Epilogue: 1994 and After

The Bandaranaikes In Power: The Second Phase

Seventeen years after the decisive electoral defeat they suffered in 1977, the Bandaranaikes returned to power in 1994 under Chandrika Kumaratunga, the second daughter of S.W.R.D. and Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Given all the turmoil in the country in the 1980s, and particularly after the Indian intervention, it was inevitable that the electoral pendulum would swing against the UNP in the 1990s. As it was, the swing was not significant enough for Mrs Bandaranaike to make a comeback in 1989. Five years later she was in poor health and unable, therefore, to make a bid for power. But she had skilfully kept the SLFP under her control. This enabled her to oversee another spell of power for the family although her daughter Chandrika had left the SLFP some years before she came to power in 1994.

Two factors helped to swing the pendulum in her favour; one had to do with President Premadasa’s failures as a political manager and the other had to do with the LTTE. While Premadasa had consolidated his power in 1989–90, his failures in the mechanics of party management saw a split in the UNP in 1991. This was seen in an attempt by two very able politicians to move a motion of impeachment on him. They were L. Athulathmudali¹ and G. Dissanayake. While the impeachment attempt failed, the expulsion of Athulathmudali and Dissanayake from the party along with about a dozen parliamentarians marked a new stage in the eventual weakening of the UNP’s hold on the electorate.

Chandrika Kumaratunga Bandaranaike

At this stage, the LTTE entered the picture by organizing the assassination of some key UNP politicians, beginning with Ranjan Wijeratne, foreign minister and deputy minister of defence in March 1991. Wijeratne was also secretary of the UNP and a potential successor to Premadasa. L. Athulathmudali was assassinated in April 1993 and Premadasa himself on 1 May 1993. G. Dissanayake, one of the principal figures in negotiating the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord was killed in October 1994. He was the UNP’s presidential candidate at that time. His assassination, a week or so before the election, left the UNP demoralized. The party organization for the election virtually collapsed. It paved the way for Chandrika Kumaratunga to secure a facile victory at that presidential election.

Negotiations

India’s failed involvement left successive Sri Lankan governments, those of R. Premadasa and Chandrika Kumaratunga, to negotiate with a reinvigorated LTTE, and to resume a military struggle once the negotiations failed. The levels of violence and the intensity of the conflict were much higher than they were before the Indian intervention. The Sri Lankan situation provides insights into the difficulties faced by democratically elected governments in dealing with a separatist movement whose violent leadership has systematically marginalized its rivals and driven traditional democratic forces (among the Tamils) to the perimeter of the political system. This radicalization of Tamil separatism makes the search for a negotiated settlement² a much more difficult exercise than it was before the Indian intervention and before the LTTE established its dominance in Tamil politics in Sri Lanka, that is, before 1985–86.³ Such is the troubled inheritance of the Norwegian government now (2003–04) ‘facilitating’ a new phase of negotiations in the Sri Lankan conflict, an exercise limited to bringing the two sides, recently in conflict, to the negotiating table.

Through much of the years 2000 and 2001, the Sri Lanka government was poised to resume talks with the LTTE⁴ but the talks began only in 2002 after the election of the Ranil Wickremesinghe government of the UNP and continued into 2003 when the LTTE broke away from the talks. Even if the talks were to resume there is little room for optimism that there would be an easy, much less early, resolution of the conflict.

For the Sri Lanka political leadership, at the highest level, negotiations with the LTTE carry a lethal danger, the prospect of assassination. Three years after the failure of his talks with the LTTE, President R. Premadasa was assassinated in Colombo on 1 May 1993; just over five years after the failure of her talks with the LTTE, Chandrika Kumaratunga narrowly escaped death on 18 December 1999 in a botched LTTE assassination attempt which left her blind in one eye. No head of state/head of government negotiating a resolution of a deep-rooted conflict, in any part of the world, faces such personal dangers. All these were apart from the LTTE’s assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.⁵ The LTTE had stretched across to Tamil Nadu to accomplish this.

The Sri Lanka dispute in its current violent form has lasted for over twenty years. As we have seen in the previous chapter, one of the factors in the prolongation of the conflict has been the ill-fated Indian intervention. At the outset, India provided raw separatist cadres from Sri Lanka with arms and military training. Ironically, the LTTE who were not the special favourites of the Indians benefited most from this. Next, the Indians saved the LTTE in early 1987 from an overwhelming defeat at the hands of the Sri Lankan army. Then the LTTE gained additional experience and prestige in leading the Tamil resistance to the IPKF. Yet the IPKF had weakened the LTTE by the time it was recalled although not to the extent intended by the Indian government. Had the Premadasa government (1989–93) moved in to the Jaffna Peninsula to replace the IPKF in 1990 the LTTE could have resisted that move but did not have the capacity to prevent it. In the event the LTTE were permitted by the Sri Lankan government to replace the IPKF. Eventually, the LTTE’s hold on Jaffna and the Jaffna Peninsula was broken by October 1995 by the Chandrika Kumaratunga government. But having driven the LTTE out of the Jaffna peninsula and on to the Mullaitivu area, the Sri Lankan forces let the LTTE off the hook through their attempt to take control of a route between Jaffna and rest of the Northern Province, through the middle of that territory, a strategic blunder which the LTTE exploited to its advantage in a long-drawn-out campaign of resistance.

Briefly then, despite the LTTE’s undoubted proficiency as a guerrilla force, and indeed despite its sophistication as a guerrilla force with international links, its survival owes as much if not more to the follies of its opponents as to its own well-honed skills. There were at least three occasions or periods between 1987 and the present day, when the LTTE could have been decisively defeated. The Indian government saved them in 1987 from the Sri Lankan army; the Premadasa government saved them from the IPKF in its final phase when it seemed intent on delivering a coup de grâce; and the Kumaratunga government deprived itself of an excellent opportunity for a telling defeat of the LTTE in 1995.

After July 1987, negotiations have had little or no effect on the conflict till 2001. In early 1990, it was the LTTE which initiated moves for negotiations with the Premadasa government. Yet discussions took place over fourteen months without any progress at all on substantive issues, indeed without discussing such issues at all. In 1994–95, the initiatives came from the Kumaratunga government. ⁶ For the first time the talks were held in Jaffna itself. The search for practical measures to help solve some of the problems relating to the Tamils have been initiated by Sri Lankan governments, under Premadasa, and later under Kumaratunga. In 1993, a consensus was reached between the government (the UNP) and the principal opposition party (the SLFP) on constitutional and administrative measures for a settlement of the conflict. But the Tamil parties were reluctant to accept it. The LTTE showed no interest. Reaching a consensus between the government (the SLFP-led People’s Alliance) and the principal opposition party (the UNP) proved to be more difficult in 2000, but even if such a consensus had been reached, the LTTE had shown no interest in anything other than a separate state despite all its talk, occasionally, of a federation or even a confederation. The moral of the story, so far as the Sri Lankan case is concerned, is that radicalization of Tamil politics makes the search for a negotiated settlement a much more difficult exercise than it was in the years before the LTTE established its dominance in Tamil politics in Sri Lanka.

Continuity Of Policies

There were three points of continuity between the Kumaratunga government’s policies and those of its predecessors. First, she followed her parents in organizing a left-of-centre coalition in 1994 to face the UNP. After she won power, she extended her left-of-centre coalition (the People’s Alliance which was, in effect, a continuation of her mother’s United Front) to a collation with the JVP in 2004. With this coalition’s victory in the parliamentary election in April 2004 a new left-of-centre coalition with the JVP was established.

The second point of continuity, the attempts of negotiations with the LTTE, was with the UNP governments and Jayewardene and Premadasa.

Third, apart from attempts at negotiations with the LTTE there were other points of continuity in policies between Chandrika Kumaratunga and the UNP under Premadasa and Jayewardene. She repudiated many of the policies associated with her parents in the heyday of their political power and ascendancy in national politics—in language policy, the devolution of power—and finally, and no less decisively, there was a rejection of her parents’ commitment to a recognition of the dominance of the Sri Lanka polity by the Sinhalese-Buddhist majority. And as though to cap it all, the daughter has cast aside her left-wing views on economic policy and enthusiastically adopted liberalization policies which she had once disdainfully dismissed, indeed excoriated, and has even begun to preach the virtues of privatization; she has kept on emphasizing the role of the private sector as the engine of economic growth.