"Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome. So long as our battle cry reach some receptive ear and other hands come forward to pick up our weapons and other men come forward to intone our funeral dirge with the staccato chant of the machine gun and new cries of battle and victory." — Ernesto Che Guevara (‘Message to the Tricontinental’)

What defines ‘the political’, says Carl Schmitt, is the friend/enemy distinction. The murder of Major Nizam Muthalif by the LTTE brings home the fact that the LTTE is the enemy. It is the enemy because it regards the democratic state as the enemy and acts as such, lethally. As Lenin drove home, the military and the police are the quintessential apparatuses of the state. The LTTE threatens, targets, attacks the state, and therefore it is the enemy.

The killing also underscores the fact that we are not now and have never been in a state of ‘no war, no peace’, and that was a phrase that disarms us, is part of the psychological war waged against us.

The LTTE has been waging a Cold War against us, using the peace process and negotiations as war by other means. The murder of Major Muthalif is very much part of that Cold War.

The murder is a significant escalation, but the very fact of escalation reminds us that there was an escalation ladder with other previous episodes as rungs. The recent murder points to both change and continuity in the LTTE’s behaviour during the peace process/CFA.

Major Muthalif is the first ranking officer of the military to be killed by the LTTE during the ceasefire. Earlier targets were police officers both Sinhala and Tamil, and lower ranking (NCOs) Tamil members of the armed forces, especially military intelligence.

The killing has little to do with the impasse in the negotiations. It is not because the UPFA government is supposedly supporting Karuna. It is not because Chandrika doesn’t ‘sign now’ on the dotted line of the joint mechanism arrangement (or PMS or whatever she now chooses to call it), nor because Ranil Wickremesighe didn’t go beyond the bounds of Oslo and reconfigure Sri Lanka as a confederal polity — both of which are arguments deployed by the same spineless ignoramuses who have argued that democracy and human rights should be put on a back burner at this stage of negotiating with the Tigers.

That the killing has nothing to do with any tardiness in negotiations due to the UPFA or alleged military backing of the Karuna faction is best evidenced by the fact that during Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s incumbency the Tigers murdered a Sinhala police officer, Inspector Thabrew within his sleeping quarters in Dehiwela, a suburb of Colombo.

What the killings do show is that the LTTE considers the intelligence apparatus of the military and police, i.e. of the state, as legitimate targets even during the CFA. It does so because it intends to pre-emptively cripple the Sri Lankan state by going for its eyes and ears. It needs to do so only if it is planning to go to war.

War may not be imminent or probable but in any Cold War context, a hot war cannot be ruled out. This does not mean that we cannot negotiate with the Tigers, our enemy. But it does mean that we have to recognise that they are the enemy and the main enemy- and that we must not allow them to change the balance of forces in our sphere of influence.

Insofar as a violent threat to the democratic state is actively posed by only one group on this island today, the main enemy of the democratic polity is not the JVP or JHU ( however repugnant the latter is, and however supportive, objectively, of the Tigers). The main enemy is, by definition, the armed Tigers or more accurately the Tiger army.

The LTTE has several subsidiary objectives in the murder of Major Muthalif. The first is to inflict such pain and damage on the state as to compel it to move against the Karuna rebellion, crushing it in a pincer with the Tigers or acting as anvil for the Tigers’ hammer. It is not that Prabhakaran believes that Karuna is the creature of the Sri Lankan military. He knows that the military, though doubtless sympathetic, is not actively supporting or providing strategically significant patronage to Karuna. However he hopes to repeat an old Israeli practice, which is to inflict so much pain on the neighbouring state that it cracks down on the guerrilla resistance.

Prabhakaran’s secondary objective is to intervene in the overall Lankan crisis and push it to the point of explosion. He has three thrusts: this killing in the heart of the city; civic unrest in the North and East, specifically the East and more precisely Trincomalee; and a diplomatic campaign to pressure Chandrika into signing the joint mechanism agreement without any modification.

His specific target in this respect is the joint mechanism. The Muthalif murder helps in several ways. Either the President is intimidated into precipitate signing, or she delays signing, or she signs but Southern opinion is hardened, thereby precipitating polarisation and instability. Any of these three scenarios is a victory for Prabhakaran.

What should be the policy response? What should be done, not done and undone?

1. The outrageously provocative killing in Colombo should be used as the reason to revisit the joint mechanism and reopen negotiations. This does not mean a mechanism with LTTE participation should not be set up. What it does mean is that the sluice gates cannot be opened, permitting Tiger cadres to penetrate cleared areas, especially in the coastal belt which is so vital for Sea Tiger activity (itself dangerous to neighbouring India).

2. On her visit the president must sign an agreement making for annual joint military exercises between Sri Lanka and India. This can be broadened with India’s concurrence to include the USA, China etc.

3. Sri Lanka must enter a strategic partnership of a sort that will give our military a permanent, irreversible edge over the LTTE. India will not sign such an accord and will take exception if we sign one with the USA, China or Pakistan. The USA will take exception if we sign with Russia, China or Iran. Therefore I suggest a strategic partnership with Israel.

4. The situation in Trincomalee must be defused. Failure to do so will either mean that ethno-religious rioting will derail the joint mechanism or the signing of the agreement will add fuel to ethno-religious unrest and catalyse upheaval. The antics of Sinhala Buddhist fundamentalist fanatics play into the paws of the Tigers and will lose us the East which we have a historic chance of wresting from Prabhakaran thanks to the Karuna resistance. There are few voices with the credibility to defuse the situation: the Mahanayakes, the military commanders and perhaps above all, the Prime Minister, Mahinda Rajapakse. He must be sought out and requested to do so by the President.