EDITORIAL

War Front

Kumaratunga intends to wreck the ceasefire

The permanent ceasefire between the Liberation Tigers and the Sri Lankan armed forces which began on Saturday is a key and welcome step on Sri Lanka's road to peace, coming as it does after many years of ethnic conflict. As we argued last week amid the widespread speculation in the regional press and renewed opposition from Sinhala right wing forces, the foundation of any successful negotiations must surely be a stable and indefinite truce between both protagonists. The establishment of just such a ceasefire within two months of the United National Front government coming to power is a triumph for Norwegian diplomacy, particularly given the present political circumstances in Colombo.

As in all successful compromises, both sides are set to benefit from the ongoing tranquillity and protections the agreement provides. The permanent ceasefire has therefore been - quite rightly - warmly welcomed by the international community. India, the United States, Britain and Japan publicly hailed the deal within hours of its unveiling Friday by the Norwegian government. Other countries have subsequently sent their commendations as has United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

The necessity for the prompt expressions of international support quickly became apparent. No doubt the endorsements came as great relief to Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for Sri Lanka's President Chandrika Kumaratunga reacted to the truce with characteristic belligerence and resentment. This week, whilst the peoples of Sri Lanka begin to look forward to life devoid of military violence and conditions of war, the Sinhala militarists are mobilising in opposition to the ceasefire under Kumaratunga's banner. As this edition goes to print, Kumaratunga's People's Alliance (PA), the Sinhala-nationalist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the Tamil paramilitaries of the Eelam People's Democratic Party (EPDP) were reportedly seeking legal mechanisms to torpedo the agreement. Their purported argument is that due constitutional process has not been followed. However their real motives are clear to all: to wreck the ceasefire, perpetuate the war, frustrate Norway's peace efforts and undermine the UNF's longevity in the process.

We have consistently argued that President Kumaratunga, her occasional pro-peace rhetoric notwithstanding, will prove the greatest impediment to a successful resolution of Sri Lanka's conflict. Amid the raging battles of the late nineties, Kumaratunga's public relations efforts and the distance maintained by the international community enabled the President to conceal the endemic racism which underpinned her military project. But in the past few months the international community has had ample opportunity to reevaluate its original assessment of the Sri Lankan quagmire and the characteristics of its principal actors. Furthermore, as we have cautioned before, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe's sometimes embarrassing efforts to develop consensual cohabitation between the office of the President and Parliament as Sri Lanka's preferred mode of governance were always doomed to failure. Not because the idea itself was unworkable per se but because Kumaratunga's tyrannical nature and personal enmity will not permit such political coexistence. We recall that flush with electoral success, senior members of Mr. Wickremesinghe's United National Party (UNF) last December urged him to move swiftly against Kumaratunga. The Premier opted to extend his hand of cooperation instead. He may come to regret his magnanimity in the coming weeks. The Premier has taken a bold gamble with regards to the permanent ceasefire: after

Kumaratunga's refusal to authorise what to all rational minds is a vital necessity for Sri Lanka's future, Wickremesinghe chose to sign the deal on the government's behalf instead.

Kumaratunga's grounds for opposing the ceasefire deal are in themselves baseless. The present truce draws on past agreements including, crucially, the ceasefire she herself undertook with the LTTE in the abortive peace process of 1995. The events that led to the termination of that agreement is partly behind the elaborate monitoring mechanisms built into the new truce. Furthermore, the protections and obligations for both sides enshrined in the present ceasefire are based on the specific concerns and requests put forward by them during the Norwegian-sponsored discussions of the past two months. With regards to negotiating authority, Mr. Wickremesinghe's government has - by virtue of its victory in the December polls - the trust of the Sinhala people while the Liberation Tigers have been endorsed by the Tamil people as their sole representatives. Kumaratunga, whose government was unceremoniously thrown out last year, has no public mandate save that being presently extended by the forces of Sinhala chauvinism.

However, the extraordinary powers she wields could - against the wishes of most Sri Lankans - plunge the island back into turmoil and then bloodshed. If the Norwegian peace process is to continue unscathed and Sri Lanka is to sustain its slow climb out of the abyss, both Oslo and Wickremesinghe's government will need the close support of the international community in the weeks ahead.

Talking Points

The Tamil language has continuously been undermined

On February 21, officially designated International Mother Language Day, the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) published a startling report on the world's languages. Half of the six thousand languages spoken around the world are seriously endangered or dying, it said. The areas affected are varied. Up to 50 European languages are under threat, while in the US, only 150 native Indian languages survive out of the hundreds spoken before European settlers arrived. India's policies, UNESCO said, were sustaining the subcontinent's tongues.

Despite the alarming rates of deterioration - out of Africa's 1,400 languages, 250 face extinction while 500 are declining - UNESCO expressed optimism many could be saved. Ainu - spoken by only eight people on the island of Hokkaido in Japan in the late 1980s - is now being revived, for example. UNESCO Director-General Koīchiro Matsuura argued last Thursday that "all languages be given equal recognition, for each is a unique response to the human condition and each is a living heritage we should cherish."

The matter is of course particularly important in the context of the world's ethnic conflicts. In Sri Lanka, for example, the start of the spiral of - primarily anti-Tamil - violence which began decades ahead of Tamil armed resistance was undoubtedly legitimatised by the passing of the Sinhala-Only Act in the fifties. Contempt for Tamil language quickly expanded into ethnic hatred for its speakers. The begrudging repeal of such blatantly racist legislation has not changed matters in practice.

Sinhala domination of Sri Lanka's armed forces and government has itself fuelled Tamil discontent and official racism has also arguably contributed to the perpetuation of the conflict. In 1974 for example, Sri Lanka unsuccessfully demanded that the International Association of Tamil Research hold its conference in Colombo and not the Tamil cultural heartland of Jaffna. The infamous police action on the last day of the conference became a key catalyst in igniting Tamil armed resistance.

The countless small acts of discrimination over the years have had as much impact as the large-scale atrocities and anti-Tamil riots. Tamil detainees having to sign statements or confessions in Sinhala, the dispatching of official correspondence in Sinhala to Tamils and the acute shortage of Tamil-language textbooks - especially without the customary spelling and grammatical errors - are the more protested about slights. Others, equally glaring, include the clumsy spelling and appalling grammar on road signs in some Tamil areas, particularly the Sri Lanka Army garrison towns like Vavuniya. The tensions are - as can be expected - more widespread in the eastern province where state-sponsored Sinhala colonisation of Tamil territory has, over the past few decades, created latent points of friction.

Whether, in the new spirit of ethnic reconciliation, the new government attends to these language related issues remains to be seen. But the sentiments of the Tamil community, after decades of seeing their mother tongue undermined by Sinhala officialdom, were summed up last year by Justice C.V Vigneswaran in his acceptance speech on being appointed to the Supreme Court: "The sterile and impotent provisions now appearing in Sri Lanka's constitution have little meaning to the Tamil-speaking people of the northern and eastern provinces. They need to govern themselves in their own language with little interference from outside."