President Jayewardene has been candid enough to admit what has been common knowledge about the state of the Sri Lankan armed forces. Asked by a BBC correspondent why government troops drawn from the Sinhalese population had not fired on rioters attacking Tamils and destroying their homes and business, he has said: “I think there was a big anti-Tamil feeling among the forces. They also felt that shooting the Sinhalese, who were rioting, would have been anti-Sinhalese, and actually in some places we saw them encouraging (rioters)”. He has also been honest enough to acknowledge that the trouble in the armed forces had erupted before the ambush by Tamil terrorists in which 13 Sri Lankan soldiers had been killed, that the army had gone on the rampage in Jaffna two weeks before the outbreak of mass violence against Tamils on July 25 and that he was not informed of this development at that stage. In view of President Jayewardene’s statement, it is not necessary for us to cite other pieces of evidence to underscore the point that Tamils in Sri Lanka cannot possibly trust the armed forces to protect their lives and properties and that this must be the central issue in the discussions between the government of India and the president’s brother, Mr. HW Jayewardene, who has come to New Delhi as his special emissary.
President Jayewardene has backtracked somewhat on the charge of foreign (read Soviet) involvement in the recent anti-Tamil conflagration. Apparently he is not in a position to produce a shred of evidence in support of the accusation which, on the face of it, does not make much sense. For it is difficult to see what advantage the Soviets could have possibly hoped to gain by fanning anti-Tamil passions among the Sinhalese population. But this in any case is a less important issue than the undependability of the Sri Lankan armed forces, unless it is President Jayewardene’s case that this unreliability itself is the handiwork of Soviet agents, and that they have penetrated the armed forces in significant enough numbers. To the best of our knowledge, he has not talked of such a link so far and, as is only evident, he is not the man to exercise discretion when it comes to making charges against the Soviet Union. He has now sought to draw another Red herring across the trail. He has accused some unnamed southern Indian states of “talking about an invasion… helping the terrorists… harboring them.” This is not to say that some Tamil terrorists are not present on Indian soil, or that they are not receiving any kind of assistance from fellow Tamils, or that Mrs. Gandhi should not do what she can to prevent Tamil Tigers from operating from this country. But there can be little doubt that President Jayewardene is trying, deliberately or otherwise, to confuse the central issue.
He knows as well as anyone else that terrorism is an expression of the despair of Tamils in Sri Lanka who have been treated very badly since the proclamation of emergency in the Jaffna region four years ago, that the Tigers, on the Sri Lanka government’s own statement, do not number more than a few hundred and that they are too badly divided to pose a serious threat to the government. Indeed, if the Tigers have succeeded in terrorizing anyone, it is the moderate leadership of the Tamil United Liberation Front. It is possible to argue effectively that the Tigers would not have found much support among the Tamil population in the island if President Jayewardene had not been reckless enough to order the army to “liquidate” them and thus permit it to unleash a reign of terror among Tamils. But we do not propose to raise this issue in the present context since the more pertinent point right now is that the existence of small terrorist groups at odds with one another cannot explain either the state of the Sri Lankan armed forces or the orgy of violence against Tamils. President Jayewardene has expressed the hope that discipline will come back among his armed forces. But what precisely does he mean? One can talk of the breakdown of discipline in a service only if the men defy the officers or if the junior officers defy the senior officers. Has that been the case in Sri Lanka? Either way, the state of the armed forces is the critical issue and the talks in New Delhi should centre on it.