As Delivered:
The Sri Lankan Perspective
Rohitha Bogollagama, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sri Lanka
Thank you, John. Deputy Prime Minister Hean, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I am here for the third time, and I would like to thank you again for the Shangri-La Dialogue. The first two times I came with the hope that one day I would address this august assembly about great accomplishments from Sri Lanka. Today I am happy to bring you a story from Sri Lanka about success in countering terrorism. From the outset, for the purpose of clarity, allow me to run through the structure of my address. It will comprise the following elements: the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam’s (LTTE) reign of terror; the rescuing of civilians by launching a humanitarian mission; and the way forward through reconciliation and the political process.
When I addressed this forum last year, Sri Lanka’s security forces were in the middle of a major operation to clear over 15,000 square kilometres of territory, particularly in the north and part of the east. Today we are happy to announce that no territory in Sri Lanka is controlled or subjugated by any force or organisation associated with the terror outfit of the LTTE.
It took over 25 years for us to come this far. Terror struck us in the mid-1970s, with the assassination of Mayor of Jaffna, Alfred Duraiappah, a Tamil political leader in the Jaffna municipality. After nearly two and a half decades, we see a Sri Lanka wholly free of LTTE terror.
The LTTE began by ethnically cleansing the north by driving out the Muslims and the Sinhalese. They then targeted civilians in the south by carrying out massive suicide attacks. The suicide bombings on the Central Bank of Sri Lanka on 31 January 1996 killed 91 and wounded 1,400 civilians in Colombo. This was Sri Lanka’s equivalent of 9/11, and it took place nine months after the Oklahoma bombings. The LTTE tried to cripple our economy, bombing Colombo’s World Trade Centre and destroying nearly half of the fleet of our national carrier, then known as Air Lanka and now called SriLankan. They indulged in countless assassinations of our political leaders, including the then-President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1996. Two years earlier a female LTTE suicide bomber extinguished the life of a distinguished former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi. The assassinations, destruction of human lives and misery brought about by the LTTE could run for several pages if I were to continue.
Today I am pleased to announce the end of LTTE terror in Sri Lanka as a result of the efforts of President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government just a few days ago. Sri Lanka will no doubt enter the annals of history as a classic example of a country that successfully prevailed over the scourge of terrorism, while tenaciously upholding the cherished values of democracy and human rights that have been deeply engrained in the psyche of our people. Armchair critics and sceptics who doubted the firm resolve of our brave armed forces to defeat the so-called invincible might of the LTTE have been effectively silenced today, along with the guns.
The astonishing success of this campaign is to the credit of President Rajapaksa, who has provided effective and decisive leadership to the military establishment in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. His acumen in sustaining broad-based popular support for the military campaign, and his engagement with the polity for wide consensus was evident from the very outset.
I would now like to recall his initial engagement with the LTTE, beginning in 2006, after the closure of the Mavilaru irrigation network, depriving 35,000 people of water. This occurred when the government was engaged in peace talks with the LTTE in Geneva. I was part of that delegation myself on two occasions: in February 2006 and October 2006 I sat across a table with the LTTE hierarchy, with the exception of Prabhakaran, but it took us nowhere in terms of a negotiated process.
Let me now take you back to some of the key elements of the LTTE’s development. Permit me briefly to recapitulate what Sri Lanka had been faced with over the last 25 years. The LTTE emerged as a terrorist group claiming to be fighting for an independent state exclusively for Tamils, to be carved out of the northern and eastern provinces, comprising around 33% of the island’s land mass and 60% of its coastline. During these years successive governments tried to negotiate with the LTTE, beginning in 1985 with the government of President Jayewardene. We met then with the LTTE in Singapore for talks initiated by the Indian government. Several rounds of talks were held at intervals, but the LTTE never engaged seriously in these talks. They used them as opportunities to re‑arm, re‑group and wage war again.
The LTTE were never serious in negotiating a political solution. I was involved in these negotiations myself, in the last two rounds. The longest ceasefire negotiated by this process in February 2002 only helped to transform the LTTE from a guerrilla group into a semi-conventional army. It allowed them to be the first terrorist group in the world to acquire air power in the form of a rudimentary air force, along with an illegal naval force known as the Sea Tigers. Between February 2002 and November 2005, over 740 civilians were killed, including my predecessor as Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, in August 2005.
According to UNICEF, the number of child soldiers conscripted by the LTTE reached over 7,500 during this period alone. Despite these developments the government of the day ensured an uninterrupted supply of food, medicine and other essential items to the areas under the control of the terrorists, well aware that the LTTE was siphoning off a significant part of these supplies for their own use. However, successive governments never used such supplies as a weapon of war against the Tamil community, whom we regard as an integral part of Sri Lanka.
The violence unleashed by the LTTE would never have grown into the dimensions it eventually reached without a number of factors. The first was the collection of millions of dollars by means of the illicit arms trade; drug‑trafficking in international waters, and commercial activities carried out by sections of the diaspora including illegal money transfers through hawala banking, international financing through several financial frauds and credit card scams, in addition to extortion from the Tamil community itself. The second was the LTTE’s ability to take forward their insignia on flags, even in countries where it is proscribed, along with the establishment of propaganda and fundraising events and other functions glorifying the terrorist movement without being restrained under the law have made these [tough details?] at times ineffectual.
In undertaking military campaigns to eliminate them, our government’s primary concern was to safeguard innocent civilians, many of whom had suffered multiple displacements over the years and had their children forcibly conscripted by the LTTE to be used as cannon fodder. Many had lost one or more of their family members to the LTTE, and even young girls were not spared.
In the last stages of the operation, the situation became more complex and dangerous. Cornered, the LTTE used civilians as a human shield on a small strip of land of around six square kilometres, thereby placing the people in most inhuman conditions without proper food, shelter, sanitation, water and electricity, and exposed to the natural elements. I vividly recall the footage obtained by the UN, which were most perturbing. All men and women, with their children were fleeing the city, while the LTTE cadres were shooting at them to prevent their escape. I witnessed this on that footage, along with some of the embassy leaders resident in Colombo.
It was against this backdrop that we witnessed the exodus of these people into the safety of areas controlled by the government. They are now temporarily accommodated in welfare villages providing them with basic facilities, and remain one of the highest priorities of the government today, when the parents of the tyrant Prabhakaran are being cared for by the government. Since July 2006 over 6,200 personnel have made the supreme sacrifice in their defence of their beloved motherland, while nearly 32,000 were injured or maimed.
It should be noted that all of this was achieved in an unhelpful and hostile environment. The LTTE published pages of propaganda about alleged carnage, and recorded telephone interviews under duress with civilians who were held hostage by the LTTE. Those unsubstantiated transmissions that were made against the military claimed that heavy weapons were used in civilian areas, in order to support the allegations of genocide against the Tamil people. This was fabricated, with it sinister motivation being to discredit the armed forces and embarrass the Sri Lankan government.
During this time there was pressure for the government to declare a ceasefire or a pause from certain sections of the international community. This would no doubt have prolonged the conflict and provided a lifeline to the terrorists, and we consciously avoided that. Had we succumbed to such pressures, the Tamil civilians who were held as human shields by the LTTE would have had to pay with their lives. Fortunately for them, we did not yield to any such pressure tactics and stayed the course to liberate those long-suffering people, bringing the conflict to an end. We could have completed this mission very much earlier, but being a responsible and democratically elected government we had to move very cautiously, taking into consideration the safety of these civilians.
Although the LTTE has been defeated militarily, we are left with this international network largely intact. Many operatives have clearly cultivated powerful political lobbies in certain capitals, with a view to resurrecting the LTTE. It is important for the international community to take all measures necessary with the government of Sri Lanka to crack down on the global network of the LTTE.
I would now like to move to the second phase of my address, which includes the immediate challenges faced by the government of Sri Lanka in the current scenario. The rehabilitation and resettlement of nearly 280,000 people displaced by the conflict is one of the foremost priorities. Civilians accommodated in welfare villages require family reunification. The influx of a large number of civilians within a short space of time scattered families, as you will have noted. The government is endeavouring to address the issue of family reunification as one of foremost importance among our list of priorities.
Children who were denied their childhoods are able today to lead more secure lives as child conscription by the LTTE is no more. Facilities for education are available for these children, perhaps for the first time in their lives. Youths who may have been destined to be suicide bombers have thrown away the deadly cyanide capsule and are waiting to be rehabilitated. The training camps and factories of the LTTE that produced suicide devices and armaments are no longer in existence. Even some LTTE combatants have found our internally displaced person (IDP) camps to be a safe haven. The next step will be to resettle IDPs in their original places of residence. We will proceed with this exercise, alongside the reconstruction of infrastructure facilities.
The government is firmly committed to reaching a political settlement acceptable to all. In his address to parliament last week on 19May, President Rajapaksa said, and I quote his statement: ‘The defeat of the LTTE and the breakdown of their armed strength will never be the defeat of the Tamil people. We do not accept the military solution as the final solution. It is necessary that the political solutions they need should be brought closer to them faster than any country in the world would bring.’ The Tamils have responded magnificently to the President’s call for unity, even before the conflict was brought to an end the government brought together a significant group of the Tamils on 28 and 29 March 2009 to discuss our plans and objectives for developing the northern province, and they pledged their support and cooperation. We will have an inclusive process in this regard, and we will have everyone who is conscious of our countries on board irrespective of whatever ethnic identities one may have by birth.
This post-conflict phase is crucial in restoring confidence in people. We know these challenges will not come all the time, and some challenges only come once. This is one such challenge that we have got, and we will not miss out on this opportunity. Those whose lives have been torn apart by this terrible conflict will be addressed as a key element of reconciliation. The international community has a role to play; the post-conflict reconciliation, the re-integration of former combatants into the political and economic processes. We have done well in already installing a former LTTE combatant as Chief Minister of the Eastern Province in 2008. We also have the one-time number two in the LTTE as a Minister of State in the government at this moment. These are the transformations we have already put in place, models to go by and examples to cite.
The post-conflict reconciliation will also involve a presidential task force for resettlement, development, and security of the northern province, which has been established through these programmes. I will now come to the reconciliation process. As identified, we have already unfolded the roadmap to achieve this objective through the devolution of power to regions as provided for in the constitution, within the framework of the 13th Amendment. The provision has found its full implementation, although for the last 22 years since the Accord that brought this into the framework of our constitution it was hampered, and implementation was prevented, due to the presence of the LTTE, who believed only in a terror agenda in Sri Lanka, and ignored the call from the local parties, as much as from the international committee, to be part of a pluralistic process and political agenda.
Our people are resilient and want to get on with their lives. The post-conflict period will focus on rehabilitation, resettlement, economic development, and holding free and fair elections. We may replicate our success in the eastern province in this regard. This can never been completed unless we win the hearts and minds of the people affected by years of suffering. Mr Chairman, Excellencies and my friends, we have overcome terrorism, and Sri Lanka is poised for economic takeoff. Sri Lanka will be the most liberalised economy in this region, that will compare with some of the most developed economies. We also want the support from the international community, to look at the agenda that we are now entering into in the post-conflict scenario.
In conclusion I will mention the overall dimension of past success, both to our people in Sri Lanka, and the region, and to the world at large: one, Sri Lanka has come out as a free country today, free from the scourge of terrorism; two, the LTTE as a terrorist organisation is eliminated. The elimination of the LTTE from Sri Lanka as a terrorist organisation will prevent other types of terrorism, such as money laundering, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and arms smuggling, and other means of terrorist networking the world over, through the elimination of the LTTE. Third, dealing with the terror organisation, the way the government of Sri Lanka has done, will send a strong signal to the international community that terror can be defeated and terrorism can be eliminated. Thank you.
