IPKF COULD HAVE FINISHED THE WAR LONG AGO, PREMADASA AND JVP MADE US FIGHT IT AND DIE

Last week, Sri Lanka commemorated the servicemen and women who paid with their life and limb, defending the territorial integrity of this country, so that the next generations could live in peace.

- By Ranga Jayasuriya

During the two-and-a-half decades of conflict, 28,619 military and police personnel died and another 40,000 suffered permanent disabilities.

The War Heroes Day, which falls on May 19, should be a day of recollection—though it remains a day of division. Probably, it is hard to expect it to be any different because no matter how you view it, it represents a defeat of a struggle in which various sections of Tamil society had heavily invested, even though the campaign ventured into nihilistic terrorism from very early on. That may be why, as the initial government announcements suggested, the president opted to skip the ceremony until a social media outcry compelled him to change his mind.

In this moment of reflection, one should ponder whether the immense loss of life and limb in the protracted war could have been avoided. I am not getting into the esoteric and highly polarised debate on the genesis of the conflict. It is indeed hard to offer a coherent explanation why the Northern elites, who had the best of both worlds well until the Black July, sought the destruction of this country on a set of propped-up grievances. That is notwithstanding the fact that by the time of Black July 1983, the Inspector General of Police, the Chief Justice, the Attorney General and President J.R. Jayawardene's Chief Political Advisor were all Tamils.

Probably to find the causes of the ethnic problem, one should look as far as the years preceding the independence, when Chelvanayagam et al. liberally borrowed Mohammed Ali Jinnah's Two-nation theory despite having witnessed the carnage of partition.

Therefore, let's seek answers to a more earthly question: Wouldn't this war have been fought to an end long before by the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF)?