NAKHON PATHOM (Thailand): A key Tamil Tiger military commander was a decidedly elusive figure on the first day of the second round of the Sri Lankan peace talks here. He turned down interviews and kept well away from the media pack hounding the negotiators.
Yet the evasive tactics of the moustachioed Karuna who has led the Tigers in key battles against government troops and has been given the rank of “colonel” by the rebels — could not disguise the symbolism of his presence as a member of the Tamil Tigers’ negotiating team
Unlike the other three negotiators of the Tamil Tigers, Karuna, who is in his thirties and has close to 7,000 armed militants under his wing as Tiger commander in the eastern province, represents the military wing of the rebels.
Anton Balasingham, chief negotiator of the Tamil Tigers, is the movement’s political ideologue, while S.P.Tamilselvan heads the political wing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as the rebels are officially known.
For nearly two decades, the Tamil rebels have been fighting a bloody secessionist struggle against the government and the majority Sinhalese community. The current talks are the fifth attempt at peace to end a conflict that has more than 64,000 lives since 1983.
Karuna’s performance during and after this round of talks — from Oct. 31 to Nov. 3 — will be a barometer of how the battle-hardened members of the LTTE view the latest attempt at a political settlement.
The importance of having no less than a Tiger military commander in the negotiations has not been lost on one member of the Sri Lankan government’s negotiating team, Rauff Hakeem, a cabinet minister and head of a political party that represents Sri Lanka’s Muslim minority.
“Karuna’s presence here is symbolic, for it provides some idea about the LTTE fighting cadres’ willingness to embrace peace,” Hakeem told IPS on Thursday. “Giving him such exposure is good for the general push for peace.”
“He (Karuna) has a lot of respect for Prabakharan,” added Hakeem, referring to the reclusive LTTE leader Velupillai Prabakharan. “And Prabakharan knows that Karuna’s contribution (during the talks) on behalf of the Tigers cannot be ignored.”
Ironically, if peace and political settlement do materialise, it is the military commanders who would have to prepare to take the backseat in the minority Tamils’ campaign.
The Tigers themselves have still to decide what future awaits fighters like Karuna in a new, peaceful and post-conflict Sri Lanka.
Karuna could very well have been the kind of battle-hardened militant that Balasingham had in mind when he spoke recently about the possible roles for the armed LTTE cadre in a new political climate.
The LTTE’s military structure “will be there until a permanent solution to (the conflict) is resolved,” Balasingham told the ‘Sunday Leader’, an English-language Sri Lankan weekly, in an interview on the eve of the current talks.
“Even after, we have to think of arranging a security system for the Tamil people in a federal system or regional autonomy,” he added. “Therefore, this military force will be there to protect the life and interest of our people.”
But such a military force “may be structurally changed”, he said. “This is a practice where national liberation movements have been converted to national guards in the interest of the communities they were fighting for.”
Since joining the LTTE in the 1980s, Karuna has been at the vanguard of many violent campaigns against the government troops. He led Tiger troops during battles in the 1990s in northern Sri Lanka, say military analysts in the country.
“Karuna has a heavy track record,” added Iqbal Athas, defence correspondent for ‘The Sunday Times’, an English-language weekly in Sri Lanka. “He is the one who rounded up (over 600) policeman and killed them (after a round of peace talks broke down in 1990).”
Maj Gen Shantha Kottegoda, a military advisor for the Sri Lankan peace negotiators, knows only too well what it is like to be on the receiving end of an LTTE attack led by Karuna.
In 1997, Karuna led a Tiger offensive on a military camp headed by Kottegoda in the Wanni region, in northern Sri Lanka. Government troops were forced to pull out on that occasion.
Yet this week, Karuna, who traded his striped military fatigues for a business suit for the talks here, shared a few words with Kottegoda as they sat across the negotiating table for the first time.
Moreover, on the first day of the talks, when the touchy issue of fear by the Muslim community in Sri Lanka’s eastern province toward the Tigers was taken up, Karuna took an active role in discussing Muslim insecurities with Hakeem.
Muslims have been expressing fears of being forced to live under the Tamils in any peace deal with the Sri Lankan government. Making up about seven percent of the nation’s 19.6 million people, most of them live in country’s eastern and northern provinces, where the Tamils have been fighting to establish their own homeland.
On Friday evening, Karuna broke his self-imposed silence and spoke about his commitment to the peace process. “Our main purpose is to make the peace process last,” he told a small crowd of journalists.
“We have fought for the rights of the Tamil people, and we think the same rights should be enjoyed by the Muslim people in the north and east,” he added. “All the (LTTE) commanders gave me a sendoff to discuss the issues. We are not here as tourists, but to work.”
This side of Karuna has convinced Hakeem that the Tiger military commander has the capacity to adjust into his new role as a peace advocate. Hakeem said that he came away from intense discussions with Karuna feeling “cautiously optimistic that rapprochement will be reached”.—Dawn/InterPress News Service.