Why Wiping Out Insurgents Won't Bring Peace to Sri Lanka

By Mitu Sengupta, AlterNet. Posted May 5, 2009.

As an insurgent force, the LTTE has been inordinately successful.  By the early 2000s, it had captured much of the north and east, and was governing these territories as though they were already a separate state (the LTTE provided schools, postal services, and even rudimentary hospitals).  The LTTE brought forth a harsh and authoritarian regime, but one that was, perhaps, an inevitable response to the harsh and authoritarian regime that the Sri Lankan government had become.  Sri Lanka has been characterized by Human Rights Watch as one of the world’s worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances, and by Reporters Without Borders as more hostile to journalists than any other democratic government.   

In many ways, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state have been reflections of each other’s stinginess and inflexibility.  Both share culpability for perpetuating a war that has lasted 26 years, claimed some 100,000 lives (about 30,000 in the last two years alone), and produced a thick stream of refugees.  Both, moreover, have squandered opportunities for peace, though it is unlikely that the Sri Lankan government would have agreed to negotiate at all – as it did in 2003, following a ceasefire – had it faced a lesser organization than the Tigers.   

Ultimately, the annihilation of the LTTE will mean that only one of the two fearsome, unbending contenders in the country’s long and bloody war will have left the arena and, that too, probably not for good.  Far from being a recipe for peace, this will probably ignite a new cycle of grotesque injustice and pitiless reprisal.   

To most governments, the bloodbath in Sri Lanka is the consequence of a sovereign power besieged by a brutal domestic insurgency.  This is to be expected in a world where states are generally considered legitimate, no matter what they do, and those that challenge their authority are instantly viewed as criminal – a distinction that’s been sharpened by the menacing language around the “war on terror.”  Indeed, following Sri Lanka’s success in having the LTTE proscribed as a terrorist organization in 31 countries, including the United States, the sense that the Sri Lankan state is on the right side of history has grown from strength to strength, which might explain the shockingly muted condemnation of its actions in the rapidly unfolding tragedy.   

It’s probably too much to expect the American government – or any other government for that matter – to accept the argument that the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE have mirrored each other’s unyielding approach, and, that ultimately, the noble sovereign power and the sinister terrorist organization are two sides of the same bloodied coin.   

The one, small opening for peace that the LTTE’s retreat may provide is that without its looming spectre, the Sri Lankan government will be less able to shield its decaying democracy and ugly human rights record from the eyes of the international community – that is, of course, if the latter cares to sustain its gaze at this small and strategically unimportant island once the worst of the crisis is over.   

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Mitu Sengupta, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Ryerson University.  She may be reached by email: mitu.sengupta@gmail.com

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