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President Kumaratunga’s remarks to the International Magazine “Time” that she offered the North to Prabhakaran for 10 years, has become an issue. It sounds like a mediaeval queen signing off part of her fiefdom for peace. In modern day democratic society one just cannot make sweeping promises like that.
While the Minister for Constitutional Affairs has, like the President herself, maintained total silence on this controversial remark all week, Ministers Kingsley Wickramaratna and Mangala Samaraweera have tried to defend the President. Mr. Wickramaratna asks what’s wrong in talking with the LTTE and Mr. Samaraweera says the President made the offer in trying to get the LTTE to accept a political solution.
Nobody says the President must not seek ways and means of searching for any solution to the terrorist problem in the North. And in the early months of her administration, she was not only immature and ignorant of the working of Government, but also extra-ordinarily naive in her dealings with the LTTE. Like President Premadasa before her, she too fell into the LTTE trap to believe the LTTE only trusted them to deliver the goods to the terrorists.
And deliver the goods she nearly did with this offer, It’s all “passe” now. Fortunately this pronouncement did not come out in the open then. The LTTE has in the meantime shown its colours and the President must at least now have opened her eyes (like Mr. Premadasa did) to the stark reality — the bitter truth — that the LTTE wants war and little else.
The question is why LTTE failed to respond to the 10-year offer. Did it know that the President’s offer was not constitutional and would not be accepted by the people (probably not even by the Tamils). Or that they want a permanent State of Eelam, not a temporary one. Or is it evidence that the LTTE has to be in the business of war? The Eelam expat lobbies live on the continuation of the war to justify their existence abroad. For them money can be collected only if there is war. The whole business of Tiger Incorporated is just like the big business it is for many in the arms trade in Colombo. Some Generals and Commanders both in Colombo and in the North also want only war. Until there are no financial incentives for the prosecutors of the war — on both sides — war it shall be, for many moons to come.
The People’s Alliance rode to office on the pictures of dead bodies. Even in office, the PA plastered city and village walls with posters depicting a skull of an African man taken from Time Magazine and of a naked man tied to a post which however, turned out to be a UNPer killed by the JVP and asked the question “Do you want to go back to this era?”.
Suddenly, after 3 1/2 years in office, the PA has been made aware by psychiatrists that gory pictures of the ‘violence culture’ are giving nightmares to children.
It is said that some psychiatrists need psychiatric treatment themselves. Whatever that may be the truth probably lies elsewhere. The Government may be getting a little concerned now about its own human rights record coupled with its inability to check LTTE-sponsored violence.
The promulgation of these emergency regulations banning the publication of gory pictures brings into focus once again the debate on censorship. By and large the media have not overplayed the morbid scenes that follow bomb explosions and the like. TV violence is known to instigate more violence than real life scenes. Can the government stop CNN or the BBC from transmitting gory pictures of mangled and depacitated bodies to the Sri Lankan homes?
In this context, the PA could be reminded of the woman who brought the body of her child to the conquering Emperor Asoka and said “O Emperor, you may be a great warrior but can you be so great as to give back life to this child?” It was then, when he saw the lifeless body, that Chanda Asoka renounced violence and became Dharma Asoka, the Prince of Peace and Ahimsa. The Government needs to re-think this sudden ban.
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