Nation building by Committee makes a perfect fool's paradise
The current Tittawella-Samarawickreme talks are now being increasingly seen as the "strike-back of the technocrats.'' Business analysts have particularly been fond of seeing these talks in this light because they hope that finally the country will be run by those who understand the economy.

It is a fondness for the Asian Tiger syndrome. Sri Lankans have for too long watched countries such as Malaysia and Singapore overtake them, and progress dramatically ahead, while their own island of promise gets more deeply mired in a quagmire of divisive politics and corrosive violence.

So, the professionals are naturally seeing the silver lining to the dark cloud. They feel that Tittawella and Samarawickreme can work their magic, and Presto the country's problems will disappear.

But this kind of sentiment is only symptomatic of the state of utter wretchedness of Sri Lanka' political culture. The thinking that the intractable issues that involve a 20 year old conflict can somehow be made to disappear through a technocratic approach, says that Sri Lankans are only fond of the Mahathir-type economic model. They do not know the first thing about how to get there. The Colombo professional particularly represents this mindset.

This is not to say that the Tittawella- Samarwickreme efforts are useless. But the reference to that committee here, is an attempt to measure the exact depth of the current mire that we as a polity are stuck in.

One aspect of it is that Prabhakaran is playing elder statesman. It is his entitlement to play that role when Sri Lankan rulers are making perfect asses of themselves. His message has been consistent, and it has been clearly articulated to hide the fact that he is gloating over his unexpected success in making the Sri Lankan government look the villain yet again.

The international community had also to be given just this chance, to fry the Sri Lankans. It is forgotten now that the LTTE was being difficult, and that the Japan donor conference was boycotted by them etc.

It is the intransigence of the Sri Lankan political elite that is just now on the international radar. Chris Patten of course, because he was given such a difficult time of it -- was forced to make some noises about the LTTE's "bad behaviour.'' This was make no mistake, a gesture to pacify the effigy burning protestors who took some time off from their political squabbles to take on an alien. The moment Patten landed on terra firma, he could smell this dissent in the air, and when he delivered a lecture he was bombarded with questions about his birthday visit to the Wanni to greet Prabhakaran.

Coming under this kind of heavy fire, Patten had no alternative but to make some gestures that would pacify the Southern Sri Lankan sentiment. Therefore, he reported on his return that he had given the LTTE a pep-talk about how to behave itself, and that the LTTE had replied "Very well sir, we will be good boys sir'' --and shuffled their feet and saluted him.

You could bet your bottom dollar and maybe even that spare Euro that he had none of this on his original itinerary. The proof will be the statements now coming at the average of one every two days from the EU, which say that the Sri Lankan government should get its act together, and that the President should relent. There is nothing about Prabhakaran in these.

The fact that the lending agencies (the IMF and World Bank) are also reconsidering their policy and holding back aid that has been already pledged, gives a clearer picture of the real thinking of the international community. This is an unkind thing to say -- but there is a mental picture somewhere in my mind of all these Western potentates rubbing their hands together in glee. They have been able to fix -- yet again - - these peace-happy Sri Lankans who were getting a little too smug, and bad-mouthing the liberators of the Tamil people at that. It's nice, they would say, to put the dunce cap on the head where it belongs, and this is certainly not Prabhakaran's.

So it is in this backdrop that the technocrats in the form of Tittawella and Samarawickreme are talking. Theirs is a bottom-line oriented inquiry into the affairs of the Sri Lankan state. Their own bottom-lines too would come into that consideration.

The business community and professionals as said earlier would be happy with that, and of course theoretically, Samarawickreme and Tittawella are only tasked with the pursuit of bringing the two major political entities in the South together, so that these two entities can have the peace of mind later to attend to other issues such as peace and road development.

It will be such a technocratic committee that places issues such as peace and road development together in the same bracket. It is an incremental, bottom-up approach. Its rationale is that somehow, the two offenders within the Southern Sri Lankan polity will be brought together, and everything else and everybody else including the international community can wait until that happens.

Now, as said earlier, the professionals are happy with this approach, because they see that the business-minds and the technocrats have finally been allowed to take over from inept and corrupt politicians. There is of course the need to empathise with this sentiment of the professionals, who are also among long suffering people of this country.

But its when we have a technocratic bottom-up approach of fixing the kitchen and then approaching the issue of peace and that quarrel with Prabhakaran, that we begin to think it might be better if we had those corrupt politicians running the show after all in the first place for what its worth. To put it in terms of political theory, of course, it means that an approach that prioritizes the Southern economy while pushing the issue of peace and conflict resolution to the back burner, is not a political one.

It is a piecemeal approach that does not take into account all the bearings and ramifications of the problem. In other words, however fond Sri Lankan technocrats businessmen and professionals are of Mahathir Mohammed (I know they are) this is not how Mahathir Mohammed would have approached this problem if he was the leader of this country.

As stated in these columns a few weeks back, Mahathir had a similar ethnic divide in his country which was threatening to derail his vision for a modern Malaysian economy. But he took care of that problem first. He at least took care of that problem in parallel with his development drive, because he knew that a nation cannot be built if there is a rotten and tattered social fabric as a backdrop. So he repaired this backcloth and took care of his ethnic and political problems first. Then he proceeded to build his nation.

He did not put those problems in the back-burner and think of the "bottom-line'' the way the Sri Lankan elite is trying to come to grips with their cohabitation problem by appointing a technocratic committee to look into it, while a monstrous secessionist conflict festers in the background.

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