Tisaranee Gunasekara,  Tue Feb 28 19:20:07 EST 2006

    The Tigers are the biggest winners in Geneva. They went to Geneva intent on getting a deal on Col. Karuna and they seemed to have got one. Mahinda Rajapakse is a winner and so is Ranil Wickremesinghe but not the state of Sri Lanka. The President can now successfully conduct the Local government election campaign without having to bother about an immediate escalation of hostilities, even though he bought this partisan political advantage by further weakening the defences of the state of Sri Lanka. Mr. Wickremesinghe can justifiably claim some credit for the ‘success’ in Geneva since this success was the result of the adoption of his ‘peace through appeasement’ line by the President. The war weary Tamil people have been granted a respite, but the LTTE’s overlordship over them has been conceded once again. The anti-Tiger Tamils are clear losers since they, together with the basic democratic rights of the Tamils, have been sacrificed in this latest attempt to postpone the war by appeasing the Tigers.
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- The Academic

Politicians claim them selves winners by just going back to 4 year old agreement.
The loosers are SriLankans, children, millions of refugees, the Tsunami victims, those who had lost lives, those who had become disabled due to war.
All politicians & LTTE are winners.

Was it a success/failure, legal/illegal why bother? The point is CFA is a stepping stone for bigger and better things. Instead of whinning on about how to make it perfect, get onto things that are important such as a final solution. LTTE says politics cannot be discussed at this stage. Bala says, each step must be tackled one-by-one. So we all must wait until they are ready. The tsunami affected, displaced and the homeless must wait and put their lives/plans on hold because Bala and his Thevan want to tackle issues one-by-one! The President must realise, the interest of 15 million people are far greater than attempting to satisfy a band of terrorists numbering less than 20gs. Each day LTTE remains in control is another day wasted when resources can be put for better use. Since this terrorist filth costs SL so much time and money, govt must not waste any more time. A deadline must be imposed where substantial issues are agreed to and accepted. If they don’t meet the deadline, other less friendly method must be used to remove the cancer takes up most of govt’s attention.

Although I agree with Tissaranee's conclusion that LTTE gained more from the Geneva Talks than GoSL, I am not surprised.

LTTE always orients itself towards its final destination - Independent state of Tamil Eelam. It may take detours and diversions due to external and internal compulsions but it has a clear goal that is well articulated and communicated to the internal and external stakeholders.

On the other hand, GoSL has no clear direction as to what it is trying to achieve. For the past 50 years GoSL has never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to settle the ethnic issue once and for all.

Tissaranee has argued many times for the need of alternate leadership among tamil-speaking people.  The problem is none of the anti-LTTE can deliver anything to Tamils. Tissaranee's current favourite Karuna -who, in his words, left the LTTE on the grounds of the East is being alienated - has been operating independently for nearly two years now.

He clearly had a bargaining leverage over GoSL to at least deliver some symbolic gestures to prove his point that he could deliver something better to the East than mainstream LTTE. But Karuna has not delivered anything to the East in the last two years. He has no clear sense of where he wants to take the East. All his statements are very vile and full of personal animosity against his former boss, he does not seems even have a slightest clue as to what is needed in the East. He is just another spoiler like other members of the quartet.

Until we reach a time when -either the GoSL or Anti-LTTE elements- get their act together, the LTTE will continue to win every step in war or peace.



Last edited by Serendipity on Wed Mar 01, 2006 8:57 pm; edited 1 time in total

Before I begin I must state for the record that up to now, I have not been a very great fan of Mahinda.  I have known people who had personally interacted with Mahinda on different occasions, while he was a Minister, then PM, and now President, and all have told me basically the same thing that this is not an extremely intelligent person with an adequate understanding of what is going on in Srilanka.  A number of things- his blind insistence on upholding the "unitary" state, botched visit to India, and crackdown against Tamils (not LTTE) in Colombo and also Mannar and Trincomalee- really soured things for me.  Really the only positive thing I could say about Mahinda was that he is not Ranil.

All the same I must confess that the more I hear the screeching voices from different quarters that Mahinda was "outmaneuvered" at Geneva, the more I wonder whether all this criticism against Mahinda is nothing but empty hot air.  Substantially speaking, Mahinda's boys didn't make any commitments at Geneva to the LTTE.  They only promised to curb violence and apprehend any armed Tamil person.  This is nothing more than a mere echo of the Donor Co-chair statements and quite clearly this was stated at Geneva to placate them.  Having parroted the Co-Chairs words, Mahinda will most probably get less flak from them after future scraps with the LTTE.  If Karuna's boys blow up another LTTE cadre or shoot them dead, Mahinda only needs to "deplore violence" and wash his hands vis a vis the Int'l community.

If on the other hand, the Mahinda delegation foolishly refused to do anything at all at Geneva, they would've fell into the LTTE's hands and delivered plenty of ammunition for the Tigers to present to the Westerners.  The image of a recalcitrant Sinhala chauvinist unconcerned with violence in Tamil areas would've been made that much clearer by such a stance.  The Tigers were banking on Mahinda adopting such a line and it never came through.

As I mentioned before, the implications for Mahinda's "promise" at Geneva can be twisted to a wonderful degree.  In places like Eastern Province, the lines between govt. and LTTE territory is not quite as distinct as you would find at Omanthai or Pallai in the North.  The STF or other security forces could conceivably run amuck in the East, claiming that all of it is govt. territory and that they are only going after "paramilitaries."

Mahinda's performance at Geneva is going to make it even more difficult for the propagandists out there to tar him as a "hardliner."  Already I see the media is backtreading from this sort of rhetoric, and even Ranil is whining that Mahinda is doing everything that he would've done.  Whatever his intellectual handicaps, Mahinda in my eyes has demonstrated himself as a "player."  The LTTE will regret its mistake of not allowing their pet gimp Ranil to win the election.


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If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will see every problem as a nail.- Abraham Maslow

To be frank Taraki, I see Mahinda as weaker than either Chandirika or Ranil. Yet he appears to be doing fine after the initial January mess-ups. I suspect the reason is that he is being left alone. Ranil has painted himself into a corner and can't take up the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist card he played in the nineties to kybosh Chandrika, and as President he can't be sabotaged in a co-habitation government as Ranil was by Chandrika in a tit-for-tat maoeouvre. And the JVP and JHU have spent so much time promoting him as the new Ponchu Singhu that they are now wrong-footed when it comes to doing anything.

Of course, peace will only give him the opportunity to wreck the economy, but that's another matter.

Quote:

The third was to engage in surgical counterattacks targeting key Tiger cadres, while at the same time assisting the anti-Tiger Tamils in their politico-military activities against the LTTE (including a more flexible approach to devolution). The third option was never seriously attempted; perhaps Mr. Rajapakse’s circumscribed mental universe did not permit either a departure from the unitary state or a partnership with anti-Tiger Tamils.

This option was never used since 1983 by successive govt.  So, Indranee, it will never be used.  All previous govts killed innocent Tamils to take their revenge on LTTE.  Now it is too late to try this attempt.

Just like Taraki I have never been a Mahinda fan. In fact I was expecting an inept, extremist and a pro-socialist government from him. I thought he would mess up everything including the economy. Even when he started the CFA talks, I thought he would handle it immaturely when he appointed a very inexperienced team. Even Dr Balasingham with his previous experience in peace talks thought that he could easily outmaneuver the inexperienced GOSL team.

But what happened was that it was the LTTE team that was outmaneuvered. People will interpret the outcome of the talks as being advantageous to one side or the other depending on their loyalties. But the fact remains that the war has been at least put off by another few months without nothing much being given to the tigers except a very obvious undertaking that any decent democratic government should give - such as 'no group of people other than the security forces will be allowed to carry arms in government controlled areas'. In return the LTTE had to tacitly accept that the so-called 'people's militias' are in fact under their control and to give an undertaking not to attack the GOSL forces during the currency of the CFA. This is a good outcome for the GOSL. All the fears that the Karuna group will be disarmed and left at the mercy of the LTTE did not materialise. All that Karuna has to do now is to lie low for a while and watch whether the LTTE will honour their commitments.

Mahinda is turning out to be a very clever politician more of an 'inclusive' type who can win a many hearts including probably those of the minorities too. After all, to his credit he kept his nerve without falling to the provocations created by tigers and that must have endeared him to at least a few Tamils who hate any restart of this cruel war. In my mind him being a relatively non achiever in his previous life as a minister or PM so far works well for him as not being so confident himself, he is obliged to use everyone around him to get the best out of them. A Chandrika or a Ranil could not do that because they thought they knew the best (or at least a few other individuals around them say Mr Kadirgamar or Charitha Ratwatte respectively knew the best) and the result as we had seen was not the very best for the country.  Mahinda's beauty is that he is not only capable of using his own colleagues' ideas but also his adversary's (Ranil's) ideas to his advantage. So far he has also proved that he takes meticulous care when dealing with tigers. This is a big plus when compared with Ranil.

However I keep my judgment on President Rajapakse on hold for the next year or so to see what kind of a presidency he will offer the country.


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