Why are the Tigers refusing restart peace talks with the Government of Sri Lanka (GOSL) on any basis other than their Interim Self Governing Authority proposal?
With each passing day, the opposition to the ISGA is gathering such irreversible momentum in the south that nobody in the Sinhala polity wants to touch it now. (I guess the UNP is just teasing the President by urging her to start talks on basis of the ISGA)
So why do the Tigers want the talks to resume only on the basis of the ISGA proposal?
First let me say that the LTTE's insistence on the ISGA is a reaction to criticism that has traditionally been levelled against Tamil leaders who have negotiated with the GOSL for a political settlement to the ethnic conflict.
There is a strong body of political opinion in the northeast that talks on a final solution have always been a ruse employed successfully by every government in Colombo since 1956 to take the wind from the sails of the Tamil struggle.
According to this body of opinion, the GOSL would always come up with proposals calculated to buy enough time until the next election in order to keep its political opponents at bay and to prevent Tamils from agitating for their rights, foreclosing other options for taking forward their struggle.
Let me summarise the gist of this criticism in the words of a man who was once called the 'brains' of the Federal Party, V. Navaratnam.
"So, from time to time in the course of the struggle Tamil leaderships are likely to be subjected to tremendous pressure from friends and foes alike, both domestic and international, to sit down to talks and settle by negotiation. It is hard to imagine what there remains to talk or negotiate about. Have not the Tamils talked enough about every imaginable solution?
Have they not agreed to every possible formula for co-existence which accommodated the Sinhalese concern for the political unity of the island country?" (The Fall and Rise of the Tamil Nation p. 338)
If the Tigers start talks on the basis of a proposal by the GOSL their political bargaining power would be compromised, critics say.
Towards the tail end of the six rounds of talks between the LTTE and the UNF government critics in the northeast began to point out that the Tigers had compromised the political legacy of the Tamil struggle by aimlessly drifting along with the agenda set by the GOSL and foreign third parties.
Tigers could not ignore criticism in the Tamil press that the LTTE's position at the talks should have firmly been based on the Vaddukkoddai Resolution of 1976, the mandate for a separate state at the 1977general elections and the Thimpu Principles of 1985.
The critics argued that the LTTE delegation should have clearly and unequivocally stated at each round of the peace talks that the parameters of their negotiations policy were based on this legacy.
Their argument may be paraphrased thus: "The political landmarks of a people's struggle against a state also constitute their bargaining power; the main objective of states that wage wars to suppress ethnic or class struggles is to make the insurgent movements give up their original political goals; when states fail to do so through war they strive to roll back through negotiations the political gains made by insurgent movements; by unconditionally agreeing to the concept of internal self determination and by not prefacing their discussions with the political landmarks of the Tamil movement the Tigers compromised the hard fought political gains and historical legacy of the struggle".
Attention was drawn to the fact that Israelis had scored a political coup by inveigling Arafat and his advisors into giving up the fundamental tenet of the 'Palestinian Charter' (the equivalent of the Thimpu Principles) - Israel's right to exist as a state on the Palestinian homeland. Similarly the British succeeded in obfuscating the fundamental demand of the Irish Republican Army during the last round of negotiations following the Good Friday Agreement - that British military occupation of Northern Ireland should end.
The critics of the LTTE emphasised how talks between IRA/Sin Fein and UK saw a host of issues such as workers and women's rights, which in the final analysis could be reduced to inequalities promoted by the presence of British military garrisons in Northern Ireland, coming to the fore at the expense of the fundamental problem, the root cause of the conflict.
The critics argued that the LTTE delegation had allowed the Sri Lankan government and its international backers a free hand to similarly obfuscate the core cause of the conflict that had brought the two parties to the negotiating table in the first place. Tamils consider the Vaddukoddai Resolution, the 77 mandate and the Thimpu Principles the political manifestation of the core cause of the ethnic conflict. Therefore the LTTE delegation should have resolutely opposed all attempts by the GOSL and its foreign backers to obfuscate or detract from the core cause of the conflict, according to the critics.
The bargaining power of the Tamils was predicated not only on the LTTE's military power but also on the accumulated political legacy of the struggle defined by Vadukkoddai, 77 and Thimpu, they averred.
Apparently Pirapaharan himself had similar concerns about the manner in which from Sattahip to Oslo, the GOSL and its international supporters were tying to roll back the political legacy of the Tamil cause, debilitating thereby the bargaining power of the Tamils.
Hence he personally intervened to make a radical course correction. The ISGA was the result. The proposal's preamble embodies the gist of the course correction made by Pirapaharan.
The LTTE's position appears to be that any future negotiations could be fruitful only if the GOSL and the Sinhala polity agree on the core cause of the conflict of which the Tamil political legacy as formulated in the ISGA's preamble is considered the fundamental expression.
The Tigers feel that if they were to accept any proposal by the GOSL as a basis for resuming talks it would again trap them in another round of attempts by Colombo and its foreign backers to obfuscate the root cause of the conflict, weakening LTTE's political leverage before it can obtain anything concrete as interim relief through the negotiations.
The Tigers, the Tamil National Alliance and many Tamil opinion makers also say that talks on a final settlement is an old ruse to drag the talks on and on indefinitely until kingdom come.
They argue that if they commit themselves in principle to discuss any proposal (or counter proposal) by the United People's Freedom Front government then they would fall into the same old trap - talking shop for years about constitutional convolutions sans the slightest clue as to how the constitution can be radically restructured to accommodate even the bare minimum of Tamil aspirations. They also say that attempts to make them commit on restarting talks on the basis of a parallel GOSL proposal is an insidious ploy to roll back the Tamil political legacy, ultimately damning it to oblivion in an assimilative niche of the unitary state.
The words of an academic who was involved in the discussions that led to the ISGA sum it up.
"Why should our political legacy, achieved at so great a cost, be compromised before we even know whether a southern consensus to change the constitution is ever going to be possible?"
But no leader in the south has time to ponder this deadlock because the Presidential race is approaching fast.
