Since President Chandrika Kumaratunga is emphatically not the Jayaram Jayalalithaa of Sri Lanka, there must be some rational explanation, beyond personal pique and delusions of grandeur, to explain the near-emergency she suddenly declared last week. Perhaps the reasons are to be found in the dire warning sounded by her presidential adviser for foreign affairs, the ever-brilliant Lakshman Kadirgamar, in the Sri Lankan Parliament almost a month before she made the most dramatic constitutional move the subcontinent has seen since Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency on June 25, 1975. Kumaratunga’s apparently “sudden” decision to use her wide-ranging constitutional powers (whose constitutional propriety has been confirmed by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court) appears to be the outcome of her growing apprehension that her prime minister (who belongs to a rival party under the constitution’s co-habitation arrangement) was mistaking appeasement for the peace process. In his landmark speech in the Sri Lankan Parliament on October 8, 2003, Kadirgamar had cautioned against any complacency on the security front merely to keep the peace negotiations with the LTTE going. Even as the LTTE had taken advantage of the ceasefire agreement to consolidate itself militarily, the Sri Lankan government, he said, must “be equally diligent in seeing to it that the security of a sovereign state is maintained while these negotiations are going on”. Quoting extensively from a US Pacific Command (USPAC) assessment of a year earlier, which has long been “in the public domain”, he underlined the vulnerability of the southern rim of the Trincomalee harbour area to LTTE artillery bombardment: 81 mm mortar which, with a range of 5 km, could hit the harbour from nearby Sampur; 105 mm multi-barrel rocket launchers, which could hit the Trincomalee Dockyard at a range of 7-9 km; and heavier 122 mm artillery which could hit with accuracy from as far away as 15 km — all of which, he said, citing Sri Lankan army commanders, had in the immediate past been brought by the LTTE within range of Trincomalee. If Trincomalee harbour were “levelled”, he continued, referring to the USPAC report, the three divisions of the Sri Lankan army holding the Jaffna peninsula would be left without any source of re-supply. For, said USPAC, the Sri Lankan navy “does not have the lift resources to complete (the) re-supply effort” nor “sufficient control of the sea space to ensure military lift” nor “contract re-supply ships (which) would safely reach the peninsula”. As “the only viable means of re-supplying the Jaffna peninsula from sea is from Trincomalee”, any failure to keep the LTTE at bay at least 15 km south of the harbour was fraught with the gravest danger to any Sri Lankan garrison anywhere in the Tamil-majority North or East of the island. Kadirgamar warned that by failing to recognise and rectify the security threat over the entire year that had passed since the USPAC assessment reached its hands, the Sri Lankan government had displayed complacency of a dangerous order, reflecting its mindset that nothing should be done to upset the LTTE in case this upsets the apple-cart of the “peace process”. Replying to the debate, Tilak Marpana, the hapless defence minister whom the president summarily dismissed last week, denied any complacency on the government’s part and asserted there was nothing new about the LTTE domination of the southern side of the Trincomalee harbour, which long predated his government coming to office. He refrained, however, from commenting on Kadirgamar’s intelligence about LTTE artillery positionings or the USPAC assessment. While, to the best of my knowledge, Kumaratunga has not linked her dramatic November 4 actions to her foreign affairs adviser’s speech in Parliament, it is impossible to not see the connection between the two, especially in the perspective of the LTTE’s counter-proposals of November 1 which nowhere concede the unity, integrity or sovereignty of Sri Lanka but recommend a self-governing interim authority under the sole control of the LTTE which could secede at any time. The Sri Lankan president has long been apprehensive of her prime minister, Ranil Wickramasinghe, playing Chamberlain to the Hitlerite LTTE, a charge hotly contested by him. Her precipitate move now appears to be something of a shot across the bows of her government’s ship of state to warn against any craven reaction to the LTTE’s unacceptable counter-proposals merely to forestall an LTTE-declared breakdown of the peace process. It did make tactical sense for the president to take such drastic action when her prime minister was out of the country. But it is no happenstance that she did so when her PM was in Washington, DC. For she perceives the danger of the peace process slipping out of the benevolent neutrality of the Norwegian facilitators and into the hands of the Americans who have long been eyeing Trincomalee’s deep, deep harbour as South Asia’s Sula Bay. Bush and his spokesmen have expressed their dismay at this blunt display of lese majeste, but Kadirgamar reminded the House in his October 8 speech of the formal understanding between India and Sri Lanka, dating back to Rajiv Gandhi’s letter of July 1987 to then Sri Lankan president, J. Jayawardene, that “the work of restoring and operating the Trincomalee Oil Tank Farm will be undertaken as a joint venture between India and Sri Lanka”. Referring to a remark made earlier in the debate by a member of the Tamil United Liberation Front that his party wished to “keep the Americans out”, Kadirgamar exclaimed, “Excellent!” — but added that if non-regional powers were to be kept out of the Sri Lankan imbroglio, it would have to be under the India-Sri Lanka agreement of 1987. The Sri Lankan president’s move is thus also a wake-up call to India to stop ducking its responsibilities to Sri Lanka, as India has been attempting to do ever since the IPKF pull-out more than a decade ago. She knows that is the only way her beloved island can be protected from the tender ministrations of George W. Bush. Do we?
