The Tigers kill our leaders, our elected representatives, our children. They terrorise our towns and threaten our territorial integrity.They besiege our todays and our tomorrows.

Taken together, the Tigers pose an inescapable threat to our existence, as a state and as citizens, as a collective and as individuals, at every level and in every sphere.

We – none of us – are safe, so long as the Tigers are not overcome; so long as they have not been divested of the capability of waging war against our state and society. This divestiture cannot but be coercive, violent. If we are to survive, the Tigers have to be destroyed. In the aftermath of the assassination of Jeyaraj Fernandopulle, we must renew that realisation and rededicate ourselves to that task. There is no alternative for us; for Sri Lanka as a state and Sri Lankans as a (multiethnic, multicultural) nation and a people.

However this does not mean that we can simply go on as before. We have to understand and change the overall context in which this historic struggle is taking place. We have to change the dynamics of that struggle decisively, so that we can prevail.

Parliament members carry the coffin of Sri Lanka's Highways Minister Jeyaraj Fernandopulle to the parliament complex in Colombo April 7, 2008. Fernandopolle and at least 13 others were killed after a suicide bomb explosion by a suspected Tamil Tiger rebel during a marathon race near Colombo (Pix : REUTERS)

We Sri Lankans tend to be psychologically self –sufficient on our little island home, but it is precisely as an island which has been so impacted upon and influenced by outside currents that we have to be aware of the external context in which we fight, produce and live.

Prabhakaran and the forces that support him are far more aware than we are of the external environment. So are the domestic political elements which, in a replay of our ancient history, are collaborating with the enemy, hoping to be catapulted to power through Tiger suicide bombers.

The embedding of the Tamil Diaspora in the social fabric of Western democracies, elections in the USA, UK and India, the impact of the US recession (which Alan Greenspan has warned, might be worse than anything in the post-war era), the nature of the world information system and the new media, the political dynamics in neighbouring Tamil Nadu (where Sinhala-phobia seems to have overcome the memory of the murder of Rajiv Gandhi on Tamil Nadu soil at Prabhakaran’s insistence) – all these are factors that must be integrated into a holistic strategic and security analysis, because the biggest mistake we could make in our thinking, is to reduce "strategic" or even "security" to the purely military dimension, without understanding the larger context.

We have to move decisively to change the dynamics in our favour, before the factors I have listed above, begin to combine against us, undermining the war efforts in the field and our capacity to wage war.

The finest available minds and talents, the largest available pool of expertise and experience, must be set to work in managing each of these areas and problems. Veteran diplomat and commentator K. Godage (with whom I shared a platform at Hon Kadirgamar’s invitation and under his chairmanship, together with Sir Adam Roberts, Regius Professor of International relations at Oxford, on the subject of "Foreign Policy Challenges for Sri Lanka") has already made this point, with respect to one field of endeavour.

Mao Ze Dong urged a strategy of uniting all those forces that can be united, neutralising those that cannot, and isolating the main enemy. Translated, this would mean uniting closely, in the political, military and economic realms, with all those states that have an antipathy towards terrorism and ethnic splittism. I say terrorism and ethnic splittism because the Western states do have a problem with terrorism, but only terrorism bearing certain religio-cultural markers, and as the case of Kosovo shows, they have no intrinsic problem with ethnic separatism. Fortunately for Sri Lanka, the antipathy toward secessionism and ethnic splittism is shared by the big and emerging powers in an increasingly multi-polar world, and is manifest in a region whose power is growing, Asia.

Ambassador Dr.Dayan Jayatilleka

One must however, identify, the Archimedean point, the point at which pressure must be applied so that leverage is achieved and decisive motion commenced in our favour. As it was two decades ago, this remains the full and rapid implementation of the 13th amendment and the instituting of provincial autonomy as agreed upon with India. The imminent holding of the Provincial council elections in the east takes us back in a positive sense, exactly twenty years, to 1988, when the IPKF succeeded in clearing and holding Provincial elections in the East (though not, unfortunately, in the North). No Sri Lankan government has been capable of this achievement, until now. If I may put it more scientifically, under previous administrations/ governments, the Sri Lankan state did not have the capacity to do what only the Indian state was able to twenty years back.

President Mahinda Rajapakse is about to change that.That is not enough. It has to be supplemented and complemented with its Northern component, whether one is to call it an Advisory Political body or a Northern Authority or an Interim Council. Only then would the 13th amendment be implemented to the degree possible short of complete military victory over the LTTE and the holding of Northern elections.

Only then, and not before, would we leverage Indian support, or at least neutralise Indian misgivings (most recently expressed in MK Narayanan’s PC Lall Memorial lecture). To put it bluntly, the best answer to the loss of Jeyaraj is to politically empower those Tamil politicians who by a reactivated 13th amendment, can cut across the global narrative of a Sinhala war on the Tamils, and inflict strategic (politico-military-social- psychological) damage in the rear of Prabhakaran, our existential enemy.

(This article expresses the strictly personal views of the author)

Web Link : http://www.island.lk/2008/04/08/features1.html