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Land, police powers will divide Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka is a Free, Sovereign, Independent and Democratic Socialist Republic that is a Unitary State according to Article 2 of its Constitution. It is stated in Article 3 of the Constitution that the sovereignty is in the people and is inalienable. Sovereignty includes the power of government, fundamental rights and franchise.
Therefore it naturally follows that all amendments to the Constitution must and should be enacted with the approval of the people. However, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted by the UNP government of J. R. Jayawardena due to the pressure exerted by India amidst tremendous opposition by the people.
The 13th Amendment devolved power to Provincial Councils and the eight Provincial Councils that were subsequently established according to this Amendment have proven to be white elephants since their inception. They have only resulted in a colossal waste of public funds for their administration with the people in these provinces receiving no benefit. The ninth Provincial Council will be established once the election is held in the Northern Province in September this year and will result in a further drain of public funds that would be of no benefit to the people in the north.
The dangers of devolving political power as opposed to decentralising political power was fully explained in my article titled ‘Difference between decentralising and devolving power. The article dated April 12, 2012 was published in many websites and it is not my intention to repeat what has been said therein. However, the danger to the unity and territorial integrity of our nation if and when police and land powers are devolved to the Northern Provincial Council needs to be further explained as this is a topic that is generating much discussion with the Northern Provincial Council election scheduled for September this year.
The unity and territorial integrity of our country was protected and preserved for posterity by the security forces shedding so much blood, sweat, tears and toil and also through the sacrifice of their very life and limb. The victory thus gained after a three-decade war against separatism must not be lost during peace by establishing a Northern Provincial Council with adequate political power to ultimately work once more towards separatism. This is perhaps one of the main reasons for the Secretary of Defence to express his opinion for the need to repeal the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
When I joined the Sri Lanka Army volunteer force as a young officer in 1968, it was to perform duties with the Task Force for Illicit Immigrants that I was first mobilised.
The operations conducted by this Task Force of the Sri Lanka Army firstly made it almost impossible for illicit immigrants to freely arrive in northern parts of this island from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and secondly curtailed smuggling operations to and from Sri Lanka to Tamil Nadu. With the increase of separatist activity by the LTTE the Government gradually lost control of the Northern Province. With the war against LTTE terrorism requiring all available troops in the Sri Lanka Army, the Task Force for Illicit Immigration ceased to operate. When the LTTE began to control the beach frontage in the northern parts of Sri Lanka travelling across the Palk Strait between Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu by boat intensified.
Several Tamil Nadu politicians had crossed the Palk Strait and entered this country using this illegal rout to address meetings organised by the LTTE. Therefore, it is a fact that there was much illegal movement of Tamil people between Sri Lanka and Tamil Nadu during the period the LTTE was active in the north and east. If 75,000 citizens of Sri Lanka had travelled across the Palk Strait to refugee camps in Tamil Nadu would it not have been possible for an influx of Tamil Nadu illicit immigrants in the opposite direction? Let me prove to the readers of this article that this did actually happen during the period that the LTTE was making an effort to establish a Tamil Eelam in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka.
Soon after the LTTE had been defeated and Tamil people were being resettled in the Vanni their medical needs had to be addressed. A team of doctors from Success Colombo travelled to the Vanni to assist the Sri Lanka Army in this endeavour by conducting medical camps. I too joined this team of doctors as a member of Success Colombo. Most doctors in this team were not conversant in Tamil. Therefore interpreters who knew both Tamil and Sinhalese were found to help the doctors. One interpreter named Subramanium who assisted the doctors at the Kanagarayankulam medical camp greatly impressed me due to his fluency in both Tamil and Sinhalese. I therefore spoke to him after the medical camp in the presence of Brig. Raj Ranawake, the then Brigade Commander of Kanagarayankulam.
Subramanium informed us that he is an Indian Tamil who had been born in Deniyaya. When he was of age he had settled in Galle to do business.
Land, police powers …
During the 1979 ethnic problem he had been among the Tamils rounded up by the Sri Lanka Army for their own safety and transported by train to Kilinochchi. I am aware that he was speaking the truth because I as a Captain in the 2nd Battalion of the Gemunu Watch was in charge of that train on its journey from Galle to Colombo. At the Fort Railway station I handed this train over to another officer who was detailed to take it to Kilinochchi.
Subramanium who thus arrived in Kilinochchi in 1979 began a small business in the town and subsequently got married and raised a family. His three sons joined the LTTE and two of them were killed while fighting for the LTTE. He said he had not been able to trace the whereabouts of his third son who joined the LTTE in the latter stages of the war. When his first two sons got killed fighting for the LTTE his family was recognised as a Mahaveera family and provided with ten acres of land in Kanagarayankulam.
Since he was an Indian Tamil the LTTE had requested him to establish contact with his relatives in Tamil Nadu and to persuade them to migrate and settle in Kanagarayankulam to cultivate the ten acres of land that had been given to him. Since he had lost contact with his relatives in Tamil Nadu he was unable to do so. However he said that many other Indian Tamils who had been given land by the LTTE as Mahaveera families had persuaded their relatives to migrate to Sri Lanka as illegal immigrants to cultivate the allotted lands. He said the Grama Niladharies who were either former members or supporters of the LTTE or due to bribery and corruption have provided these illegal immigrants with affidavits stating they were citizens of the area who had been displaced by the war. These GS affidavits will ultimately enable the Illegal immigrants to obtain a new national identity card and settle in the area. I provided this information that I had gathered to the Secretary of Defence and he gave immediate instructions to investigate this possibility.
I have no reason to disbelieve the information that Subramanium provided with regard to illicit immigrants from Tamil Nadu settling in the Vanni with impunity. If this is so what would happen once the Northern Provincial Council is established under the present 13th Amendment with police and land powers?
If the Northern Provincial Council, to which land and police powers are devolved, decides to support the Eelam ideology the central government will be unable to prevent illegal immigrants from Tamil Nadu colonising the Northern Province. If the Government allows this to happen a military strategy that defeated separatism and ushered in peace to protect and preserve the unity and territorial integrity of our nation for posterity will be once more reversed by a political strategy that will destabilise and divide the country. India’s effort to force the full implementation of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution has to be understood in this context to realise its potential future danger to the unity and territorial integrity of our nation.
Indian invitation recently to Tamil National Alliance politicians for discussions amounts to interfering in the internal affairs of this country. Political leaders of the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka should endeavour to integrate with the Sinhalese majority to achieve future peace and prosperity for the nation without discussing internal affairs of this country with Indian politicians.
Such discussions will only centre on how to apply pressure on the Government of Sri Lanka to fully implement the 13th Amendment, which is an Indian trap to destabilise and divide Sri Lanka in the future. The Tamil minority in Sri Lanka must also understand that the separatist terrorists who were trained, armed and equipped by India that caused so much death and destruction during a three-decade war have been convincingly defeated and that the Security Forces of this country will never allow them to raise their heads again.
What Sri Lanka requires in the future is peace and prosperity through the strengthening of its unitary Constitution and not death and destruction by diluting the Constitution through the implementation of the 13th Amendment that would create avenues for separatists to work towards destabilising and dividing the country.
Therefore, since Sri Lanka’s sovereignty is in the people and is inalienable the President should listen to the voice of the people and make use of Article 86 in the Constitution for a referendum to repeal the 13th Amendment as this is now a matter of national importance to prevent Indian surreptitious efforts to support separatism in Sri Lanka.
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