Greed or poverty, Sri Lankan guns for hire
By N Sathiya Moorthy
Reports that some ex-Servicemen from Sri Lanka had died fighting on either side of the unending Ukraine war should shock the nation’s consciousness. The question is not about the how of it but the why of it all – greed or economic condition that has forced them and others still out there fighting, after paying LKR one million each to human-traffickers nearer home who masquerade as travel agents or run overseas job agencies.
True, such human-traffickers have been around in the country and in all Third World nations, for long. In these parts, it commenced with the Gulf oil boom in the early seventies. In Afghanistan, at the height of the US-funded, Pakistan-operated Al Qaeda / Taliban-led war on Soviet invasion, the mercenaries came from across the Arab/Islamic world. Not all of them were religious zealots. Among them were those that reportedly got paid. It is anybody’s guess, how many of them survived the war and went back home, with or without limbs, or how many of them died even before taking their first aim at a Soviet soldier or installation, killed by enemy fire.
In Sri Lanka, this is possibly for the first time that you have trained guns that are for hire by external agencies. Yes, there used to be reports that an errant ex-Serviceman or two, including those from the police force, might have joined local gangs. It stopped there.
Whatever be his other achievements or failings, later-day President Gotabaya Rajapaksa did attempt to end those ‘Colombo gangs’ using the tri-Services, post-war, but he who ended the LTTE war, violence and terrorism, did not fully succeed on the gangs front. Today, you thus have the Government of President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s ‘Yukthiya’ or ‘Justice’ programme is all about fighting drug-trafficking, which is part of organised crimes, as known under the law. That in the first phase earlier this year, the security forces nabbed as many as 50,000 persons, almost at one go, is an indicator of the shape of things as it existed – and is to come.
Call of duty
But they are not in the range of what has since been reported. Nor are they anything close to ‘army desertions’ in the midst of the LTTE war. It was then reported that southern Sinhala youth rushed to join the armed forces, lured as much by the pay-packet, pensions and concessional canteen stuff that they could purchase at lower prices as by Sinhala / Sri Lankan nationalism and the call of national duty.
Even then there were reports that some deserters, especially those who had ‘stolen’ their arms might be indulging in illegal activities of some kind or the other. The post-Aragalaya wave of shooting incidents, mostly in the Sinhala regions, where individuals are getting killed either because of personal enmity or by ‘hired guns’ reportedly involves retired policemen, if not deserters from the armed forces.
The Government agencies concerned – they are also concerned government agencies – have however denied that serving policemen too were involved in such shooting incidents that have occurred invariably in crowded streets and broad daylight. The Government has been even more vehement in denying that serving personnel of the armed forces have taken leave to join the Ukraine War, where Sri Lankan mercenaries have got killed on either side of the military divide.
If reports that each of these men who have joined the mercenary troop overseas has paid one-million rupees for becoming one should show that they were doing it owing to poverty, caused by the Aragalaya-era economic crisis. Maybe, they borrowed this money at usurious interest, but if they could borrow the money for one cause (?), they could have done it for another, too – like feeding and fending for their families.
Money trail
But the question before the lender was possibly this: How will the borrower repay the loan with interest. In the case of a prospective debtor promised an ‘overseas job’ (?), he had the means to pay back the debt and interest. Possibly, the creditor did not know that the job awaiting the debtor overseas was not a life-saving one, but a life-giving one. There might not be the debtor, around down the weeks and months for him to be able to recover, even the usurious interest, even if not the principal. Incidentally, which usurious creditor has ever cared for the repayment of the principal?
All of it raises the question if the police investigators have traced the route of money-payment that the mercenaries were using or were supposed to use, for sending their ‘salaries’ or ‘wages’ (?) back home. Was it a once-in-a-life-time payment that was being made after the mercenaries served out their agreed term, or was it a monthly payment that they could ‘repatriate’ (?) from the war-front? What were the clauses for compensating the families if the mercenaries died in the battle-field, as some of them have done already?
This raises a further question if the surfeit of Russian and Ukrainian tourists that have been visiting the country as tourists in the recent months include some of these ‘mercenary-recruiters’? The Government is on record that it would not throw out those tourists. But were all of them genuine tourists?
Lingering question
In the closing years of the war and for about a year afterwards, western diplomats in Colombo and their bosses visiting from home office used to throw up an immediate concern for the post-war period. They were convinced that the Sri Lankan government strategy and the armed forces’ tactics would definitely pay off early. The only questions in their minds were when exactly would the war end and what exactly would be the fate of LTTE boss Velupillai Prabhakaran.
This was in exact contrast to what they were professing even ahead of the ‘fall of the East’ in 2007. Then, they used to argue that a fragile economy like Sri Lanka’s could not afford to prolong the war and that the LTTE would not go away that easily and early. After the armed forces took over the East without actually fighting a last battle – attributed to Prabhakaran’s tactics to fight it another day in another theatre, but was the result of the army’s tactics, instead — a lingering question was upper-most in the western mind.
It was this. What could and would the Government do with an over-sized army. Their fear was that because of the war victory and the residual size of the armed forces that there was no residue, there would be a military coup. Conversely, they also anticipated an imminent economic melt-down that could cause the revival of a JVP-like socio-political militant movement in the South, though it might not be the JVP, which has been domesticated and democratised since.
Locusts and mice
The other question, spoken and unspoken was about LTTE renegades who might have left the outfit after losing the war… or, those that the leadership might have asked to leave the war-zone and settle down as good citizens or reformed citizens outside the war zone or the Tamil regions in the country or the nation itself. The sharp-shooter killing of Lakshman Kadirgamar had ignited in fertile western minds ‘The Day of the Jackal’ scenario, where highly paid and even more sought-after lone-wolf killers would be in high demand and would be dotting the western world like locusts and mice.
It is anybody’s guess why they thought that those killers would want to be hired only in the West and by the West. Was it because they thought too much about themselves here again as on other matters? Or, did they think that the lure of the dollar and the euro would be greater than Sri Lankan or any other currency? There are no answers even now, but we have not come across even one of those LTTE sharp-shooters in the news, in the West or elsewhere. Nor have we heard of ‘LTTE deserters’ or ‘army deserters’ working as a mercenary group anywhere, near or afar.
Yet, the truth now is that a new set of Sri Lankan ex-Servicemen are out there as mercenary fighters even if not as killers. Or, is it that all these groups and their forgotten men too are out there, only that they have not been caught, killed or otherwise exposed, still?
(The writer is a Chennai-based Policy Analyst & Political Commentator. Email: sathiyam54@nsathiyamoorthy.com)
