RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: Sri Lankan Army: Dangerous politics of betrayal  Sat Jan 09, 2010 1:06 am | |
| About 7am on May 18 two senior leaders of the beleaguered Tamil Tigers and a dozen family members walked out of their last stronghold on a sliver of beach and walked towards the front line of the besieging Sri Lankan Army, waving large white flags.
The surrender of the senior cadres - Balasingham Mahendran, alias Nadesan, and Seevaratham Prabhakaran, alias Pulidevan - came after hectic calls by satellite telephones the previous night to Sri Lankan officials and politicians, foreign diplomats, United Nations and International Red Cross officials and a British journalist.
Through the phone calls, the Tiger cadres had been passed assurances from the Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, that they would be safely received by the army if they advanced under white flags held high. For the foreign parties, it seemed a last hope of saving thousands of trapped civilians from slaughter by government artillery in the collapsing Tiger perimeter.
According to a meticulous reconstruction by the well-connected Colombo journalist D.B.S. Jeyaraj (http://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/archives/1267), what happened was this:
After daybreak Nadesan and Pulidevan walked out holding two white flags with 10 or 12 others, including women and children. A second group followed about 100 metres behind. The first group were surrounded by soldiers of a special forces unit, and brought back to meet special forces officers. The two cadres identified themselves and said they had been guaranteed safety by the President.
The army officers made Nadesan and Pulidevan kneel down and began interrogating them. The others were taken to one side and also made to kneel. Nadesan's wife, a Sinhalese, understood the threats being made by the officers and began screaming pleas in Sinhala. The two cadres then fell dead in a burst of firing, and guns were turned on the other group, killing Nadesan's wife and several others. As they fired, the soldiers called her a ''bitch'' and ''prostitute'' for marrying a Tiger.
Until recently the story from the Government has been that while last-minute surrender negotiations had started, its frontline troops were unaware of any such attempt to surrender; if Nadesan and Pulidevan were killed in no-man's land making such an attempt, they were shot in the back by their own side, which had made a practice of shooting those trying to flee.
The Tigers' resistance collapsed completely a day later, and their leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, died with family members in an effort to break through government lines. No bodies were kept for forensic examination. Rajapaksa went on to claim the political rewards of finishing a 25-year insurgency, which had been expected to culminate with a sweeping victory in the new presidential election on January 26.
Unfortunately for Rajapaksa, hubris may be bringing an early nemesis.
His triumph was shared by the army chief, General Sarath Fonseka, a Sinhalese nationalist who wanted to keep the army on its strong war footing and expand it. The President sidelined him to a less powerful combined services command. The slighted Fonseka decided to stand for the presidency himself and, over the last month, has dropped some bombshells.
On December 13 Colombo's Sunday Leader ran an interview with Fonseka in which he claimed that Rajapaksa, via a related adviser and the Defence Secretary (and his brother), Gothabaya Rajapaksa, had ordered Brigadier Shavendra Silva, commander of the Army's 58th Division in the sector where the surrenders occurred, not to accept any Tiger leaders attempting surrender and that "they must all be killed".
The claim has created a furore in Sri Lanka and beyond. Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, has written to ask for clarification.
The President and all parties named have issued denials, and Fonseka, perhaps realising that his statement might damage his vote among veterans, has ''corrected'' his story to say that while the illegal order was given by the Rajapaksa clan, the soldiers rightly ignored it.
The second bombshell has been an unlikely alliance that makes this election a real cliffhanger and has Rajapaksa extremely worried. Fonseka unveiled a power-sharing agreement with Ranil Wickramasinghe, the leader of the pro-business United National Party and a former prime minister. If he wins, Wickramasinghe will be made a powerful prime minister.
An even more likely addition is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People's Liberation Front, a Marxist outfit that has mounted two bloody insurgencies in the last 40 years among impoverished rural Sinhalese, the last put down by an equally savage counter-operation by a UNP government in which Wickramasinghe was a minister.
How they would work together is a mystery but a combination of Wickramasinghe's impeccable establishment connections and economic expertise with the JVP's populism and Fonseka's heroic status will worry Rajapaksa. In a close contest, it could even turn out that the Tamil minority's vote will be pivotal - a supreme irony, in that an abstention ordered by the Tigers originally brought Rajapaksa to power.
Wickramasinghe is understood to have engaged James McGrath, late of the Canberra strategists Crosby/Textor and current Liberal Party vice-president, as an adviser. Having helped engineer the win of Boris Johnson as mayor of London against Ken Livingstone in 2008 and the ousting of the Maldives' president of 30 years the same year, and observed his own party's recent leadership fights, McGrath is no doubt unfazed.
Hamish McDonald is the Herald's Asia-Pacific editor.
LNK
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