The war swung decisively against the LTTE following the election of Sri Lanka’s prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, to the office of President of Sri Lanka in November 2005.
Rajapaksa campaigned as an aggressive nationalist and a warmonger, and this is what he delivered. But the great irony is that he only won because the Tamils in the northern part of the country did not take part in the vote.
Had they done so, the previous Prime Minster, Ranil Wickremasinghe of the UNP, would have won. As prime minister, Wickremasinghe had negotiated with the LTTE. The two sides agreed a ceasefire, and the LTTE had dropped its claim to full independence, although many distrusted them.
But Wickremasinghe’s government was sacked by the President, Chandrika Kumaratunga of the SLFP, to prevent him making a deal. Kumaratunga also made deals with extreme right-wing parties to form a new political entity, the United People’s Freedom Alliance. Having sacked Wickremasinghe, Kumaratunga ordered fresh elections in 2004 and her new grouping won, with Rajapaksa becoming prime minister.
The condition of endorsement for his candidacy by the extreme right-wing parties was that he would insist on a unitary, centralised state – not the federal structure proposed by Wickremasinghe.
Then came the all-important 2005 presidential election, which was contested between Wickremasinghe and Rajapaksa. Had Wickremasinghe won, there would have been a chance for the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE to conclude a settlement along federalist lines – although the intransigence of the Tigers could still have proved a significant barrier.
But in the event, the northern Tamils boycotted the election, and Rajapaksa won by a whisker.
Why did the northern Tamils boycott the vote? Bizarrely, because the LTTE leadership ordered them to.
In the West we talk about “turkeys voting for Christmas;” the Tigers abstained for extinction. It was a stupid decision – and a baffling one.
Perhaps Prabhakaran thought that allowing the Tamils to take part in the Sri Lankan election would legitimise the concept of a unitary State. Perhaps he thought that even if Wickremasinghe were to win the elections, the peace negotiations have a poor prognosis. Perhaps he thought the LTTE could win militarily. Perhaps he was just too used to war to know anything else.
Probably it was a combination of all these things – but whatever his thinking was, it was a disastrous miscalculation.
Disastrous because the outside world had changed.
The West had lost moral authority through its bloodthirsty military adventures, particularly in Iraq, and its slavish support for an increasingly vicious Israel.
At the same time, global economic growth and political realignments meant that new powers, like China and Iran, were looking for clients. They sought out dirty regimes the world over who were desperate for money and respect. The Sri Lankan government sat up and begged. A new “dirty consensus” took shape, based on the proposition that states can do whatever they please to their own people, and Sri Lanka signed on with pride.
Pakistan also saw a chance to extend its regional influence, and to needle India.
But in fact, just about everybody wanted the LTTE extirpated. India, the UK and the USA all played their part with monetary support and military “advice”, and ensured too that Western financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank came into line.
With support on such a scale, Sri Lanka was able to build and finance a powerful army, navy, and air force, with modern weapons and outside expertise on how to use them. The army adopted sensible, patient military tactics, concentrating overwhelming force on successive, small tracts of territory to reclaim lands taken by the Tigers in bite-sized chunks.
The defection of many erstwhile Tigers in the East under the rebel leadership of Colonel Karuna, also helped the government’s cause. The dictatorial treatment of the Eastern Tamils by their Northern cousins under Prabhakaran contributed to this disastrous split.
The Sinhalese state even won hands down on propaganda, successfully labelling the Tigers as “terrorists” and positioning the confrontation as part of the global, post 9/11 “War on Terror”.
The LTTE leadership did nothing to counter any of this, and remained trapped by Prabhakaran’s outdated, intransigent mind-set. They led their cadres, and worse still the Tamil cause, into a strategic, military, political, public relations and humanitarian disaster.
Like any bystander, I have much sympathy with the oppressed Tamils, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s sensibilities, especially not those of victims in midst of their suffering. But it is necessary to face up to where things went wrong.
In World War I, we saw lions led by donkeys; in Sri Lanka, it was Tigers led by monkeys.
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