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THE annual "Heroes' Day" speech by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) leader V. Prabakaran on November 27, a day after he turned 51, had a twin effect. It pushed the conflict-resolution agenda back to the court of the new Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse, and gained time for the LTTE to leverage itself domestically and internationally.
The speech came two days after Rajapakse made his Statement of Government Policy in Parliament, reiterating his election manifesto's strong unitary bias and rejecting two basic Tamil concepts related to conflict resolution: traditional homelands and the right to self-determination. Prabakaran's speech contained the message that Rajapakse should rework his approach.
Contrary to the expectations in Colombo of a possible extreme hardline tone, the speech was seen by leading political scientists in the island nations as "conciliatory". A day after it was delivered, the Colombo stock market's indices rose reflecting a sense of relief among investors.
However, Prabakaran minced no words in naming Rajapakse's main allies - the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) - as "Sinhala Buddhist racist forces".
The highpoint of the address was Prabakaran's "urgent and final appeal" to the new government to "come forward soon with a reasonable political framework that will satisfy the political aspirations of the Tamil people" by next year. If this "urgent appeal" was rejected, he said, LTTE would "intensify" its "struggle for self-determination" and "national liberation" to "establish self-government in our homeland".
The LTTE would "wait and observe" President Rajapakse's approach to the peace process "for some time". This, he said, was because "President Rajapakse is considered a realist, committed to pragmatic politics".
Significantly, the "next year" time-frame is open-ended and could mean any time from January 2006 to his next annual address in November 2006. Read against Rajapakse's three-month time-frame for concluding his efforts for a southern consensus and moving towards opening discussions with the LTTE, the first quarter of 2006 is bound to be significant for the future of the peace process. On Rajapakse's parameters for conflict- resolution, Prabakaran said the President "has not grasped the fundamentals, the basic concepts underlying the Tamil national question".
Rajapakse sees the peace process as one of accommodating the majorities and the minorities within a multi-ethnic Sri Lanka, in sharp contrast to the LTTE's view that it is a matter involving "self-determination of the Tamil nation". The LTTE leader was reffering to this conceptual difference when he said that "the distance between him and us is vast".
Prabakaran characterised the new Sri Lankan Government as "essentially a Sinhala-Buddhist regime", in which the "national minorities are not represented" and the new government "has been elected by the Sinhala majority specifically with their voting power".
The LTTE's "disinterest" in the November 17 presidential election and the "boycott" call by its front organisations, resulted in a low turnout of voters from the Tamil majority northern and eastern regions. The election and the change in governance "effected by the Tamil boycott have created a wide rift, politically, between the Tamil and Sinhala nations", Prabakaran said.
The other important element of Prabhakaran's speech was his attack against the JVP-JHU combine and the "Sinhala ruling elites". He blamed them as the "Sinhala-Buddhist racist forces" that had prevented the emergence of a "congenial atmosphere of goodwill" between Colombo and the LTTE.
The "demise" of the Post-Tsunami Operational Management Structure (P-TOMS) on account of the JVP-JHU's legal opposition, Prabakaran said, had "killed the last hope of the Tamil people". If there was "so much opposition" to the P-TOMS, which was "a simple provisional arrangement, then it is a daydream to expect to secure regional self-governing authority in the Tamil homeland by negotiating with the Sinhala political leadership", he added.
The international community has always been a major target audience for Prabakaran's speeches. His references to the lapses during the previous negotiations, the failure of the P-TOMS and the "shadow war" were aimed at this section. The speech was preceded by a build-up in the north-east with sections of the media announcing the "national symbols of Tamil Eelam" and LTTE front organisations holding "Tamil resurgence" events over the past few months.
Against this backdrop, Prabakaran said: "The international community cannot ignore these proclamations of a unified nation calling for the recognition of their right to self-determination, of their right to rule themselves. Our people aspire to determine their own political status. Having been subjected to decades of systematic state repression, they call upon the international community to recognise their political aspirations."
Having given time to the government, Prabakaran said the LTTE would pursue the path of "self-governance" if there was "no reasonable political framework" by "next year".
Jayadeva Uyangoda, Professor of Political Science, Colombo University, said: "Given speculation of a possible hardline speech, this appears a conciliatory gesture towards the new President". The speech reflected two things: "The LTTE leader wants the peace process to resume. He also wants the new government to understand the political dynamics of the ethnic conflict." Uyangoda said Prabakaran has "also quite smartly placed the burden of resuming the peace process on the new President". The LTTE has "reiterated the language of self-determination of the Tamil people, which President Rajapakse might find difficult to ignore. In a way, the speech contributes to political stability and reduces uncertainty between the government and the LTTE for the moment", Uyangoda said.
On November 28, the Sri Lankan President "welcomed" Prabakaran's reference to his "pragmatic" approach to politics and reiterated his invitation to the rebel leader for talks. Rajapakse suggested that the Sri Lankan government and the rebels could resume work "immediately" on reviewing the "operation" of the ceasefire agreement.
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