From: Biniam Haile \(SWE\) (eritrea.lave@comhem.se)
Date: Tue Jan 13 2009 - 20:01:06 EST
Washington’s criminal role in the Sri Lankan state’s anti-Tamil war
by Keith Jones
Global Research, January 13, 2009
Last Wednesday, the US embassy in Colombo issued a statement that
welcomed the Sri Lankan state's recent victories in the war with the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and urged Sri Lanka's government
and military to press forward with the annihilation of the LTTE. The key
passage in the statement read: "The United States does not advocate that
the Government of Sri Lanka negotiate with the LTTE, a group designated
by America as a Foreign Terrorist Organization since 1997."
Within hours of Washington formally renouncing its support for a
negotiated settlement to the 25 year-old civil war, the Sri Lankan
government banned the LTTE.
The Sri Lankan state has now arrogated to itself the power to jail for
up to 20 years those it accuses of "supporting" the LTTE. Since resuming
offensive operations against the organization in 2006, the government
and military have leveled this charge against virtually anyone opposed
to the war or even the government's right-wing socio-economic policies,
from socialists and striking workers to the Tamil National Alliance, a
20-strong parliamentary grouping that considers the LTTE the only
legitimate representative of the Tamils in negotiations with the
government.
Colombo had previously outlawed the organization, but lifted the ban in
2002 when a truce was declared and the Sri Lankan state and LTTE agreed
to enter into peace talks.
The brief interval between the US's repudiation of the "peace process"
and the Sri Lankan government's ban on the LTTE exemplifies Washington's
criminal role—as both instigator and facilitator—in the communal war
mounted by Sri Lanka's Sinhalese bourgeois elite.
Washington encouraged Colombo to resume the civil war in 2006 and has
aided and abetted every step of the Sri Lankan military's bloody
advance. The new-found prowess of the Sri Lanka military is due almost
entirely to the support it has received from Washington directly or from
key US allies.
The Pentagon admits to having provided counter-insurgency training to
Sri Lankan troops, as well as intelligence and "non-lethal" weapons. The
latter includes sophisticated maritime radar equipment that has enabled
Colombo to disrupt key LTTE supply routes from India. Meanwhile, Israel
and Pakistan, whose governments and militaries are close US partners,
have provided the Sri Lankan military with an expanded and
technologically-enhanced arsenal.
US pressure was critical in getting Canada, the states of the European
Union, and other countries to proscribe the LTTE. These bans have
deprived the LTTE of financial support from the hundreds of thousands of
Tamils chased from their island homes by the civil war.
In January 2006—only weeks after a new government had come to power in
Colombo that denounced previous, supposedly excessive concessions to the
LTTE—then US ambassador, Jeffrey Lunstead, warned the LTTE that if it
did not quickly agree to a settlement on Colombo's terms it would face
"a stronger, more capable and more determined Sri Lankan military."
To make the point unmistakably clear, Lunstead added: "Through our
military training and assistance programs, including efforts to help
with counter-terrorism initiatives and block illegal financial
transactions, we are helping to shape the ability of the Sri Lankan
government to protect its people and defend its interests."
The quid pro quo for this support has been an Access and Cross Servicing
Agreement, signed in March 2007, that allows US warships and aircraft to
use facilities in Sri Lanka.
Last Wednesday's US embassy statement joined Washington with the
Sinhalese establishment in exalting the "liberation" of Kilinochchi, the
city that for a decade had served as the capital of the LTTE-controlled
enclave in parts of the island's north and east.
The reality is that the Sri Lankan military offensive, which had been
spearheaded by indiscriminate aerial bombing and artillery barrages,
produced a humanitarian disaster. Some 300,000 have been rendered
refugees. Many of them now face the threat of hunger and disease because
the Sri Lanka government, having ordered all aid workers to leave the
LTTE-controlled areas in September, has systematically blocked basic
relief supplies.
Human Rights Watch, an organization hostile to the LTTE, has condemned
Sri Lankan authorities, for detaining and to this day holding in
concentration camps "almost all" the ethnic Tamil civilians it has
"liberated" since initiating its offensive in the Wanni region ten
months ago.
As with the Israeli government's onslaught against Gaza, Washington and
the Western media systematically distort the history of Sri Lanka's
civil war, denouncing the victims of oppression as aggressors and
terrorists, while cynically excusing, indeed celebrating, state
terrorism aimed at keeping a people in subjugation.
It is not a justification of the petty bourgeois nationalist politics of
the LTTE to recognize that the Sri Lankan civil war was the outcome of
the Sinhala bourgeoisie's decades' long and ever-escalating oppression
of the island's Tamil minority and that the war has been waged by
successive governments with the aim of entrenching the power and
privileges of the Sinhala elite.
Unable to provide any progressive solution to the legacy of backwardness
bequeathed by colonialism and continuing imperialist domination, the
Sinhala bourgeoisie, from the very birth of the Sri Lankan state, has
whipped up anti-Tamil chauvinism to split the working class and develop
a social base for its rule.
At independence in 1948, the Sinhala bourgeoisie stripped the
Tamil-speaking plantation workers, the largest and one of the most
militant sections of the working class, of their citizenship rights.
Less than a decade later, Sinhalese was declared the state's sole
official language. In the 1970s, Buddhism was proclaimed the state
religion—the Tamils are Hindus, Christians and Muslims—and
discriminatory quotas were introduced to limit Tamils' access to
universities. In 1983, three years after smashing a general strike that
challenged its turn to a neo-liberal, export-led growth strategy, the
Sri Lankan government whipped up pogroms against the Tamil minority.
Similarly, it was the Sri Lankan state that took the initiative in 2006
to re-launch the civil war, having, with Washington's ample aid, used
the "peace process" to rearm. The mindset of the Sinhala establishment
was well-illustrated by an interview that Army Commander Lieutenant
General Sarath Fonseka gave to a Canadian newspaper last September. "I
strongly believe," declared Fonseka, "that this country belongs to the
Sinhalese. We being the majority of the country, 75 percent, we will
never give in and we have the right to protect this country. They [the
minorities] can live in this country with us. But they must not try to,
under the pretext of being a minority, demand undue things."
By any measure, the 25 year-long Sri Lankan civil war has been a
disaster for the people of Sri Lanka—Sinhalese and Tamil alike. More
than 70,000 people have been killed in a county of just 19 million. As
many as 800,000 Tamils have fled the island and another half million
have been internally displaced, meaning that a third of the total Tamil
population has been uprooted from their homes. The island's economic
development has been set back by decades due to the devastation wrought
by the war and the billions squandered on prosecuting it. The military
now consumes 17 percent of the national budget.
The war has been invoked to demand round-after-round of sacrifices from
the working class and justify the suppression of democratic rights.
Disappearances and political assassinations are routine. Parliament has
increasingly become a façade behind which a small cabal of
politicians—the Rajapakse family and its cronies—and the military rule
the country.
In the aftermath of the Sri Lankan state's "historic" victory in
Kilinochchi, President Mahinda Rajapakse has bluntly warned the
population it will have to make further "sacrifices." Furthermore, the
government has imposed a sweeping ban on the LTTE, and the editor of a
prominent opposition newspaper has been assassinated.
Washington's brazen support for a war of extermination against the LTTE,
an organization that emerged as a mass movement in response to the
communal persecution of the Tamil people by the Sri Lankan state, is a
further chilling example of the US elite's embrace of war and reaction
across the globe.
The international working class must oppose Washington's and Colombo's
drive to eradicate the LTTE, aimed as it is at strengthening the
reactionary Sri Lankan state and perpetuating the oppression of the
Tamils and of the working class. To do so implies no support for the
politics of the LTTE.
The LTTE, which represents the interests of the Tamil elite, has sought
to carve out a capitalist nation-state, by appealing for the support of
India, the US and other great-powers. It is organically incapable of
making an appeal to the working class in Sri Lanka and
internationally—the only force whose class interests lie in ending the
war, overthrowing the Sri Lankan bourgeois state, and ensuring the
democratic rights of the Tamil population, and which has the social
power to do so.
It is for this international socialist perspective that the Socialist
Equality Party of Sri Lanka fights. In a statement announcing that it is
contesting coming provincial council elections, the SEP (Sri Lanka)
declared: "In opposition to all other political parties, the SEP
candidates will emphatically oppose the war being waged by President
Mahinda Rajapakse and his government against the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal
of all troops from the North and East."
"This is not a war of liberation or a war against terrorism, but a war
to entrench the power and privileges of the Sinhala ruling elite over
the working class as a whole—Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim alike. The SEP
calls on all workers to decisively reject the divisive poison of
communal politics and to unify in a struggle for their common class
interests on the basis of a socialism program."
The SEP statement went on to declare, "The war in Sri Lanka is just the
sharpest example of the incapacity of the capitalist class throughout
the region to resolve the most basic democratic and national tasks. For
decades, religious, ethnic and language differences have been exploited
to divide the working class and buttress bourgeois rule, creating a
disaster for tens of millions of ordinary people. Once again, India and
Pakistan are beating the drums of war in the wake of the Mumbai
atrocity. By taking a stand against ethnic and religious communalism and
militarism, workers in Sri Lanka will show the road forward for the
working class throughout South Asia."
Keith Jones is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global
Research Articles by Keith Jones