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| PAINTING BY MARK HESS |
Ranil Wickremesinghe
The Peacemaker
Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was born for politics.
One of his ancestors was a 17th century King. And when Wickremesinghe
was first elected to Parliament at the age of 28, the country's then
Prime Minister was his uncle.
In the Sri Lankan context, that should make Wickremesinghe more of a
blackguard than a hero. The cause of the country's ruinous, 20-year
civil war was endless scheming by politicians to woo votes from the
majority Sinhalese community—at the expense of the island's Tamil
minority. Frustration by the Tamils morphed into armed rebellion by the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and its demand for a separate
state. But since Wickremesinghe, 54, took office, Sri Lanka has enjoyed
14 months of glorious peace. Talks with the LTTE for a permanent
solution are going well. The Tigers have already renounced their demand
for a separate state. 9/11 was a factor: the LTTE managed to fight Sri
Lanka's armed forces for two decades, but getting sucked into the
international war on terror was a whole different prospect.
Even before 9/11, however, Wickremesinghe had built a bridge to the
rebels by insisting in speech after speech that a political
answer—not war—was his goal. The country couldn't afford much
more conflict, and he saw the need to act before it was too late. "If
the LTTE had just occasionally had a bomb go off near the harbor, or
even if a bomb was simply found every once in a while," says
Wickremesinghe, "the economy would have been totally screwed."
More importantly, Wickremesinghe declared aloud what none of his
predecessors dared admit to: that the whole 20-year mess—civil war,
the Tigers, the murderous genius of their leader Velupillai
Prabhakaran—could be simply explained by the fact that Sri Lanka's
politicians had wrecked the country. "Prabhakaran," Wickremesinghe says,
"is the outcome of Sri Lanka's politics of the 20th century." The job
for today's politicians, he says, is to clean up the mess—not only
by taming the Tigers but also rewriting the constitution to provide for
a federal system of government that gives the Tamils autonomy. "Politics
was too oriented to politicians," he says. "We want to orient it to the
people." In most lands that would sound like typical politician palaver.
In Sri Lanka, it's the long-awaited sound of hope.
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