[R-G] Washington’s criminal role in the Sri Lankan state’s anti-Tamil war

[Anthony Fenton]

Washington’s criminal role in the Sri Lankan state’s anti-Tamil war
12 January 2009
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/pers-j12.shtml

The brief interval last week between the US repudiation of the "peace  
process" and the Colombo government's ban on the LTTE exemplifies  
Washington's criminal role—as both instigator and facilitator—in Sri  
Lanka's communal war.

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