Fish tactic in fighting terrorism

Typical of JR, he set a clear deadline _ six months.

JR might have read all about Napoleon, his great military hero. He even studied the lives and tactics of Napoleon's great generals. I know it because he borrowed my copy of 'Napoleon's Generals', one book that had evaded his voracious interest in the little man with a huge complex.

The problem was that while JR had studied his Napoleon, he did not familiarise himself with Mao Zedong. Had JR and the UNP paid more attention to Chairman Mao and less to Napoleon, they would have learnt far more important lessons in dealing with guerrilla tactics and warfare _ and so would have George W. Bush.

Instead, the UNP as far back as 1967, was still suffering from the Dullesian concept of the "domino effect". So the Dudley Senanayake government suddenly found itself at the centre of a row with China when the Customs Department and the Foreign Ministry refused to release thousands of Mao badges consigned to the Chinese embassy in Colombo.

Advised by such conservative officials as Defence Secretary G.V.P. Samarasinghe, the UNP government stood firm. If the Chinese embassy wanted the chairman's badge for distribution among its staff, well the Ceylon Government was ready to release a few hundred, which is what it did.

Not before hordes of Mao's Red Guards surrounded the Ceylon embassy in Beijing and gave quite a display of a revolution in the making. The Chinese government issued a statement in which Beijing said what it thought of the acts of Colombo. It was in the colourful parlance which Beijing then reserved for US imperialism and its running dogs.

The UNP was certainly not the flavour of those decades, particularly after another UNP champion of democracy, Sir John Kotelawela made an utterly ill-advised speech on neo-colonialism, almost prompting an angry Chinese Prime Minister Chou Enlai to leave the Bandung Conference in 1955 for home.

One of those in the UNP who realised the foreign policy gaffe and much later tried to make amends by moving close to Beijing was Esmond Wickremesinghe, who was JR's trouble-shooter in the post-1977 era. One man who did not like Wickremesinghe's foreign affairs' role was Foreign Minister Shahul Hameed who thought the whole world was his parish and anybody trying to do so was an infidel.

Despite Wickremesinghe's efforts, which began with the drafting of the UNP manifesto, JR, like previous UNP leaders, had little time for formulation of a coherent foreign policy.

So he did not study Mao who had led the first communist revolution in the early post-war years. Mao's advice on successful guerrilla tactics for the peasants, who fought along with him, was to be like a fish in a pond, swim along with the other fish. In short his advice was to be part of the scene, to be indistinguishable from the ordinary people and thereby become part of the normal surroundings. JR's generals, like their commander-in-chief, had probably not read Mao either. So they did not expect the militant groups in the north, which at that time had not become battle-hardened nor acquired the capability of taking on the government security forces in conventional warfare, to adopt Mao's successful method.

Those northern militants were hardly distinguishable from the population of Jaffna. The only time they became distinguishable was when they armed themselves and carried out acts of terrorism. Immediately after that, the weapons disappeared under the verti or elsewhere and they melted with the rest of society.

This kind of war calls for clearly defined ways and not the conventional approach to warfare. That is the first thing to understand.

To counter these fish-in-the-swimming pool tactic, it is essential to win the support of the people or, to use that weathered phrase, the hearts and minds of people. If your enemy is swimming like a fish, then get into the same pond, win the confidence of the people, treat each of them like a human being, not like a proven terrorist who must be tortured or eliminated.

This was the first mistake that those mandated to fight terrorism in those early days made. They treated the community with hostility and suspicion so that gradually they alienated the vast majority of the people instead of winning their support.

Those who know the Jaffna peninsula well enough realise that the community is not only divided on caste lines but also on territorial lines. People are bound together by their coming from one village or another.

Intelligence is important in fighting terrorism. The north provides the kind of social terrain in which an intelligence network could have been created.

The security forces thought firepower and numbers alone would be sufficient to overawe and overcome an enemy that lived in the community and fought from within it.

Like "Yankie Dicky", as Sri Lanka's parlour Marxists used to call him in the old days, President George W. Bush almost made the same mistake.

In the first hours of tragedy striking the United States, President Bush's thoughts were to hit back at the enemy with its vast arsenal and military might. President Bush declared war on global terrorism.

That's all very fine, but where is this monster? It is a hydra-headed monster that has been created by the very forces that are now trying to destroy it. It is like Frankenstein who thought he could control his creation.

And how did they create it? By nurturing it at an early stage, by not watching it in later years, by allowing it to live on one's soil, take root and flourish. Surely, a coalition against global terrorism has emerged. But so can a coalition of global terrorists, under international pressure. We seem to be ignoring that.

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