Sri Lanka turns sixty this Monday, February 4th. It has been in a single stage (albeit with many phases) of history from the year it turned 35, in 1983. For the past quarter century its destiny has been determined by the secessionist war. Now at sixty, the long war approaches its decisive peak, a highest stage of intensity which therefore also marks its last stage. The war has been a protracted one; a war of attrition. What is expected to be short by comparison, is its last stage. We have arrived, in the words of Winston Churchill, not at "the end of the end" but at "the beginning of the end". It is the beginning of the end of Prabhakaran and the LTTE as a rival army, but between the ‘beginning of the end’ and the ‘end of the end’ there will be heavy going. Sri Lanka can derive some grim and modest satisfaction in that its armed forces have arrived at the commencement - or have actually commenced - the third and last stage of this sort of war, that of the strategic offensive, or more accurately, the strategic counteroffensive.

There will be those who contest my definition of the war as the decisive challenge and task facing the country as it turns sixty, and will argue that it is the National or Nationalities Question (also known as the Ethnic issue) that constitutes and has always constituted the main challenge. This translates itself into a perspective which holds that either Sinhala or Tamil nationalism/chauvinism is the main problem. It was Kurt Julius Goldstein, the head of the World Federation of anti Fascist Resistance fighters, who, in Moscow in the summer of ’85 educated me out of such reductionism at the World Festival of Youth and Students. As I reported at the time in the Lanka Guardian and The Island, this veteran anti-Nazi fighter told me that the biggest error the Left made was to confuse nationalism, chauvinism and fascism: "we should have united with nationalism, even chauvinism, to fight fascism; instead of which we treated them as all the same".

Doubtless Sinhala and Tamil nationalism or chauvinism caused the war to take place. However, when a phenomenon reaches a certain stage of development and intensity, it has to be dealt with as an autonomous factor, irrespective of the chain of causation. That is why those who oppose the Mahinda Rajapakse administration on the grounds of its Sinhala nationalism, or the ultra-nationalism, even chauvinism of its smaller allies, are as mistaken as those who oppose the APRC proposals for the full implementation of the 13th amendment as an unwarranted and ill-timed concession to "peaceful Tamil nationalism". The lesson of history is that Sri Lanka must bring together Sinhala and Tamil nationalism in the war against Tamil fascism, Tamil neo-Nazism, incarnated in the LTTE and led by Prabhakaran.

This may offend the sensibilities of some, and that has been the case throughout history. Purists pilloried Stalin’s Russia when, in the face of the Nazi invasion, socialist appeals were fused with Russian nationalism and the partial revival of Russian Orthodox Christianity in the Great Patriotic War. At the beginning of 1949, the Times of Ceylon carried the text of a YMCA lecture by the LSSP theoretician Dr Colvin R de Silva giving all the reasons why the Chinese Revolution would not and could not triumph, given its rural, petty bourgeois, narrow nationalist character. On October 1st that year Mao ze Dong was victoriously proclaiming that "The Chinese people have stood up"! The dogmatic Communists decried Fidel Castro’s Moncada assault because it did not fit their checklist of characteristics for the stamp of approval. Today, many governments and leaders who are playing a major anti-imperialist and progressive role, such as Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and the ANC’s Jacob Zuma, are being opposed by a strange coalition of pro-western liberals, and ex-ultra-leftists. (The role played in Venezuela by Douglas Bravo and Teodoro Petkoff is a stark case in point.)

Thus it is not the Ethno National Question, but its issue, the war, that is our main challenge and test today. How can it be otherwise when we are faced with an enemy recently described by the FBI as "one of the most dangerous extremists groups in the world", which according to its report, pioneered the suicide belt and the woman suicide bomber, and is the only group in the world responsible for the killing of political leaders of two countries? How can it be otherwise when we face an enemy described by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist John Burns of the New York Times, as the Pol Pot of South Asia, and a movement described by renowned authority on Nazism, Prof Walter Laqueur as being paralleled in its fanaticism and ruthlessness only by the European fascist movement of the 1920s and 1930s? How can it conceivably be otherwise when we are facing Prabhakaran, the man described in the Millennium issue of The Times (London) on the theme of Death, as the man personally responsible for the most number of violent deaths on the planet? A great many countries are plagued by ethno national conflicts but few are faced with enemies of this magnitude of dangerousness. How then can anyone argue that any other issue could be more important, should have greater priority or constitute more of a yardstick?

Having lost a number of outstanding leaders, the country has not been decapitated, or reduced to those who would capitulate before the enemy. The country is lucky in that its leadership has grasped "the key link…which guarantees its possessor control of the chain", as Lenin put it. That "key link" is the need to defeat Prabhakaran and the LTTE. Sir Isaiah Berlin quoted Archilocus to classify thinkers into two main categories: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes, Sir Isaiah reminded us, know many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing. This administration may or may not know many things but it does know "one big thing" – the war and the need to win it. When that one big thing is, also that which Lenin defined as the key link, then the country is fortunate. This does not mean that the Rajapakse leadership should be exempt from criticism. What it does mean is that all sincerely patriotic criticism would be from within a strategy of critical (even savagely critical) support; which Mao referred to as "unity and struggle".

The raucous response to the APRC’s recommendations is, paradoxically, the best evidence of the constructive character of the proposals. There are those who criticise them as not enough, as too little too late, and those others who damn them as too much too soon. In a monograph co-published by the US Institute of Peace (USIP) and the International Centre of Ethnic Studies (ICES) in 1998, I argued, as a former Minister of the North Eastern Provincial Council, that the failure of the experiment was not because of the insufficiency of the quantum of devolution, but because of the LTTE’s war against the Council and a plethora of political errors on the part of the key political players, not least the EPRLF. The 13th Amendment has never been give a chance to work, and it should. To those who say that it is a formula which is twenty years old, my reply is that federalism is over fifty years old as a slogan in the Sri Lankan debate! As for the Indian model, that will work by definition, in India, not Sri Lanka. Here I am not being facetious. India has a huge landmass and more importantly, an ethnically multi-polar situation, while Sri Lanka is a small island with an ethnically bipolar situation, as was first observed by that pioneering Indian scholar of Sri Lankan politics, the late Prof Urmila Phadnis of the JNU. The 13th amendment is the product of the impact of the Indian model (in the person of the Indian negotiators and 70, 000 Indian troops) upon the Sri Lankan reality, and is the resultant of the interaction. It is the closest approximation of the Indian model that is acceptable to Sri Lanka.

One of Sri Lanka’s legendary educators and teachers of history, L.H. Horace Perera is a long time resident of Geneva. A man with decades in the UN system, and a liberal Catholic by belief, he is by no means a "Sinhala Buddhist hardliner", still less a JVP or JHU sympathiser. I asked him what type of system he would recommend for the island as a historian and one who has watched independent Sri Lanka make so many mistakes. He readily answered that "given its geographic location and history, it requires a strong centre. That strong centre must permit some autonomy at the periphery, but whenever the island had a weak centre, it was defeated, and civilisations collapsed."

Sri Lankan extremists must recognise two realities. A strong centre is imperative, which means that there can be no devolution of power beyond that of provincial autonomy or a quasi-federal system. Full federalism would be imprudent, which is something the majority of people instinctively know and therefore have consistently rejected. The other extreme must know that a strong centre cannot mean an over-centralised system. Strength lies in flexibility, not brittleness.

Critics of the APRC proposals seem to suffer from a touch of amnesia. Surely President Rajapakse’s response is far more constructive than that of President Jayewardene who disowned Annexure C and the APC of 1984? Surely this present outcome is better than the sincere exercise of President Premadasa’s APC in 1990, which was however, so devoid of success that it had to be shunted into a Parliamentary Select Committee? Surely it is better to attempt the full implementation of the 13th amendment than have a devolution proposal which suffers the fate of the Mangala Moonesinghe proposals, and Chandrika’s ‘union of regions’ package(s) of 1995 and 1997? Surely a practicable proposal is better than one which suffers the same fate in the legislature as President Kumaratunga’s August 2000 draft Constitution?

The proposals accepted by President Rajapakse remind me of nothing so much as the mid 1986 agreement arrived at the Political Parties Conference (PPC), the voluminous document of which is still available in print. That conference was summoned by President Jayewardene at the written insistence of Vijaya Kumaratunga who had returned from discussions with the Tamil militants in Jaffna and India. The entirety of the democratic Left was represented and did the running at the Conference, and produced a political platform which made for full Provincial autonomy, with no merger. Though he later supported the Indo-Lanka Accord as Sri Lanka’s last best chance for peace, Vijaya was himself staunchly opposed to the merger.

Given the war, the APRC recommendations translate in the immediate context, into an Interim or Transitional Political Authority (council) for the North, and Provincial elections for the East. Those outsiders who say that an election in the East will somehow lack legitimacy because of the presence of so-called paramilitaries, should be reminded of the far more violent conditions under which elections were held in Iraq and Afghanistan after invasion! As for paramilitaries, the US would not have initially (temporarily?) won the Afghan campaign without the support of the Northern Alliance warlords, and today, the limited success of the so-called surge and the COIN (counterinsurgency) doctrine of the cerebral General David Petraeus, is made possible precisely because of the active participation of "paramilitaries" from among the Sunni community, who have formed neighbourhood Vigilance Committees against al Qaeda. If the Anbar model is good enough for the US in Iraq, it sure is good enough for Sri Lanka in its own Eastern province! Let us not even go into the issue of Shia militia who are operating within the folds of the Army and law enforcement bodies (the pun is intended) put together by the US led coalition.

For those at the opposite end of the Sri Lankan spectrum who oppose a Northern Interim administration with Police powers, a reminder is needed that without such an intermediate structure, the picture will be one of a Sinhala army fighting Tamil insurgents. The matter was different in the Punjab and Kashmir where the Indian Army was and is able to field a multiethnic, multireligious force, including Sikh generals. We must recall that in the Punjab, the job was finally done by a Sikh Police chief, the legendary KPS Gill, and also because the Punjab had its own Chief Minister and administration. There will have to be a sufficiently heavy Sri Lankan armed forces presence in the North and East for the foreseeable future. However, our armed forces must be relieved of the burden of the policing functions they now discharge. This will free up more Security Forces for frontline fighting. Secondly, no one can ‘police’ ethnic neighbourhoods as efficiently as those who speak the same language and come from the same community. Thirdly, the Sri Lankan armed forces after victory must not become an army of Occupation, as Israel disastrously did after the brilliantly won Six Day War. A Tamil run Provincial Council with Police powers, under an ally and partner of the Sri Lankan state (the Ramzan Kadyrov factor of the successful Chechen campaign by Russia) will help us avoid this calamity.

Sri Lanka at sixty must learn a lesson from Putin’s Russia. It succeeded in the Chechen war not because it had oil, unlike Sri Lanka. Russia had oil even under Yeltsin! Had the Chechen war gone on, Russia would have still been bleeding and would never have re-merged as a great power as it has under President Putin. It is President Putin’s resolve in defeating the Chechen secessionist terrorist army (which even blew up apartment blocks in Moscow and took hostages in a Moscow theatre), that put Russia back on the road to recovery and greatness as a state. Russia’s victory was two pronged: one was the unleashing of the full might of its military, including electronics, Spetnaz Special forces, armour, artillery and airpower; the other was the political installation of its ally and former Chechen "warlord", youthful Ramzan Kadyrov as the President of Chechnya. Today Russia and Chechnya are peaceful and prosperous.

As we reach sixty then, what is the fundamental lesson to grasp? There are some thinkers who are so incisive that their work earns respect across ideological boundaries. So it was with Carl Schmitt, whose early 1960s essay (actually the product of two lectures) "The Theory of the Partisan: A Commentary/Remark on the Concept of the Political" is not only prophetic but is also the most rigorously intellectual work on the subject. In this work, in which Schmitt reaches beyond Clausewitz and ends with Fidel Castro (he names the ‘giants’ - Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara; but significantly, no Trotsky) the core idea relevant to Sri Lanka today is that of "the Absolute Enemy". Schmitt identifies the superiority of Lenin as precisely in grasping the concept of the absolute enemy and absolute enmity.

"What Lenin learned from Clausewitz, and he learned it well, was not just the famous formula of war as the continuation of politics. It involved the larger recognition that in the age of revolution the distinction between friend and enemy is the primary distinction, decisive for war as for politics… The only question therefore is this: is there an absolute enemy and who is it in concreto? For Lenin the answer was unequivocal, and his superiority among all other socialists and Marxists consisted in his seriousness about absolute enmity….The knowledge of the enemy was the secret of Lenin’s enormous strike power." (Carl Schmitt, 1962:35)