Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

Lanka to address Tamil aspirations for regional autonomy. The President and the ruling
party immediately dissociated themselves from the report of the Experts Committee.
Sinhalese nationalist partners of the ruling coalition, the JVP and JHU, harshly
denounced the proposals. Despite this political setback, the APRC proceedings continued
through to 2008 but with little progress in terms of any concrete proposals. The hardcore
Sinhalese nationalist representatives of the APRC appear to believe that neither the
APRC nor the government should make any commitment on the nature and scope of a
political solution until the war against the LTTE is successfully concluded. The
assumption being that once the LTTE is militarily defeated and the Tamil community is
disarmed, the political solution would not require any degree of regional autonomy.
The way in which the Rajapakse administration has re-defined the debate about a
political solution warrants acknowledgement. xxv By 2008, it became quite clear that
President Rajapakse has altered the basic framework within which a negotiated political
solution to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict has hitherto been conceptualized. He has changed
four components of that framework and added two new elements. The first, is about the
constitutional scope of the envisaged political solution. President Rajapakse’s formula is
‘maximum devolution within a unitary state’ as the guiding principle of the political
solution. The limited scope of regional autonomy implied in this formula is minimum
devolution which is a fundamental deviation from the positions held by the previous PA
and UNF governments.
The second is about the basic strategic path to peace in Sri Lanka. The government
appears to believe that a political solution without a military victory over the LTTE will
not provide sustainable and durable peace in Sri Lanka. In the government’s thinking, as
articulated by the President and the government’s political theorists, a military solution,
or a political solution paralleled with a military victory, is more likely to work. This
differs from the argument of previous governments that the LTTE needed to be militarily
weakened in order to persuade its leadership to opt for a political settlement. The
emphasis now is on defeating, rather than weakening, the LTTE.
The third, emanating from the first and the second, concerns the LTTE’s role in a
possible negotiated solution to the ethnic conflict. The government does not seem to
believe, nor does it hope for, any negotiations with the LTTE. The military defeat and the
elimination of the LTTE from the politico-military equation seem to be the government’s
strategic objective in the present phase of the war. Those who pursue the objective of
peace without the LTTE treat the LTTE as the ‘absolute enemy’ of the Sri Lankan state.
The LTTE is seen as the main obstacle to peace in Sri Lanka, and to be removed through
military conquest.
The fourth, concerns the unit of regional autonomy. With the help of the JVP and through
judicial intervention, the government has achieved a goal which no other government
would have dared - the de-merger of the Northern and Eastern provinces. Tamil
nationalists for long held that the merger of the two provinces was a non-negotiable
principle in any political settlement. Acknowledging this, the Indo-Lanka Accord of July
1987 proposed the merger of the two provinces. They were temporarily merged a few
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