The President’s pronouncement of a five year moratorium on elections could have been dismissed as one of her usual negligible utterances except for the subsequent attempts by the state media to drum up support from among religious and civil society leaders for this ‘no elections till rebuilding is complete’ line.

Clarity is an attribute that is alien to Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga and it is not quite clear whether her ‘Hambantota declaration’ is applicable to all elections or just parliamentary elections. Since the present parliament has five more years left of its normal term, not having another parliamentary election for five years would be neither unconstitutional nor undemocratic. However any attempt to use the tsunami disaster to postpone the Presidential election would be both unconstitutional and anti-democratic and should be opposed unequivocally.

Replying to his detractors’ charge of ‘over cooperation’ with the government, the deputy leader of the UNP Karu Jayasuriya stated that he had no intention of playing politics over the dead bodies of tsunami victims. This is the kind of mature and responsible attitude we need from both the government and the opposition. The government must not use the plight of the country to cling to power through undemocratic means while the opposition must refrain from using the tsunami as a fast track to power. The last thing the country needs is a resumption of the political civil war in the South and the ‘no-elections’ statement of the President is the kind of irresponsible and counterproductive intervention we can do without at this critical juncture.

Irresponsible actions by democratic leaders will not only undermine political stability and civil peace in the South; they will fit in ideally with the LTTE’s plan to use the post-tsunami conjuncture to further its separatist agenda. As part of their attempt to conduct themselves like a parallel state the Tigers are demanding equal status with the government of Sri Lanka in the relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction effort. The Tigers know the importance of achieving equal status with the Sri Lankan state in all matters (that was why the LTTE attempted to win recognition for the Sea Tigers as a parallel naval force equal to the Sri Lankan Navy). The LTTE proposal to the Norwegians amount to an ISGA-isation of the relief and reconstruction effort - with the Sri Lankan government in charge of rebuilding of the South and the Tigers in charge of rebuilding of the North and the East; one country; two states. It will be ISGA under another name, an arrangement which will grant all powers to the Tigers in the interests of rebuilding the North and the East, thus enabling the them do as they please - from child conscription and the murdering of political opponents to arms smuggling and the setting up of new camps, all under the guise of relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation.

Currently the LTTE is working overtime to rebuild its military capacities and child conscription is a key component of this effort. Father Harry Miller, the US born Jesuit priest resident in Batticaloa stated: "The LTTE is abusing this disaster in order to increase its influence in the east`85. At this moment, the LTTE is recruiting child soldiers in the camps. The orphaned children are especially vulnerable. It is open hunting season for the Tigers" (De Volksrant – 7.1.2005). That the Tigers should have begun abducting children less than a month after the tsunami devastation is indefensible – and inevitable. The LTTE lost some of its cadres to the tidal wave and this loss would have worsened its pre-existent manpower problem. There won’t be any volunteers to join the Tigers (either from the North and the East or from the Diaspora) and most adults can and will resist any attempt to conscript them. That leaves the children, the defenceless ones whose plight can be ignored in Colombo and Oslo, because they are poor and powerless, because they have no voices and no votes. And what better hunting grounds than the villages devastated by the tsunami, than the camps for the displaced people?

Hannah Arendt said that "the horrible can be not only ludicrous but outright funny" (Eichmann in Jerusalem - A Report on the Banality of Evil). The TNA leader Mr. Sampanthan’s remark to the Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin that the LTTE is taking away children out of ‘charity’ falls into this category. From Jaffna to Colombo to Oslo the response to the Tigers’ child conscription drive is either a Sampanthan-type ‘defence of the indefensible’ or near total indifference. Apart from a few honourable exceptions (such as the UTHR and the SLDF) there are no voices raised from within the Tamil society, here or abroad, against this despicable crime. This silence is reminiscent of the silence that prevailed in Germany about the Holocaust; reminiscent but less comprehensible; the Germans were silent about the agony of ‘racial others’ – Jews, Slavs, Gypsies etc. The Tamils are silent about the agony of their own, of Tamil children.

The indifference about child soldiers bears witness to the ‘moral debacle’ of not just Tamil society but also of Sinhala society. If we oppose the bifurcation of Sri Lanka, if we oppose Tamil peoples’ right to separation, then we must accept responsibility for the protection and well being of the Tamil people. Consequently our silence about, our unconcern for the fate of Tamil children is both inexplicable and indefensible. If we believe in a united Sri Lanka, then these are our children, our future citizens and it is our duty to show the same concern about this issue as we do regarding other types of child abuse. However from the President and democratic political leaders to most of the state and public media, from the courts to religious and economic leaders, the silence is deafening; the unconcern is staggering. I do not know whether there are specific laws against child conscription in Sri Lanka. If not it is time to introduce such laws - with the toughest possible punishments to those who conscript children and to those who aid and abet such practices. After all if the North and the East is a part of Sri Lanka, then there has to be adequate provisions in the Sri Lankan law against child conscription.

Rebuilding as Separation?

A phoenix rising from the ashes; a Tiger Eelam rising from the tsunami devastation – that is obviously what the LTTE is working towards. The Tigers know well how much can be gained through the manipulation of the opportunities presented by the post-tsunami conjuncture. Relief and rehabilitation can be used by the Tigers to bolster the sole representative status and to strengthen political legitimacy and military prowess; rehabilitation can be used to promote separation. That is why the Tiger Supremo in his post-tsunami meeting with the Norwegians sounded so reasonable, so amenable – so unlike his Maaveerer Day mode.

These Tiger machinations can be defeated only if the state’s relief and rehabilitation effort is executed with speed and efficiency. For more than a month now a section of our people have been existing in a living hell; if the relief efforts are not made more efficient, if rebuilding is not accelerated it will lead to discontent and eventually instability. Some signs are not propitious. If media reports are to be believed the official rebuilding plan is a sadly botched job, with glaring inconsistencies and embarrassing inaccuracies. This is partly the outcome of the regime’s top down approach to the task of rebuilding. The regime must involve the provincial councils and the local government authorities as well as the intended beneficiaries in both the planning and implementation stages; the opposition too must be made equal partners in the rehabilitation effort through the all party committee. None of this has happened so far and the entire effort is centralised in the hands of three Presidential favourites of unproven competence. The result is unnecessary inanities such as sending non-Tamil language forms to Tamil areas. Such mistakes will give credence to Mr. Pirapaharan’s warnings of chauvinism and bureaucratism (even if they are the result of generalised incompetence) and strengthen the Tiger case for an ISGA type arrangement to handle the rebuilding of the North.

Another urgent need is to multilateralise the relief effort in the North and the East without allowing the TRO to monopolise it from the Tamil side. Non-LTTE Tamil parties as well as non-TRO Tamil organisations should be enabled to engage in relief and rehabilitation activities in the North and the East. The post-tsunami conduct of the LTTE clearly demonstrates that the Tigers are interested only in furthering the Tiger Eelam agenda. The government has no excuse whatsoever to cling to the illusion that the Tigers can be reliable partners in any search for peace within a united Sri Lanka. Therefore it is incumbent upon the regime to diversify its dependence and look to the non-LTTE Tamil parties to become its counterpart in the necessary search for peace through a political solution to the ethnic problem. Realistically this role will not be played by Vellupillai Pirapaharan; it can only be played by alternate Tamil leaders such as V. Ananadasangaree, Karuna Amman, Douglas Devananda and D. Siddharthan. A political solution based on the Oslo Agreement can be the basis on which this necessary alliance between the democratic South and the democratic North can be founded.

Defeating the LTTE’s attempt to use the post-tsunami conjuncture to promote its separatist agenda presupposes the existence of political stability and civil peace in the South. The LTTE will win if there is a resumption of political civil war in the South. That is why the President’s ‘no elections’ statement could not have come at a worse time. If she is indeed trying to postpone the Presidential election by five years it will polarise the South once again along party lines and destroy the fragile but precious spirit of cooperation. The task of rebuilding cannot succeed without unity. But unity is not uniformity. Attempts at achieving uniformity, especially in a country that is profoundly pluralistic, will lead to worse divisions. This is the lesson of 1956. Just as any attempt to impose ethno-religious majoritarianism on the minorities will worsen ethno-religious divisions, any attempt to achieve political uniformity by subverting pluralist democracy will exacerbate political polarisation.