From: rags@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Raghavan Jayaraman)
Subject: Accord of 1987 :- Repost [re: memoirs of Jayawardane]
Organization: Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois.
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 13:28:01 GMT


There is nothing new in the quoted portions of the book as those are well
known. Here I am going to repost a part of my articles on this subject
which  I had posted in SCI a year and half back. If any one is interested I
can post/mail the rest too.

Now to quote Jayawardane:-

" What is wrong in sipping some whisky if monks themselves had taken liquor
to attain Nirvana"

Hmmm! Doesn't he know that he can attain that simply by dropping his
clothes:-)

--------------------

I will come to the predicament I talked about in my earlier post by the end
of this article. India's involvement in Srilanka may be crudely put to be
due to  strategic reasons and its own tamil ethnic population. At the
outset  let me deal with the former.

Everyone may remember the  conditions leading to the deployment of seventh
fleet by US in 1971 and their subsequent development of Diego Garcia. They
eyed on the natural harbour at Trincomalee but India had put pressure on
Srilanka under the disguise of Non-alignment against this. Since then India
always had a fear about this strategic point. In 1956 S.W.R.D Bandaranaike
committed to non-alignment and later his wife  Srimavo Bandaranaike in 1964 
barred all foreign navies from Trincomalee, pleasing India.

In 1977, when Jayawardene defeated Sirimavo, lifted the ban on trincomalee
and started distancing away from India. In 1981,  a bid to develop a oil
tank farm in Tricomalee was won by a singapore based consortium inspite of
competitive offer by India.  Also in 1983, an agreement over the location
of VOA transmitter in Srilanka was renewed. These made India suspicious of
US interests in that strategic point. This was compounded by the outside
help Srilanka got after the flare up in 1983. Mossad was beleived to have
been advising the Srilanka Govt. with covert US assistance. Pakistan was
pointed to have trained the Special Task Force against guerillas and
weapons arrived from China. UK was beleived to have channelled their help
indirectly thro' a security firm of the Island. Due to the
apprehension that its geostrategic interets were being threatened by
involvement of foreign hands in this ethnic conflict, India prepared a blue
print to contain the Srilankan situation. This was disclosed due to the
Coomar Narain spy scandal. So by 1983, Indra Gandhi's Govt. protested the
Srilanka's decision to dispose of unidentified bodies without inquiry and
communicated its concern at the prospect of million refugees entering
India. She sent PVNR  to Colombo and invited TULF leader Amirthalingam for
talks. Now Jayawardene accepted India's help in solving the crisis. G.
Parthasarathi came up with a proposal 'Annexure C' which collapsed because
Jayawardene reneged it due to sinhala opposition. Then Indra was
assasinated.

After Rajiv was elected to power, due to the mounting military pressure at
home, Jayawardene came to Delhi and consulted Rajiv. Rajiv inturn started
putting pressure on militants for a negotiated settlement by curbing
militant activities in TN, arranged for a cease fire and made the militants
meet Srilankan officials at Thimphu [1985]. This time it was the turn of
militants to reject the offer. 

Again in April 1986, the mediation was initiated by India by sending the
Srilankan Govt. new draft to TULF. It was bogged down by militants on the
point of merger of north and eastern provinces, inspite of involvement of
MGR. By Dec.'86, after meeting with Jayawardene in Bangalore, 'December 19'
proposal was offered to militants, to be reneged again by Jayawardene.
Frustrated by the failure of 3 years of mediation, MGR at the behest of
centre told Prabhakaran, to either accept a negotiated agreement or leave
for Jaffna. He chose the latter.

By April 1987, there was a massacre of sinhala civilians on a good friday
and bomb explosion in colombo. Srilanka announced the oil and food embargo
on Jaffna and were all out for taking on Jaffna. India at this time sensed
the danger of decimation of tigers and its aftermath it had to bore at TN.
So it acted by sending the Eagle mission-4. 

Rest in next

raghavan
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