On the waterfront

Since President Chandrika Kumaratunga is emphatically not the Jayaram Jayalalithaa of Sri Lanka, there must be some rational explanation, be...

Since President Chandrika Kumaratunga is emphatically not the Jayaram Jayalalithaa of Sri Lanka, there must be some rational explanation, beyond personal pique and delusions of grandeur, to explain the near-emergency she suddenly declared last week. Perhaps the reasons are to be found in the dire warning sounded by her presidential adviser for foreign affairs, the ever-brilliant Lakshman Kadirgamar, in the Sri Lankan Parliament almost a month before she made the most dramatic constitutional move the subcontinent has seen since Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency on June 25, 1975. Kumaratunga8217;s apparently 8220;sudden8221; decision to use her wide-ranging constitutional powers whose constitutional propriety has been confirmed by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court appears to be the outcome of her growing apprehension that her prime minister who belongs to a rival party under the constitution8217;s co-habitation arrangement was mistaking appeasement for the peace process.

In his landmark speech in the Sri Lankan Parliament on October 8, 2003, Kadirgamar had cautioned against any complacency on the security front merely to keep the peace negotiations with the LTTE going. Even as the LTTE had taken advantage of the ceasefire agreement to consolidate itself militarily, the Sri Lankan government, he said, must 8220;be equally diligent in seeing to it that the security of a sovereign state is maintained while these negotiations are going on8221;. Quoting extensively from a US Pacific Command USPAC assessment of a year earlier, which has long been 8220;in the public domain8221;, he underlined the vulnerability of the southern rim of the Trincomalee harbour area to LTTE artillery bombardment: 81 mm mortar which, with a range of 5 km, could hit the harbour from nearby Sampur; 105 mm multi-barrel rocket launchers, which could hit the Trincomalee Dockyard at a range of 7-9 km; and heavier 122 mm artillery which could hit with accuracy from as far away as 15 km 8212; all of which, he said, citing Sri Lankan army commanders, had in the immediate past been brought by the LTTE within range of Trincomalee.

If Trincomalee harbour were 8220;levelled8221;, he continued, referring to the USPAC report, the three divisions of the Sri Lankan army holding the Jaffna peninsula would be left without any source of re-supply. For, said USPAC, the Sri Lankan navy 8220;does not have the lift resources to complete the re-supply effort8221; nor 8220;sufficient control of the sea space to ensure military lift8221; nor 8220;contract re-supply ships which would safely reach the peninsula8221;. As 8220;the only viable means of re-supplying the Jaffna peninsula from sea is from Trincomalee8221;, any failure to keep the LTTE at bay at least 15 km south of the harbour was fraught with the gravest danger to any Sri Lankan garrison anywhere in the Tamil-majority North or East of the island. Kadirgamar warned that by failing to recognise and rectify the security threat over the entire year that had passed since the USPAC assessment reached its hands, the Sri Lankan government had displayed complacency of a dangerous order, reflecting its mindset that nothing should be done to upset the LTTE in case this upsets the apple-cart of the 8220;peace process8221;.

Replying to the debate, Tilak Marpana, the hapless defence minister whom the president summarily dismissed last week, denied any complacency on the government8217;s part and asserted there was nothing new about the LTTE domination of the southern side of the Trincomalee harbour, which long predated his government coming to office. He refrained, however, from commenting on Kadirgamar8217;s intelligence about LTTE artillery positionings or the USPAC assessment.

While, to the best of my knowledge, Kumaratunga has not linked her dramatic November 4 actions to her foreign affairs adviser8217;s speech in Parliament, it is impossible to not see the connection between the two, especially in the perspective of the LTTE8217;s counter-proposals of November 1 which nowhere concede the unity, integrity or sovereignty of Sri Lanka but recommend a self-governing interim authority under the sole control of the LTTE which could secede at any time. The Sri Lankan president has long been apprehensive of her prime minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe, playing Chamberlain to the Hitlerite LTTE, a charge hotly contested by him. Her precipitate move now appears to be something of a shot across the bows of her government8217;s ship of state to warn against any craven reaction to the LTTE8217;s unacceptable counter-proposals merely to forestall an LTTE-declared breakdown of the peace process.

It did make tactical sense for the president to take such drastic action when her prime minister was out of the country. But it is no happenstance that she did so when her PM was in Washington, DC. For she perceives the danger of the peace process slipping out of the benevolent neutrality of the Norwegian facilitators and into the hands of the Americans who have long been eyeing Trincomalee8217;s deep, deep harbour as South Asia8217;s Sula Bay. Bush and his spokesmen have expressed their dismay at this blunt display of lese majeste, but Kadirgamar reminded the House in his October 8 speech of the formal understanding between India and Sri Lanka, dating back to Rajiv Gandhi8217;s letter of July 1987 to then Sri Lankan president, J. Jayawardene, that 8220;the work of restoring and operating the Trincomalee Oil Tank Farm will be undertaken as a joint venture between India and Sri Lanka8221;. Referring to a remark made earlier in the debate by a member of the Tamil United Liberation Front that his party wished to 8220;keep the Americans out8221;, Kadirgamar exclaimed, 8220;Excellent!8221; 8212; but added that if non-regional powers were to be kept out of the Sri Lankan imbroglio, it would have to be under the India-Sri Lanka agreement of 1987.

The Sri Lankan president8217;s move is thus also a wake-up call to India to stop ducking its responsibilities to Sri Lanka, as India has been attempting to do ever since the IPKF pull-out more than a decade ago. She knows that is the only way her beloved island can be protected from the tender ministrations of George W. Bush.

Do we?