Tigers seek a blast back into talks

The week began with a major blast carried out at Anuradhapura, in the typical LTTE way with the use of a suicide killer targeting UNP’s Janaka Perera, the Opposition Leader of the North Central Provincial Council, and who had made the record of his military operations against the LTTE at Weli Oya and Jaffna the focus of his election campaign in the recent provincial elections in the NCP.

As the news of the blast that killed 27 and injured more than 80, killing the wife of Janaka Perera, as well as both Dr. Johnpulle, the UNP Organiser for Anuradhapura and his wife too, and several UNP Provincial Councillors, foreign news services seeking comments about the attack had very soon been fed with suspicion that this may not be an act of LTTE brutality. When told of the defence view that it was yet another LTTE act of terror, the major news channel queries that view stating they had been told that the LTTE was in the practice of targeting the Government; therefore why should it target an Opposition Leader and an important Opposition event.

It was necessary to explain to them that the LTTE had through most of its suicide killer attacks, in addition to taking down a known human or economic target, had also tried its best to cause a major backlash against the Tamils living in the vast areas outside the LTTE’s armed control in the country, particularly in the Western Province, where the presence of large numbers of Tamils among the Sinhalese and Muslims, could make them easy targets. Having failed in all their attempts in the face of a much wiser people, led by those not inclined to stoke the fires of racism unlike in dark period of 1957 and 58, 1970 and 77 and 1983, by targeting its known enemy Lt. Gen. Janaka Perera (Retd.) and the opening of a new UNP office at Anuradhapura, the LTTE was obviously keen to create not only an ethnic backlash, with the nature and size of the attack; but a politico-ethnic backlash, too. It is to the credit of the Sri Lankan people that this attempt too met with failure, due to the increasing understanding among the people of the strategy and tactics of the LTTE, despite some ugly attempts by the UNP to whip up anti-government feelings over this attack, which could easily have spilt over to racist tension of a dangerous kind.

A bloody rise

Apart from decimating the UNP leadership in Anuradhapura, which will have bigger problems for that party, faced with the many internal rifts and repeated defeats at the polls, the killing of Janaka Perera also raises some important issues about the leadership situation in the UNP. It was the view of many political commentators in the run up to the recent NCP elections that Janaka Perera, had he become Chief Minister of the Province, would have been a major new challenge for the UNP leadership. Although he lost the goal of Chief Minister, his performance in the election, with the large preferential vote he received, did not take him out of the future reckoning for the UNP leadership, very much in the short-term. His elimination by the LTTE in this brutal manner has, therefore, given more breathing space for the UNP leadership, which we can see as a one-man-show despite all the efforts at reform that so many are crowing about so often, after every electoral defeat faced by the party and its leader.

As the UNP was trying hard to place the blame for the Anuradhapura bomb on the Government, it became necessary to recall how much the current leadership of the UNP owes to such violence in the past. Just for the record, with no motives being imputed, but as a statement of sheer circumstance, it was the LTTE’s assassination of President Ranasinghe Premadasa that propelled Wickremesinghe to the position of Prime Minister. Later, it was the LTTE killing of Gamini Dissanayake, the UNP Presidential Candidate in 1994 that paved the way for Wickremesinghe to be the party leader. These are not accusation made at the UNP leader but the mere statement of fact. Also, it was the sudden death, in circumstances that many still consider mysterious, if not suspicious, of Gamini Atukorale, the fast rising Assistant Leader of the UNP, soon after its short-lived electoral success in December 2001, that has assured that Ranil Wickremesinghe remains in his post at the helm of the UNP, weathering many a storm raised by persons who were not as mercurial in their rise at the late Atukorale.

Political fallout

If the week began with that huge blast, it ended with a suicide blast, too, at Broalesgamuwa where the damage was not that large, but yet giving sufficient warning that the LTTE is still capable of carrying out such covert operations in many parts of the country not under its armed control. The Boralesgamuwa blast is believed to have targeted the Agriculture and Mahaweli Minister Maithripala Sirisena, who is also the General Secretary of the SLFP, which would have made him a very important political target. Although the LTTE failed to get its quarry, it did certainly given an important message of the need to be every vigilant of its activities in areas outside the confined of the Vanni and other areas of the North where it is now being challenged with much vigour by the Sri Lankan Security Forces.

The vigilance should not only be for the LTTE operatives, or sleepers, living in the midst of the people, awaiting their orders to carry out their fell deeds. There is also the political mileage the LTTE seeks to gain through these attacks, their frequency, numbers killed and persons successfully targeted. The frequency of such attacks can be used by those who oppose the current military operations against the LTTE, to once again call for a halt to the armed confrontation, raising the need or renewed efforts at a negotiated peace with the LTTE while it still carries arms.

There will be no shortage of supporters for that cause, both locally and internationally, although many such voices have been largely muted these days due to the success the Armed Forces are achieving in the North. It is, therefore, necessary that the political strategists of the Government look into this aspect of LTTE suicide killings. While it is conceded that it is well nigh impossible to prevent a suicide killer from carrying out one’s task, it is necessary to reduce, as far as possible, the opportunities for such violence acts and the success they inevitably achieve, even on a lesser scale as at Boralesgamuwa last Thursday.

It may be necessary to review, both from a defence and security point of view, as well as the political important of certain events where leaders of Government and other prominent citizens who could be targets of the LTTE are required to participate. With the major economic targets now comparatively safe from LTTE attacks, it is bound to look at the softer and less likely targets, especially in locations where one least expects such attacks to be carried out both in terms of geography and apparent economic or political importance.

The Karuna Factor

President Mahinda Rajapaksa went ahead with bringing the TMVP into the UPFA and was courageous enough to offer the position of the first Chief Minister of the Eastern Province to Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan or Pillaiyan, taking into consideration the political realities and refusing to give in to sectarian pressures that would have been detrimental to the overall path of reconciliation with the Tamil people. He has now gone a step further and brought Karuna Amman, then man who led the breakaway group from the LTTE and contributed so much to its weakening, to Parliament, through the process of the nominated MP.

The move has come in for criticism both from the UNP and much more vociferously by the JVP. To Ranil Wickremesinghe and the UNP, Karuna Amman is a person who should be in jail and not in Parliament.

This criticism could be made with much greater conviction about some of those from the UNP who are in the August Assembly today, but for the political manipulations that have prevented them being brought before the law. The UNP leader sees a criminal in Karuna Amman. No doubt the record of Karuna Amman while in the ranks of the LTTE was certainly criminal, but he did turn away from that. The UNP Government that was in power from 1977 till 1994, during which period the LTTE grew into the monster it had become, there was hardly any instance of it or any of its leaders being brought before the law for criminal activity.

If one cannot deal with former terrorists politically, and thereby create the conditions necessary for those still following the path of terror to rethink their situation, how is one to deal with the entire issue of terrorism, and the bringing in of those still in the ranks of terror into democracy? If Karuna Amman is to be considered a criminal today, how much more of a criminal is Velupillai Prabhakaran, with whom Ranil Wickremesinghe signed the “Ceasefire Agreement” in February 2002? Was he not aware of the many crimes that Prabhakaran had committed and directed, including the assassination of the leader of the UNP, President Ranasinghe Premadasa, as well as Gamini Dissanayake, and the former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, too? Did the UNP leader not know that Prabhakaran is clearly wanted by the Indian Courts for his role in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination? If with all that knowledge he found it in order, “for the sake of peace and restoring democracy”, to sign a pact with Prabhakaran, which in its unravelling is seen as a total sell-out to the LTTE, serving the interests of the armed separatists and their western supporters, what is the basis of his opposition to the presence of Karuna in Parliament? Is it that there will be one more voice ready to take on the TNA, those shifty supporters of the UNP, who are dyed in the wool activists of the LTTE, and are mistakenly labelled as proxies of the Tamil Tigers?

It is obvious that the UNP is still suffering from its defeat in the Eastern Province, where the balance of power went to the UPFA, mainly due to the TMVP’s success in Batticaloa and Trincomalee, and see in the TMVP, Karuna and Chandrakanthan a major threat to what was a very safe vote bank for the UNP in the East, which it can not be so certain of retaining in future elections.

JVP Isolation

Trapped in its own political isolation, the JVP is making much of its opposition to the presence of Karuna in Parliament. They are careful to state that what they oppose is not the persona of Karuna, thereby taking part of the wind off the UNP’s charge against his presence, but the fact that he has come to a seat once held by the JVP.

It is not difficult to understand the situation of the JVP, as it keeps on losing seats in Parliament as well support outside in the larger electorate. The fact is that the JVP is caught in the trap of the UPFA Agreement, which once saw as a garland which helped it to get so many MPs elected in April 2004, but is today strangling the party in terms of seats in Parliament. What would have happened to the JVP, had it contested on its own was seen very well in the local Government elections in early 2006, where it was barely able to hold on to just one local body in Tissamaharama, an area that is claimed to be strong.

The JVP has been watching its numbers in Parliament being steadily whittled down as they resign for ill-health, or are compelled to resign by the party, only to be replaced by the SLFP, and also watch in despair as the Wimal Weerawansa faction remains in parliament ready to expose the JVP at every turn.

Having suffered this humiliation in silence for so long, the party has suddenly decided to protest, when Karuna was brought in to the House, to fill the seat that fell vacant when a JVP member resigned from Parliament to contest the elections to the North Central Provincial Council. The JVP seeks to make a virtue of its silence at previous instances of SLFPers filling its vacant seats, on the ground that the SLFP was a constituent party of the UPFA. That is not the best of political logic.

The fact is that the TMVP is now a part of the UPFA, which gives that organisation the right to pick a TMVP member to represent it in Parliament by filling a vacant seat held by the UPFA - albeit through its former JVP partner. Will the JVP have the courage to state openly and in writing to the Commissioner General of Elections and the Speaker, to let them and the country know whether it is anymore a constituent party of the UPFA? If it declares so legally, then it would appear that according to the present law they have the right to be in parliament at all.

What is going on in Parliament with all these cross-overs and the general inaction of political parties, including the JVP against such action, is a depiction of the in-built danger of the Electoral System as worked out by the JR Jayewardene Constitution of 1978, whereby members are elected to Parliament solely on the basis of party, and they hold their seats only at the wish of the party that brought them in. A party is also an alliance that decides to contest as a single group with a common symbol. The JVP has forfeited the rights of UPFA membership when it chose to part company with the Alliance its opposition to the “P-Toms” post-Tsunami relief exercise under Chandrika Kumaratunga.

It now has to suffer in silence, as it has no claims to moral superiority on the matter of selecting MPs to represent the UPFA. What takes any bite off the JVP argument is that the member who resigned his seat to contest the NCP election, did so to contest against the UPFA, which makes the JVP sound hollow when it says that its silence all this while was because the replacement for its members came from within the UPFA. The JVP does not seem to understand that one cannot hunt with the hounds and also run with the hares.