The 4th of February this year will be a very special occasion. It will mark the first occasion in about two decades when Sri Lankan sovereignty will extend over practically the whole country. From 1987, when the Tigers rejected the Indo-Lankan Accord and began their battle against the Indian army, then acting in concert with the Sri Lankan government, they held sway over a wide swathe of territory. That was reduced but, when they were on the verge of extinction, different opinions in India as well as the Sri Lankan government coming to terms with the Tigers gave them a new lease of life which was accompanied by control again over substantial areas.
Though the Kumaratunga government managed to regain Jaffna in 1995, its other offensives were less successful. The loss of camps at Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu led to domination of those two districts, an arrangement officially accepted in 2002 with the Ceasefire Agreement. Indeed that Agreement led, though that could not have been the intention of the government that signed it, to an extension of LTTE control over several other districts, and the decimation of other Tamil groups that attempted to resist this hegemony.
All that changed from 2006 when the Tigers withdrew from Peace Talks, and launched their two intensive assaults in North and East respectively, expecting that the extent of their infiltration during the CFA, the arms they had brought in and stockpiled, the strongholds they had built up, made their victory inevitable. The forces however managed to resist and repulse them, both in Muttur and in Muhumalai, and then proceeded to ensure that they would never be subject again to such sudden surprise assaults.
I will not attempt to comment on the brilliance of the strategy that was employed, the intensity of the concentration, the excellence of the discipline that contributed to so signal a victory. There will in time be enough experts in military history to write about the most successful struggle against terrorism in recent years by a small country subject to so much pressure to allow others to dictate as to how it should conduct itself. The achievement of India against Sikh terrorism, the achievement of Russia against Chechen terrorism, were impressive, but no one would have dared to interfere with India or Russia.
I think we have learned lessons from those two operations too, the need to be firm against terrorists, but ensure that we do not engage in othering, that we work together with moderate forces amongst the minority group that sought separation. We must acknowledge that terrorism developed because those minorities felt discriminated against, and we must work together with those amongst them committed to a united country to remove all causes of complaint. But there should be no compromise on our sovereignty, because we saw in the case of Kosovo how urges to compromise, on the basis of guarantees, lead to splintering, with guarantees forgotten in a paean of self-righteousness.
So I believe that, on this the 61st anniversary of our independence, we have reason to be immensely proud of what might be termed our regained sovereignty. But there is more too, for we can also congratulate ourselves - despite what seem last ditch efforts to stymie this - on what might be termed a renewal of independence too.
Sri Lanka is used to such variations on the theme of independence. There are those who say we did not really get our independence in 1948, because we still had British bases on our territory. The Soviet Union certainly thought so, and vetoed our membership of the UN for several years, though in fact they yielded well before the Bandaranaike government politely asked the British to take away their troops, from Trincomalee as well as Katunayake.
But then there was the fact that we continued as a Dominion, with the Queen still our titular Head of State. That problem was got over only in 1972, with the proclamation of the Republic. So, if you read the rather facile notes reproduced year after year by tutors of politics for the Advanced Level, you have assertions that we only got independence properly in 1972 (or in 1956, because that was when we got a government that got rid of British bases).
Personally neither of those deficiencies strikes me as serious, because in both cases there was no question about who made the decisions, the British government very properly agreeing promptly to both our requests to remove themselves. Contrariwise, I believe we were in much greater danger in recent years of losing our independence, to a very strange mindset that developed after the CFA, and which sadly we allowed to hold sway without challenge.