With the Sri Lankan armed forces having wiped out the LTTE and brought the war for an independent Eelam to an end, the rebel group’s international relations head Selvaraja Pathmanathan has announced a plan to set up a Provisional Trans-national Government of Tamil Eelam with the support of 800,000 Lankan Tamils living all over the world.
Sri Lanka has laughed it off and one analyst has called it a desperate attempt by the LTTE to rise from its ashes. Though Prabhakaran is dead and along with him the entire leadership, there are an estimated 2,000 rudderless LTTE cadres with arms, according to intelligence reports, and they can pose a challenge in future if they have a political platform to fight on. So however fanciful the virtual Eelam concept may look, it deserves a closer examination.
Mr Pathmanathan has refused to call it a government in exile for such a regime will require a host country. But the aim is to mobilize international support so that this transnational setup can metamorphose into a government in exile in time.
Mr Pathmanathan has set up a committee of experts under lawyer Visvanathan Rudrakumar to structure such a government.
It will hold talks with other groups holding similar views on Tamil nationalism, homeland and right to self-determination for the Tamil people of Sri Lanka on working out a common plan of action
Mr Pathmanathan has said such a government is necessary to articulate the aspirations of the Tamil people, as reflected in the 1976 Vaddukottai resolution, the 1985 Thimpu declaration and the LTTE’s 2003 Interim Self-Governing Authority Proposal, in the world fora as the Tamil people
cannot fight for these rights in their homeland “now under occupation by the Sri Lankan armed forces”.
He has said the committee will also work out an action plan for the people living in “Tamil homeland”, taking into consideration the ground realities there. There should be a linkage between these two plans, he has explained.
Mr Rudrakumar says:” It is a well accepted proposition in international law that the legal claim to establish a government in exile arises the more readily when the exclusion of its political leaders is achieved through acts contrary to principles of ius cogens, such as the unlawful use of force, abductions with a view to torture, genocide, war crimes, detention in internment camps or “open prisons,” the rape of women and the kidnapping of children.”
He has already said the party will work with the Tamil National Alliance and try to reach out to the Muslim MPs as” the diversity between “Tamil and Muslim regions” has been used “as a threat in the past against realisation of the Tamils’ right to self-determination”.
The committee’s plans include election of a constituent assembly to draft a new Constitution, ensure the return of the 300,000 displaced Tamils to their homes and bring to justice “those who have committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
The Sri Lankan Government is not far wrong in saying these leaders are “hallucinating”. For the very idea of a transnational government is based on a grand illusion that there existed an independent Tamil Eelam government which Sri Lanka ousted from power by force. The de facto
control exercised by the LTTE in three of the eight Tamil-majority districts in northern Sri Lanka was sustained all these years to create this illusion. It now lies in ruins with the LTTE crushed before it could realise its dream of an independent Eelam and the Sri Lankan government in firm control of the entire country.
When many countries were subjected to aggression and occupation during the Second World War, the international community recognized governments in exile rather than the puppet regimes that controlled territories. In other words, the normal rule of recognizing a government if it is in effective control does not apply when the country is under foreign military occupation. This rationale was never applied to Sri Lanka despite the LTTE’s 30-year armed struggle based on ethno-nationalism. In other words, no country was willing to support the independent Eelam cause.
The question of recognizing an Eelam nation never arose because it was never born.
Another criterion for recognition is the representative character of such governments in exile, even if euphemistically called transnational governments. The LTTE might have claimed it was the sole representative of the Tamils. But its popularity was never tested in any election. Even
granting that the LTTE can stake claim for such a support when dictatorial regimes are recognised in the world, the fact remains that it lost its legitimacy in the eyes of the world long before it lost the war, with some 31 countries listing it as a banned terrorist outfit.
The LTTE, or the remnants surviving with the support of the diaspora, can cite human rights violation by the Sri Lankan forces to justify its claim to legitimacy. The only loose parallel is what happened in Myanmar.
Despite massive human rights violation in Myanmar (Burma) by the military junta, no state has recognised the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma in exile which was formed by elected parliamentary representatives on Dec 18,1990 after the junta refused to hand over power to Aung sang Suu Kyi whose National League for Democracy won a sweeping victory in the May 1990 national elections.
The LTTE never participated in any election in Sri Lanka; it never recognised Colombo’s authority over “Tamil homeland”, though it allowed its proxies like the Tamil National Alliance to contest and superimposed its own administrative structure on existing government apparatus in territories under its control and made government servants drawing salaries from the treasuries to serve two masters.
The most ironic part is Selvaraja Pathmanathan’s authority itself is under question. There is a power struggle within the LTTE or what is left of it outside Sri Lanka. While Mr Pathmanathan, in recognition of current reality that no one can take the place of Prabhakaran to carry on an armed struggle, has sued for a peaceful, democratic campaign, the intelligence wing does not recognise him and maybe is harbouring a nebulous idea to revive an armed struggle at a future date as the LTTE’s war chest is still intact.
Another parallel being drawn is the creation of Bangladesh through secession of the Bengali-speaking east Pakistan from the Urdu-speaking West, brought about by Indian armed intervention after Gen Yahya Khan refused to accept the election of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the elected leader of East Pakistan.
Though the Tamils claim the north and east as their traditional homeland, authority was centralised in Colombo until the 1987 Indo-Sri Lanka agreement which led to the creation of provincial councils all over the country, including the north-east.
True, the temporarily merged north-eastern provincial council had an elected government headed by Mr Varadaraja Perumal of the EPRLF. The point was that the elected members took an oath of allegiance to the Sri Lankan constitution. Anyway, the council collapsed the moment IPKF, its prop, left the country. Mr Perumal himself fled to India along with departing Indian soldiers in March 1990 after getting the council pass a resolution, declaring an absurd “conditional unilateral declaration of independence”, something as unheard of in the annals of history as the transnational Government the LTTE is talking about now.
The LTTE can claim that Eelam was the demand of the Tamil people as reflected in the Vaddukottai resolution on the basis of which the TULF won 17 seats from the north and east in 1977 and, thanks to the decimation of the SLFP, emerged as the main opposition. The struggle turned militant only because the boys, as they were then called, felt TULF leader A Amirthalingam abandoned the goal of Eelam after he got the Cabinet-rank post of Leader of the Oppposition. It is a different matter that after the 1983 pogrom, the TULF MPs refused to take oath under the Sixth amendment and forfeited their seats.
As Mr Pathmanathan put it colourfully after announcing the death of Prabhakaran, the LTTE guns have fallen silent. With that the articulate Tamils have lost their voice.
The million dollar question is whether Mr Pathmanathan can forge unity among Tamil parties, a daunting task considering that Prabhakaran stifled dissent by systematically eliminating rivals, militant and moderates.
- Asian Tribune -
