The book may not be the whole story of the civil war in the island nation, but in the absence of other stories of the kind, it is a chronicle that cannot be missed, writes N Sathiya Moorthy
Gota’s War
Author: CA Chandraprema
Publisher: Ranjan Wijeratne Foundation, Rs1,000
Colombo-based journalist CA Chandraprema’s book, Gota’s War: The Crushing of Tamil Terrorism in Sri lanka, is a painstaking effort to put together at least the Government’s side of the untold story. By acknowledging access to Government documents and armed forces’ commanders on the field at the time, the author has lent certain credibility to the proceedings narrated in the book.
For a book carrying the name of Defence Secretary Gotabaya (Gota) Rajapaksa on the title, it is not a eulogy at all. Through the years of ‘Eelam War-IV’ the proceedings on the ground displayed professionalism at all levels of the Sri lankan armed forces, coupled of course with the tenacity and confidence of the average soldier. In earlier years, the armed forces were besieged by the problem of demoralisation leading to large-scale desertions at higher levels and lower levels alike. Gota, a field officer at the time, himself had thrown up and left the forces in disgust, the author says. The book also says without citing any cohesive plans that might have gone into it, on how the same man as Defence Secretary years later was able to appreciate the mistakes in the past, and apply correctives in ways that they worked. Thus, the President of the day, a brother of the Defence Secretary, could be motivated into sitting through the Security Council meetings and other important discussions within the armed forces, and feel personally convinced that things could work, after all. This was not the case in the past, when the political leaders of the day often succumbed to pressures from within the country and outside to capitulate under lTTE pressure and return to the negotiations table.
The ethnic war in Sri lanka is even otherwise a lesson in counter-terrorism methodology. Just as the lTTE fought three kinds of war — conventional in the North, guerilla in the East and terror-strikes elsewhere in the country — the Government too was saddled with strategy, acquisition and diplomacy. There were independent elements that fitted into each of these aspects on both sides. With the result, the ethnic war in Sri lanka became a kind of ‘shadow war’ of sorts in which external powers, agencies and groups took sides, and played a smaller or larger role, as the case may be. For instance, the Sri lankan Tamil diaspora in the West were at one level purported to be disseminating information from the battle-front, particularly about the civilian sufferings. At another level, the very same people were seen camping outside Parliaments and campaigning as voter-constituencies with their legislative representatives, adding a new element for which the Sri lankan Government does not seem to have found an answer to date.
If yet the lTTE lost the war and the Government won it, they are not without reasons. living in the past, the lTTE leadership forgot that over 30 long years, the armed forces had added numbers and professionalism to its ranks, that in the Mahinda-Gota combine, they had elements that were missing on the Government side in the past, and post-9/11, the world was divided on episodes but not on larger issues of tackling terrorism. As the book confirms, the US Pacific Command had done as assessment for the Sri lanka armed forces during the ceasefire years, to which the Sri lankan armed forces added their own elements subsequently.
Despite holding territory, demoralising the Sri lankan state, polity and the armed forces in engagement after military engagement through years, if the lTTE lacked the advantage of being recognised as a ‘state actor’, in terms of the international community conferring institutional credibility that goes with institutional continuity, for instance. This lesson was never understood by the lTTE leadership of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, holed up in the Vanni jungles for long, and his international diaspora handlers, outside. The use of ‘human shields’ in their hundreds of thousands too lost its charm for the international community after the Moscow theatre fiasco, but that too was not lost on the lTTE.
The lTTE leadership in Vanni and the diaspora teams elsewhere were thinking and working in isolation, so much so even the belated but sane advice given by their own ideologue, the late Anton Balasingham, fell on deaf ears. Having sacrificed all equals in other militant groups and his own at the altar of personal ego, and assassinated saner moderate Tamil voices, Prabhakaran had around him in later years, a whole generation of young leaders and commanders who had been taught to worship him, not learnt to question him. By amassing all powers, political, military, strategic and tactic in his hands, Prabhakaran could not spare much time for one another when holed up during the closing weeks of the war. With the result, impractical promises coming from across the Palk Straits and rest of the world those days, for instance, became a straw that he latched on to. In earlier and more peaceful times, he would have seen through it without effort.
Historically, rarely have insurgencies out-lived the generation of its original practitioners. In this case, on the ground, the lTTE’s suicide-bomb tactic of conferring immortality on cadre, the motivation to bite the cyanide at least provocation all contributed to dwindling numbers over time. The diaspora, which was living in their troubled past when in Sri lanka, were bringing up their own children in the West, of the West and for the West, protected from the sufferings of their brethren back home. Neither side learnt from the need for the lTTE to go in for forcible recruitment of child-soldiers, which meant that they could not hope to stay on the ground and fight their war another day.
Such an assessment would have shown that a peace settlement was the honourable and pragmatic way out. Instead, there seems to be the diaspora thinking, going in particular by the post-war propaganda on the HR front in the West that some sections hope to keep the pot boiling, wait for another day, and fight an unwinnable war all over again. Such an assessment of having to sacrifice more Tamils, young or old, to the war machinery in an unknown future should also motivate the current Tamil leadership nearer home, to negotiate an incremental political solution, to which elements could be added along the long drawn out way to normalcy.
The Gota’s War is an interesting narration, making for easy reading for all those interested in the military reversals and successes of the Sri lankan State in fighting lTTE terrorism over all those years. Unlike many others of the ilk, elsewhere it is not exclusively for the professional soldier, or military scholars and historians alone. The journalistic narration makes the difference. Yet, for a journalistic rendering, care should have been taken to proof-read the manuscript closely, that too in the IT generation, where the tribe of proof-readers has vanished already. Names like those of Indian National Security Advisor, a frequent visitor to Colombo those days, and Indian Defence Minister AK Antony (not MK Anthony) are mis-spelt, grammar is halting and punctuation-marks missing in many places.
Yet, to the average Tamil reader of the book, the various spellings used for the bombed lTTE Political Wing leader SP Tamilselvan across the book would be a reflection of the ‘Sinhala insensitivity’ to their centuries-old presence in the country — and, not just an eminently excusable spelling error. More so to him would be the author dismissing the events of 1983 in a few sentences, not going on to name the perpetrators of the anti-Tamil riots across the country, which were fairly well-known across the country, and at times, elsewhere too. As if to balance out, Chandraprema has confined the armed forces’ capture of Killinochchi, the lTTE headquarters, for instance, to a few sentences.
Gota’s War, that way, may not be the whole story. The sub-title, The Crushing of Tamil Tiger Terrorism, clearly indicates which side of the story it seeks to tell. Yet, in the absence of other stories of the kind, which can be expected to roll out of the pens of some more of the dramatis persona, as had happened in and about the past decade, Gota’s War is a chronicle that cannot be missed. Combined with the partisan propaganda of the lTTE and the half-told stories of some international agencies, media organisations and individuals claiming access to information on the ground, the well-researched book provides the contemporary historian not in the know of things with much more to chew than earlier.
The reviewer is an expert on Sri lankan affairs