Besides the Sinhalese and Tamils, Muslims and upcountry (or Kandyan) Tamils have their own political angles. The Muslims are a democratic force to reckon with and will be a formidable presence in the future.
The outcome of the war will not by itself lessen the task of resolving the pre-LTTE political problems, and the economic costs of war will stifle Sri Lanka for a long time to come. More likely to happen is what is being bandied in government circles as the need to consolidate the military victory in the name of national security and in the name of forestalling future challenges to national sovereignty. This approach is neither new nor wise. It is the extension of the old approach of N.Q. Dias, Sirimavo Bandaranaike's Permanent Secretary. The application of Dias's method now would be to go beyond establishing military outposts in the Northern and Eastern Provinces and turn them into garrison provinces where suspect Tamils will be kept under surveillance, even in camps if necessary, by Sinhalese soldiers while Sinhalese civilians are induced to settle to change the ethnic composition of these areas. Ethnic surveillance and settlement is what is reportedly happening in the 'liberated East'.
Thirty years of violence has broken and brutalized the Tamil society. People living in the Northern and Eastern Provinces have been displaced multiple times, have little to lose and are quite used to receiving and returning violence. Constant military poking of them will eventually produce violent reactions. They may not have the organization, the resources and the fire power of the LTTE, but they will have the rage and the resourcefulness that Palestinian teenagers showed in their first Intifada using sticks and stones against Israeli military tanks. A revamped Dias approach will turn the North and East into two restively lawless provinces that will not make life there any worse than it is now, but will impose a permanent drag on the rest of the country.
A second likely development is on the political front. What is being talked about is a condescending approach that recognizes the need for a political settlement but insists that the military defeat of the LTTE has set limits on what the Tamils can and cannot ask for as well as the manner in which they could ask for it. The Thirteenth Amendment is the most what the Tamils will get, it has been asserted, but they should not expect all of it, only parts of it. The debate over whether the Thirteenth Amendment is sufficient or not will go on endlessly, and a military outcome is not going to put an end to it. What is more important is whether there is the political will and commitment to bring about a constitutional change at this time or in the near future. Political will and commitment are two attributes that have been sorely missing in the shaping of Sri Lanka's constitutional development.
The Thirteenth Amendment, reluctantly introduced at India's insistence, is far more comprehensive and specific than the Soulbury Constitution. Along with changes to the Citizenship laws the Amendment provides the framework to address three of the "four basic demands" that was formulated by the Federal Party in 1957 and formed the basis of the B-C Pact: in regard to language, regional autonomy and citizenship. The fourth one calling for the stoppage of "state aided colonization" (not to be confused with voluntary internal migration) in the North and East could also be addressed if the government abandons the surveillance and settlement approach that it now seems ready to implement in the North and East.
Delhi and other powers have not been able to prevail on the government or the LTTE to stop fighting and prevent the humanitarian tragedy involving the civilians in the combat area. The international community sat on its hands for too long and is now unable to do anything to prevent a tragedy escalating into a disaster. International institutions and their highly paid officials stand helpless and exposed of their ineffectiveness. Reduced to basics and stripped of the grand language of sovereignty and self-determination, the failed role of India and the international community in the situation in Sri Lanka is no different from the inability of a civilian police force to stop two fighting gangs going at one another in the middle of a city, town or village. The difference is that globalization and post-cold war 'imbalance' of powers have transformed local conflicts into modern war pits using weaponry that by any rational assessment should be beyond the means of most of the conflicting state and non-state parties.
The Government of Sri Lanka has been accused of taking cover under its sovereignty to deny the international community its competence to protect the war affected civilians in Sri Lanka. The accusation is not without merit but it is incomplete in that it lets off the record of the LTTE in ignoring international calls for respecting democracy and human rights while claiming the right of self-determination. The right of self-determination loses all meaning if it is not intertwined with the principles and practice of democracy.
Self-determination can be experienced in many ways. Tamils steeped in the tradition of their psalms and poetry, know the immortal words of their seventh century savant, Tirunavukarasar (Appar): "Nam-arkum kudiyallom" - we are not subjects of anyone. That sums up better than anything else in Tamil ethos the essence and the defiance of individual self-determination.
In its far better known and more materially sustained European origins too, the principle of self-determination began as an individual development before being usurped, some times positively but many times perversely and atrociously, not only by the building block of modern society - the nation state, but also by non-state actors wanting to become states. In the long history of national self-determination the notorious location of the LTTE is quite widely acknowledged. What is not equally realized isthat in taking on and defeating the LTTE at its own game, the state of Sri Lanka is emulating the LTTE and establishing its own notoriety.
During the dark days of 1983, Narasimha Rao, then India's Foreign Minister, flew to Colombo and personally delivered a stern message from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to President Jayewardene. The latter though taken aback kept his composure and responded: "You may occupy us but you cannot conquer our spirit"! Nothing less should be expected of the Tamils of Sri Lanka.
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