The fine balancing act needed in Geneva

Sunday Essay by Ajith Samaranayake

A sudden rash has broken out on the face of our free press. Sunday writers coyly taking cover behind freshly-minted pseudonyms are being paraded across it in the ingenuous guise of experts on conflict resolution military pundits and political oracles. There is a common if self-evidently contradictory theme to their chorus. The Government's negotiating team for the Geneva talks are inexperienced, they chirp, but when it returns it must not be seen to have been second to the LTTE. So already these self-styled pontiffs have posted the Government a tall order. Having summarily branded the negotiating team as green horns they yet expect sensational results from Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva and his merry men.

A curious characteristic of this media volubility is that it is strictly confined to times when non-UNP governments are in office. Nary a squeak escaped these pundits when a team of lawyers with no background in politics was packed off to Thimpu for the first-ever talks with the LTTE. Only some sullen noises were made when the LTTE sojourning at the Hilton was locked in talks with the Premadasa regime. When Prof. G. L. Peiris and Mr. Milinda Moragoda parleyed with the Tigers they were treated as the collective acme of wisdom. But Nimal Siripala and his team are fair game to our media wise-acres.

So does any Cabinet Minister whether green or blue spring up suddenly full-blown as a seasoned negotiator? Does he imbibe the skills of bargaining with his mother's milk? Does he fall from the skies armed with all the requisite skills? Conversely do those pundits who have scuffed at the JVP's comrades listening to lectures from the hated Americans expect the Marxists to live forever in hermetically-sealed compartments? Do they nurse the illusion that Marxism ceased with Stalinism?

So like any other negotiator Nimal Siripala de Silva or his colleagues have not fallen from the skies brandishing bargaining skills. However Minister de Silva does have an experience of an encounter with the LTTE which he is unlikely to forget. As Minister of Housing and Construction in the first Chandrika Kumaratunga administration, he was in Jaffna to open an outlet of the Building Materials Corporation when a bomb exploded killing an official Ranjith Godamuduna. The Minister himself was injured and took some time to recover and was said to be prone to nightmares for some time after. Perhaps it will be a chastening experience for the LTTE to sit across the table from, one of their few failed targets.

Against this supposedly pitiable caricature of green horn negotiators whom do these media pundits set? Why the awesome figure of the sagacious Mr. Balasingham of course. There may be some trifling doubt about Mr. Balasingham's doctorate in psychiatry but these media oracles are in no doubt that Anton Balasingham Stanislaus (as he was known in a different incarnation) is the wise old owl who will run rings round the Government team. He may be wily, slimy and even wicked but a note of awe creeps into their collective voice when they invoke his name.

But neither did Mr. Balasingham spring up full-blown as a negotiator from the head of Prabhakaran in the manner of some ancient emanation from the head of a deity as found in the old mythologies. In his earlier avatar of Stanislaus he was a journalist at the Virakesari and a translator at the British High Commission who is still remembered by some old friends as an ordinary middle-class Tamil living and working in Colombo. As an employee of the British mission he became entitled to British citizenship and settled down in old Blighty but when his wife died he brought her body to Colombo for the funeral. For A. B. Stanislaus then Sri Lanka was still home.

While not underestimating Mr. Balasingham's intellectual skills and his flair for sophistry we would like to suggest that the reason for the advantages and successes which the LTTE has so far enjoyed in the negotiating process has to be sought elsewhere.

The reason is that the LTTE has occupied the moral high ground hitherto in relation to the Sri Lanka Government. It has succeeded in projecting the Tamil people as the under dogs, the victims of state oppression weighed down by Sinhala majoritarianism, a picture incidentally which has more than an element of truth about it. The LTTE's appeal is to the world's emotions and against this appeal clever legal arguments or politico-historical exercises on the part of Government delegates can have little effect and cut little ice.

In such a context exhortations to go for the LTTE's jugular or unmask its moralistic pretensions too can not be very helpful. There is a general feeling that given the fact that the JVP and the JHU support the Government the delegation should go all out to turn the tables on the Tigers.

Such exhortations emanate both from the Government's supporters as well as those who would like egg on its face. This is why the Government delegation should strike a fine balance in Geneva. Given the Sri Lankan State's history of a majoritarian ideology (disenfranchisement of the Indian vote, Sinhala only, state-aided colonisation, standardisation of university entrance marks, attacks on Tamil people and property) the Government delegation can not afford a self-righteous stance accusing the LTTE of all the violence and mayhem.

However, the Government can seek to capture some of the moral high ground by demonstrating how the LTTE which was once perceived by the west as the under dogs has now become transformed into an oppressive instrument itself with a flagrant record of violating human rights and democratic norms (gratuitous violence against civilians, the induction of child soldiers, intolerance of opposition).

The essence of the trick should be this fine balancing act between the proclivity towards self-righteousness and dispassionate irrefutable logic. The Government delegation should not be seen as seeking to bury the embarrassing anti-Tamil past of the state at the same time as not being reluctant to make the most of the positive gestures towards a negotiated peace which it has made to the LTTE in the recent past.

To take a gung-ho attitude towards the LTTE would be to unconsciously buttress the view of a monstrous Sinhala state which the LTTE has been assiduously cultivating in the international eye. However, on the other hand the Government need not be self-conscious either about propagating its positive achievements while refraining from projecting any image of lily-white rectitude. If Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva and his colleagues can arrive at such an intermediate position there is no reason to be afraid of the gruff Mr. Balasingham.
