Sri
Lankan Peace Talks Collapse
Amid Intensifying Civil War
By K. Ratnayake
01 November, 2006
World
Socialist Web
Talks
between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam (LTTE) in Geneva last weekend broke up without agreement on any
issue, including the convening of another round. The collapse of talks
will inevitably lead to a further expansion of a war that has already
cost thousands of lives this year.
Just hours after talks ended,
fierce artillery exchanges erupted between the army and the LTTE on
the northern Jaffna peninsula at Muhamalai and Nagarkovil. Even as the
negotiations were taking place in Geneva, army chief Sarath Fonseka
visited Jaffna to meet local military commanders and discuss “the
security situation”.
President Mahinda Rajapakse
only agreed to send a delegation to Geneva “without conditions”
to maintain the increasingly flimsy charade that his government wants
a negotiated peace. Since July, he has ordered the military onto the
offensive, in breach of the 2002 ceasefire, and seized LTTE-held territory
in Mavilaru and Sampur in the East, and parts of Muhamalai district
on the Jaffna peninsula.
The government has no intention
of returning to the 2002 ceasefire, which would mean giving up areas
seized from the LTTE. As a result, the prospects for any, even limited,
agreement in Geneva were bleak from the outset.
Sunday Times defence correspondent
Iqbal Athas noted last weekend: “[T]here were powerful groups
in Colombo who wanted the security forces to continue offensives until
the military capability of the guerillas was weakened.” Athas
has close ties to the Sri Lankan military and intelligence establishment.
There was no agreement on
an agenda for the two-day talks. Norway’s international development
minister Eric Solheim attempted to pressure both sides, warning that
if talks failed the government would lose aid money and the LTTE would
become even more isolated internationally. But the threats were to no
avail.
Press reports indicated that
the closed-door sessions involved rancorous exchanges. According to
the Daily Mirror, chief LTTE negotiator S.P. Thamilchelvan said the
LTTE was willing to “forget the past” and did not raise
the return of Sampur and other areas. The LTTE’s main demand was
the reopening of the A-9 highway running through LTTE territory to Jaffna,
in order to allow food and other supplies to reach people cut off in
areas of the North.
However, the government delegation
rejected the demand, offering only to ferry goods by sea. Chief negotiator
Nimal Sirapala de Silva provocatively called on the LTTE to “normalise”
the North and East by allowing the functioning of government courts,
police and all political parties in areas under their control. Such
a move would further undermine the LTTE’s military position and
open the door for provocations inside its territory by the government
and military.
The talks eventually broke
down on the issue of the A-9 road. De Silva insisted that the highway
remain closed for “security reasons” and accused the LTTE
of previously extracting extortionate taxes on vehicles passing through
its territory. He turned down an offer by the Norwegian-led Sri Lanka
Monitoring Mission (SLMM) to supervise the route to allow humanitarian
supplies to reach Jaffna.
In its press statement, the
LTTE insisted the A-9 had to be re-opened before any new round of talks.
“The closure of the A-9 highway has resulted in open prison for
more than 600,000 people in the Jaffna peninsula” under army occupation,
it declared, branding the blockade as a new “Berlin Wall”.
In concluding the talks,
Solheim declared: “Both parties reiterated their commitment to
the ceasefire agreement and promised not to launch any military offensives.”
But the government and the military have repeatedly demonstrated their
intention of flouting the truce, seizing LTTE territory under various
“humanitarian” and “defensive” pretexts.
The government’s main
reason for refusing to reopen the A-9 highway is that its closure allows
the army to keep the pressure on the LTTE. The military wants to mount
an offensive to recapture key strategic areas along the road. These
include Elephant Pass, the gateway to the Jaffna peninsula, which the
army lost for the first time in 2000.
The military launched a major
operation on October 11 against LTTE positions at Muhamalai north of
Elephant Pass, but was beaten back. Claims that the attack was “defensive”
were soon shown to be a lie after the LTTE handed back the bodies of
75 soldiers who died inside its territory. In all, around 130 soldiers
were killed and more than 500 wounded in the fierce fighting.
The LTTE responded with a
suicide bomb blast on October 16 that killed at least 116 sailors near
the town of Habarana and an attack on the navy complex in the southern
port of Galle on October 25. Following the breakdown of talks, the LTTE
has warned that the military is preparing for another offensive on the
Jaffna peninsula.
Colombo politics
Rajapakse has been careful
to disguise his government’s aggressive military policies for
two reasons. Firstly, the overwhelming majority of the population does
not want a return to civil war, which has cost tens of thousands of
lives since 1983. Secondly, the president is making sure he retains
the backing of the major international powers to press the LTTE to the
negotiating table on his terms.
Rajapakse narrowly won the
presidency last November with the backing of two Sinhala extremist parties—the
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU). His
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) held protracted talks with JVP leaders
to establish a formal coalition, but negotiations broke down after the
JVP insisted that the government had to abrogate the 2002 ceasefire
and dispense with the services of Norway as formal facilitator of the
international “peace process”.
Last week the SLFP signed
an agreement with the opposition United National Party (UNP), establishing
a grand coalition of the longtime rivals for the first time. In office
in 2002, the UNP signed the ceasefire with the LTTE and attempted to
negotiate a power-sharing deal to end the war, but talks were constantly
destabilised by the SLFP, the JVP and the military. The SLFP-UNP coalition
is being packaged as a “consensus” to end the war, but the
agreement gives full rein to the military to continue its operations.
Both parties are acutely
sensitive to the JVP’s accusations that they are betraying the
country. During the Geneva talks, the JVP organised an extensive “meet
the people” program to denounce any negotiations. The party condemned
the SLFP-UNP coalition as “paving way for the negotiating table
which is advantageous to the Tiger terrorists and dilutes the limited
war moves to defeat Tiger terrorism”. The JVP is demanding nothing
less than a full-scale offensive to destroy the LTTE.
The collapse of the Geneva
talks has again exposed the LTTE’s political perspective, which
aims at getting the backing of the major powers for a power-sharing
arrangement with Colombo. Its main appeal at Geneva was to the Co-Chairs
and the “international community” to pressure the Sri Lankan
government to abide by the 2002 ceasefire. The Co-Chairs—the US,
the EU, Japan and Norway—preside over the international donors’
group for Sri Lanka and the so-called peace process.
The global powers, however,
are only interested in peace in Sri Lanka as a means of furthering their
own interests in South Asia. The US in particular is intent on pressuring
the LTTE to disarm and accept a minimal political role. US officials
have hinted that Washington may supply military assistance to Colombo.
On the eve of negotiations, the US and Sri Lanka militaries were due
for the first time to hold a joint amphibious exercise, which was only
postponed at the last minute.
The Co-chairs posture as
being even-handed and neutral, but no criticisms have been made of the
Sri Lankan military’s provocative actions and obvious encroachments
into LTTE territory. During a visit to Colombo on October 19-20, US
assistant secretary of state department Richard Boucher bluntly declared
that the US supports the peace talks but, at the same time “stands
with the government and the people of Sri Lanka in resisting terrorism”.
Along with the Rajapakse
government, the US and other major powers bear political responsibility
for the escalating civil war in Sri Lanka.
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights