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By V.S. Sambandan
In a detailed reply to the Sri Lankan Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe's offer earlier this week, the LTTE's chief negotiator, Anton S. Balasingham, said the Government had not addressed its demand for an interim administration. "What is sought and what is delivered are two different sets of structures," he said. The four-page letter, reproduced in the TamilNet website was firm and clear about the LTTE's demand: an interim administrative structure as envisaged by its leadership. The latest LTTE position ties up any further progress in the peace process to the Government's willingness and ability to give an interim administration outside the unitary Sri Lankan Constitution. The unchanged worldview of the Tigers — particularly the U.S., which wants it to renounce terrorism, and India, which stays away from any international meeting in which the LTTE is a participant — provides the external backdrop for the rebels unilaterally suspending talks on April 21. Given Mr. Wickremesinghe's position in a bitter co-habitation Government headed by the constitutional powerful, but politically opposed President, Chandrika Kumaratunga, it would be near-impossible for him to meet the demands without inviting the wrath of the President, who last week said she would sack the Government if it acted against Sri Lanka's sovereignty. The LTTE wants "an innovative interim administrative structure, vested with adequate authority and legal status" in which they have "greater participation in both decision-making and delivery of the tasks of rebuilding the war damaged economy and restoring normalcy in the Tamil-speaking homeland". The LTTE leader, V. Prabakaran, made this demand when he met the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Jan Petersen in rebel-held Kilinochchi earlier this month. The Tigers had not spelt out the powers, functions and mechanisms of the interim administrative model demanded by Mr. Prabakaran. In his reply, Mr. Balasingham said the Tigers had "entrusted" that task to the Wickremesinghe administration "with the hope that you will act with courage and creativity" as he had "an overwhelming mandate from the Sinhala masses to establish an interim administrative structure for the northeast". However, he said, the Tigers were "surprised" and "dismayed" that the Government "did not address the critical issue of setting up an interim administrative structure as suggested by the LTTE leadership". Dismissing the development-oriented structure as one with "extremely limited administrative powers" and in which "the participatory role of the LTTE is not clearly defined, or rather, left deliberately ambiguous", he said the Government had "effectively rejected" the LTTE's proposal "without specifying any reasons". Criticising Colombo for taking "refuge" under the Constitution, he said the Government's offer would create an "apex bureaucracy linked to several other inefficient and defunct state agencies". Not concealing annoyance at the treatment meted out to them as "terrorists'', the Tigers said "the continuous hard-line attitude" by "powerful international governments" against the Tigers "under their proscription laws casts a negative impact on promoting peace and ethnic reconciliation". The LTTE, Mr. Balasingham said, had been "very flexible, accommodative and conciliatory" during the talks, had "offered major political concessions" from its "entrenched positions" and "maintained peace under extreme provocations" despite "main international and regional players" continuing to treat the LTTE "shabbily as a proscribed entity with a terrorist label to be excluded from international forums". The rebels also expressed concern over "the growing involvement of formidable international forces" from which Colombo was "soliciting not only aid" but was also setting-up a "grand international safety net to bring undue pressure on the freedom of our people to determine their political status and destiny".
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