Sri Lankan conflict and SAARC
Jayadeva Uyangoda

Being one of the most enthusiastic members of SAARC, Sri Lanka has, in recent years, been quite disappointed with the inability of the regional body to move forward either in fulfilling its original objectives or meeting new challenges. From Sri Lanka's perspective, SAARC has fallen victim to inter-state politics between the two principal South Asian states, India and Pakistan, who have been rivals from the very beginning of their emergence as modern nation-states.

Sri Lanka's special affinity with the idea of closer co-operation among South Asian nations runs back to the 1950s where the island nation's foreign policy shifted decisively towards a position which later came to be called non-alignment. There were, of course, occasional deviations from this policy when regimes of the United National Party (UNP)-the most conservative of the post-independence ruling parties-took up an openly pro-American stand on external relations. In the early eighties, there was also a proposal made by some sections of the then ruling UNP that Sri Lanka should join ASEAN. However, all Sri Lankan regimes after the mid-1980’s have demonstrated a clear commitment to the spirit and programme of close South Asian cooperation. Quite significantly, ordinary citizens of Sri Lanka seem to cherish the ideal of South Asian solidarity. That, in a way, represents a kind of citizen-based sense of internationalism.

India and Pakistan in SAARC: Sri Lankan responses
Sri Lanka's political consensus for a strong South Asian regionalism has been shared by non-state civil society actors as well. Particularly after the mid-1990s, there have been a variety of initiatives by women's groups, the media, business and professional bodies as well as trade unions, to link up with their counterparts in the rest of South Asia in programmes of what has been described as the ‘multi-track approach to regional integration’. These initiatives are backed by a strong argument in Sri Lanka to continue to strengthen civil society, people to people contact in South Asia, parallel to and independent of the official process.

Given the history of bickering and inter-state rivalries, particularly between India and Pakistan on the one hand, and between India and her smaller neighbours, on the other, there is also recognition among the intelligentsia in Colombo of the continuing inability of the official SAARC process to transcend bilateral irritants. In a seminar held in Colombo in 2001, Gamani Corea, Sri Lanka's eminent economist, articulated these views quite mildly when he said: 'The political stresses and tensions among the larger members of the region, particularly Indo-Pakistan, has stood in the way of even arranging summits and other meetings. When SAARC was established, it was felt that it would help to defuse political tensions, but there has been only partial success' (Kelegama, 2001: vi).

The SAARC Charter does not allow bilateral issues to enter its official agenda. That has been a deliberate decision made by the founding fathers of SAARC, in order to insulate the newly set-up forum for co-operation from contentious bilateral issues. Even at the first summit in Dhaka this dimension was re-iterated. It was obviously a decision made with exceedingly good intentions, primarily in view of the volatility of bilateral relations between India and Pakistan. But the point from the perspective of the regional co-operation is that it is precisely the inability of both India and Pakistan to transcend bilateral tension that has negatively affected any significant progress in the direction of closer regional cooperation and solidarity. In fact, those in Sri Lanka who closely follow the dynamics of South Asian politics often express their anguish that the smaller South Asian nations can hardly push the two giants in the region towards reconciliation that can effectively be translated into regional stability.

Sri Lanka's officials have been quite aware of the difficulties of building regional cooperation in South Asia in a background of unresolved and continuing conflict between India and Pakistan. At the very first SAARC Summit held in Dhaka in 1985, Sri Lanka's President Junius Jayewardene appealed to the fellow heads of state and government to 'trust each other'. Jayewardene reminded Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi that 'India, the largest in every way, larger than all the rest of us combined, can by deeds and words create the cooperation among us so necessary to make a beginning'.

However, the complex dynamics of bilateral inter-state issues continued to cast a shadow over the progress of South Asian cooperation. Other than the familiar Indo-Pakistan tension, there had emerged by 1985-86 problems in India-Sri Lanka relations too. The Sri Lankan government as well as many Sinhalese nationalists began to be extremely critical of what they thought as India's interference in Sri Lanka's growing ethnic conflict. Prime ministers Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi adopted a stand which was openly sympathetic to Sri Lanka's Tamil nationalists who were engaged in a secessionist war. The Indian government also dealt with the Sri Lankan government on the ethnic conflict in a manner that gave rise to the argument of regional hegemonism. Quite interestingly, by 1986, when the second SAARC Summit was held in Bangalore, the bilateral tension between India and Sri Lanka too had reached a qualitatively high point. Sri Lanka's President Jayewardene said at the Bangalore Summit: 'We cannot build this association if we allow bilateral issues to grow. If we bring bilateral issues to this forum, then maybe we would be crippled before we could walk…. The SAARC ship has set sail [and] it has started its journey. [T]here should be no mutiny on board' (Jayewardene, 1988). Jayewardene was, of course, referring to the possibility of the Indian government using the SAARC forum to censure Sri Lanka on its harsh military policy towards Tamil civilians.

It is precisely the policy of keeping bilateral issues away from the official SAARC process that has now become a matter of concern. Many Sri Lankan analysts are of the view that unless India-Pakistan relations are improved in a direction of ensuring a tension-free and stable South Asia, there is simply no possibility for a stronger sense of regionalism in South Asia. Sri Lankan analysts have also been watching how both India and Pakistan had occasionally sent out signals of moving into extra-regional alliances at the expense of SAARC. For example, in the late 1990s, there were signs of Pakistan moving towards greater co-operation with West Asia, where Pakistan would find greater cultural affinity and already-existing economic and migrational bonds. Similarly, India's signals for a possible new alliance, or closer economic co-operation, with countries in the Eastern direction are seen in Sri Lanka as suggestions of India's increasing de-emphasis on South Asian regional cooperation.

The absence of a conflict resolution mechanism within South Asia to address bilateral, inter-state issues that are normally excluded from the official SAARC process, has often been noted by Sri Lankan analysts. They have proposed the setting up of such an institutional mechanism for regional conflict resolution, or even amending the SAARC Charter to enable deliberation on bilateral issues. At the very early years of SAARC, a Sri Lankan analyst even proposed a treaty-based regional security framework for South Asia as a mechanism for minimising and managing bilateral tension (Ariyasinghe: 1990). This proposal envisaged the regional security framework to evolve 'a strategic consensus' among the South Asian states in order to ensure regional security in South Asia. Such a regional security framework was also thought necessary in the context of extra-regional orientation that India and Pakistan had developed in the sense of strategic alliances and defence agreements. But, while proposing such a regional security framework, Ariyasinghe also warned that given the specific geo-political dynamics in South Asia, India would perhaps want collective security arrangements to be 'Indo-centric', because of the perception that the smaller SAARC countries might 'gang up' in an effort to contain India's dominance in the South Asian region (Ariyasinghe, 1990: 41-43).

Sri Lanka, India and South Asia
Sri Lanka's relations with South Asia have also been defined to a great extent by the framework within which the island's relations with India have evolved. The fact that India is Sri Lanka's closest neighbour has certainly had political-geographical implications for the nature of relations between the two nations. In Sri Lanka, attitudes towards India have been quite varied and often ambivalent. Both Sinhalese and Tamil communities consider India as their civilisational homeland. Among the Sinhalese, the historiographical belief is that the nation's founders came originally from Eastern India, Bengal. They also believe that they have got the basics of their culture, language and religion from the Aryan North India. Meanwhile, the Tamils, who live in the North as well as the Eastern and Central provinces, consider as their zone of origin the Dravidian South India. This Aryan-Dravidian ideological dichotomy in Sri Lanka's Sinhalese-Tamil relations has also had implications for Sri Lanka's formal, inter-state relations with India. During the Tamil secessionist insurgency, which began in the early 1980s, India took up a position which was sympathetic to and even supportive of the Tamils while being critical of, and even hostile to, Sinhalese-majoritarian Sri Lankan governments. Against this backdrop, Sri Lanka's relations with India remained tense and even mutually non-cooperative throughout the 1980s and even early 1990s.

Meanwhile, vicissitudes of Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict and India's attempts to control the conflict trajectories had a direct impact on the process of South Asian regional co-operation too. Sri Lanka's political leaders in the 1980s had not been quite comfortable with what they thought as India's direct interference with Sri Lanka's internal affairs. India's pro-Tamil nationalist stand also made Sinhalese nationalists quite angry. They propagated the idea that the Indian government had designs to either dismember Sri Lanka through military intervention, or even annex Sri Lanka to the Indian state. Indeed, the Sinhalese nationalist rebellion of 1987-89, which was partly provoked by the Indo-Lanka Accord of July 1987, had an explicitly anti-Indian orientation. Young Sinhalese rebels in waging a bloody insurgency against the Jayewardene regime thought that they were also fighting to liberate the motherland from the Indian 'hegemonic expansionism.'

When Sri Lanka's President Premadasa hosted the SAARC Summit in Colombo in 1991, the Indian government had no hesitation to boycott it. President Premadasa by this time had adequately antagonised the Indian government by forcing India to withdraw her peace keeping troops from the Island and also by undermining, in alliance with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Indo-Lanka Accord signed in 1987 by President Jayewardene and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. When the Colombo Summit was held three months later, it was a brief, one-day affair, described by a newspaper cartoonist in Colombo, quite sardonically and in the sports parlance, as a 'one-day international.”

While India-Sri Lanka's relations have improved quite significantly in the 1990s along with changes in political personalities as well as regimes in both countries, Sri Lankan governments have also moved closer towards Pakistan in situations where the relations with India had suffered setbacks. In the mid-eighties, President Jayewardene sought to improve cooperation with Pakistan, indicating that that measure of cooperation could have entailed Pakistani military assistance to Sri Lankan government to fight the Tamil secessionist rebels. In 1999, in a somewhat similar development, President Chandrika Kumaratunga sought and indeed obtained direct Pakistani military assistance when the LTTE rebels threatened to re-capture the Jaffna Peninsula. There was also explicit displeasure among Colombo's official circles that India in 1999 refused to come forward to Colombo government's rescue with military assistance. Thus, Sri Lanka's turning to Pakistan for military assistance has had a complex logic with implications for relations with India.

The ethnic conflict has seen other negative consequences for Sri Lanka's relations with India as well. Particularly in the 1980s under the tutelage of President Jayewardene, Sri Lanka's foreign policy took a specifically pro-Western, or pro-American, direction. There were also attempts at closer cooperation with Singapore, South Korea and South East Asia particularly against the backdrop of Sri Lanka's economic liberalisation, which began in 1978. Meanwhile, in order to strengthen the Sri Lankan state's capacity to fight the counter-insurgency war against Tamil secession, the Jayewardene regime also took steps to re-establish diplomatic and military links with Israel. Israel began to provide military training as well as military hardware for the Sri Lankan state. This development displeased India. Indian officials saw it as a potential challenge to their regional security doctrine which did not allow external actors to enter into the region using the small countries in the neighbourhood.

This backdrop seems to have forced the Indian policy-makers of the Rajiv Gandhi administration to radically re-asses the Indian policy towards Sri Lanka. Instead of letting Sri Lanka move along an autonomous direction of foreign policy that would have run counter to India's own strategic interests, India seems to have decided in 1987 to make a direct intervention in Sri Lanka's conflict. That intervention was designed to enable India to maintain a firm grip as well as control over the trajectories of Sri Lanka's internal, ethnic conflict as well as external relations. The tragic failure of that strategy is, of course, another story.

Sri Lanka in South Asia
Despite Sri Lankan people's rather affectionate stand towards the idea of closer South Asian solidarity and cooperation, that idea does not seem to have a strong material basis. This became quite clear during 2001-02 when there was a great deal of tension between India and Pakistan, even with the possibility of limited nuclear war. There was hardly any protest in Sri Lanka against Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests. Many Sri Lankans did not seem to be troubled by the possibility of even a conventional war between the two South Asian giants. Sri Lankan people appeared to have thought that as long as Sri Lanka could stay away from the consequences of an Indo-Pakistan war, nuclear or conventional, they could proceed with life as business as usual. In an objective sense, this reveals a sort of island mentality in Sri Lanka, and also a peculiar political culture that has been shaped by so much political violence that even a possibility of disastrous inter-state war in the regional neighbourhood could not outrage the public.

Actually, the material foundations of Sri Lanka's relations with South Asia are almost exclusively limited to the trade relations with India. Economic relations with other South Asian nations remain quite marginal and insignificant. Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Bhutan are not major trading or economic partners for Sri Lanka. Even in the future, Sri Lanka's economy may not find much partnership with these countries. The present trend is for Sri Lanka's greater economic cooperation with India and closer economic integration with the Southern Indian states, particularly Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. This is so, notwithstanding the fact that Sri Lanka has been in the forefront of pushing for South Asian free trade regime. The fact that Sri Lanka's economy was liberalised long before all the other South Asian economies, enabling it to establish close links with economies outside the South Asian region, has two important implications in this regard. Firstly, Sri Lanka will continue to remain economically distanced from the South Asian countries other than India. Secondly, closer economic integration with India, whose economy is entering a new phase of capitalist development, would be quite easier and possible for Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka's peace process and South Asian politics
From Sri Lankan people's perspective, one area where the failure of SAARC as a regional body of cooperation hasbeen felt quite acutely is the ethnic conflict. SAARC, partly due to the principle of no-bilateralism, has never taken any step towards helping Sri Lanka resolve the conflict. While India's diplomatic and military misadventure in the mid and late eighties only exacerbated the conflict, India's pre-eminent strategic presence in South Asia has also prevented any other country in the region taking an active interest in the Sri Lankan conflict. When the Indian mediation and intervention attempt failed to resolve Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, a fairly significant opinion emerged in Colombo that SAARC, either alone or in collaboration with the British Commonwealth, should play a facilitatory-mediatory role in bringing the government and Tamil rebels to the negotiation table. Ideally, SAARC could have pursued the role of a contact group, first facilitating dialogue between the two parties to the conflict and then providing the services of mediation. This opportunity SAARC never explored. Actually, a SAARC initiative for conflict resolution could have commanded a great deal of prestige and legitimacy, and eventually success, in Sri Lanka.

The incapacity of the SAARC to assist one of its member states to resolve its internal conflict has in turn created the space for extra-regional forces to set in motion a highly internationalised conflict resolution process. Sri Lanka's present negotiation process has been facilitated by Norway. The broader peace process is internationally spearheaded by the US and Japanese governments. The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and other global, multilateral economic institutions are financially backing this initiative. Actually, Sri Lanka at present has a highly globalised peace process to resolve its internal conflict. And no South Asian has sought to be included in this process. This has revealed one of the fundamental weaknesses of SAARC as a regional political process.

(Jayadeva Uyangoda is professor and Chair, Department of Political Science and Public Policy, University of Colombo).

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