Fear and Loathing in Post-War Sri Lanka

By Gibson Bateman, November 11, 2011    
Human Rights

Originally published in The Mantle

Sri Lanka’s bloody twenty-six year civil war is over. The Sri Lankan government, led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, can rightfully claim a resounding military victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (L.T.T.E.). It would be misleading, however, to call Sri Lanka a post-conflict society. There is no question that the underlying tensions of the conflict remain.

Sri Lanka is a diverse country with historical ties to five ethnic groups (the two largest being Sinhalese and Tamils) and four religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. Sinhala and Tamil-speaking people have occupied the island for more than two thousand years. Historically, political disagreements have been based on religion. The political marginalization of the Tamil people (Sri Lanka’s largest ethnic minority) lies at the heart of many conflicts.

While Sri Lanka gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1948, tension over ethnicity and the creation of an official language in the country began to fester decades before liberation. In the decades following independence, violence erupted sporadically and the perception (amongst Tamils) that the government favored the Sinhalese (the country’s ethnic majority).

The recent civil war between the country’s Sinhalese majority and Tamil separatists was fought largely over questions of federalism, the devolution of power from the country’s central government to local governments, and the L.T.T.E.’s desire for a separate state. Most of the fighting occurred in the country’s North and East, although the L.T.T.E. also launched various attacks in Colombo, the nation’s capital in the south. Full Story>>>