The agreement on tsunami recovery, crafted with such difficulty by the government and LTTE, needs to be revised to be consistent with the interim determination of the Supreme Court. Much will depend on whether the government's legal team can come up with a satisfactory response to the Supreme Court, which has stalled the full implementation of the agreement.
In the meantime, people on Sri Lanka's Ground Zero, where the tsunami struck, will have to remain patient in their sufferings while the country edges towards a breakdown of the ceasefire. It also remains to be seen whether or not the LTTE will engage in self-fulfilling prophecies that bring the worst nightmare of the people of the north east into reality. One of the self-defeating features of the LTTE's constant warnings about a possible return to war is that, sooner or later, they may feel impelled to deliver on their prophecy.
The P-TOMS agreement was reached by the government at great cost to itself. As a result of going ahead with the agreement the government lost its majority in Parliament.
The legal problems that the government is now having with implementing the agreement are due to constitutional restrictions which do not correspond to the needs of a country that is trying to re-unite itself, at least on a humanitarian issue.
The stalling of the agreement will lead to a further deterioration of the confidence that people in the north east have about the ability of the government to solve their problems. It will also erode their confidence in the efficacy of negotiations between the government and LTTE to end the ethnic conflict.
In addition, the impact that the stalling of the P-TOMS agreement, or its non implementation, would have on international opinion needs to be considered. From UN Special Representative on Tsunami Recovery, President Clinton, to foreign diplomats in Colombo, those who seek Sri Lanka's betterment have been looking with positive expectations towards the joint mechanism on tsunami recovery.
The international community stands ready to help Sri Lanka to make up for the lost years of its development due to war and tsunami. But they will certainly be disappointed if the country's political and other elites, who enjoy a high standard of living themselves, get caught up in their own in-fighting at the expense of their impoverished countrymen.
Possible offer
It will be easy to be disheartened and cynical about the present situation in the country. It took six long months for the government and LTTE to finally put their differences aside and negotiate an agreement on tsunami recovery.
It will take close upon another two months for the law to be decided on, when the Supreme Court makes its final determination on September 12. Judicial activism, where the courts challenge or support the power of governments to take their own decisions, can be a mixed blessing.
In the 1930s, the Supreme Court in the United States attempted to block the efforts of the government to take the country out of economic depression. On constitutional grounds, they obstructed the New Deal legislation of President Roosevelt.
On the other hand, in the 1960s, the US Supreme Court supported the Civil Rights legislation of President Johnson, which sought to integrate blacks and whites as equal citizens. President Roosevelt's method of dealing with the obstruction he faced from the Supreme Court was to appoint more liberal judges to the Supreme Court who effectively overturned earlier adverse rulings.
The case that is now pending before the Supreme Court offers both the court and the country an opportunity for both sides to be heard and a fair and wise verdict on the P-TOMS agreement to be reached. Hopefully, the final determination of the court will give people the satisfaction that a decision that is in keeping with the needs of the country has been made.
There is of course a possibility of the Supreme Court making final determinations on September 12 that would make the implementation of the P-TOMS agreement as it presently stands difficult. But a respectful and respectable way does exist for country to be speedily taken out of its crisis.
An offer by the UNP at this time that it will, if necessary, support a change in the constitution to enable the P-TOMS agreement to be implemented will be a confidence building measure to the people of the north east and indeed to people all over the country and internationally as well.
Such an offer will not harm the UNP's interests. On the contrary, the UNP will be helping the government to do what it might otherwise have to do by itself in the future. As the political party with the best chance of forming a government in the future, the UNP will be aware of how difficult it is for a single party to get rid of the obstacles to the peace process. A policy of positive bipartisanship on the peace process at this time would be a grand gesture that could restore the faith in the viability of the peace process and the growing maturity of the polity.
Tacit bipartisanship
At present Sri Lanka enjoys a tacit bipartisanship between the two major political parties, but it is more a negative type of bipartisanship than positive when it comes to action. It can be argued that today, in a theoretical sense, the two major parties have reached a bipartisan consensus on the two major issues relating to ending the war and the ethnic conflict. The first tacit bipartisan agreement is that that they are both agreed on a federal solution to the ethnic conflict.
The government agreed to a federal solution in its Constitutional Bill of 2000. Also the government's readiness for a federal solution has been repeatedly proclaimed since then by the President on the political stage. The UNP accepted a federal solution at the Oslo peace talks in December 2002, when it arrived at an agreement with the LTTE to explore a federal solution to the ethnic conflict.
In addition, with the signing of the P-TOMS agreement by the government, the need to work with the LTTE as a partner to end the civil war and to re-unite the country was affirmed. This was also done by the former UNP government in 2002 when they signed the Ceasefire Agreement with the LTTE.
There too, the need to treat the LTTE as a partner was accepted. Thus, it can be seen that there is a tacit bipartisanship between the government and UNP where it concerns both federalism as the solution, and where it concerns negotiating with the LTTE as a partner as the way to reach a solution.
Unlike in other politically developed countries, such as Britain, however, both of these parties have reached these milestones separately, without seeking or obtaining each other's explicit support. The best time to change the policy of tacit bipartisanship to explicit or positive bipartisanship is for the government and UNP to work together to make the P-TOMS agreement operational in as short a time as possible.
Today the country has President Chandrika Kumaratunga, in the last stages of her presidency, acting as a determined statesman in trying to take the peace process forward.
The ascent of Ranil Wickremesinghe to the leadership of the UNP spelled one major change for the better in the politics of the country that is most visible today. As opposition leader, Mr Wrckremesinghe is not resorting to the irresponsible practice of whipping up opposition to governmental initiatives to end the ethnic conflict through negotiated and political means. So far it has only been Mr Wickremesinghe who, as opposition leader, has chosen to forego narrow political advantage by not trying to win over die hard nationalists to his party by taking on the nationalist line.
But so far, not even Mr Wickremesinghe has been prepared to actually work together positively with the government to resolve the ethnic conflict. This is where politics in Sri Lanka needs to change, and the grand gesture needs to be made, if the country is to put its ethnic conflict behind it for good.
(http://www.dailymirror.lk/2005/07/26/opinion/01.asp)
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