PRESIDENT+PRIME MINISTER = PEACE

According to President Chandrika Kumaratunga, the reason she took over the key ministries of defence, interior and media on 3 November was the deterioration of the security situation in the country. The visible advantages accruing to the LTTE due to their ability to move about freely and enter government-controlled territory in unlimited numbers was one of the most criticised aspects of the ceasefire agreement. However, after taking control of that part of the government most concerned with security issues, President Kumaratunga appears to be conducting affairs in much the same way as Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was doing when his ministers were in charge of those ministries..The president has made repeated public statements that she would honour the entirety of the ceasefire agreement. She also ordered the armed forces to abide by the rulings of the international monitors of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) and respect their status as the arbiters of the ceasefire agreement. This was quite a turnaround from her past conduct, when she had been a strident critic of the SLMM, even to the extent of publicly demanding that the Norwegian government should remove its present head for being biased. While the president has not rescinded her demand that the head be removed, she has legitimised the role of the international monitors by her orders..Furthermore, the president has not followed one of her own controversial directives to the former defence minister, whose portfolio she took over. In October the president had ordered the latter to remove the camp put up by the LTTE in an area of Trincomalee determined to be government territory by the international monitors. But, after assuming the role of the defence minister, she has been quiet about the LITE camp, no doubt realising that any effort to forcibly remove it could severely endanger the ceasefire..Therefore, it is clearly evident that the president, who took over the three ministries citing national security concerns, has not changed anything fundamental compared to what her predecessor as defence minister was doing. In the last week of November she even instructed the media ministry that she took over not to criticise the LTTE. Her own words towards the LTTE have become more conciliatory and beginning to sound more like that of the government that she only recently was criticising for being too soft on the Tigers..This was followed by her proposal for a power sharing scheme with regard to the peace process which briefly raised hopes that a quick solution may be in the offing. In her proposal she sought to address the peace process as a first priority. A little earlier the president and the prime minister had appointed a joint committee of high officials to work out an agreement between them that could resolve the political crisis, but before the joint committee could submit its mutually agreed proposals, the president acted unilaterally and publicised her own set of proposals. If the prime minister felt let down that the president sought to gain an advantage at his cost, he had reason to feel that way. But it is in the interests of a negotiated settlement that the president's proposals should be evaluated on their merits..The proposals provide for a substantial broad-basing of the peace process. One of the major complaints regarding the process has been the exclusivist attitude of the government. Only the members of the negotiating teams and a handful of others knew what was really going on in the peace process. It has sometimes been said that only the prime minister knows where he wants the peace process to go. The president's proposals envisaged setting up a joint council co-chaired by both the president and prime minister which would set the overall policy direction of the peace process and to which the negotiating team would report. The inclusion of presidential nominees in the negotiating team and a civil society advisory body are some of the other key features in the president's proposals, which in turn would ensure a much greater participation from diverse interest groups in the peace process. The proposals were rejected by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in the first week of December..In any negotiation much depends on the spirit with which the negotiators enter into the negotiations. An erosion of confidence at the outset itself is a bad sign. But the alternative to a negotiated settlement of the cohabitation crisis is not preparing for an election, as some members of the government seem to believe. Apart from the cost considerations and volatile political atmosphere, the main reason an election is not an alternative to a negotiated solution is that it simply will not solve the problem. There is no alternative to civilised and rational "give and take" at the negotiating table. This would also be the best way for Sri Lanka's political leaders to show the world that LTTE leader Velupillai Prabakharan was mistaken in his analysis of the present political crisis which had set the government and the president against each other as reflecting Sinhala racism. Today, the vast majority of Sinhalese people are united in desiring that the president and the prime minister, representing two different political parties, should work together to take the peace process forward. What stands .in the way is not Sinhala racism but the politicians' quest for power..The optimism that President Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Wickremesinghe would resolve the political crisis through a compromise agreement is now giving way to pessimism. It appears that decades of party rivalry, bolstered by personal differences, cannot be bridged. The leadership (as well as personality) factor in the present crisis cannot be discounted. Both the president and prime minister are undisputed leaders coming from opposing parties. The decision-making structures within their respective parties vest them with enormous authority. They have the power to set the tone for either confrontation or compromise, which the rest of the party membership can pick up. But their inability to find a solution to the political crisis brought about by the president's take-over of the three key ministries puts both of them in a potentially vulnerable situation..The society-wide consensus that the president and prime minister should work together for the common good is born out of two circumstances. The first is that the solution to the ethnic conflict necessarily calls for a bipartisan approach by the two main political parties. If the president and prime minister were to work together, a two-thirds majority to change the constitution is possible for a start, to get an interim administration for the north-east underway. If they do not work together, even the next step forward cannot take place..Tragically, much of the attention of the country's policymakers and media is being devoted to the political crisis rather than to dealing with the many other problems facing the country. In the north-east, for instance, the LTTE is continuing to recruit children on a significant scale, and the Muslim people of the east are at the receiving end of oppressive treatment. Yet there is scarcely any attention being devoted to these problems. The plight of displaced Tamil people in the north-east, and the economic reconstruction of the war ravaged areas is getting further prolonged..More compromise.When assessing the political career paths of the president and prime minister, an ascending and descending trend can be seen. With the end of her second and final presidential term due in less than two years, President Kumaratunga is on a declining trend. She faces the terrible prospect of ending her political career as a person who presided over a failed war for peace and was kept out of the peace process that succeeded. On the other hand, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe is on an ascending trend. He has been more successful as prime minister than was expected, especially with regard to the peace process with the LTTE..Both the president and the prime minister are currently involved in a tussle over the defence ministry, which is a very important institution of government. Both have legitimate reasons to stake their claim to it. Indeed, the president may have greater claim because from 1978 onwards, the presidents of the republic (there have been three prior to President Kumaratunga) retained the defence portfolio. Indeed, even after his party lost its parliamentary majority in 1994, President DB Wijetunga retained the defence portfolio..Further, if we accept the notion that the party on the ascendant should compromise more than the party on the decline, then it is the prime minister who is in a better position to compromise on the defence ministry dispute. Accordingly, he should consider accepting the president's offer of full cooperation in the peace process that she has requested him to take forward. There are precedents for power-sharing with regard to the defence ministry. In the mid-1980s President JR Jayewardene created the position of the national security ministry and while he retained the defence portfolio, he permitted Lalith Athulathmudali to conduct the war against the LTTE as the minister of national security..There are several advantages in the prime minister accepting the president's proposal that she would keep the defence ministry but provide him with decision-making powers in relation to the peace process. It will provide a golden opportunity for the peace process to re-start on a firm basis of bipartisan support. Even the LITE has recently been asking the president and prime minister to resolve their differences to enable a stable government that could re-start the peace process with them. The Tamil people will feel more confident that the peace process will yield a genuine solution if the president and prime minister are jointly involved in the peace process, as the constitutional obstacles to a just political solution will no longer be insurmountable barriers..There is of course, the possibility that the president will not cooperate with the prime minister in a genuine manner, but seek to trip him up, for instance by revealing the details of secret negotiations with the LTTE. The president has an unhappy track record of being indiscreet and speaking her mind to the detriment of both her friends and foes, and indeed even herself. But peace-making is always a risky proposition, whether it is with one's democratic opponents or military opponents. There are also conflict resolution mechanisms, such as facilitators and monitors, to make it more likely that the trust placed will not be abused..Up until now the prime minister has succeeded in the peace process with the LTTE because he took risks on the basis of a rational calculation that they would not go back to war and because he set up an international safety net. The urn too has a bad track record of suddenly going back to war. But the advantages of the peace process have kept them within its fold. The prime minister needs to make the same rational calculation now, and design adequate safeguards, on the rationale that working with the president is in the larger interests of the country. In the event that the president does not cooperate in good faith, the people will know that the prime minister did his best under the circumstances. Democracy is about letting the people be the final judges.