‘Sri Lanka model of COIN sets a dangerous precedent for humanity’
[TamilNet, Thursday, 11 October 2012, 18:26 GMT]After the International Community of Establishments working in tandem
with a genocide-intending Sri Lankan state oversaw a brutal military
solution over the armed struggle of the Eezham Tamils in May 2009, the
‘Sri Lanka model’ of dealing with insurgencies is now being incorporated
into the science of Counterinsurgency (COIN), opines RM Karthick,
observing what dangerous ramifications this could have for struggling
peoples worldwide in an article published on Sanhati, an Indian online
journal, on Wednesday. Outlining internal and external factors in
shaping the conflict, using the politico-military analysis of the late
TamilNet senior editor ‘Taraki’ Sivaram, the author explains how
internationally coordinated measures against the LTTE and the genocidal
intent of Sinhala nationalists led to Mu’l’livaaykkaal and the systemic
repression of the Eezham Tamils in their homeland that followed.
Full text of the article by Mr RM Karthick, a research scholar in
Political Theory at the University of Essex, UK, published on Sanhati
follows:
Genocide as Counterinsurgency – Brief Notes on the “Sri Lanka Model”Speaking at
a conference at Trinity College, Dublin on 24th May 2012
titled ‘The Local and the Global: The Geopolitics of Peace and
Conflict’ exiled Sinhala journalist Bashana Abeywardane, opined that
genocide was used as a Counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy by the Sri
Lankan state to crush the armed struggle for a sovereign state of Tamil
Eelam led by the LTTE. Citing British military strategist Frank Kitson,
who had played an important role in suppressing the Mau Mau uprising and
the insurgency of the Malayan Communist Party, Mr. Abeywardane said
that when you want to neutralize an insurgency movement, you must
destroy its “genuine subversive element” – arguing that in the case of
Sri Lanka, the genuine subversive element in the island was the Tamil
population as such. He further cited geo-political factors that
influenced the decision of the world powers to support the Sri Lankan
state’s military offensive leading up to May 2009, arguing that the
island held geo-strategic importance only if it was a unitary political
entity.
COIN, as the term suggests, is a war manoeuvre used
against insurgents by states. While the principal feature of COIN is to
ensure that a state facing an insurgency does not lose its
constitutional-legal monopoly over violence in the territory it
controls/seeks to control over to the insurgents, there are specific
cases where COIN gains additional features as well. According to David
Kilcullen, a leading COIN expert based in the US, counterinsurgency “is
an umbrella term that describes the complete range of measures that
governments take to defeat insurgencies. These measures may be
political, administrative, military, economic, psychological, or
informational, and are almost always used in combination.” He further
adds that to understand strategies deployed in particular conflicts it
is necessary to take into consideration “the nature of the insurgency
being countered, the nature of the government being supported, and the
environment—especially the human environment—in which the conflict takes
place.”
As a phenomenon, countering insurgencies is as old as
states and empires. As a concept, study in COIN gained momentum in the
colonial period so as to deal with frequently occurring rebellions in
colonies as well as to counter the “communist menace”. As a science, it
grew with late modernity and the rise of what ‘Taraki’ Sivaram (iconic
Eelam Tamil journalist, military analyst and senior editor of TamilNet
who was assassinated by Colombo in 2005) called “counter-insurgency
nation-states”. We must understand that COIN has developed as a science,
deployed by specific actors in specific conditions as a science. And by
virtue of its being a science, each deployment – whether successful,
partially successful, or failed - is closely followed, studied and
applied by various states engaged in COIN operations according to the
particular conditions they encounter.
Some refined political
analysts, understanding the geo-strategic importance of Sri Lanka, have
argued that the Sri Lankan war machine was ideologically and materially
equipped in its COIN operations against the Tigers by a confluence of
world powers. Reflecting on this, Mark Whitaker writes in his biography
of ‘Taraki’ Sivaram that “by the middle 1990s Sivaram had come to view
Sri Lanka’s conflict as a kind of military-political laboratory in which
the various repressive forces of late modernity (local and
international) were testing their clever, often cruel,
counter-insurgency tactics”. Just that the lab rats favoured by the
world powers in the island had genocidal intentions.
From here,
we need to chalk out those points that need to be outlined so as to
further study the ‘Sri Lanka model’ of COIN – both objective conditions
and subjective forces that existed in the island.
Objective conditions:
- Location of the island of Sri Lanka makes it geo-strategically
important. The position of the island between the routes of the Straits
of Malacca and Hormuz make it an excellent base for a power seeking to
exert influence in the Indian-Pacific waters;
- Demographic distribution in the island, with the Eelam Tamils
identifying the North and East region as their traditional homeland
(i.e. Tamil Eelam).
Subjective forces:
- A virulent strain of Sinhala/Sri Lankan nationalism that seeks to
forcibly assimilate Eelam Tamils through Sinhalization, which possesses a
neanderthal paranoia about external Tamil conspiracies to take
over/divide its Sri Lanka, seeing the entire island as primarily Sinhala
property, and exercises control over both repressive and ideological
state apparatus;
- An Eelam Tamil nationalism that had manifested itself as an
armed struggle, that aspired for a political solution based on the right
of nations to self-determination;
- World powers with vested interests in preserving the unitary state structure of Sri Lanka.
The author needn’t spend time in elaborating on point
(3). The inherent appeal for genocide that such a strain of nationalism
would possess should be evident to readers. Suffice to point out that
the ideological patriarch of Sinhala nationalism, Anagarika Dharmapala, a
xenophobic monk who expounded theories of Sinhala race superiority and
the need for their lebensraum, was greatly impressed by Japanese
militarist nationalism. No wonder that what his sons did at Mullivaikaal
is compared by Tamils to the Rape of Nanking.
Point (4) needs
some observation. The armed struggle for Tamil Eelam led by the LTTE was
categorized under “Identity-Focused Strategy” by the US Field Manual
3-24.2 on ‘Tactics in Counterinsurgency’ (April 2009). According to the
manual, “The identity-focused strategy mobilizes support based on the
common identity of religious affiliation, clan, tribe, or ethnic group.
In this strategy, legitimacy and popular support are tied to their
identity and, often, no effort is made to garner popular support outside
their identity. Rather, communities often join the insurgent movement
as a whole, bringing with them their existing social or military
hierarchy. External support is garnered from international elements of
the same identity.” Further, it is argued that this strategy “Protects
what it considers the interest of the identity”, and “Mass base easily
aligns with insurgency objectives.” In other words, the goals of this
type of an insurgency includes preserving and protecting political,
historical and cultural symbols that are of core value to the community,
and the strength of this type of an insurgency is the support it enjoys
amongst masses adhering to an identity.
To use Sivaram’s
analysis [1], the LTTE, after it developed into a conventional army
effectively challenging the monopoly of violence that the Sinhala state
possessed, required the following conditions:
- A politically motivated population from which to raise battalions;
- An economy to raise resources to clothe, arm, feed and deploy its forces;
- A secure territory to train and barrack the forces;
- An efficient logistics system;
- Facilities to treat a battalion of wounded fighters.
To this, I would like to add another crucial condition
(F), namely, a rear base to withdraw should a situation emerge when the
best fighting forces risk complete annihilation. The Tigers had this in
Tamil Nadu till the point when the Indian government turned hostile
towards the Eelam Tamils’ struggle. The neutralization of the rear base
by India cut-off the only possible, strategically favourable sanctuary
the insurgents had in the region.
Other than this, the LTTE’s de
facto state that emerged after hugely successful military operations
against the Sri Lankan military secured all other conditions. Popular
support among the Eelam Tamil people, a civilian infrastructure that
functioned like a ‘normal’ government with its system of taxation, funds
from a million strong diaspora, medical facilities to treat the
wounded, a political and military stronghold in the Vanni region, and
logistics system secured mainly through control of the sea with the Sea
Tigers.
It was this force that the Sri Lankan state faced. From
the conditions that the LTTE secured in their de facto state, we can map
out those measures taken to destroy them.
Measures adopted by Sri Lankan government to destroy the LTTE:
- The measures taken by the co-chairs (the group of US, EU, Norway
and Japan who were ‘managing’ the peace process initiated between the
LTTE and the Sri Lankan government since 2002 till its collapse in 2006)
in the ceasefire period to restrict taxation by the LTTE in the
territory in governed – but considering the taxation of the Sri Lankan
government as legitimate [2];
- The measures taken in the ceasefire period to restrict the movement of the Sea Tigers, thereby affecting flow of logistics;
- Foreign intelligence supplied to the Sri Lankan military to
target and attack the Sea Tigers’ bases, boats and supply channels;
- Proscription of the LTTE in Western countries where the Tamil
diaspora is present, arrests of diaspora activists and criminalization
of fund raising for political or relief purposes [3];
- Sri Lanka’s undeclared embargo on food, medical and other basic supplies to LTTE controlled regions;
- Sri Lanka ‘compelling’ the pull-out of relief organizations and NGOs after the collapse of the peace process in 2006;
- Sri Lankan military’s systematic targeting of hospitals,
educational institutions and food supplies so as to leave the Tiger’s
civilian infrastructure in complete disarray;
- Making the secure territory of the insurgents insecure for the population;
- Collective trauma inflicted to hurt not the insurgent alone,
but the population as such, so as to destroy their political motivation.
A study of the patterns of claymore attacks, Kfir bombings, and
artillery shelling by the Sri Lankan military would show that these were
intended to target the Tamil population primarily. Add to this cordon
and search operations in Sri Lanka overrun Tamil territory, creation of
High Security Zones and military enclaves, military checkpoints that
make the Sinhala repressive state appear omnipresent, destruction of
Tamil cultural and political symbols, routine tortures, rapes,
interrogations, disappearances etc. The point is, reduce the population
to subhuman conditions that let alone being political, even to be
treated as something close to a human would appear as an act of
benevolence by the Sinhalese.;
- Finally, with all external factors in its favour, with the
political space for the Tigers completely blocked, and the internal
factor of Sinhala nationalism being at an all time high, using the
moment to inflict as much casualties as possible on the Eelam Tamil
people as a warning of what would happen to those resisting Sinhala
hegemony.
The adoption of these measures led to Mullivaikaal,
with 40000 plus dead and many more disappeared. An observation of these
measures shows that while the genocidal intention of internal actors in
the state influenced the manner in which they handled conditions (A) and
(C), the counter-strike to conditions (B) (D) (E) and (F) was dealt
wholly or largely by external forces. Or, the external forces, which had
vested interests in the island, created favourable conditions for the
Sri Lankan state to unify the island through whatever means possible.
It all these known factors taken into account that made the ‘Sri Lanka model’ tick.
What
followed after shows Sri Lanka’s operations did not stop with the
military defeat of the Tigers. They are listed out as points to give
readers a general overview – ideally, each of the points merits separate
analysis – of what is happening in the so-called ‘post-war’ era. Some
of these factors have been listed by Sivaram much earlier as being part
of a COIN strategy.
— Increased military presence in the North
and East and creation of military bases in Tamil areas. A report
published in the July 14, 2012 issue of the Economic and Political
Weekly titled “Notes on the Military Presence in Sri Lanka’s Northern
Province” states that military to civilian ratio in the North is as high
as 1:5 – higher than Kashmir. The Sinhala military monitors, dominates
and penetrates all aspects of social, cultural and political life of the
Eelam Tamils be it civil society protests, religious festivals or
birthday celebrations. Paul Virilio contends that “Whoever controls the
territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about
laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and
circulation.” Sinhala military control of Tamil territory equals Sinhala
possession over it, to facilitate smooth access of the Sinhala state
apparatus to all corners of the island.
— Settlement of Sinhalese
from the South in places where Tamils have been displaced. Tamil
activists argue that this is a system of colonization intended to
destroy the territorial integrity of the Tamil homeland by bringing
about demographic changes that would make them a minority in their own
areas.
— Building of Buddhist statues and monuments celebrating
Sinhalese triumph in Tamil areas often carried side-by-side with
destruction and desecration of places of political or cultural
importance to the Tamils.
— Parcelling out Tamil lands to foreign
investors through a military-corporate nexus. A combine of free-market
capitalism that respects no borders and a militarist state that is bent
on breaking the sovereignty that the Tamils aspire to, works towards
facilitating exploitation of human and material resources available in
the Tamil homeland.
– Induced proliferation of drugs, alcohol and
pornography among the Tamil people. Likewise, a high prevalence of
sexual abuse of Eelam Tamil women by the Sri Lankan military and police
forces has also been recorded. An ICG report on “Sri Lanka: Women’s
Insecurity in the North and East” credits this to the overwhelming
military presence in the Tamil areas. However, the analysis and
conclusions of this report has been
criticized
by Tamil feminists and scholars for failing to recognize the genocidal
nature of the sexual violence perpetrated on the Eelam Tamils. Analysts
further say that all of these processes have been intended to
systematically tear the socio-cultural fabric that binds the Tamil
people
— ‘Disappearances’ and routine psychological harassments
of ex-LTTE cadres not just to make them broken persons, but also to warn
those around of the consequences of rebellion. Particularly affected
are women combatants. A TamilNet analytical
feature
details how women cadres have been subject to abuse and in many cases,
forced pregnancies, in the course of ‘rehabilitation’. The fate of about
2000-3000 women cadres is still unknown, the feature notes.
What
is to be noted here is that none of the world powers that aided the Sri
Lankan state with ammunition and ideas, some of who have now started to
ask the Sri Lankan government to speedily implement the “positive
recommendations” of the ‘reconciliation’ commission setup by it, have
addressed even one of these issues with the seriousness it deserves.
Likewise, while the Sinhala nationalists justify/deny the above in the
name of security, other observers call these processes a protracted
genocide, results of structural violence. These are the effects of the
‘Sri Lanka model’ on the Eelam Tamil nation.
The science of COIN
will add the ‘Sri Lanka model’ in its ambit. Already, numerous states
across the world facing insurgencies have threatened to do a Sri Lanka
on the rebelling people. Turkey of late has been making most references
in public to this model to the Kurds. But as mentioned above, the
success of the ‘Sri Lanka model’ depended on a combination of internal
and external factors, objective conditions and subjective forces, none
of which will be found at a different time and a different place – the
laboratory and the lab rats would not be the same elsewhere. We must
also realize that international legitimacy, ideas and weapons from all
directions given to the internal actors who had genocidal intention
played the major role in effecting the defeat of the insurgents and the
concomitant genocide than the internal actors themselves. Other states
needn’t have all the advantages that Sri Lanka had.
Then again,
no COIN expert worth his salt would suggest a blind imitation of this
model. It needs to be restated here that there is no pure model of COIN –
each one influences the other and in turn is influenced by others. What
will happen is that those aspects of the ‘Sri Lanka model’ that can
find applicability in other conflicts will be studied deeper and applied
accordingly.
One can see at least 3 general lessons emerging
from the ‘Sri Lanka model’ that other states might find appealing to
deal with insurgencies.
- Military solution first. Display
ruthlessness in securing your hegemony and the population will be
willing to accept any political solution you throw at them later.
-
Winning ‘hearts and minds’ is outdated. Break the spine of the
population; throw fear in their hearts and numb their minds. They will
be grateful to you for letting them to just live.
- The press
does nothing to influence public opinion that you don’t want it to. If
they are against you, they are with the ‘terrorists’ and are to be dealt
accordingly.
What this would mean for people involved in
struggles against various oppressive governments is left to the reader’s
imagination.
Notes:
[1] See Mark Whitaker, “Learning
Politics From Sivaram: The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil
Journalist in Sri Lanka”, London: Pluto Press, (2007) p. 146.
[2]
For further information on how the LTTE’s Peace Secretariat viewed the
tilting of the parity of status by the co-chairs through various means
during the peace talks,
click this link.
[3]
For a more elaborate account of how the criminalization of Tamil
diaspora politics is still taking place in the West so as to arm-twist
them to drop the demand for Tamil Eelam, refer to Vicki Sentas’ chapter
“One more successful war? Tamil diaspora and counter-terrorism after the
LTTE” in “Counter-Terrorism and state political violence: The ‘war on
terror’ as terror” edited by Scott Poynting and David Whyte, Routledge
(2012).
External Links:
