03 March 2005
Marxists oppose self-rule for LTTE
By Arjuna Wickramasinghe & Simon Gardner
COLOMBO: Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels are fascists who deserve neither self-rule nor direct tsunami aid, the government's Marxist ally said on Wednesday, vowing to quit and topple the ruling coalition if it agrees to either.
The People's Liberation Front, or JVP - whose rabid opposition to rebel autonomy is a major stumbling block to converting a three-year truce into permanent peace after two decades of civil war - want the Tigers to embrace democracy.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) can keep their guns for now, and even join the political mainstream, but they must let the minority Tamils they claim to represent speak out, JVP leader Somawansa Amarasinghe said in a rare interview.
"We are going to break with the government if (it) pushes for a joint mechanism with the LTTE for distributing tsunami aid or interim self-rule," said Amarasinghe, who fled into exile in Britain in 1989 after the Marxists' last rebellion and returned in 2001. "That is not going to work."
"The LTTE must agree to have talks that lead towards restoring democracy in the north and the east," he said, a photograph of the JVP's slain founder behind him on the wall of the party's Colombo headquarters.
Faded black and white pictures of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin hang in the lobby downstairs. "The British government never agreed to have talks to share power until (it) received the guarantee from Sinn Fein, IRA that certain conditions are met before implementing the Good Friday agreement," the former irrigation engineer said.
The JVP mounted two rebellions against the Sri Lankan state in the 1970s and 1980s - in which an estimated 50,000 people were killed.
The party, which draws its support from the majority Sinhalese community, is now Sri Lanka's third biggest, with 39 seats in the 225-seat parliament. However the JVP has been locked in squabbling with President Chandrika Kumaratunga, and if they quit the alliance it would bring down her coalition.
JOIN THE MAINSTREAM: "We ourselves took up arms against an undemocratic government," Amarasinghe said. "We will be very happy if they enter mainstream politics."
The separatist Tigers have accused successive governments of discriminating against Tamils and waged a two-decade war for autonomy that killed more than 64,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.
Their war is now in limbo thanks to a 2002 cease fire. Antagonism between the coalition and the Tigers reached a crescendo late last year, when the rebels threatened to go back to war unless the government discussed their demand for self-rule. And while December's tsunami has diverted both the Tigers' and the government's attention to humanitarian relief and rebuilding coastal communities devastated by waves that killed about 40,000 Sri Lankans, fresh killings in the east are stoking tension again.
The JVP does not believe the Tigers will go back to war to push their case for interim self-rule and Amarasinghe argues that enshrining the rebels' right to autonomy in the constitution would only pave the way for a bloodier conflict.
"The LTTE is a fascist organisation, which is trying to establish a one-party rule in the north and the east which should not be allowed and should not be promoted," Amarasinghe said, likening reclusive Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran to former Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic.
"Prabhakaran must be at the Hague ... he is responsible for ethnic cleansing," he said. "There are no Muslims in the north. They were chased ... What guarantee will we have that the Sinhalese and the Muslims in the eastern province will not suffer the same fate under an LTTE controlled interim authority?" -Reuters
© The DAWN Group of Newspapers, 2005