What Blake really said

There’s been a bit of an uproar about some comments made by the U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Robert Blake. Reportedly,

In an interactive session at the University of Madras on Friday, U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka Robert Blake rejected Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s view that political talks could come only after the LTTE was wiped out or disarmed. “A military solution is going to be very, very difficult,” he said, citing Sri Lankan Army Chief Sarath Fonseka’s statement that even if the Army occupied all of northern Sri Lanka, a residual guerrilla force of at least a thousand LTTE fighters would go underground. [DailyMirror]

It’s not clear whether it is indeed a contradiction of the government position. I think the government’s stated position is similar to that of the ambassador. The source of the confusion seems to be this Hindu article. It could be that Hindu’s correspondent misinterpreted the Ambassador,

The U.S. Embassy website carries the full speech by the Ambassador at the University of Madras. People can judge for themselves.  Here’s a relevant excerpt:

America’s experience in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere has taught us that terrorism cannot be defeated by law enforcement and military measures alone.  That is why President Bush has made the promotion of democracy one of the centerpieces of American foreign policy.  And that is why the U.S. and other Co-Chair countries have urged the Government of Sri Lanka to adopt now a political solution to the conflict within the framework of a united Sri Lanka that meets the aspirations of all of Sri Lanka’s communities.  One way forward is for Sri Lanka to complete the work of the All Parties Representative Committee which has reached agreement on 90% of a blueprint for constitutional reform that most Sri Lankans believe offers great promise.  It remains for the country’s two main Sinhalese parties to agree on the document, which has proved a significant hurdle thus far.

One reason for the lack of recent progress on a consensus APRC document, is that some in Sri Lanka believe that the Government should first defeat the LTTE and then proceed with a political solution.  The U.S. view is that the Government could further isolate and weaken the LTTE if it articulates now its vision for a political solution.  This would help reassure the more than 200,000 IDPs now in the Vanni that they can move south and aspire to a better future.  It would also disprove the LTTE’s claim that they are the sole representative of Sri Lanka’s Tamils and the only ones who care about Sri Lanka’s Tamils.  Finally it would help to persuade Tamils in Canada, the US and other parts of the diaspora to stop funding the LTTE which in turn would hasten an end to the conflict.  The U.S. also believes that an improvement in the human rights situation — that has disproportionately affected Tamils — would help to hasten reconciliation and give Tamils a greater sense that they will enjoy a future of hope and dignity within a united Sri Lanka. [..]

The whole thing here. The speech doesn’t have the Fonseka reference cited by the Hindu correspondent, possibly the reference was part of Q&A.

– Deane.

Aljazeera Inside Story — Sri Lanka’s Civil Strife

There is an initial report on the situation near the battlefront near Kilinochchi. Followed by a discussion between Palitha Kohana (Sri Lankan foreign secretary), Sinnappu Maharasingham (Chairman – Tamil Action Committee) and Ashok Mehta (former commanding officer IPKF)

Here’s part 1:

And Part 2:

Ice cream, guns and the rest of Sri Lanka

Today in Pictures, Ice cream for the soldiers:

Much more excellent pictures on Sri Lanka at Martein van asseldonk’s Flickr.

The Indian Intervention, a round up

We have crawled the web and compiled a round-up of opinion pieces on the recent developments in India with regards to Sri Lankan conflict. The opinions come from both sides of the Palk Strait.

• The Indian Involvement: Where do we go from here? – K. Godage, The Island.
• Indo-Lanka equation: Time for a trade-off  – Dayan Jayatilleka, The Island.
• Time for some introspection – TS Gopi Rethinaraj, Hindustan Times.
• Our Relations with South India — K.Godage The Island.
• The Cornered Tigers and after — Nitin Pai, Indian National Interest.
• Looking Beyond ‘Military Victory’  – N. Sathiyamoorthy the Daily Mirror.
• Tamil Nadu: Grinding the Sri Lankan Grist  – Dr. Geeta Madhavan, the DailyMirror.
• South India has no moral right to criticize the war (interview) with Minister Champika Ranawaka – the Daily Mirror.
• Q&A with Defence wire on India and weapons — DefenceWire

 

If you have more articles of interest on the topic, please include it in the comments section.

Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists

The “stratergic model” of terrorism holds that people become terrorists for political reasons. People, according to this model, resort to terrorism when they belive that no other method could bring them closer to their political goals. This is the dominant view amoung most contemporary ‘experts’.  Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security, begs to differ. By studying terrorist organizations around the world (including it seems, the LTTE) Abrahms offers seven tendencies of terrorists which seems to contradict this mainstrem view. 

 According to Abrahms, terrorists, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what they want;(2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort, failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don’t compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have been achieved.

The complete paper (pdf) is here. It explains explains things in more detail. Bruce Schneier writing for  the wired has an excellent summary. Incidentally, the article has the same title as this blog post. We might have accidentally copied it.  

InMutiny welcomes your views.

Zainul’s personal experiences and views on the conflict

From the comments section

“One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, “The conflict lies within ; not without” cliched quotes these are!! But I use them like so many others have, for a cliched war this is, that we are fighting!!!

I was born in ‘83. In August. My mom nearly lost her husband to the Black July of ‘83 just months before she had me. I brought the war with me, as it were. Never have I lived in a Sri Lanka that was peaceful.

I am trilingual, thank god! I don’t know how many of you have frequented government offices in Sri Lanka. But you should. Just walk around with a tamil friend, or if you are a tamil speaker then that would do. Be a bit shabbily dressed if possible. This exercise will, forever, kill the myth that Sri Lankans are a hospitable, helpful nation. oh, we are that to outsiders! But for our own people?

Let me tell you a story…

In 1956, knowingly or unknowingly the “Man with the Silver Tongue”, gave form to a hitherto largely invisible devil. Language, all of a sudden, became a problem to the ceylonese pupulation. Remember, the educated adults of that time were all English speakers. They just took up language as a tool to reach the people. Democracy in its most cruel outing, is what I see it as!

The swabasha movement was a failure in itself for there was more than one swabasha. Ironically, both the languages have the same word for that concept. But what it did do was, it took away our capacity to broaden our horizons.

How does the story end?

It ends with us being a bilingual nation, where the governement officers are not bilingual. I have pretended to be a speaker of the tamil language only, in our esteemed government offices and even hospitals. Not just in Colombo, or the south but even in the North West. Same story. At the best you get a blank stare, but more usually a rude reception and an insistence that you speak the Sinhala tongue. Then if they have some iota of decency in them, they go looking for someone who speaks tamil.

Do you recall the bomb blast at the offices of then PM Sirimavo Bandaranaike? They had to call in an innocent worker from inside the office to answer the queries of a tamil speaking woman at the gate!! This is the attitude of the PM’s office.

The armed conflict may or may not end. My feeling is that it will end sooner rather than later because the L.T.T.E is hard pressed for Human Resources. But what about the war with our warped attitudes? our constant need for one-uppance? Until and unless there is a conscious and concentrated effort to integrate the people of Sri Lanka, until and unless we have a Mandela among us, that war will go on. More frustrated young men will become freedom fighters for that cause.

And until such a day, we’ll keep quoting the cliches , “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, “The conflict lies within ; not without” !

–Zainul Mahas

Douglas Devananda – a pivotal figure in the conflict

Devananda has been clashing with the Tigers since he and Kittu were the military chiefs of the EPRLF and LTTE respectively, in Jaffna in the mid-1980s. The US State Department’s latest Report on Patterns of Global Terrorism, an authoritative source, mentions Devananda as having survived “at least eleven” attempts on his life by the LTTE. From a machine gun attack on his office in Colombo, through a spike in his skull in the Kalutara prison, to several suicide bombers, mostly women.[/color][/b][/size]

Kathiravelu Nithyananda Douglas Devananda, Leader of the  EPDP, was born in Jaffna on 10th November 1957, as the second of the four sons and one daughter of Subramaniam Kathiravelu. His mother Maheswary died when he was only six years old. His father Kathiravelu was an active member of the Sri Lanka Communist Party.

Devananda had his primary and secondary education at the Jaffna Central College, where his mother was a teacher, till her death. While being a teenage student in Jaffna, he was exposed to, and influenced by his father’s political work and that of his uncle K.C. Nithyananda, who was a leading trade unionist of his day.

From Jaffna, in 1974, Devananda was sent to Colombo for further studies under K.C. Nithyananda’s tutelage. Nithyananda assumed the role of Devananda’s parent and mentor. In Colombo, however, it was not studies that interested Devananda, the teenager, but politics. He joined the Eelam Liberation Organisation (ELO). In 1975, he became a founder member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organizers (EROS). He organised the General Union of Eelam Students (GUES) in Colombo, and coordinated its activities in the North and East of Sri Lanka. Being one of the pioneers of the armed struggle, it was then that he assumed the pseudonym of Douglas.

When President Jayewardene appointed Nithyananda as the Chairman of the newly formed Palmyrah Development Board, Devananda functioned as his personal assistant. In 1978, Devananda alias Douglas and two other EROS members left for military training with Al Fatah of the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Palaly, Jaffna. He successfully completed the training and returned to Sri Lanka.

Trouble was brewing in the hierarchy of the EROS. The organization, with its leadership based mainly in London, broke up into two. A section, including Padmanabha and Devananda left EROS and formed the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF). The student body GUES of the EROS, attached itself with the EPRLF. In the EPRLF, Douglas Devananda served as a member of the politbureau of the Central Committee and as the commander of its military wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

In 1980, the Sri Lanka government arrested Douglas Devananda twice under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. When the July 1983 anti-Tamil riots broke out, Douglas Devananda was an inmate of Welikada prison. He was one of the few prisoners who escaped death at the hands of the Sinhala criminals who were let loose by the authorities on July 25th and 27th to kill the Tamil political prisoners. After the two massacres in the Welikada prison, which resulted in the death of 53 inmates, Douglas Devananda along with 27 other survivors was transferred to the Batticaloa prison. In September 1983, he along with all the other Tamil political prisoners escaped from the Batticaloa prison and fled to Tamil Nadu in India.

From India, in 1984, he went for advanced military training, and led a group of other EPRLF members, both men and women, for training with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP). Following the training, he returned to North-East Sri Lanka and resumed charge as the commander of PLA of the EPRLF. Based in Jaffna, he was also in charge of all political and military activities of the EPRLF in the North and East of Sri Lanka. On May 5th of 1985, Devananda lost his teenage sister, Shobha alias Mathivathani in the Karainagar Naval Base attack. The searchlights of the navy gunboats caught up with her and she was shredded in a hail of heavy machine gun bullets.

In May 1986, serious internal contradictions relating to the strategy and tactics of the struggle and the internal structure of the organization cropped up within the EPRLF. As most of its politbureau members were based in Tamil Nadu, Douglas Devananda undertook a sea voyage to Tamil Nadu to sort out the problems. His sea voyage on July 7th of 1986 ended up in a tragedy, which resulted in the death of seven of the nineteen-member entourage of Douglas Devananda. He swam back from Tamil Nadu waters to Jaffna in the Palk Straits when the boat capsized. He was fortunate to survive with the support of another EPRLF cadre who was right behind Devananda to see that he was not giving up his swimming. Both were later rescued by a fishing vessel which was in the vicinity. Two days later, covering his body that had scars of fish bites with a shawl, Devananda carried out the last rites of his fellow cadres who perished in the mishap at a cemetery in Jaffna. He lost his loyal comrades Imama, Ashok, Edward, Chenpagam, Sukirthan, Gnanam and Nagarajah to the Indian Ocean. Though Douglas Devananda arrived safely in India after a second sea voyage, the internal contradictions could not be resolved. Consequently, Douglas Devananda and his loyalists parted company from the others, and laid claim as the real EPRLF. The two factions were however dubbed as the EPRLF (D – Douglas Devananda) and the EPRLF (R- Ranjan alias Naba).

In October 1986, EPRLF (R) conspired and framed charges against Devananda for an incident in Choolaimedu in Chennai and had him arrested. He was however released on bail. Following this incident, cleavage between the two factions of the EPRLF became permanent. In May 1987, EPRLF (D) under the leadership of Douglas Devananda, together with Paranthan Rajan who led a breakaway group of the People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) formed the Eelam National Democratic Liberation Front (ENDLF) in Tamil Nadu. However, this arrangement did not last long. Thereafter, EPRLF (D) transformed itself into the Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP).

Following the Indo Sri Lanka Agreement of July 1987, the EPDP also decided to give up the armed struggle and join the democratic political mainstream in Sri Lanka. Douglas Devananda decided to enter the democratic mainstream as Kathiravelu Nithyananda Douglas Devananda.

The LTTE started wiping out the other movements in the latter part of 1985. They first eliminated TELO and PLOTE by killing many of its cadres and capturing some. Finally in the latter part of 1986, the LTTE started attacking the EPRLF cadres. While Devananda was in India the EPRLF members were captured, tortured and killed by the LTTE. By December 1986 EPRLF was also banned by the LTTE. EROS and its leader Balakumar of course gave into to the LTTE threats and agreed to dissolve their group and surrendered to the LTTE.

In September 1987 Devananda’s brother Premananda and some leading members of the EPDP returned from India. Premananada, Sivakaran alias Ibrahim, Ragavan, Sritharan and George, all, members of the EPDP, were also abducted by the LTTE in Jaffna and tortured. The Tigers pulled his ailing brother out of an ambulance, together with Ibrahim, and murdered them both.

Devananda was arrested for the 2nd time in India and later released on bail. He however managed to arrive in Colombo by the end of May 1990. When Padmanabha was assassinated by the LTTE in Chennai on June 19th in 1990, these very same forces were disappointed to discover that Devananda was in Sri Lanka, weeks before the incident.

Having entered the democratic mainstream, Douglas Devananda and nine members of the EPDP were elected to Parliament from the Jaffna District, in August 1994.  Douglas Devananda was re-elected to Parliament in October 2000, in December 2001 and again in April 2004, and is continuously in Parliament since August 1994.

Premadasa and Ranjan Wijeratne were very fond of this spirited young man, trusted him instinctively, spotted his potential, inducted him into the mainstream and built him up politically.

In October 2000, Douglas Devananda was appointed as the Minister of Development, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of the North, and Tamil Affairs, North and East, in the People’s Alliance Government headed by President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.

Douglas Devananda has worked with and within the state system for twenty years, with three Sri Lankan Presidents from the Sinhala community: Ranasinghe Premadasa, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapakse. It was Premadasa who first called him “thamby” (little brother), as does President Rajapakse today. Except for a brief intermission he has been a Cabinet Minister from the 1990s.

The US State Department’s latest Report on Patterns of Global Terrorism, an authoritative source, mentions Devananda as having survived “at least eleven” attempts on his life by the LTTE. From a machine gun attack on his office in Colombo, through a spike in his skull in the Kalutara prison, to several suicide bombers, mostly women.

[img]http://lankalibrary.com/images/deva2.jpg[/img]

On October 9th of 1995, Douglas Devananda’s residence in Colombo was attacked by the LTTE. This was the first commando style attack of the LTTE in the South. He survived this attack due to the valiant efforts of his party cadres and bodyguards, four of whom paid the supreme sacrifice in the incident. Once again on June 30th in 1998, Douglas Devananda was brutally attacked by the LTTE mafia detained at the Kalutara Prison, when he visited the detainees who were on a hunger strike to air their grievances.

On July 7th, 2004, another attempt was made on his life by a LTTE female suicide bomber while the Minister was seeing the public on a Public Day at his Ministry. The woman suicide bomber, identified as Thiyagaraja Jeyarani, was reportedly on a mission to assassinate Douglas Devananda. She had gone with an accomplice to his Ministry in Kolpity and insisted on seeing the Minister without undergoing a body check. When the security staff of the Minister became suspicious, they informed the Minister. At the instructions of the Minister, his security staff took her to the Kolpity Police Station to investigate, at which time she detonated the explosives strapped around her body killing herself, four police personnel and injuring eleven persons.

Recently, on November 28th, 2007 the LTTE once again sent its woman suicide cadre to take his life. A young woman had gone to his Ministry at Isipathana Road and requested to see the Minister. The woman realized that she would not be able to reach the Minister, became agitated and detonated the bomb strapped to her breast killing herself and another EPDP member.

Velupillai Prabhakaran has tried so persistently to kill Devananda, and by his ability to survive, Douglas Devananda has demonstrated that despite the fact that he has been wounded, scarred and blinded in one eye, and compelled to live a life in the shadow of death, that he is not an easy target! [/size][/quote]

Youth and the conflict

Writing for the ST Mirror, Tahnee Hopman and Myanthi Peiris surveys the views of several young people on how they feel about the conflict in Sri Lanka :

There is a strange thing about war; being so much a part of our lives, the impact of 20 years of conflict has left most Sri Lankans strangely immune to the violence now almost synonymous with our culture. The war has left a far more lasting and negative impact though – particularly on the Sri Lankan youth.
“For people in our age group who have not known a country free from war, it can be very depressing to look around at Sri Lanka now. It restricts our freedom, but that is not the biggest problem,” says 20-year-old Safra. “For me, the most significant problem is the anger in the minds of the people which will inhibit them from moving on towards a better future even if the army defeats the LTTE and the war is “won” that way. As long as people refuse to forget the past or put it behind them, nothing will change. I’m sometimes curious to see what the country would have been, had it not been torn apart by war from 20 years. I’m sure we could have been so much more than what we are now.”

Most young Sri Lankans like Safra, feel deprived at not knowing the country their parents and grandparents knew. The most difficult thing to face right now is the helplessness that war brings – that feeling of not being able to see a solution. Is the military strategy the only option left now, or would negotiations still be possible? While they agree that the army appears to be successful, living in constant fear and watching innocent civilians fall prey to attacks by the terrorists makes them feel that our country is not really progressing towards achieving peace.

Read the whole thing at the Sunday Times.

Glimpses of Jaffna

The NoWarZone crew of YaTv, takes a closer look at the life in the Northern peninsula. The first video is on the security and livlihood of people living in the city:

And secondly, on the famous Nallur Kandaswamy Kovil and more on living in a climate of fear:

1982, Colombo.

A rare collection of pictures by (we assume) Adrian Brain:

Pettah, 1982

Much more at Adrian’s flickr.