Financial Times - Remove your blinkers; open your eyes

William H. Avery, a former US diplomat in an article published in the Times of India, Tuesday May 16 titled “Violence Won't Work” wrote a piece that all leaders in governance, politics, business, academics and civil society must read. Having read it; all of them, especially the Chamber and business leaders must wake up, remove their blinkers and open their eyes to reality. The dawn of reality must jolt them into immediate strategic action before it is too late for Sri Lanka, its people and especially the business sector. The previously adopted strategy of waiting with folded arms, unconcerned and watching can surely bring only disaster for all. This is what Avery said:

Violence Won't Work
Sri Lanka's foreign minister Mangala Samaraweera was in New Delhi last week, seeking India's support in keeping the island's fragile ceasefire intact after months of spiralling violence. If Samaraweera was hoping to come away from his visit with concrete pledges of military support, he will have been disappointed. The official line from the prime minister's office went no further than expressing "India's interest in the continued stability and prosperity of Sri Lanka".

With the IPKF India learned the hard way that it cannot solve Sri Lanka's problems. But India does have something to offer its neighbour, something far more valuable than military assistance: Leadership by example.

Looking across the Palk Strait, Sri Lankans can see a beacon of hope. In India, they have a shining example of the peace and prosperity that a multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy can create for its citizens.

Sri Lanka is at a critical juncture, and the stakes are enormous: Nothing less than the lives and livelihoods of the nation's 20 million people. If the Sri Lankan government and LTTE are to find a framework for peaceful coexistence - if they are to give their people the peace and prosperity that Indians enjoy - both sides will first need to accept three fundamental principles.

The first principle is that there is no military solution to this conflict.
This ought to be clear to both sides, having spent two decades fighting each other to a stalemate. The Sri Lankan government, for its part, seems to accept that a political solution is called for.

The LTTE, however, appears to still harbour a belief that warfare will make its Tamil homeland a reality.
Recent weeks have seen the LTTE attack a Sri Lankan naval convoy off the coast of Jaffna and detonate a suicide bomb at army headquarters in Colombo, the latest incidents in a campaign of violence that stretches back to last December. If a political solution to Sri Lanka's conflict is to be found, the LTTE will have to accept that such tactics are more befitting of a ragtag band of terrorists than would-be leaders of the Tamil people. Which image does the LTTE want to convey?

The second is that the costs to both sides of the status quo are high. In economic terms, uncertainty about Sri Lanka's stability has cost both foreign and direct investment.
The nation as a whole should be growing at least as fast as India; yet Sri Lanka's economic growth since 2003 has trailed India's by from 1 per cent to 3 per cent per year. This is in spite of Sri Lanka having opened its economy to foreign investment a full 14 years before India.

In the areas of the country controlled by the LTTE, the economic picture is particularly bleak. The majority of the people there live on subsistence farming, and trade with the outside world (apart from LTTE-controlled smuggling) is not a significant part of the economy. Indeed, around 500,000 Sri Lankan civilians living in isolation in the north and east of the country are the forgotten victims of the LTTE.

While other Sri Lankans and South Asians enjoy ever increasing levels of prosperity as part of the global economy, the Tamils living under the yoke of the LTTE are stuck in a time warp, back in a time when South Asians lived off the land in a hard-scrabble existence. When will the LTTE realise the cost its struggle is imposing on the Tamil people?
Thirdly, both the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government must realise that they can achieve much more for their people together than they ever could separately.

Sri Lanka is not a small country. Yet it represents less than 2 per cent of the population of South Asia, and is dwarfed by India's 1.1 billion souls. Sri Lanka's best hope for sustained economic growth is to attach itself to the larger Indian economy; Sri Lanka can only do so if it is, like India, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy.

The Sri Lankan government understands the necessity of closer economic integration with India; this is the rationale behind its effort to enter into a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with New Delhi. The LTTE needs to understand too that it cannot go it alone. Scale matters in South Asia, and that the odds of success for all people of Sri Lanka are greatest if they pool their resources and abilities. Will the LTTE continue to sulk in impoverished isolation or join with the rest of Sri Lanka in building a vibrant, diverse and prosperous nation?

It is important to remember that the Tamil people have legitimate complaints about the way the Sri Lankan government treated them in the past; Sri Lanka's post-independence history is a shameful record of systematic discrimination, punctuated by gross huan rights abuses, against the Tamil people.
But the outside world must not confuse these legitimate grievances with the illegitimate actions of the LTTE, brutal terrorists who have created their own version of the Taliban's Afghanistan within Sri Lanka's borders.
They have made their point. Now these terrorists urgently need to evolve into a political entity that understands compromise can take them and the Tamil people much farther than violence ever could.

Once this happens, there is no limit to what a unified Sri Lanka can achieve. Its people need look no further than India to see that.