JVP redder than red with rage
By Our Political Editor

President Kumaratuga talking to delegates at the Development Forum meeting.

With three billion dollars in the bag after this week's Sri Lanka Development Forum meeting in Kandy and the aid donors not quivering over pre-conditions for the Joint Mechanism, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga seemed both elated and emboldened.

Days before aid donors sat down in the hill capital to determine what Sri Lanka needed for economic recovery from the devastating Boxing Day tsunami, upper echelons of the UPFA leadership became privy to heartening news - that the donors were not going to demand deadlines or lay down pre conditions. Though the donors were unaware that President Kumaratunga had made up her mind to face all odds and go ahead with the Joint Mechanism.

The first indications came when she wanted to brief Sri Lanka's neighbour, India. She wanted to meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and tell him that her Government had decided to accept the Norwegian-brokered Post Tsunami Operational Management Structure - even though she now hates to call this process to share equitably aid with Tiger guerrillas for tsunami recovery, as the Joint Mechanism, the name by which it is better known.

President Kumaratunga sought a hurried meeting with Premier Singh. The request went through diplomatic channels. But the Indian Premier was away in Moscow on an official visit where a number of bilateral issues were being discussed with President Vladimir Putin.

She had in fact suggested May 11 for the New Delhi visit, but the ruling Congress Party in India was having problems. The main opposition Bharatiya Janatha Party (BJP) had launched a strong anti-Government campaign and was boycotting Parliament, where the Budget sessions were in progress. Hence, the presence of Congress Party parliamentarians in the Lok Sabha, particularly that of Mr. Singh, was found essential.

Suggestions were made even for a brief meeting, but the Indian leader was in no mood to let the Sri Lankan President come for such a short visit, a diplomatic nicety to say "Don't come, now". He felt he not only had to talk to her, but also shower on her Indian hospitality. That meant at least one banquet before she departed New Delhi for Colombo. Hence, the suggestion came later that she could come over on a full-day visit on May 14 - a Saturday, when Parliament does not sit. This was to include a working lunch. But, officials in Colombo were nervous.

It was too close to the meeting of the Sri Lanka Development Forum in Kandy. Hence, it was decided to postpone the visit and fix it for a later date. There was some confusion yesterday (not surprisingly) that the President's Office was trying to rush through a day visit to New Delhi. Others dismissed this saying she was going only on a private visit, while still others asked what the indecent hurry was when Indian Foreign Minister Kanwar Natwar Singh is visiting Sri Lanka in the second week of next month. President Kumaratunga expects to brief him on the Joint Mechanism (JM). He would naturally convey this upon his return to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

In the wake of Kumaratunga's own pronouncements at the Development Forum as well as the much publicised Rupavahini interview she gave Janadasa Peiris, now Chairman of Lake House, there has been a hurry on the part of the Tiger guerrillas to have the JM implemented. On Tuesday, Norway's Special Envoy Erik Solheim and his aide Lisa Golden met LTTE Chief Negotiator, Anton Balasingham in London.

Now that President Kumaratunga had responded favourably to the JM, he urged the Norwegian peace facilitators to ensure an agreement between the UPFA Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on the JM be concluded without delay. With Kumaratunga now going high profile on the JM, the question whether it would be signed at a higher level or confined to the Ministry of Triple R - Relief, Reconstruction and Rehabilitation and the LTTE's Policy Planning Division or at a higher level remains a billion dollar question.

But after Kumaratunga made clear she was for the JM, which the Tiger guerrillas had already accepted, the Kilinochchi leadership gave her sharp retort on statements she made. She first told a JVP delegation that met her at the Janadipathi Mandiraya in early May that by accepting the JM, the LTTE had accepted Sri Lanka's sovereignty and territorial integrity. She repeated the same remarks during the Janadasa Peiries interview on Rupavahini.

The comment was to anger the LTTE leadership in the Wanni. Political Wing leader S.P. Thamilselvan telephoned the Jaffna and Colombo based Tamil media to rebut Kumaratunga's statement. He said the LTTE, though it had agreed to the Norwegian-brokered JM, was not accepting the sovereignty of Sri Lanka or its territorial integrity. In fact, the composition of the committees had been so constructed as to avoid Government dominance on sharing aid for tsunami recovery.

The Government's junior partner, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, already piqued by Kumaratunga's opening remarks at the Development Forum meeting, and the snide remarks at the interview with Peiris, had taken note of the Thamilselvan remarks as well.

On the one hand the JVP has decided to return to the cabinet. Its four ministers were back in their seats they had vacated for two weeks after their dramatic walkout. The issue was discussed by the JVP politburo prior to the Development Forum meeting. So too was the issue of JVP participation at the Development Forum meeting. Some of the radical members argued that it was the opportune moment to show the world that the UPFA Government in general, and President Kumaratunga in particular, were not speaking in one voice over the vexed JM quagmire.

They asked why the JVP needed to give credence to this argument for a joint apparatus with the LTTE. There was, however, a difficulty. The organisers of the Kandy meeting had given the JVP's Fisheries Minister Chandrasena Wijesinghe, a top-slot to brief the 100 or more foreign delegates from donor nations and agencies about the beating the fishing industry took due to the tsunami.

In the meantime, Treasury Secretary P. B. Jayasundera, not quite the hot-favourite of the JVP over the CEB and CPC re-structuring issues, had been in contact with the JVP hierarchy. He had assured them that the international community was not going to impose pre-conditions or deadlines for the JM in return for aid. The World Bank Country Director for Sri Lanka, Peter Harrold who survived a move to have him declared persona non-grata for some remarks he made in March over the status of the LTTE, was the first to say so.

Dr. Jayasundera was only echoing these sentiments. JVP patriarch Somawansa Amarasinghe, one of those who favours a continuing relationship with President Kumaratunga, come-what-may, said it was good that the country was getting so much funds, and that the JVP must participate in Kandy.

So participate it did; but was quickly in for a rude shock when President Kumaratunga gave her junior coalition partner if not a slap on the face, a knock on the head - and in front of the whole world. She said that she was prepared to lay down her life to take unpopular decisions, even if it meant threats from within her party or outside. The JVP representative at the Forum Vijitha Herath, the man in charge of the party's international affairs, was taken aback. With an ear on the President's impromptu speech, and an eye on trouser pocket, Herath pulled out his mobile phone, and dialled his boss Amarasinghe who was watching the President live on the telly from his Colombo residence.

He said the President was making disparaging remarks about the JVP. He asked his boss whether he should walk-out. Again, Amarasinghe was to calm the situation. He asked Herath not to over-react, and told him two wrongs would not make a right. The JVP constrained by the responsibilities of governance, the dramatics was left to Ven. Athureliye Ratana of the JHU, the party of the Buddhist monks.

The young radical monk took everyone by surprise. A captive audience too polite to walk out listened to his dignified statement delivered in a measured tone. The JVP was not amused on two counts. One was that they had been the subject of vilification, by innuendo by their coalition head - the President, in front of the world. And to add insult to injury, the JHU, which they always felt 'stole' some of their votes in the April 2004 elections, was now winning the applause of the nationalist element, which is the JVP's own vote-base.

The next day, the JVP politburo issued yet another statement, quite strongly worded, saying that the President (their coalition head) had violated internationally-accepted norms and practices by airing internal differences to the world at large.

This accusation came almost with the SLFP's General Secretary Maithripala Sirisena accusing the JHU's Ven Ratana of trying to gain cheap political advantage by doing what he did in Kandy. Deaf to the JVP's complaint, though, the President not only had stabbed the JVP in the back, but now decided to turn the knife in further. She had called her trusted mediaman Janadasa Peiris and given that interview - even before she spoke at Kandy where she went a step further - a premeditated attack on them.

This time she said that it was the JVP, together with the UNP that killed her husband actor turned politician Vijaya Kumaratunga. This was the President's theory on who killed Vijaya Kumaratunga, so much so that the actor-turned politician's friends say that Vijaya, were he around would be the first to ask his wife to pipe down on these conspiracy theories, which she changes from time-to-time depending on the current political situation.

The Janadasa Peiris interview on state Rupavahini tv came to be known in the pro-JVP, PA circles when Dilan Perera, the pro-JM anti-JVP busybody now firmly entrenched with the President at the expense of Media Minister Mangala Samaraweera boasted about it to Mervyn Silva, the colourful PA politician.

It was Dilan Perera who moved a resolution before the SLFP Central Committee to support the President's proposal of a JM, i.e. a proposal to work with the LTTE, radical step for a party that had its origin as a Sinhala grassroots nationalist party.

Not to be outdone, Minister Samaraweera went to Parliament the next day, and referred to the JM as a "peace bridge", and added that the only stumbling block to this bridge was "the UNP". No, it wasn't the JVP that was a stumbling block, according to Samaraweera.

Samaraweera, despite being the Media Minister, albeit with wings clipped by the President for giving the JVP 'too much play on state media', could call none higher than Nishantha Ranatunga at SLRC for verification. He was asked if he could not edit some of the attacks on the JVP.

Ranatunga had told the Minister that the President no less had asked him not edit a word of what she said. She wanted the "whole thing" aired. In desperation, the Minister called Peiris, only to get the same response. "Madam wanted the whole thing". Nothing was to be edited. The JVP was infuriated. They were redder than red with rage - and the President was nonchalantly waving the red flag at them.

On Thursday, the JVP wrote to the Rupavahini boss demanding a Right of Reply. They wanted to give their side of the story, and one UNP wag said it is probably to deny that they had any involvement with the UNP in the murder of Vijaya Kumaratunga. The President's friends say that the President has every reason to be angry with the JVP. She sees them as having said things about her even the UNP would not have said, that her alliance with them is notwithstanding the objections from her children, that in government, they are not allowing her to pursue her agenda either for the revival of the run-down economy, or for peace with the LTTE.

Now, she had called them for a meeting on the 16th at 7 pm., in Kandy, in the midst of the Development Forum meeting, and they had spurned her. She was also to raise the issue of the fate of Western Province Chief Minister Reginold Cooray who faces certain defeat in a vote of no-confidence in his council sans the JVP's support. Their excuse for not being available for that meeting was that they had to participate at the 40th anniversary celebrations of their party in Colombo.

The fact that while the President had declared yet another round of war of words with the JVP, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse was attending their 40th anniversary celebrations. A meeting called on the 19th (Thursday) was also turned down when the Secretary to the President asked them to come. This time, of course, the JVP has good grounds to call it off, especially after the double-whammies in Kandy and over Rupavahini.

The JVP is demanding a copy of the JM draft before they come for any meeting with the President. Understandably so. Here is a junior partner in a coalition Government hitting in the dark because the President, their coalition govt. head, does not trust them with a copy of what she is going to agree to with the LTTE.

In sheer desperation, the President's Secretary has asked the JVP to suggest dates for a meeting with the President, and assured them that a copy of the JM draft will be made available to them prior to that meeting.

Such a meeting is, however, unlikely for some time, what with the patriarch Somawansa Amarasinghe, Wimal Weerawansa and Nandana Gunathillake embarking on a visit to Japan, courtesy the Japanese peace Yasushi Akashi. Weerawansa will return in five days, while the rest of the Marxists stay on to see the wonders of capitalist Japan. While they stay at the stately Imperial Hotel adjoining the Imperial Palace, the JVP leaders will no doubt be pondering their future.

But the monopoly of pondering the future of the UPFA Government will not be their monopoly. The lady at President's House will be doing the same - and the only thing that may bring them together may be - the opposition UNP's announcement of a 'Jana Bala Meheyuma' or a people's uprising in July against both the JVP, and the President, asking them both to quit.

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