Untitled Document

By Paul Harris

Winning the peace through new ideas
As I see it, there is good news and there is bad news today. The good news is that
the battlefield war between the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE is over. That is because the LTTE could not be decisively overcome: neither on the battlefield as a conventional army, in the jungles as a guerrilla force, nor in the towns and cities as a terrorist organisation. As a beneficial result, the crippling burden of large scale death and bereavement and the horrors of war have meantime been removed from the people of this island. The bad news is that, having lost the war, the Sri Lankan state is in grave danger of losing the peace.

The peace process is, to paraphrase the l9th century German military thinker Clausewitz, the continuation of war by other means. It may be less bloody but the battle to save Sri Lanka continues nevertheless. The enormous resources which have been devoted to fighting war now have to be diverted to winning the peace. The government could not beat the LTTE using overpriced bullets and bombs. Now is the time to look at other weapons in the armoury.

I know the government believes that economic initiatives can be used to win over the people of the north and the east. That's fine as far as it goes, but in the de facto State of Tamil Eelam, which is what a large part of this island will become before very long, the LTTE will control economic activity with its own parallel system of regulations, permits and taxes. The trickle down effect for the vast mass of the people will be marginal and their lives and activities will be strictly regulated by the agents of the self-declared President and Prime Minister of Eelam.

Even at this very early stage, just a hundred days or so since the signing of the MoU, the LTTE has already introduced a raft of measures in the east, including an 8% tax on government servants, encouragement to take legal grievances to LTTE courts, a dress code for women and taxes on large numbers of ordinary traders and shopkeepers.

A significant part of the economic benefit due to flow to the north and the east from the government's well intentioned measures will simply be hijacked by the LTTE's considerable organisational talents.

So how do we ensure that the peace process is turned into a resounding victory? In any battle you seek out the weakness of your enemy and exploit it mercilessly. I believe the greatest weakness in the LTTE is its own singleminded dedication. Associated is all the inflexibility and lack of mental agility which goes with taking oneself too seriously. In Mallavi I asked the ostensibly genial LTTE PR front man Daya Master when was Prabhakaran's next cocktail party and could I please have an invitation? He looked totally nonplussed in the face of a modest bit of British humour. Several hours later, he sternly warned me. "It is not good to make fun of us."

In the attempted creation of a one man, one party state of anachronistic rigidity the LTTE will fail to satisfy the innermost spiritual and cultural needs of Tamil people in the north and the east. The collapse of the LTTE will not be brought about by firing bullets or throwing money at them, but by introducing ideas and culture with which the LTTE is unable to cope: a real alternative to dull and inflexible ideology and blind hero worship.

I was delighted to see that the Prime Minister has invited Sir Richard Branson of Virgin entertainment and airlines fame to visit Sri Lanka. The invitation came at London's elite Carlton Club at a meeting arranged by the PM's new Ambassador at Large, the energetic Nirj Deva, formerly Britain's only Sri Lankan Member of Parliament. Branson is one of the brightest and most original thinkers in England who has, in his time, revolutionised the worlds of pop music, entertainment and air travel.
I think the PM could do a lot worse than invite Sir Richard to become Honorary Minister for Fun with Special Responsibility for the North and the East. With his clout Sir Richard could bring Robbie Williams, Elton John, even Paul Macartney, to Sri Lanka. Given such fierce competition the adulation for Comrade Prabha will evaporate as surely as night follows day.

These days there is an NGO for everything. Why not an NGO dedicated to starting up pop groups in every town and village? There are NGOs dedicated to starting radio stations in former war zones and they should be encouraged to come here pronto. The US has planes and ships equipped to broadcast radio and TV programmes to subject peoples: they used them in former Yugoslavia. Every family should get a free wind-up radio that doesn't need electricity (there's an NGO for this as well). Every village should have a TV satellite dish.

The so-called Iron Curtain, which kept the peoples of Eastern Europe the unwilling subjects of communism for so long, terminally melted in the face of more vibrant cultures and the onslaught of new ideas. That is the way to win the peace.

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