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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ginseng" data-source="post: 587348" data-attributes="member: 33032">If the armed conflict is unwinnable by each side, and the peace dividend so obvious and substantial, what explains the breakdown of the peace process? This is a puzzle, though hardly an inexplicable one, that applies to many ethno-national conflicts.In Sri Lanka?s case, the Tigers have contributed significantly to the breakdown. In April 2003 they suspended peace talks, on flimsy grounds, with Ranil Wickremasinghe, the relatively moderate prime minister then in office, who had signed the ceasefire agreement with Prabhakaran. The peace process never recovered momentum thereafter. In November 2005, with the process in freefall, the Tigers called on Tamils to abstain from a contest for the country?s powerful presidency between the dovish Wickremasinghe and Mahinda Rajapakse, a hardliner backed by Sinhalese chauvinist groups, on the flawed reasoning that Sinhalese politicians are uniformly inimical to Tamil aspirations. Tamil turnout was low as a result, and this enabled Rajapakse to beat Wickremasinghe by a razor-thin margin. Rajapakse?s ascent to power in Colombo dealt the comatose peace process a mortal blow.After the ceasefire, the Tigers also continued their practices of recruiting child soldiers, and killing anti-LTTE Tamils. Lakshamn Kadirgamar, the Sri Lankan foreign minister (and a Tamil), was assassinated in Colombo in August 2005. From 2006, LTTE teams have been conducting decapitation attacks on the Sri Lankan military hierarchy - the army commander was gravely wounded by a woman suicide-bomber in Colombo in April 2006. The growing evidence of the LTTE?s unreformed nature boosted the anti-peace movement which has steadily gathered strength and momentum among Sinhalese-Buddhists since 2003 (the Tigers cite government provocations, such as the military?s use since 2004 of a renegade LTTE militia led by Colonel Karuna in the east?s Batticaloa district to murder senior LTTE officers and prominent civilian supporters). Norway, the third party in the peace process, lacked the clout to rescue the process from terminal decline.Yet the Tigers? foibles have simply provided additional energy to an anti-peace movement that is deeply ingrained in Sinhalese-Buddhist society, and which is essentially opposed to any political settlement with the Tamils. These elements, especially the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (People?s Liberation Front / JVP), an extreme majoritarian-nationalist group, were in 2005 responsible for sabotaging the joint government-LTTE mechanism for post-tsunami reconstruction advocated by the United States and India.From Sri Lanka to Cyprus and until recently, Northern Ireland, ethno-national majorities harbour powerful forces wedded to ideas of hegemonic dominance. Peace in Sri Lanka is contingent on the defeat of such supremacist delusions, and the reconstruction of the island as a federal state which institutionalises self-rule for a Tamil-majority northeast, combined with a measure of shared rule at the centre in Colombo for representatives of all of the island?s communities and a measure of shared rule within the autonomous northeast for its Tamil majority and Muslim and Sinhalese minorities. The extent of self-rule would have to be a compromise between the Tigers? preference for a loose confederation, on the lines of what the Dayton agreement engineered for Bosnia and the Annan plan prescribed for Cyprus, and the moderate devolution favored by Sinhalese doves, whose model is unitary but decentralised states like the United Kingdom and Spain.Such a solution is contingent on the LTTE?s involvement and cooperation. The Tigers are arguably no more ideologically dogmatic than the Provisional IRA had historically been. The Tigers? influence among their people - partly coerced, but much of it genuinely popular - is comparable to that of the Palestine Liberation Organisation among Palestinians at its zenith in the 1970s. In Sri Lanka?s last parliamentary election, in April 2004, Tiger-backed candidates swept the Tamil electorates in the north and east. On the Jaffna peninsula, almost entirely under the government?s military control, candidates endorsed by the Tigers won 90% of the popular vote. In the multi-ethnic east-coast district of Trincomalee, where most Tamil voters also live in government-controlled areas, LTTE-backed candidates polled 69,087 votes, while a rival Tamil group sponsored by the government and military got 560 votes.In early July 2007, the Tigers will observe 'Black Tigers? Day' - the twentieth annual commemoration of the first attack by the LTTE?s suicide-warfare specialists, the Black Tigers, on 5 July 1987. At the last Black Tiger commemoration in July 2006, Black Tiger martyrs stood at 273 - 199 men and seventy-four women. Unfortunately, that number, and those of their victims, looks likely to rise in the foreseeable future. From: <a href="http://www.agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=6241" target="_blank">http://www.agoravox.com/article.php3?id_article=6241</a></blockquote>

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