MAHINDA Rajapakse, Sri Lanka's President, has done what no Western leader has so far done. He has inflicted a devastating, presumably final, defeat on a terrorist organisation. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been militarily crushed and its leadership killed.
The Tamil Tigers' quarter century of rebellion and terrorism is at an end.
What did it achieve?
The Tigers will be remembered for their savagery and their cruelty. They pioneered suicide bombing. They pioneered child soldiers. They used human shields. They used children as suicide terrorists. They murdered not only their opponents in the Sri Lankan Government or security forces, they also murdered alternative Tamil leaders, especially moderates who rejected their terrorist methods.
And like many extremist cults under the leadership of a charismatic dictator, in their case Velupillai Prabhakaran, who died in the Tigers' jungle fastness earlier this week, the Tigers killed each other.
The Sri Lankan Government has achieved its victory at terrible cost.
Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith has pursued human rights concerns with the Sri Lankan Government over thetelephone to his counterpart in Colombo,Rohitha Bogollagama, and in public comments.
The quarter-century-long civil war cost 70,000 lives or more. Information on the events of the past few weeks is still murky, but perhaps 6000 or more civilians have died in the fighting since the beginning of this year. Yet against the Tamil Tigers it seems there was only ever going to be a military solution. At one point the Tigers controlled more than one-quarter of Sri Lanka's territory and ran their own army, navy and air force, their own courts and their own mini-state. But in peace agreements of the past the Tigers never gave up their terrorist struggle and they never accepted the results of elections they didn't win.
The cost of this civil war has been horrendous and much of that cost has been borne by the overwhelmingly innocent Tamil community. This is doubly tragic because Sri Lanka could be, should be, perhaps now will be, a naturally successful country.
The question for Rajapakse is, having won the war, can he win the peace?
He started well with a speech on Tuesday in which he not only hailed the victory of his soldiers, but spoke of the need for reconciliation and for a political path forward that included the country's Tamil minority. He delivered part of the speech in the Tamil language, an important gesture.
However, he has urgent humanitarian, economic and political problems to address. For a start, the past six months' fighting has left somewhere between 250,000 and 300,000 people internally displaced.
Says Smith: "There are two key aspects, the protection of civilians in the conflict zone, and also those who have moved to displaced people's camps, but second, there has to be political reform, political reconciliation, political rapprochement."
Smith further points out: "Sri Lanka's longstanding international reputation is now very much at stake." The Foreign Minister prssed these points in a long telephone conversation with his Sri Lankan counterpart on Wednesday.
Close observers of Sri Lanka see two conflicting dynamics. The Sri Lankan Government will want to screen the people in camps and others who for years have been living under Tamil Tiger rule to see if there are any Tiger office-holders or bona fide terrorists among them. This could take some time; some Sri Lankans talk of it taking up to two years. Smith and others have pointed out this is just too long.
On the other hand, if the Sri Lankan Government is to turn its military victory into long-term political stability, it has to work hard to reintegrate Tamils into Sri Lanka's normal life and to do so quickly.
The Tigers have controlled territory in the north and east of Sri Lanka since the early 1980s. While they undoubtedly had a measure of popular support, there is no evidence at all that anything like a majority of Tamils supported them. Like most such movements they were ferocious in their treatment of dissenters within their own ranks. However, successfully integrating that part of the Tamil population that the Tigers controlled for so long requires a great deal of sophistication, as well as some generosity and clear goodwill. Whether Rajapakse's Government can do it is an open question.
Pramit Chaudhry, senior editor at the Hindustan Times in New Delhi and one of South Asia's shrewdest strategic analysts, believes Rajapakse needs to act quickly on the political front. "Rajapakse now needs to go over the heads of the right wing of his party and give some devolution, some regional autonomy, to the Tamils," Pramit told me. "The Right of his party will say they don't deserve it. But he probably needs to hold some elections among the Tamils to have someone with authority to talk to."
The most immediate task, however, is to avoid humanitarian disaster among the internally displaced. Rajapakse has declared his country doesn't need advice from the international community, but it does need material assistance.
While some international donors have gone slow on aid in protest against Sri Lanka's human rights practices, surely now is the time for maximum generosity to make sure the people in the camps are fed, housed and clothed.
The Sri Lankan Government should surely see the precedents from all over the world, that distressed populations held for long periods in camps are breeding grounds for discontent and, ultimately, potentially violent reaction.
Canberra has given $23million in emergency humanitarian aid since December. The case for the international community to do more is overwhelming.
For whatever the difficulties about how Sri Lanka got to where it is, this is a moment of stupendous historical opportunity for the country. Of all the regions of the world, South Asia is one of the least commercially integrated. Indian strategic analysts talk of the "ring of fire" that surrounds them, just as Australian strategic analysts sometimes lament the "arc of instability" to our north.
India's ring of fire consists of a disintegrating Pakistan to its west, a strife-torn Nepal to its north, a troubled Bangladesh to its east and Sri Lanka to its southeast. The best thing that all the small, troubled economies of South Asia could do is hitch themselves to the Indian growth juggernaut. A recent Asian Development Bank report concluded that the greatest obstacle to South Asian economic integration was not internal tariff barriers among these nations but poor infrastructure. In some cases (as between Pakistan and India) political hostility also inhibits trade.
India is working hard to repair that infrastructure with all of its neighbours except Pakistan. With Sri Lanka, India already has a free trade agreement. The feeling is that it has been reasonably successful but could deliver a lot more. Close observers believe India will be in a mood to try to help the Sri Lankan Government if it can. New Delhi wants to stabilise the states on its borders. It will also want to limit growing Pakistani and Chinese influence in Colombo. Islamabad and Beijing sold the weapons to Sri Lanka that accompanied the huge growth of its defence forces to well more than 200,000 (about 1 per cent of the population) and the defence budget to about 5 per cent of gross domestic product.
The Tamil Tigers irrevocably forfeited Indian sympathy when they assassinated India's former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bombing in 1991. Colombo can find critical help in New Delhi.
Gandhi's assassination was one of numerous incalculable strategic blunders made by Prabhakaran. The Tigers were men of war and violence. There is no evidence they could have transformed into a movement of peace and democracy. Another of Prabhakaran's blunders was to urge, and as far as possible enforce, a Tamil boycott of the presidential elections in 2005. Rajapakse won office only narrowly. Prabhakaran in effect ensured his victory by the boycott. Yet Rajapakse proved a far more ruthless and effective opponent of the Tigers than any Sri Lankan president before him.
For all that, there is no doubt the Tamil community, which makes up about 18 per cent of Sri Lanka's population of a little more than 20 million, historically has suffered a good deal of discrimination and injustice. Its experience somewhat resembles that of the Chinese in Malaysia.
At the time of Sri Lankan independence in 1948, the Tamils were essentially two communities, an urban professional and merchant class, and a rural, labouring community. The former had done well and the new Sinhalese majority took several steps of what may be called positive discrimination for the Sinhalese, steps that ended up hurting the Tamils, especially those at the bottom of the social ladder.
Experts differ on whether the best way forward is some regional autonomy, as already exists in an eastern province of Sri Lanka governed locally by a breakaway party from the Tamil Tigers, or simply a better deal for Tamils in areas such as language policy and university entrance. One thing is for sure. The defeat of the Tigers offers the chance to end one of the worst civil and terrorist conflicts of the past 30 years and to build something better. It is in everyone's interests for this opportunity to be grasped. Australia should do what it can to help.
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