Indo-Lanka Accord solved nothing

While national security and the 13th Amendment have not come into focus in Sri Lanka’s current election campaign – notably in the Opposition’s - serious concerns over both issues were expressed at the plenary sessions of 12th International Sri Lanka Studies Conference held recently at the in Mahaweli Centre, Colombo.

The Royal Asiatic Security of Sri Lanka (RASSL) organized the three-day conference the main theme of which was 'Sri Lanka after the war: Prevention of recurrence, reaching for prosperity.'

Several speakers who presented papers examined India’s role and its impact on Sri Lanka’s future in the wake of the Tamil National Alliance in its election manifesto trying to sell old wine in new bottles: (1) Merger of the North and the East and the power sharing arrangement to this unit. (2) Devolving power over land, finances, police powers and socio-economic development. (3) Power to attract foreign investments without interference from the Central Bank or the National Treasury and (4) a federal political solution with power for self-determination all of which is LTTE-style Tamil separatism with a new face.

While an Indian Speaker Chandrakant Yatanoor of the Political Science Department. Gulbarga University, Karnataka expressed India’s view that Delhi sees an urgent need for the devolution process to start, several Sri Lankan speakers did not necessarily share his sentiments on Indo-Lanka relations,

Dr. Piyasena Dissanayake, Senior Lecturer, Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies said that despite the existence of SAARC for the last several years, tension between India, the region’s pivotal power, and her neighbours have not decreased.

He was speaking on ‘The impact of India’s big power obsession on the South Asia State System.’

“It is undeniable that there is a lurking suspicion in India’s neighbours that the former has hegemonistic designs detrimental to the latter’s sovereignty and independence as confirmed by the Indian involvement in Sri Lanka in the 1980s and the Indian economic blockade against Nepal”

Dr. Dissanayake noted that in Sri Lanka’s case India trained, armed and funded all the separatist groups in an act of proxy invasion. Further, he recalled that Sikkim once a semi-independent state has been fully absorbed into the Indian Union.

According to him, there is no gainsaying the fact that the recent Indian economic and foreign policies bear out her aspirations for major power status. The U.S. and the former Soviet Union by turning a blind eye to India’s provocative actions in Sri Lanka and Nepal had conceded South Asia as India’s legitimate sphere of influence

“Thus India is increasingly looked upon by her South Asian neighbours as a threat to peace and security in South Asia,” he concluded.

Neville Ladduwahetty of the RASSL presenting his paper on the ‘The illegality of the Indian-imposed 13th Amendment’ recalled that the Indo-Lanka Accord compelled the Sri Lankan Government to transform the structure of the State from District to Province and create a Tamil majority political unit with devolved powers consisting of the Northern and Eastern Provinces.

Although these provisions had been incorporated as the 13thAmendment to Sri Lanka’s Constitution and certified on July 14, 1987, a careful study of it after a lapse of 22 years have revealed strong grounds to challenge the legality of the 13th Amendment on two counts, according to Ladduwahetty.

The first count, he noted, is that the Supreme Court consisting of nine judges as a body did not give a collective ‘determination’ as to whether the 13th Amendment Bill “required approval by the people at a referendum” as required by Article (a) of the Constitution.

The second, he observed, is due to the failure of the then Parliament to appreciate that the provisions in the 13th Amendment necessitated the requirement of a referendum. This caused Parliament to delete the procedural requirement of a referendum without first revising the provisions of the Bill.

These two counts should be the grounds for a Court to declare the 13the Amendment illegal, he stressed.

Former Deputy Inspector General of Police Gamini Gunawardena said that the Indo-Lanka Agreement lacked the people’s consent and therefore had no legitimacy.

“Consent obtained under duress is not consent”

His presentation was ‘Is the 13th Amendment valid any longer?’

He drew attention to the fact that two of the parties to the Indo-Lanka Agreement India and the LTTE had reneged on key matters and therefore the agreement was no longer valid. While Sri Lanka went ahead and transformed the structure of the State and merged the North and East in accordance with the agreement, India failed to disarm the Tigers. And the latter violated the agreement within a few months of the signing.

Furthermore, 22 years of experience of Provincial Councils has shown that far from sharing power or devolution, the system had distanced the people from the administration further by an additional barrier creating a greater level of corruption and waste.

“All this was done to appease the Tigers and attract them to the path of peace. The present situation is that the Tigers are no more. They were vanquished in war peace has been restored. Now to appease whom is anyone insisting that the13th Amendment that nobody wanted should be implemented in full? What problems will it solve now?”

RASSL President Dr. Susantha Goonatilake in his presentation said that the so-called traditional homelands were a major plant of all the separatist movements supported by Indians. His presentation was titled, ‘Foreign-funded NGOs constructing a fictional history; questioning sovereignty, welcoming foreign intervention.’

According to Dr. Goonatilake, in the “Traditional homelands of the Tamils” theory its proponents were helped by many foreign-funded NGOs and individuals who took on the role of propagandist for the fiction, both within and outside Sri Lanka, questioning Sri Lankan sovereignty and welcoming foreign intervention.

“Among the NGOs in these different exercises were the International Commission of Jurists, the National Peace Council, Inter-Religious Peace Foundation, International Alert, National Christian Council, Sarvodaya Movement for Inter-Racial Justice and Equality, Law and Society Trust, International Centre for Ethnic Studies, The Social Scientists Association, the Civil Eights Movement, the Berghof Foundation and the Marga Institute. Some of these groups, according to Dr. Goonatilake had infiltrated the defence establishment and the university structure – especially through ‘peace studies’.”

With the removal of the LTTE these groups and individuals would form an ideological reservoir for separatist fiction, he warned. Therefore the most effective way to counteract this, the RASSL President stressed, was to adopt the measures taken after World War II for the de-Nazification of Germany which the Western Allies applied to the entire ideological apparatus of the Nazis.

Former Editor Sunday Observer H.L.D. Mahindapala whose paper was read by Ramani Samarasinghe, noted that the denigration of the Sinhala Buddhist has been a huge institutionalized industry in academic, NGO, Christian and pro-separatist lobbies. This conglomerate of lobbies, according to the paper, has been merely recycling the political agenda of the Vadukkodai Resolution of 1976 which laid down the parameters of their separatist goals.

The main target of the resolution was to demonize Sri Lanka’s South as the enemies of the Tamils and endorse violence to achieve their separatist objective.

Lieutenant-Colonel (Retd) Anil Amarasekara, former Commanding Officer of the 2nd Infantry Battalion of the Vijayabahu Infantry Regiment from 1990 to 1992 and the Officer Commanding Troops at Anuradhapura in 1995 presented a paper on ‘Human conflict with relation to land acquisition.’

In his presentation he warned the government to exercise extreme caution in implementing resettlement of people in the North. In this context he recalled that before the LTTE took control of the Northern Province, an Army Task Force for Illicit Immigration (TAFII) was in operation to prevent illicit immigration from Tamil Nadu. But since the State lost control of the province 30 years ago there was no way of knowing how many people from Tamil Nadu had illegally entered the island from South India.

Asked Lt. Col. Amarasekera:

“How then is the government going to establish who is a citizen and who is not when resettling internally displaced people in the Northern Province? I am made to understand that the accepted procedure for those who have lost their National Identity Cards is to obtain an affidavit from the Grama Niladari confirming residency in his division. On the strength of such an affidavit a new identity card is issued. This may be the only country in the world where citizenship can be thus established on an affidavit from a single government employee”

Amarasekara observed that during the three-decades the LTTE dominated most of the Northern Province it was they who alienated land to the people and not the Sri Lanka Government. Most of these lands had been distributed among the so-called Maveer (Great Heroes) families. Hence he stressed the need for the authorities to think twice before implementing a land alienation policy that would virtually amount to unknowingly paving the way for LTTE’s Tamil Eelam which the Security Forces fought so hard to destroy and sacrificed their life and limb in the process.

The lieutenant colonel also recalled a visit to Manik Farm on two occasions last year.

“I was very surprised to meet several people of Indian Tamil origin from the older generation who spoke good Sinhala. When questioned with regard to their ability to converse so fluently in the language, they revealed they were plantation Tamils who had lived at one point of time in the hill country among Sinhala people. I realized that many of them very likely are those who earlier were to be repatriated to India under the Sirima- Shastri Pact.

They were subsequently resettled in the Mullaittivu and Kilinochchi districts on the sly after the 1983 ethnic riots by Redd Barna and other International Non-Governmental Organizations in an effort to link the Northern Province to the Eastern Province with the idea of creating a land mass exclusively inhabited by Tamils. This was a surreptitious effort to establish a Tamil homeland in the North and East and thereby bisect and destabilize our country.”

A number of other officials, scholars and academics also presented papers on various topics at the three-day conference.

-Asian Tribune -