaration, its content and its brevity. A recognition of the significance of each can contribute to our understanding of the whole issue.
To the extent that each nonaligned conference is issueoriented, the early 70's marked a shift of emphasis from politics to economics, and Algiers was a landmark. From Algiers to Colombo a new area of action is identified, and at Algiers we note the first signs of its opening, the shift from economics to culture and ideology. That is, to the sphere of the super-structure.
With hindsight we may conclude that the brevity of the statement on communications showed that a total grasp of the magnitude of the problem and its manifold implications was still lacking. Such a firm, comprehensive view was to be reached in the fullness of time, mercifully, in a matter of a few years. These were years marked by the Lima foreign ministers meeting, the Tunis symposium of specialists, the Delhi conference of foreign ministers and the holding of the 5th Summit in Colombo.
But the content of the Algiers statement, despite its almost casual concern did reveal a sure sense of the essential character of the problem. And in comprehending the essence, the nonaligned nations accomplished the crucial task of relating the issue to the basic aims of the movement, thus facilitating its natural incorporation into the corpus of nonaligned thinking.
The Algiers "Action Programme for Economic Cooperation" enjoined the nonaligned states to "reorganize existing communication channels which are the legacy of the
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colonial past and which have hampered free, direct and fast communication between them". (My italics).
By correctly identifying the institutional origins of the present communications system, the Algiers Declaration did present it as no more than yet another oppressive burden cast upon us by our common colonial inheritance. But the actual consequence of this legacy, and therefore the challenge confronting us today, was given narrow and limited definition. The problem was seen only in terms of the need for an allround improvement in communication between ourselves.
Fortunately, the meetings which marked the run-up to the Colombo summit helped to assemble and refine many valuable ideas and insights gathered over the years by specialist writers both within and outside the Third World. In the hands of the non-aligned, this accumulated knowledge was transformed into a searching, coherent and damning critique of the present information order, presented to the world for the first time as a potent and insidious instrument of domination.
Once that well-founded and cogently argued critique was submitted, the global information system would no longer be seen as a historical accident nor as some neutral institution responsibly fulfilling the felt needs of the world community. It was the authentic child of colonialism and its growth paralleled the process of territorial and economic expansion that characterized the rise of the major colonial powers.
The location of Reuters in the City of London and of HAVAS, the forerunner of the Agence France Presse (AFP) near the Bourse in Paris was surely symbolic? Equally significant were the decisions taken at various conferences held in Europe in the 19th and early 20th century. Here, the carving out of the operational areas for the major news agencies not only reflected the contradictory collusive and competitive impulses of the imperialist enterprise, but also
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faithfully mirrored the existing spheres of influence - political, economic and cultural - of the leading colonial powers.
In short, the system's own genesis underscores a fact crucially important to our understanding of the problem today. The communication "order" had an integral connexion with the entire structure of global power, and its configuration and distribution in any given period. Full of telling ironies, the American contribution is exceptionally informative. The founders of A.P. were as much motivated by a spirit of nationalist resistance to European pre-eminence in the field as we are today to alien domination. The early history of AP and UPI is the history of American affirmation of American independence in a world where the power centers were still sited in Europe. An American writer, Curtis T. White observes, "For there is a parallel between the current dominance of Western news agencies and the structure of internal news dissemination some 60 years ago. At that time, the United States charged the Europeans with bias and distortion of the news and bitterly complained about the imbalance and the lack of access to and control of communications systems. One need only substitute the term "developing countries" for "USA" in 60-year-old documents on the need to break up the European news monopoly, and they would read like documents written today". (Foreign Policy Spring 79).
Henry Luce, the founder of TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE, and truly an American native to the grain, may have been premature and somewhat over-optimistic when he spoke of "an American century." Nonetheless, it is a simple fact of history that post-war American paramountcy was matched uy a triumphant American challenge to the long established monopolist positions of the European news networks.
Having achieved ascendancy in the field of economic, political and military power, the U.S. will now seek to complete such dominance by advancing into the sphere of
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culture and ideology. American values and American ideas would also strive to acquire a global reach.
In this field in particular, those who controlled and managed the system were uniquely advantaged because of their technological supremacy. Even as we denounce the existing system and endeavour to build a "new order', technology is giving the old order new, awesome dimensions and creating what Ashok Mitra called "leaping distances" between those who are dependent and disadvantaged and those who already occupy the commanding heights.
Immediately after the war, the prevailing system was vested with moral and institutional sanctity through direct U.S. intervention in the UN and ancillary agencies. "The free flow of information" was elevated into a sacred principle. Not unnaturally, it was the legitimate twin to the complementary concept of "free trade'. Information was a commodity, a neutral, value-free object that was marketed and therefore governed by the laws of supply and demand. Just as the gross iniquities and grotes que absurdities of "free trade" have been convincingly demonstrated, the myth of "free flow' has also been exposed.
The information debate internationally initiated by the non-aligned has helped us to catalogue the more pernicious and negative characteristics of the system. If perception of the problem and mobilization of the political will at an international level was our first achievement, the big breakthrough, the second success has been this critical dissection of the system. It has provided the growing agitational campaign with the necessary argumentative or back-up support.
The 'free flow' is not a free flow, but a largely one-way traffic, north to south, with little horizontal movement between the countries of the Third World. Meanwhile, content analysis has established that the information is value-loaded rather than value-free; it is often trivial, sensationalist and marketoriented, pandering to the racial, cultural and other prejudices
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of western consumers. It is also frequently given to distortion, misrepresentation and ideological-propagandist bias, apart from being oblivious, insensitive and hostile to the interests and aspirations of the Third World.
Anti-colonialism and neo-colonialism were the foundations of nonaligned thought, while politics, economics and culture were the main areas of group action. I return to that point only to draw your attention to the distinctive vocabulary which grew up with the debate, a vocabulary in which we find key phrases such as "cultural imperialism", "information imperialism", "de-colonizing information", "academic colonialism" and so on.
A western commentator, Rosemary Righter (Sunday Times, London) is therefore close to the crux of the matter when she describes what she terms 'the dilemma of the West' as that of "the principle of freedom of information being rejected as intrinsic to the neo-colonialist pattern of dominance".
Yes, the West does recognize the Third World critique of the system and its clamour for a new order as a frontal attack on the pivotal principle that upholds and makes inviolate the prevailing order. There is however, another reason for the combative fury that characterizes its counter-offensive. That reason is stated most succinctly by the same writer as, "the decolonization of the media has become the goal that unites more countries than any other North-South issue".
That's not all. As part of the counter campaign, the western media has trumped up the theory of a collusive, if not conspiratorial action, in which the nonaligned have "ganged up" with the Soviet bloc. Neither on the question of the new economic order nor on the information order is there complete convergence of views between these groups of nations. The nature of the problem, nevertheless, dictates both the main areas of conflict and therefore the principal antagonists as well as other alignments, temporary or lasting.
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Here, as in the case of the New Economic Order, the system against which we are battling has been created by the west and remains west-dominated. In reality therefore, "alien domination", "cultural imperialism" and "de-colonizing information", means western domination. Inescapably so. Consequently, however tenable such short-hand propositions like "equi-distance" or "non-bloc" or "anti-bloc" may be, in practice, we find it a needlessly exacting and an unproductive exercise to fit these notions into the procrustean bed of facile theorizing. غد
While bearing this in mind as a question of some importance in the area of international action, far more important is to remind ourselves that the struggle in the cultural-ideological sphere poses difficulties more complicated, and therefore more daunting than in the field of politics. Only then can we face up boldly to a stark truth; that while we have registered a major advance, conceptually and politically, our gains on the ground, in real, measurable terms, are disappointingly modest.
Nikhil Chakravarty, editor of the Indian journal "Mainstream', puts it ably. He says, "In the Third World the fight against the transnational news agencies is not going to be an easy one. It is not just a question of mobilizing an entire people against colonial subjugation, as the struggles for national independence demanded. Such struggles, no doubt hard fought, have had a straight-line objective, namely the liquidation of alien rule. In contrast, the struggle against virtual colonial domination in the field of information demands a more sophisticated and complex approach, and to that extent, is more arduous".
Starting from the nonaligned news agencies pool, a spirited Yugoslav initiative that certainly deserved richer rewards, we have in the recent past seen positive efforts in many directions. These included the setting up of national
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news agencies, the steady expansion of news exchanges, both regional and sub-regional, a great advance in training facilities, an improvement in national infra-structures, a campaign for cheap telecommunication tariffs and a more equitable place in the communication system as a whole.
When all this is added up, is there really not much cause for satisfaction? I am neither a politician nor a public official and feel no special urge to evade the issue. All my adult life I have been a journalist and I speak from that experience. Not only a purely professional experience but an experience that has also been educative in the larger sense, in the sense of a slow awakening to the realities of the world.
How 'national" are our national news agencies? What is their daily output? What is the quality of that output? How much of the service provided is actually used by the national press, radio, TV? How much of it is transmitted abroad via the "pool" and other exchange arrangements and how much is used in other countries?
In each case the answer is likely to be depressing. Why? I cannot generalize but I can certainly speak of conditions in my own country.
Sri Lanka which gained independence in 1948 has had universal adult franchise for 50 years and has operated a multiparty parliamentary democracy for 35 years. Its literacy rate is one of the highest in the Third World, and it boasts an unbroken tradition of over a hundred years in newspaper publishing. Yet, its infant 'national' news agency 'Lankapuwath', is a mere façade. Though it has established a link-up with the Geneva-based IPS which is conducting some useful real-guard action against the giants, LANKAPUWATH is a camouflaged servicing agent for the big networks and living off fees paid by the press and radio for their services. Its own service, a daily bulletin of local news, is coldshouldered by even the state-owned media. Why? The editors say that news is not news but ministerial statements, official
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communiques, poorly written and dull. So if "Lankapuwath' survives this year, it will be a miracle.
While this situation directs our attention to the problem of professionalism and training, that is only a superficial aspect of the problem.
"Over a billion people a day make their value judgements on international developments on the basis of A.P. news", claims Stanley Swinton, AP's World Service Director. Whether overblown or not, the assertion hammers home the salient fact that the system is not confined to the mere transmission and receipt of information, but the forming of opinions, shaping of attitudes and the inculcation of values.
This includes 'news value' - what the journalist is taught at a training institute and/or learns at work everyday. What constitutes "news" in his mind, and how he should present that news are both governed by that scale of values which are now part of his intellectual and professional conditioning. The ultimate outcome is a vicious cycle of bondage in which the media pleads that it gives the audience what it wants, and the audience cries that it has to accept what it gets.
So a royal romance in the household of our former imperial ruler could claim more adulatory attention, space and time from our media in one month than the coverage given to all the news from all the nonaligned nations in a year So professional training is simply not enough if it merely means instruction in handling of 'the tools of the trade'. Indeed, such training in Cardiff or West Berlin or the East-West Centre may help perpetuate the system. In the popular idiom, the mass communicator is also mass educator. But who will educate the educator?
This particular problem was discussed quite thoroughly at the Third World Journalist's seminar sponsored by the Dag Hammerskjold Foundation in 1975. As a report that followed noted, "It will be all the harder for those who need and want
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change in that the chief vehicle for alerting and mobilizing public consciousness to the realities of information subservience, the press, is itself the tool and the principal exemplification of this subservience".
Deeper down, as we touch the domestic power structure, we observe the role of local elites, their self-interest, their ideological outlook, and international linkages. We may refuse to go so far as Herbert Schiller and speak of such elites as "coerced" and "bribed" by the transnationals. But we can surely agree with this statement of Juan Somavia that, "There is increasing evidence that in addition to force or economic pressure, a supplementary instrument exists which is less contentious and more subtle, but equally effective. This is the capacity for cultural domination and transfer of consumption and development styles which incorporate the peoples of the Third World, both psychologically and practically, into the value system of the transnational power structure...In this task, there is an alliance between Third World internal bourgeoisie and the transnational system".
Television is new to Sri Lanka. The government has recently granted full diplomatic recognition to the PLO, a step wholly endorsed by all the other political parties. And yet on the world news programs of our national TV, all we see is the US Ambassador and the Israeli Ambassador abusing the nonaligned for their resolution on the Golan Heights. A crude example, to be sure, but very effective for my purpose here. This same ominous trend can be seen in the "canned' programs with which an impressionable audience is bombarded daily. Our intelligeitsia, our media-managers and our "gate-keepers" have forgotten the sound advice given to an audience in Papua New Guinea by a New Zealand producer on a UN project: "Remember, when we sell you programmes we may be giving you something more potent than all the Bibles and battleships of the past"
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Press, radio, TV, everything is centered in Colombo, the capital, where a privileged English-educated minority stands at the apex of the power structure. In the countryside dwell the millions of Sinhala or Tamil educated poor, at whom the national communications system, controlled and managed by the metropolitan elite, is directed. It is almost a mirror-image of the global system, and the relationship of dominance and dependence between center and periphery is not significantly different. Can we really democratize internationally without a parallel effort internally? Is the 'communication system' only a communication system?
May I end this paper with a passage taken from a document prepared by a Sri Lanka media institute with which I am associated: "The issues raised by the debate on the New International Information Order do not concern only international communication relations. They are closely interrelated with the problems cf national structures and relations of communication. In the first place it is through the links between transnational agencies and organizations and naticinal media that the pressures and influences of the former and the communication content they disseminate are transmitted. Secondly, the aims of democratizing communication require for elimination of inequalities and the correction of imbalances not only in the international but also in the national sphere".
(This was a paper delivered at a seminar titled "The Nonaligned Countries in the '80s: Results & Perspectives", organized in Baghdad, Iraq, in 1982, under the patronage of president Saddam Hussein.)
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