Thoughts from London

Can't you see the threat dear Professor
Professor Gamini Lakshman Peiris, minister for this, that and the other, has spent most of his academic life teaching lessons to his students and anybody else who would care to listen to him.

At least in his political life one hoped that he would try to teach himself some lessons drawn from the experience of others, past and present. If he had been following the Hutton Inquiry now on in London probing the death of British scientist Dr. David Kelly, a weapons expert with considerable experience in Iraq, he might have drawn some interesting inferences.

If however, he has been too busy like some of his ministerial colleagues placating the LTTE to have paid attention to what is emanating from the Hutton Inquiry, he should have informed himself of some of the damning evidence during his stay in London last week.

If he has been otherwise occupied lecturing assorted groups here to have followed the proceedings, it is still not too late to inform himself of what has occurred so far. If he is clever enough (he no doubt is, in a theoretical sort of way) and honest enough to concede, he would doubtless see the unmistakable parallels between the contretemps facing the Tony Blair government and the Ranil Wickremesinghe administration.

The announcement of a judicial inquiry under Lord Hutton to investigate Dr. Kelly's suicide was forced upon Tony Blair by public anger that the government mishandled or deliberately manoeuvered Dr. Kelly's name into the public domain as the source for some media reports.

The larger question, however, hovered ominously in the background. Did Blair mislead parliament and the country by exaggerating the threat from Iraq to British security in order to invade that country and become President Bush's darling?

It is a fascinating issue because most people believed that the war was unjustified and unlawful and Tony Blair joined Bush to satisfy his vanity as a great war- time leader determined to eliminate evil from the world.

To satisfy this messianic complex, Blair and his partners in the crime of hyperbole, provided the public with what he called intelligence evidence that was highly bloated to justify war.

Evidence emerging at the Hutton inquiry increasingly points to the fact that there was disquiet in sections of the intelligence community and among some security analysts that 'intelligence' was being 'hardened' and presented as definitive thus serving political purposes.

So it was a case of intelligence being manipulated and the views of experts in the field ignored or minimised for political ends. Isn't a similar thing happening in Sri Lanka, only in reverse? Since the Wickremesinghe government committed itself to ending the conflict and achieving peace everything and every word is subsumed for that purpose.

No sensible person will object to bringing the conflict to an end, unless he was a merchant of death fattening himself on filthy lucre earned by selling arms whether they were weapons of mass destruction or those that blow up people from here to eternity.
Most people- let’s not say all for the sake of accuracy- desire peace after decades of intractable war.

But here is the difference. The UNF government, because it has staked its future on achieving a peaceful end, finds itself a hostage of the LTTE which knows that the UNF's political future depends on it. So it is exploiting this weakness skilfully, undermining the authority of the government in numerous ways.

Since Wickremesinghe and his government are inexorably tied to the idea that the peace process has brought momentary respite to the armed conflict between the State and the LTTE, the Tiger leadership will eventually reach a negotiated political settlement.

Based on this assumption-a dubious one at that- it seems to strive for peace at any cost. And so it relents every time the Tigers growl, it catches pneumonia each time Prabhakaran or some other prominent Tiger sneezes.

The dangers inherent in such servility seem to escape the government leadership. It is deliberately minimising the actions of the Tigers in the hope of pleasing the LTTE and so misleading the public.

The increasing Tiger military build up in and around Trincomalee is a case in point. Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and Defence Minister Tilak Marapana were reportedly alerted to this dangerous development in April and June this year, according to Laknet quoting a letter from Navy Commander Admiral Sandagiri to ITN.

What has the government done about it? This is surely a question that the Sri Lanka public would expect a clear answer to in view of the fact that Trincomalee is not only a vital naval base but also the lifeline for some 40,000 troops in the Jaffna peninsula.

For whatever reason President Chandrika Kumaratunga as commander-in-chief of the armed forces ordered a briefing on the security situation in the Trincomalee area, the navy and army provided an assessment. It emerged that the LTTE has established or upgraded about 12 camps or bases since the MoU was signed 20 months ago.
Here is the parallel between the Blair government and the one in Sri Lanka.
The Blair government took the intelligence and blew it up so that the threat to the UK from Saddam appeared more real and imminent.

The Colombo government is taking the intelligence gathered by people who should know the dangers and consciously reducing a real and developing threat into a political parlour game.

The Blair government looked at intelligence through the telescope to make the threat appear bigger. The Wickremesinghe government is looking at the LTTE's military build up and its refusal to quit the Manirasakulam camp despite the verdict of the Monitoring Mission, through the wrong end of the telescope making the LTTE actions look distant and small.

When Defence Minister Tilak Marapana was questioned about this camp in an interview by a Sunday newspaper he was quoted as saying: "I don't know why people and the media are making such a big issue out of this……..".

If-and some might say when- Eelam War IV breaks out it will be too late for him to edify himself. But then, he will be in Colombo. It is those out there in the field who will have to bear the brunt of such complacency and ignorance.

As for Minister Peiris he told a news conference nearly two weeks back that the dozen or so camps mentioned existed before the MoU or were not in government-controlled areas.How gratifying!

The question, professor, is not in whose territory they are located but whether they constitute a new and dangerous threat to Sri Lanka's security and territorial integrity.
We rest for a reply.

Back to Columns