Bauer may come, Bauer may go ...

Editorial The Island

Norwegian Peace Envoy Jon Hannsen Bauer is here again to kick-start the stalled peace talks. He is expected to have talks with the government and the LTTE. Before Mr. Bauer, Mr. Solheim had been shuttling between Oslo and Colombo in an attempt to revive, if not resurrect, the talks but in vain.

It is strange why those who are trying so frantically to revive the peace process haven’t reflected on why their attempts have come a cropper. It is high time they came to terms with the fact that the peace process is no more. It died the day the LTTE walked away from talks a few years ago under the UNF government. The LTTE kept on driving nails into its coffin, the last being the capture of the Mawilaru anicut. What we have today is only a mummified peace process. Nothing is going to bring it back to life.

The cause of its untimely death was the flawed CFA, which turned out to be nothing more than a license for the LTTE to continue its terror project through a low intensity war with the government kept under pressure not to retaliate. Had it stopped short of capturing the Mawilaru sluice gates, the government would have been taking all atrocities lying down. It is at Mawilaru that the Tigers cooked their goose, well and truly.

There is no point in embracing a dead peace process and wasting time to resurrect it. What is called for is a brand new peace process devoid of the flaws which finally led to the collapse of one being mourned for. No peace process is going to last if it has as its foundation a CFA, which is blatantly biased towards one party. For, the inevitable outcome of such an arrangement is the gross abuse of the truce by the party concerned much to the detriment of the peace process.

In trying to make peace through a failed CFA—paradoxically both the government and the LTTE insist that it is in tact and want each other to abide by it!—its architects put the cart before the horse. The measures such as allowing the LTTE to enter the so-called government controlled areas for doing ‘political work’ should have been made conditional to the outfit renouncing violence. Within weeks of the signing of the CFA, they were given unbridled freedom of movement. How on earth could a violent guerrilla movement be expected to start doing politics, all of a sudden? The Tigers, who entered the areas which they had been banished from, behaved just like that proverbial cat which had been made to hold a lamp on a dinning table but couldn’t resist the urge to give chase to a rat. They consolidated their power in those areas not so clandestinely as we had predicted in these columns immediately after the signing of the CFA.

The reopening of the A-9 highway became a goldmine for the LTTE, which lost no time in extorting money from those who used it. It raked in millions of rupees per week by way of illegal taxes. The CFA provided for the road to be used by unarmed troops. Nothing of the sort happened. That vital artery ended up being the LTTE’s monopoly. The LTTE is eager to get it reopened today because it cannot bear the loss of revenue. The government is said to be contemplating an alternative road to the North. We don’t believe it is a sensible idea, given the risks, the cost and the difficulties involved in protecting it.

High profile assassinations, killings, abductions, extortion and other crimes recorded a steep rise as the governments in the post CFA period were wary of countering LTTE violence for fear of antagonising the foreign sponsors of the truce and offending the LTTE, which got emboldened as a result to resort to even suicidal terror. The LTTE also took delivery of several arms shipments behind the façade of a truce, though a few of its arms ships perished at the hands of the Navy and the Air Force.

If the failed CFA continues to be the basis for a future peace effort, too, its failure is a foregone conclusion. The bane of Sri Lanka’s peace processes has been that its architects stubbornly refuse to learn from their mistakes and continue to move in circles along the same old rut.
A prerequisite for the success of a future peace effort is to have a new CFA drafted with no room left for either party to abuse it to further its interests. Without that being done on a priority basis, even if Mr. Bauer were to shuttle between Colombo and Oslo at such a speed that he would, while going out of the airport, meet himself coming in like in a cartoon movie, Sri Lanka would still be without a peace process, let alone a lasting peace.