The government and the UNP are playing ping pong on the question of their much sought after co-operation. They are still at the stage of exchanging carefully drafted missives full of nothing. One wonders when the leaders of the two sides will finish firing letters and get down to brass tacks. Will it be within days, weeks, or years? If the pace at which they are proceeding is any indication, then it looks very likely that we will have to wait till the cows come home.

President Mahinda Rajapakse and UNP Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe are no strangers to each other and the Temple Trees/the President’s House and the Cambridge Terrace have only a little distance between them. (For some UNP parliamentarians the Temple Trees is only a jump away!) If the two leaders are genuinely desirous of addressing the issue, a powwow between them is only a telephone call away. Remember Mahinda’s recent dash to Britain to see Blair and Ranil’s globe trotting to see and be seen with leaders of other countries. Why can’t they see each other here in Colombo? Are we to gather that, as a local saying goes, even the shadow of an unfeasible marriage is crooked?

There is high octane performance on the part of business leaders, religious dignitaries, professionals and others to bring the two parties together. They seem to think that if they could achieve that feat and thereby bring about a southern consensus, hey presto, there will be peace! In other words, they reckon the absence of co-operation between the UNP and the SLFP as the roadblock on the path to peace. Nothing is further from the truth! It is also one of the myths obfuscating the real issue of what really impedes the resolution of the conflict.

Consensus or no consensus, there have already been some solutions, proposed as well actually implemented. Under the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, devolution of power to the provinces has been achieved, in spite of all its shortcomings. The SLFP and the JVP opposed it tooth and nail in 1987. After much blood letting, all parties in the South have now accepted the Provincial Council system but it has come a cropper, as the LTTE rejected it: it is not functioning in the North and the East, where it is needed most. True, the Concurrent List, tilted in favour of the government, has rendered the system hollow, to a great extent but that is not the reason why the LTTE rejected it. Its objections came even before the implementation of the 13th Amendment despite having initially endorsed it – under India’s pressure.

In 2000, President Chandrika Kumaratunga offered Regional Councils, which went way beyond the 13th Amendment in terms of the unit and the degree of devolution. Chandrika may be faulted for anything but devolution, on which she has taken up a principled stand. The UNP teamed up with the JVP – there are no permanent enemies or permanent friends in politics, eh? – and shot down the Regional Council bill in Parliament. Another instance of lack of consensus! But, the LTTE had rejected it even before it was officially unveiled; therefore what other parties thought of it mattered very little.

Then came the international community on the scene, led by the US, under the UNF government. A grand show was made of the Oslo Declaration, which envisaged federalism, with the LTTE agreeing. But, no sooner had the LTTE returned home than it did make a U-turn, reneging as it did on the agreement. The much flaunted Oslo Declaration is now as dead as a dodo in all but name.

Peace making has been a process of successive governments as well as the international community proposing and the LTTE (or ‘Sun God’) disposing. Thus, it should be seen, it is not so much the absence of a southern consensus that has throttled the peace effort but the intransigence of the LTTE, which has rejected India’s Provincial Councils Chandrika’s Regional Councils and the international community’s federalism

Now the question is: What does the LTTE really want? We need not labour the point – it is Eelam! That is what Prabhakaran has been saying consistently right throughout. He, it should be recalled, reiterated it for the whole world to hear in 2003 at Kilinochchi, addressing the media: He renewed his call to his cadres to kill him if he ever departed from Eelam!

Is a southern consensus going to wean him away from his goal? The discerning aren’t optimistic. How can one forget that all what the mighty international community, which has bombed Afghanistan and Iraq into the Stone Age and made a fugitive of bin Laden, has achieved by way of helping Sri Lanka is to take the horse to water. The animal, true to form, is refusing to drink and not even Blair or Bush or Singh can do anything about it. It has even kicked the EU nationals out of the Monitoring Mission with impunity!

Will those who are going hell for leather to bring Mahinda and Ranil together be able to make the horse drink? We doubt it. However, we really appreciate their sincere effort and wish them good luck!