Sri Lanka has traditionally been considered a land of hope and sunshine. Because of its stunning beauty and the serenity of its natural environs, it came to be known in history as Serendip, the Island of Refuge. Located at the meeting point of the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka has been at the crossroads of both history and geography. Apart from India, travellers and seafarers from other ancient lands including Greece and Rome, Ethiopia and Arabia, South-East Asia and the Far East have found their way to the country. Fa Hien from China and Buddhaghosha from India were amongst the celebrated Buddhist pilgrims who came to this historic land in ancient times. In a more recent period, colonialists from Europe have left their imprint on its soil. When enormous pressure of work weighed him down during India’s struggle for freedom, it was to Ceylon, as it was then called, that Jawaharlal Nehru decided to holiday for a month with his wife and daughter in 1927.
Like India, every inch of this Emerald Island is steeped in history. Through ages past its interaction with India has been very intimate, intense and close. It is separated from India by a stretch of only 35 km of sea, having been a part of the land mass that traversed millions of years ago from the Antarctic northwards to join Asia where the Himalayas stand now. Sri Lanka is intrinsically connected to the story of Rama as told in the Ramayana and of the Buddha as narrated in Mahavamsa, the great epic of Sri Lanka. Tamils of Sri Lanka claim to belong to the Dravidian race like their brethren in Tamil Nadu while Buddhists of this island nation consider themselves to be of Aryan origin from India’s north. Even Muslims of Sri Lanka have had close kinships in India. Thus, Sri Lanka conjures up images of a past in the hearts and minds of the people of both India and Sri Lanka that goes back two millennia and more.
It is quite natural that such a historic land is marked by rich cultural diversity. Unfortunately, however, instead of celebrating that diversity, Sri Lanka has often been in the eye of ethnic storms that have left tragedy behind.
Well before my arrival in Sri Lanka in 1989, the challenge posed by Tamil militancy had assumed very serious dimensions. To meet this, President J.R. Jayewardene ordered his military chief to stamp out terrorism in the northern and eastern provinces in all its forms. In 1981 the Jaffna Public Library was burnt, destroying its treasure of some 100,000 works regarded by Tamils as the centrepiece of their cultural identity. The brutal suppression of Jaffna Tamils under the emergency and the destruction of the Jaffna library in 1981 rendered the Tamil United Liberation Front’s moderate style of politics under Amirthalingam untenable in the eyes of his own constituents. Members of parliament from TULF declined to take oath for the sovereignty, unity and integrity of Sri Lanka as required under the constitution after their election. President Jayewardene’s tough policy concerning the Sri Lankan Tamils thus proved counterproductive. It gave a fillip to militancy rather than eliminated it. Militancy took deep roots in the northern and eastern provinces of Sri Lanka thereafter.
As Tamil massacres followed and stringent measures were imposed such as cutting off food and medical supplies to the heartland of Sri Lankan Tamils, they took refuge in India in large numbers. India intervened with airdropping of humanitarian supplies in the area only to be branded by the Sri Lankan government as aggressor. As a consequence, relations between the two countries touched a nadir. Ultimately negotiations between President Jayewardene and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi resulted in a peace agreement on 29 July 1987 with the objective of resolving Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict and to take care of India’s security concerns.
The letters exchanged between Jayewardene and Rajiv Gandhi annexed to the agreement provided that Trincomalee and other ports in Sri Lanka would not be made available for military use by any country in a manner prejudicial to India’s interests. Sri Lanka’s agreements with foreign broadcasting organizations were also to be reviewed to ensure that any facilities set up by them in Sri Lanka were used as public broadcasting facilities and not for any military or intelligence services. It was also agreed that the work of restoring and operating the Trincomalee oil tank farm would be undertaken as a joint venture between India and Sri Lanka. As a reciprocal measure India committed itself not to allow its territory to be used by Sri Lankan militant groups for activities prejudicial to the unity and integrity of Sri Lanka. India also undertook to assist in the disarming of Tamil militants.
The most important part of the accord, however, related to the gains for the Tamil community. It provided for a general amnesty to political and other prisoners held by the Sri Lankan government under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and other emergency laws, and rehabilitation of militant Tamil cadres to help their entry into the mainstream. Both countries recognized that each ethnic group had a distinct cultural and linguistic identity which had to be fully nurtured. While underscoring the necessity of strengthening the forces contributing to the unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Sri Lanka, the accord sought to preserve Sri Lanka’s character as a multi-ethnic, multilingual and multi-religious plural society ‘in which all citizens can live in equality, safety and harmony, and prosper and fulfil their aspirations’.
The agreement thus set the direction for Sri Lanka’s evolution as a state belonging to ‘all’ its people which allowed them to promote their identity without let or hindrance. In a reversal of the ‘Sinhala only’ policy, it was specifically recognized that the northern and eastern provinces had been areas of historical habitation of Sri Lankan Tamil-speaking peoples, ‘who had at all times hitherto lived together in this territory with other ethnic groups’. The agreement provided for the merger of these provinces into one single province subject to a subsequent referendum, the constitution of provincial councils through democratic elections, devolution of necessary powers for them to function properly, and recognition of Tamil as an official language on par with Sinhala.
The letters exchanged between the two signatories to the agreement and annexed to it also provided for the induction of an Indian military contingent to implement it if the Sri Lankan head of state deemed that necessary. President Jayewardene invoked that provision resulting in the deployment of an Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka’s north and east with the objective of disarming Tamil militants and guaranteeing the cessation of hostilities between them and the Sri Lankan security forces. It was also to ensure the safety and security of all ethnic communities in that area and peaceful elections to the provincial council of the newly created North Eastern Province. It was to maintain law and order and sustain peace in the province while the government of Sri Lanka undertook to establish a police force for it. The IPKF was endowed with the necessary authority to fulfil those responsibilities. Sri Lanka’s own security forces, which had failed to deliver in the past, were relegated to the barracks for the entire period of IPKF operations.
The Indo-Sri Lankan agreement of 29 July 1987 raised hopes for a settlement of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict to the skies. However, those hopes were dashed to pieces by the LTTE as it turned its back on the agreement since it denied them the right to an independent state of Eelam and to carry arms to achieve that objective. The IPKF’s tenure, conceived of as being of short duration, got extended beyond its first year of operations but the LTTE had not been disarmed. The force’s continued presence in the country thus became an anathema to the Sri Lankans in general and its new president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, in particular.
By the time I arrived in Sri Lanka on 22 April 1989 as India’s high commissioner, the two nations geographically and culturally so close to each other had politically moved wide apart. Jayewardene was no longer in the saddle. President Premadasa had taken over the reins of the country from him at the advent of the year. Both were from the same party, but one had crafted the 1987 agreement; the other was hell-bent to destroy it. The new president regarded the IPKF as a symbol of India’s imperialistic presence in his country and a setback to its sovereignty and he viewed the Tamil problem as a purely domestic one. His government soon joined the LTTE in its strident call for the IPKF’s expeditious withdrawal showing little regard for the sacrifices it had made, including the loss of more than a thousand lives, in defence of Sri Lanka’s interests.
Those representing the Sinhala viewpoint stressed their own links with India, ethnic, religious, cultural and commercial, for the past two millennia and more and the fact that all segments of the Sri Lankan population had equally close bonds with India so that there was no room for India to play favourites with the Tamil population. There was a strong streak of opposition to the accord among the Sinhalas which had come to the fore. The Sinhala marine who struck Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi with the butt of his rifle at a guard of honour in Colombo was a symbol of that opposition. It was evident that there was bitter opposition in Sri Lanka’s radical circles, both Sinhala and Tamil. In addition to the LTTE, the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), the militant Sinhala outfit, was also opposed to it, as also the Sinhala clerics.
Just three weeks after the agreement was signed, President Jayewardene and Prime Minister Premadasa also narrowly escaped death when bombs were thrown at them at a meeting of the parliamentary group of the government. As the parliament’s Speaker felicitated President Jayewardene on his escape at the time, saying, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers who shall soon be in Heaven’, his immediate retort was that ‘Rajiv missed Heaven by a few inches, and I missed it by a few seconds!’
Gradually, anti-agreement riots broke out in several parts of Sri Lanka and the accord which had been welcomed as a triumph for peace in both nations and hailed internationally by no less a person than President Reagan as an act of great statesmanship was in tatters. While it was meant to secure Tamil rights and should have earned their gratitude, their most vocal and potent champion, the LTTE, was opposing it through and through and the militant body was at war with the IPKF. The Indian military contingent was also out of sync with the policy of President Premadasa, who wished to keep India out of any solution of Sri Lanka’s Tamil problem.
Quite early in his administration, Sri Lanka’s new president set his heart on inviting the LTTE for discussions. Owing to the military pressure put by the IPKF on them, the LTTE treated the IPKF as its enemy number one. They would certainly not hesitate to use the new president to obtain the force’s withdrawal before going back to their old ways to achieve full-scale Eelam. The president either failed to read their mind properly or if he did, he was prepared to take the consequences of his talks with them in his stride. The consequences indeed were far-reaching, as time would tell, disastrous to him and disastrous for his country.
President Premadasa perceived himself as the Duthagamani of his age. It was his dream to unite the nation again and be hailed like that legendary hero. He had convinced himself that the IPKF had designs other than its stipulated purpose of disarming the LTTE and therefore viewed with sympathy the JVP’s call as well as that of the LTTE for it to quit. But for that goal, the two militant bodies stood as two opposite poles in Sri Lanka’s communal divide. The JVP was symptomatic of the extremist streak in Sinhala nationalism; the LTTE of its Tamil counterpart. The JVP was fighting for untrammelled Sinhala dominion in Sri Lanka’s unitary state while the LTTE struck at the very root of that idea in order to achieve an independent Tamil state comprising the north and the east of Sri Lanka. The former regarded the IPKF presence as an insult to Sinhala dignity and pride; the latter saw it as a major obstruction to achieving its goal of Tamil Eelam. The only thing common between the two was the hatred of the IPKF and that was the common denominator between them and President Premadasa, too.
The 1987 agreement with India divided the ruling United National Party in Sri Lanka through the middle. The president signing it at his back when he was on foreign tour as prime minister in his cabinet created a gulf between him and his political mentor which did not heal even after his nomination by Jayewardene as UNP’s candidate to succeed him. While JR had passed on the executive presidency to Premadasa, he had passed his political mantle on to another party colleague, Gamini Dissanayake.
In his background and training Gamini was much like Jayewardene, a high-caste Goigama which Premdasa was not. The differences with President Premadasa resulted in a tug of war for power between Gamini and the new president and though Gamini lost the political battle the trail of bitterness between the two groups in the party continued to govern their attitudes towards each other and split the party. It came to an end only when a few years later both of them were consumed one after the other by the violence enveloping the country.
With the passage of time the national mood in Sri Lanka turned palpably against the Indo-Sri Lankan accord and especially against the IPKF’s continued presence. The upbeat sentiment following its signing had disappeared and the two nations had become prisoners of distrust in the face of the acerbic campaign led by President Premadasa for the IPKF’s expeditious return home. With its gains and obligations for each of the three parties involved so amply defined, the accord was a perfect document for resolving Sri Lanka’s chronic ethnic problem but the devil lay in its implementation. The ferocious opposition of the LTTE and the JVP and the internal politics within the UNP made that difficult. Given the UNP’s overwhelming majority, President Jayewardene was able to have it endorsed by the parliament in the teeth of vehement opposition by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party led by Sirimavo Bandaranaike. However, much to JR’s embarrassment, fissures soon appeared in the UNP itself on whether the accord really strengthened Sri Lankan unity or stood in the breach and whether it had treated the two signatories on an equal footing or not. JR’s detractors including Premadasa had felt that it did not. He was bitterly opposed at least to its military clauses. Premadasa did believe in Sinhala-Tamil unity as essential for the country’s progress but he could not endorse the idea of relegating the responsibility to resolve the conflict to India, much less if it meant India’s military ‘intervention’.
President Premadasa also developed an animus against Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, harbouring a feeling that the latter had pushed the agreement down Sri Lanka’s throat which the latter could neither vomit out nor gulp down. That misunderstanding coloured his entire attitude towards the Government of India. His trump card now was that in the year and a half that the IPKF had been in Sri Lanka, it was nowhere near disarming the LTTE and therefore had lost the rationale for its operations on its soil.
Meeting the LTTE challenge indeed was not a cakewalk for the IPKF, which was carrying out its military and administrative tasks on a terrain that was LTTE’s home ground and where the latter was not without popular support. The IPKF had not only driven the Tamil militants into the jungles but also facilitated elections at both national and provincial levels, including that of the new president, in the militancy-infested areas in the north and the east. It was done at the cost of enormous loss of men but Sri Lanka was not ready to acknowledge either their sacrifices or achievements. All the IPKF had earned in return was the label of being an ‘occupation force’.
Sensing the national mood in Sri Lanka, the Government of India decided on a strategy of phased withdrawal of the IPKF with the first withdrawal involving 6,000 troops taking place on 7 June 1988. The process had thus begun well before the new president took charge. Lalith Atulathmudali, Sri Lanka’s minister for national security and deputy minister for defence, confirmed the withdrawal to the Sri Lankan parliament the next day. Subsequently, on 1 January 1989, the Government of India made a formal statement saying it was hopeful of making more withdrawals in consultation with the Sri Lankan government as the situation in the North Eastern Province improved further; as the devolution of powers became effective; as the Indo-Sri Lankan agreement got progressively implemented and as the mischief-making potential of extremist elements opposed to the agreement was reduced. The Indian government’s position on the crucial question of IPKF withdrawals was governed by that statement throughout thereafter. The statement was timed with Premadasa becoming the country’s executive president but it had no impact on him. True to his election pledge, the newly installed president worked relentlessly from day one of his presidency to have the IPKF leave his country without delay.
Matters came to a head soon. The JVP, active in Sri Lanka’s south with its spree of murder and mayhem, charged India with grossly violating Sri Lankan sovereignty through what it called the occupation of its north-east by the IPKF and confinement of Sri Lankan forces there to the barracks. It found the situation humiliating and wanted the ‘alien occupation force’ to leave Sri Lanka without any further delay. It killed the ruling United National Party’s cadres by the hundred for having sold the country to foreigners and was carrying out a ferocious campaign against India. As part of this it called for a total boycott of Indian goods, obstructed their unloading at seaports and assassinated some importers of those goods. President Premadasa had lifted the emergency soon after coming to office in January 1989 and released prisoners of the JVP in the hope that the gesture would mollify the brutal Sinhala outfit and stop its terrorist spree. The gesture went unheeded. Nor was there any dent in the misdemeanours of the LTTE and its venomous campaign against the IPKF. As I arrived in Colombo on 21 June 1989 to assume charge as India’s high commissioner, I saw gruesome signs of militants on the rampage. Dead bodies were hanging from the trees even in the capital. The orgy of violence let loose by both outfits was taking a heavy toll.
Those were grave and rather hopeless times for Sri Lanka. As a first step in his bid to bring the militants to the negotiating table for a resolution of their grievances through ‘consultation, compromise and consensus’, President Premadasa declared a temporary ceasefire on 12 April throughout the country. The IPKF followed suit and decided to observe ceasefire in the north-east where peace and security were their charge. On the other hand, the LTTE responded with an open letter to the president that they on their part would not cease fire until ‘the invading Indian Army’ withdrew from Sri Lanka. Shortly afterwards, however, when Ranjan Wijeratne, foreign minister, invited them formally to a dialogue with the government without conditions, they accepted the invitation through their London office.
The LTTE delegation comprised Anton Balasingham from London and Yogi and Lawrence from the Wanni jungles. Balasingham’s wife Adele also joined the delegation as its secretary. Later Thilakar from LTTE’s Paris office joined. Two Tamil Muslims from the Eastern Province also came to Colombo and joined as LTTE representatives in July. Prabhakaran’s deputy, Mahattya, came to Colombo for talks towards the end of the year but Prabhakaran never did. That was his way of keeping all his options open.
On the Sri Lankan side the president lined up several ministers including A.C.S. Hameed, minister of higher education, leader of his delegation, and Ranjan Wijeratne, minister of foreign affairs and also minister of state for defence; a host of secretaries to the government including those of defence and foreign affairs; and from his own office, his two secretaries, Wijedasa and Weerakoon. The whole impression was of intergovernmental talks rather than a sovereign government talking to a group of rebels. At the end of every session of talks even joint communiqués were issued. The star-studded delegation from the government and the format for the talks served to make the militant body a bit intransigent. However, as the talks proceeded, the LTTE showed its peaceful face to people by declaring a ceasefire and claiming that it covered every citizen of Sri Lanka and every other Tamil group of militants.
There was great excitement in the country about the president’s peace initiative yielding results. The Government of India wished the president of Sri Lanka well so long as the proposed talks with the LTTE did not mean a joint tirade by the Tamil militants and the Sri Lankan government against India and the IPKF. The Government of India also assured the president that the Indian military contingent would be phased out by the end of 1989 so long as Sri Lanka implemented its commitments under the accord. These included, inter alia, the devolution of powers to provinces and guarantees for the safety and security of all the communities in the North Eastern Province.
At my credentials ceremony on 24 April the Sri Lankan president referred to his offer of talks to the LTTE and what he called their quick response a week ago. He said he would strive hard to bring them into the mainstream and into the parliament. All other groups had accepted representation in it except the LTTE and the JVP and he wanted to bring both of them into it. Dialogue alone could achieve that, he said. He came out in my conversation with him as a devout Buddhist and one staunchly devoted to the unity and integrity of the nation but with equal respect for all communities. It is another matter whether he had the right solutions in mind for achieving that objective and whether he succeeded in translating them on the ground. Obviously he did not, for the fires burning then became a conflagration in time and the ethnic conflict continued with no clear solution in sight well into the future. Gradually the question of national sovereignty came to occupy the high ground in Sri Lanka in the context of the IPKF’s presence. Nearly a third of Sri Lanka’s territory comprising the north and the east was seen as having slipped from Sri Lanka’s control into the hands of the IPKF. That image was fuelled daily by the local media, the political parties in Opposition and the militant organizations like the JVP and the LTTE.
The allegation was repeated ad nauseam that with the IPKF placed in charge of the administration and security of the north-east, with Sri Lanka’s armed forces there consigned to the barracks, and with its government deprived of dealing with immigration and customs in the area, the two provinces had moved out of the pale of its authority into the orbit of the hegemonic power to the north. Worse, Varadaraja Perumal, the duly elected chief minister of the newly constituted North Eastern Province, was regarded as India’s protégé who looked to New Delhi for his authority rather than to Colombo. His presence was resented both by the LTTE which treated him as a usurper of its mantle and by the Sri Lankan government which had little control over his actions. The Sri Lankan government headed by President Premadasa resented more strongly than ever the loss of those trappings of sovereignty.
With that mindset India had become the flogging horse for all of Sri Lanka’s ills. Its sacrifices to implement the 1987 accord hailed in the world as a breakthrough for peace and security in the region had failed to earn Sri Lanka’s appreciation. If the Sri Lankan government did not ‘exercise jurisdiction and control in the north-east’ due to the presence of the IPKF as it maintained, its control over the rest of the country was no less fragile thanks to the depredations of the JVP. In the south, district after district had been ‘liberated’ by the JVP from government control and its militants belonging to that organization had been working assiduously to wrest control of Colombo itself from its hands. In the areas under JVP’s control, the writ of the government did not run at all. UNP cadres were murdered day and night by the JVP, the tourist centres emptied of visitors, rail and road transport was embargoed, trade scuttled, pharmacies deprived of medicines and tea houses, tea inventories and tea farms burnt destroying much of Sri Lanka’s export potential. Ships were not allowed to either load or unload their wares even at the Colombo port. There were serious blackouts at JVP’s command in the south and in all administrative matters it was the ‘JVP commander’ in charge who ruled the roost.
In all his work as the country’s helmsman, President Premadasa gave the highest priority to obtaining the prompt departure of the IPKF from Sri Lanka to restore his writ in the north-east. While taking his oath of office in January at the Temple of Buddha’s Tooth Relic in Kandy, he had vowed that that he would not surrender an inch of Sri Lanka’s territory nor a shred of its sovereignty to anyone. He clearly had the IPKF in mind while making that promise.
Bernard Tilakratne, foreign secretary, invited me to the Sri Lankan foreign office in mid-May and showed me the text of a communiqué jointly decided upon at the talks between the government and the LTTE. The communiqué contained a litany of complaints about the IPKF’s behaviour and baseless allegations such as the death of thousands of civilians at its hands. It painted the Indian military contingent with a badly tarred brush, depicting it as an occupation force. Those remarks were attributed to the LTTE in the document but rather sympathetically with the Sri Lankan government shooting from LTTE shoulders to ‘expose’ India’s misdeeds in Sri Lanka.
Notwithstanding our protest, Roopa Wahini, the government-controlled television channel, carried the SLG-LTTE joint communiqué in its entirety, speaking about the IPKF’s alleged crimes from the housetops as it were. Next morning the Sri Lankan print media also had it all over. The same press which in the past had hurled stones at the LTTE as the enemy of the nation now regaled in defending it against its new enemy, the IPKF. As a consequence I personally told President Premadasa in a very friendly but frank conversation that Sri Lanka was forgetting the distinction between friend and foe. He smiled and said: ‘I know what you mean. There will be a time when I will pay my tribute to IPKF. You will see it.’
The historic 1987 accord now appeared to be under greater strain than before. Sri Lanka’s new president had no liking for it; at best he tolerated it but without its military provisions. He did not want to have anything to do with the IPKF. The LTTE and the JVP were deadly opposed to the agreement and even Varadaraja Perumal, his Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front and other groups in his coalition had relinquished support for it in their bid to don the revolutionary mantle again. Leaders of the highest stature in the country like Sirimavo Bandaranaike, leader of the Opposition, were egging the government to recover Sri Lanka’s north and east from the IPKF’s control and send it back home at the earliest. That the IPKF’s premature withdrawal could put the LTTE back in control of those areas absolutely did not matter since the LTTE had started showing its angelic face to the government by agreeing to come to talks with the president and declare a ceasefire.
In the eyes of the new president, the fate of those areas and the Sinhala-Tamil equation were Sri Lanka’s internal affair with which India had little to do. The critics of the accord were emphatic that the so-called ‘Indian intervention’ had to end before the process of reconciliation could commence. The 1987 agreement with India was treated by them unreservedly as an instrument of perpetual Sri Lankan humiliation and therefore worthy of being scrapped soonest possible. The few who still favoured it could not come out openly for fear of LTTE and JVP reprisals.
Even while talks between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government were going on, Samanthurai in district Amparai witnessed Hindu-Muslim riots in May 1989. Amparai had a peculiar demographic position in the North Eastern Province. Nearly 80 per cent of its population consisted of Tamil Muslims, the rest being Tamil Hindus with a sprinkling of Sinhalas here and there. The LTTE had especially treated them with disdain. The Muslims, Tamil-speaking though like the Hindus of the area, were clamouring for a separate status within the newly created province. The accord had taken due note of the fact ‘that Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic and a multilingual plural society consisting, inter alia, of Sinhalese, Tamils, Muslims (Moors) and Burghers’. The accord had also recognized that each ethnic group in Sri Lanka had a distinct cultural and linguistic identity which had to be carefully nurtured.
Notwithstanding those provisions, Samanthurai suffered heavily from communal riots. People were kidnapped and killed, properties looted and homes burnt by both Muslims and Hindus, losing complete sight of the linguistic bond between them. Samanthurai had a small police post which stood idly by as the tragedy unfolded. However, President Premadasa used the IPKF as scapegoat for the failures of the Sri Lankan police and told me that the IPKF must restore law and order there in twenty-four hours, failing which he would bring his army out of the barracks and entrust it with the job. He had thought that he was setting an impossible task but the IPKF picked up the gauntlet and to his amazement delivered. Sri Lanka’s North Eastern Province comprised one-third of Sri Lanka’s area and two-thirds of its sea coast. The president was looking for ways to wrest control of that part from IPKF. The communal violence in Samanthurai, he thought, had given him that possibility but it did not work out that way.
The LTTE and the Sri Lankan government under President Premadasa were strange bedfellows. The LTTE had projected Premadasa in the past as a diehard Buddhist not to be trusted. His Buddhist fervour had won him great accolades in the Sinhalese community. ‘He thinks Sinhala Buddhism, he dreams Sinhala Buddhism, he talks Sinhala Buddhism,’ Harsha Navaratne, a Sarvodaya field director, had said about him. While the president’s reasons for bringing the LTTE to unconditional talks were clear, several questions about its true design and purpose in coming to those talks had remained unanswered. Was the LTTE responding to his pluralistic image in doing so or did it simply want an interregnum of peace to reinforce its strength, having been hit hard by the IPKF? Was it not simply using the peace negotiations as an opportunity to get the IPKF out of the way by cooperating with the government for the time being and once that was achieved, it would return to the jungles for continued warfare for an independent homeland for Sri Lankan Tamils? Whatever its motives might have been, the new president of Sri Lanka was ready to try out the consultative route with them. ‘I am available for any discussion to arrive at constructive solutions,’ he had announced in his inauguration address at Kandy. The future, however, belied the president’s pious hopes. Henceforth all the shots were called by the LTTE and eventually his collusion with them proved his undoing. They won against him both in the battle of wits and in the killing war on the ground.
Premadasa made a stunning announcement on 1 June at a religious ceremony in Battaramulla asking India to withdraw the last IPKF soldier from Sri Lanka by the end of July. That was followed by a formal letter to Rajiv Gandhi making that request. Later he crystallized the D-date for the IPKF’s final withdrawal to 29 July 1989 on its completion of two years in Sri Lanka. Then followed an ultimatum that if the IPKF did not comply, the president as commander-in-chief of Sri Lanka’s armed forces would order the latter to come out of the barracks in the north-east and assume full command to guarantee the region’s security. The ultimatum raised the prospect of a clash between the armed forces of two friendly neighbours.
The president stuck to his guns during a visit of the Indian prime minister’s special envoy, Mr B.G. Deshmukh, his principal secretary, to Colombo with a view to avoid a face-off.
The Indian government did not want a contingency to arise in which our armed forces would run into a clash with those of Sri Lanka. It decided that everything possible should be done to avoid that contingency but that India should keep itself in readiness if such a situation were forced on it. As a result, the families of Indian officials were withdrawn from Sri Lanka, an Indian security contingent was inducted into Colombo to protect the Indian High Commission and the Vienna Convention was invoked further calling upon the government of Sri Lanka to guarantee its security as part of Sri Lanka’s diplomatic responsibilities. Meanwhile, India’s armed forces made preparatory moves to meet every contingency after Sri Lankan aircraft were spotted hovering over the temporary headquarters of the IPKF in Trincomalee.
In the midst of war drums beating, I pitched myself as hard as I could to prevent a military clash taking place between the two countries. My initiatives in the matter had all the blessings and support of our prime minster. I met all concerned in Sri Lanka several times including the foreign minister, Ranjan Wijeratne, who was also minister of state for defence and equally keen not to allow the situation to reach a flashpoint. I also met former president J.R. Jayewardene, who was aghast at the way the situation had developed. Both of them carried our suggestions across to the president for a settlement of the issues involved through negotiations rather than ultimatums. Narasimha Rao, minister of external affairs, obliged by renewing his invitation to Wijeratne to come to New Delhi for talks on the issues involved and Rajiv Gandhi agreed to resume the process of IPKF withdrawals frozen since 1 June if the Sri Lankan president would agree to send his foreign minister for the purpose. The Indian position on the matter was finalized with me sitting at the Colombo end of the hotline and the prime minster and the external affairs minister on the other on the night of 27-28 July.
Happily, President Premadasa endorsed the proposal but only after a stormy session I had with him on 28 July. A serious crisis was averted as the foreign secretary, Bernard Tilakratne, and I signed a joint communiqué in the president’s office chamber that day in his presence, providing for my good friend Ranjan Wijeratne to be in New Delhi the next day. As a result India recommenced the process of IPKF withdrawals. It took a couple of more meetings between Wijeratne and the Indian leadership to have 31 March 1990 fixed as the date for completing that process, much as he would have wanted that done by the end of 1989. The change of guard in India from Rajiv Gandhi to V.P. Singh as prime minister and I.K. Gujral as minister of external affairs in November raised great hopes in Sri Lanka for the advancement of that schedule but with all the will to do that, the new government managed to prepone the departure of the IPKF’s last units from Trincomalee only by a week.
The IPKF finally left Sri Lankan shores on Saturday, 23 March 1989 in the midst of hoary references to its role in Sri Lanka by me and this time also by the Sri Lankan president. He did so both publicly and in a formal letter to Prime Minister V.P. Singh with the Sri Lankan media playing the same tune. I myself left Sri Lanka thereafter in June 1990 to join in New Delhi as secretary, Ministry of External Affairs.
Meanwhile, a determined Wijeratne stamped out the leadership of the Janata Vimukti Peramuna, the JVP Eleven as it was called, but the LTTE acquired new teeth. It’s spree of violence continued taking victims such as Amirthalingam, the leader of TULF, in the midst of reconciliation talks with him in the heart of Colombo. It also committed numerous violations of the ceasefire in the North Eastern Province, and called off talks with the Sri Lankan government as also the ceasefire when it realized that the president was not succeeding in persuading India to withdraw the IPKF forthwith as urged by it. It also assaulted with great force and killed several cadres of the Tamil National Army, a misnomer for the Citizens Volunteer Force, raised with the approval and support of the Sri Lankan government to provide security to the members of the Provincial Council in Trincomalee in the absence of a police force. In the midst of it all the government of Sri Lanka continued to collaborate with the LTTE, allowing it to take control of the North Eastern Province as the IPKF’s units carried out their phased withdrawal. A frustrated Perumal, elected chief minister of the province, declared an independent ‘State of Eelam’ to be remembered in the history of Sri Lankan Tamils as its first architect and was compelled to leave Sri Lanka. He and many CVF cadres ultimately took refuge in India duly disarmed and on promise of shedding their revolutionary role in Sri Lanka completely.
In course of time, President Premadasa, Ranjan Wijeratne, Gamini Dissanayake, and Atulathmudali became victims of the violence there. Rajiv Gandhi, too, became a victim of the LTTE. All of them had been major players on the scene in my time in their attempt to resolve the Sinhala-Tamil equations in Sri Lanka. They had differed in their perspective of the problems involved and the solutions they had sought to bear on them. All of them, however, were dedicated to the goal of preserving Sri Lanka’s unity, integrity and sovereignty, which was anathema to the LTTE. It used them to its advantage so long as it could and then resumed its spree of ‘revolutionary’ violence to realize the objective of an independent state for the Tamils of the island. It kept Sri Lanka, government after government, meandering between war and peace in dealing with its menace and it took the latter nearly two more decades and the loss of several thousand lives on both sides of the ethnic divide to eliminate Prabhakaran and the hard core of the LTTE.
However, the last chapter of this great tragedy might not have been written yet. The events I witnessed highlighted the trauma of this pearl of the Indian Ocean and the fact that Nature’s bounties may be of no avail to a people who seek answers to their problems in blood and gore rather than a sense of brotherhood celebrating their diversity. The Tamils of Sri Lanka have still to receive a fair answer to their demand for equal status with the Sinhala community in terms of political, social, cultural, religious and linguistic rights. That should include their right to administer their majority areas through representative institutions under a formula equally acceptable to Sri Lanka’s Sinhala majority. Only then would Sri Lanka’s nightmare end and hope arise.