EDITORIAL

A Return To War?

Last week’s joint press conference by the SLFP and JVP would have served to send cold shivers down a lot of spines, and not just UNP spines at that. Cementing a fast-growing relationship, the nation’s first brother, the ebullient Anura Bandaranaike, sat cheek by jowl with the diminutive but dashing JVP leader Wimal Weerawansa and proclaimed to the nation that they want to tear up the peace process and return the country to war. No prizes then, for guessing which party down-and-out arms traders, who have been languishing in the doldrums for the past year, will choose to finance at the next election.

The JVP-SLFP declaration is based on the gamble that the JVP’s anti-peace propaganda campaign has won enough support to make a major dent in the UNF. If attendance at JVP rallies is a yardstick, then the party’s polls ratings are at least as high, if not higher, than they were in December 2001. And that is the piggy on to whose back Anura Bandaranaike yearns to climb.

The SLFP’s strategy is now clear. Risking all, the President has decided that she will run with the peace hare while her brother hunts with the war hounds. Chandrika Kumaratunga is no angel of peace. While articulating the rhetoric of engagement and dialogue with the LTTE, she has done everything in her power to destabilise the peace process. For his part, Anura Bandaranaike has followed his father’s footsteps, putting himself forward as the guardian of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist sentiment.

If there was indeed a father of the ethnic strife that has engulfed Sri Lanka for the past half-century, then that father is S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. Seeking to win cheap votes from what he perceived to be the nationalist majority, Bandaranaike Senior precipitated the riots of 1958, following his ‘Sinhala only’ initiative. The rift created between the Sinhalese and the Tamils back then is yet to heal. Now, his son has indicated that he will follow in those misguided footsteps, urging that Tamil nationalism be eliminated through war.

To say that Anura Bandaranaike has often been wrong in the past would be to tell a lie: he has always been wrong. Despite having been in politics since 1965 and in parliament since 1977, he has found himself on the wrong side of every government every time. The only occasions on which he has held office have been through the patronage of the UNP. He was made minister of higher education — ever so briefly — by D.B. Wijetunga in 1994. Then, having wept and threatened to take to the bottle once more if not given the job, he was made speaker, again ever so briefly, in 2000. At 54, Bandaranaike brings a lifetime of failure with him to enrich the SLFP-JVP nexus.

It was Interior Minister John Amaratunga who presented to ministers a report just last week which stated that five of the JVP’s 16 members of parliament, including Wimal Weerawansa, are former members of that organisation’s military wing. It was the JVP’s military wing that was responsible for thousands of bloody, gruesome and sadistic murders; countless armed robberies; and hundreds of acts of arson throughout the country between 1987 and 1992. It was the JVP that brought the entire country to a halt with wildcat ‘strikes’ and ‘curfews,’ the penalty for non-conformity being death. It was the JVP that slaughtered in cold blood right before her very eyes, Vijaya Kumaratunga, the father of Vimukthi and Yasodara, the President’s children. Snuffing out the economy, the rebels sought to precipitate chaos, take over the country and establish a Marxist dictatorship. That’s who the JVP are: reds, now no longer under their beds.

That was just a decade ago. Having twice been put down by force of arms, the JVP has now elected to take advantage of the freedom democracy offers, to engender chaos. Setting its face steadfastly against the peace process, the party’s leadership knows very well it cannot win popular support. No one wants the clock put back, the economy set on war, and a steady stream of body-bags being wheeled in from the warfront. That is why the JVP so desperately needs the SLFP.

Given the UNF’s shaky parliamentary majority and its non-too-successful attempts to establish an efficient government, both the PA and the JVP recognise the fact that the government is vulnerable, its only trump card being the peace process. That very vulnerability is the main disincentive for the LTTE to demilitarise itself and enter into a meaningful dialogue that will culminate in a universally acceptable settlement. After all, if the Tigers do disarm and democratise, a future SLFP-JVP government could wipe them out militarily in days. So long as they retain their militarism, the SLFP-JVP coalition will continue to agitate against just this. Catch 22, and the victims are not just Ranil Wickremesinghe and his UNF, but all Sri Lanka.

To be fair, Wickremesinghe had this coming, and The Sunday Leader was among the first to warn him of this in its pages. While it was clear to the whole of Sri Lanka that Kumaratunga was out to scuttle the peace process from the very outset, it took the Prime Minister a full year to absorb this unhappy fact. An year in which the President consolidated her role as saboteur, with Wickremesinghe deftly doling out the cohabitation rope with which she could one day hang him, and with him, the peace process. Plans to impeach Kumaratunga — against whom heaven knows there is a good enough case — were abandoned at the Premier’s insistence. A well-argued case to impeach Sarath Silva, her nominee as Chief Justice, was abandoned. The television channels and media were opened to the President to use as she willed, with the government languishing in a virtual media blackout, unable and incapable of getting its message out.

The quandary that Sri Lanka finds itself today, with the peace process in jeopardy, the economy far from optimistic and the cost of living steadily squeezing the life out of the populace, is as much the UNF’s doing as the PA’s. UNF ministers have, by and large, been barely better than their former PA counterparts. Corruption, inefficiency and waste are rife, and the government looks the other way.

As we have pointed out time and time again, a government is responsible not just for governance but for the delivery of leadership, both moral and political. There is a notable vacuum of both in the UNF. It is important that the government, and most importantly the Prime Minister, stand up against what is wrong, untruthful and unjust. Their laissez faire attitude to governance must change, or it will be the government that does.