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Tsunami aid battle key to Sri Lankan peace and politics

By Dayan Candappa

FROM debris-strewn beaches where fishermen are defying a ban on rebuilding to jungle hideouts of rebels lobbying for aid, battles over post-tsunami reconstruction could shape peace and politics in Sri Lanka for years to come.

Rebuilding Sri Lanka was always going to be tough because minority Tamils on the stricken east coast and majority Sinhalese living in coastal areas of the south have long felt alienated from the centre of power in Colombo.

Now with Tamil guerrillas and former southern rebels criticising the reconstruction plans of the ruling coalition, analysts and agencies say aid has become a major bone of contention.

“The tsunami didn’t wash away the political divisions. In fact it may have made them worse. What we have here is a moment that will define the peace process and politics for years,” said Jehan Perera, director of the National Peace Council.

Trouble was brewing in the Tamil rebel-controlled northeast long before the government announced the ambitious $3.5 billion reconstruction programme that was launched on Wednesday in the devastated southern town of Hambantota.

The plan was not made public and details that emerged were sketchy. Government officials could not say whether any of the money would go into rebel-controlled areas.

Soon after the giant waves crashed ashore on Dec. 26, Tamil Tiger rebels fighting for autonomy in the north and east appealed to donors to deal with them directly, saying the government was preventing aid from flowing into areas under their control.

Aid agencies said at the time the allegation was unfair because the government had little control over the relief effort in the first days after the disaster.

“It was a quest for legitimacy on the part of the Tigers,” said Kethesh Loganathan, Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives. The Tigers are outlawed in several Western countries as well as in neighbouring India.

Backfire: Although the bickering over aid has made cooperation more difficult, analysts agree that any government move to cut the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) out of reconstruction could backfire.

“Any scheme that attempts to bypass the LTTE (would in) forcing the LTTE to develop and execute reconstruction programmes of its own...immeasurably strengthen the case for secession,” the Centre for Policy Alternatives said in a memo to authorities in charge of reconstruction.

However any government attempt to incorporate the rebels into reconstruction could anger the south, heartland of the Sinhalese majority and the scene of two Marxist-led rebellions in the 1970s and 80s that killed around 80,000 people.

Although the former southern rebels, the JVP, are now part of the ruling coalition and there is no suggestion of a return to violence, the Marxists are fierce critics of the truce between the Tamil rebels and the government that has halted fighting in the north for three years. Also worrying is the mild but growing JVP criticism of the relief effort. In the latest attack, JVP Minister K.D. Lal Kantha was quoted as saying on Wednesday that the businessmen put in charge of reconstruction knew nothing of the ground situation.

Southern Sri Lanka is the JVP’s main powerbase and the party has been steadily increasing its representation in parliament since returning to mainstream politics in the 1990s. “The situation in the south has developed into a competition between two factions in the ruling coalition,” said Loganathan.

All over the southern coast, people are defying a government ban on rebuilding within 100 metres (109.4 yards) of the sea.

Loganathan said a sense of disillusionment was to be expected amid so much death and destruction, but he warned it would deepen unless victims felt their needs were being addressed in the government’s plans to rebuild the tsunami-shattered coast. Aid agencies expressed similar concerns. “There is a concern about dialogue with local communities,” said Sanaka Samarasinghe, a Bangkok-based official of the United Nations Development Programme who is working in Sri Lanka. “To be fair by the government it is understandable that the consultative process should suffer when things are being expedited. We are hopeful that will change.” reuters

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