The Chickens Come Home

By Rajan Hoole –June 6, 2015 

Dr. Rajan Hoole

Law Enforcement and the Security Services: Politicisation and Demoralisation – 16

A contemporary general had no doubt that the North was by far the priority. At the same time he felt that there should have been a clearly thought out strategy to block access to the East and prevent the LTTE from escaping from the North and regrouping in the East. This would have also entailed mustering adequate naval cover. He said that there was no such strategy in place.

We also mention here contemporary arguments in favour of ‘East First’. One was the political one that if the government forces firmly controlled the East, the LTTE would be denied any possibility of its separate state of Eelam and would be forced to negotiate. The other was that Eastern Tamils could then be weaned away from the LTTE, to bring about demoralisation among the LTTE’s Eastern cadre and deny the LTTE recruitment from the East. It is true that recruitment from the East fell during this period. The LTTE was forced to compensate by intensifying brainwashing and virtual press- ganging techniques to get school children from Jaffna into the fighting ranks (see the last chapter of our Report No.13 of 1994 and also Special Report No.6).

Premadasa too may have been happy not to bother the North unless the North bothered him. It was consistent with the deal he entered into with the LTTE in 1989, whom he very likely continued to have back-door contact with even after hostilities commenced (see Sect. 19.4). Thus, quite often, major operations in the North were viewed indifferently or even undermined. It is a fact that the political establishment allowed defence officials to fight each other for the good part of 1992 and ’93 without intervening decisively. One intervention was Premadasa’s removal of JOC (i.e. Wanasinghe’s) control over operations about April 1992, which was restored by him after 5 months. But Wanasinghe’s initiatives for operations in the North did not get far.

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