EDITORIAL

Prepare For The 'Tiger Economy'

It will soon be a year since Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, which over the past two decades has claimed more than 64,000 lives, claimed yet another victim. For many of the younger generation, this has been the first year of peace in their memory. The first year without roadblocks and checkpoints; the first without gory pictures of charred bodies on the evening news; the first in which the word 'debacle' has ejected itself from the lexicon; and the first in which every time the phones are jammed or a loud report is heard, it is not attributed immediately to yet another bomb. For many of us, life has returned to normal.

But there is no dancing in the streets. Banish the thought. That is not the way the public mind works. The days when heroes were lionised are past. That is how come, having won World War II, Winston Churchill was flung ignominiously out of office. The dust had barely settled on Europe before the old warrior was handed his hat and shown the door. No Nelson or Wellington he. Memories are short, and the public is never satisfied with what they've got.

That is perhaps why, in his search for peace, Ranil Wickremesinghe is in no great hurry. For the first time in this conflict, a politician is deliberately allowing himself to be led by events rather than seeking to lead them. The risk involved in clearing the roadblocks and dismantling the checkpoints was grave indeed; the removal of restrictions of travel between the north and south was well nigh reckless. After all, but for the brief ceasefires from February to June 1990 (five months) and January to April 1995 (four months), we have been at war for almost 20 years. The current ceasefire, now seven months old, is something of a record.

While Ranil Wickremesinghe's dismantling of the apparatus of war and suspicion were gambles, they were gambles that have paid off. It gave each side an opportunity to see that the other was not as inherently evil and monstrous as they earlier thought. For let's face it, barbarism is not something endemic to the LTTE: the Sinhalese have been every bit as brutal, as anyone who was around in 1983 knows only too well. Just as almost no Sinhalese were prosecuted for the crimes of that outbreak of race hate, the Tiger cadres who committed the most heinous crimes in this war too, will walk away unpunished.

Tough luck. There are times when a quest for justice is simply not the most pragmatic course to follow. That opinion however, will not be shared by the JVP, who want blood. Mind you, they do not want justice for the murders, thefts and kidnappings they committed in the 1980s: but it is their view that murders, thefts and kidnappings committed by Tamils are just that much worse than excesses of the same kind committed by Sinhalese.

In incredibly poor taste, President Kumaratunga chose not to wish the talks well or offer encouragement to either side, but to belittle them altogether. Barely 24 hours prior to the first meeting at Sattahip last Monday, she alleged publicly that the talks were about nothing more than "holding carnivals in the north." Playing to the extreme right-wing Sihala Urumaya lobby that is increasingly her only audience these days, Kumaratunga demanded that the LTTE openly renounce Eelam and promise to lay down arms. The president's remarks went almost unnoticed however, as the world focused its attention on the events unfolding at Sattahip.

The unstated fact is however, that there is very little in the talks that were, by any yardstick, substantive. Most of the legwork had been done behind the scenes well in advance by G.L. Peiris and Milinda Moragoda. Given their self-effacing style, both ministers are well fitted to diplomacy. Neither claims credit for himself, and both are content to let credit pass on to others. For all intents and purposes, Sattahip has been little more than a photo opportunity, but it nevertheless paved the way for a very significant statement by Anton Balasingham.

Taking time off from his otherwise upbeat opening speech, Balasingham was not above taking a swipe at Kumaratunga. "There are powerful forces in southern Sri Lanka who are irrationally opposed to peace and ethnic reconciliation," he said. "The intransigence of the previous government could only be attributed to its incredible military theory that war begets peace and political solutions can only be realised by military means. By practising such an absurd notion the last government of Sri Lanka plunged the entire country into the abyss of social and economic disaster."

Balasingham was not above levity, the first time in 20 years that a spontaneous smile has lit the faces of an audience he has addressed. Turning a pun on the so-called tiger economies of Southeast Asia, he said that Wickremesinghe has pledged, "to transform the island into a successful Tiger economy." Significantly, the "T" was capitalised in the official handout of the speech given to the media by the LTTE. Even as that would have made the hairs on Kumaratunga's head stand on end as quills upon the fretful porpentine, Balasingham assuaged Sinhala suspicions by making it clear that the demand for a homeland should not be equated to a demand for eelam. He also went out of his way to emphasise that the north-east was the homeland of the Tamils and the Muslims.

None of this could have been music to Kumaratunga's ears. In desperate straits, with her party breaking up before her very eyes, the president is preparing a last ditch stand to dissolve the executive presidency and return to parliament, from where she hopes to lead her troops to victory. Wickremesinghe however, is equally opposed to dismantling the executive presidency, and is happy to have Kumaratunga squirming at the top of the constitutional pinnacle, emasculated and impotent. The quandary that faces the president is that she holds office only for another three years, when she must fade gracefully into the sunset, still barely 60. For her part, she'd much rather head the government from parliament into her dotage, just as her mother did. The reforms she seeks may well come in the form of a referendum under Section 86 of the constitution, which gives her the right to "submit to the people at a referendum any matter which, in the opinion of the president, is of national importance."

The battle lines were drawn last Wednesday however, when the government formally tabled the 19th Amendment to the constitution in parliament. With a vote due in October, and with every likelihood of the PA being further fractured in consequence, Kumaratunga must want to kick her confidante, Mangala Samaraweera, for leaking the infamous 'coup' memorandum which precipitated this crisis. Be that as it may, she too, is no doubt bracing herself for the Tiger economy that is to come.