Misguided Priorities Of CBK

By Dinesh D. Dodamgoda –September 7, 2015

Dinesh Dodamgoda

Former President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga now as the head of the Office of National Unity and Reconciliation has declared her three main priorities. They are taking back land from the Sri Lankan army, investigating disappearances of Tamils, and resettling the displaced, the Indian Express reported.

There is no doubt that the task of resolving those issues that included in Ms. Kumaratunga’s priority list is important and good in terms of winning hearts and minds of the Tamils. However, the question is that whether this is the best way to initiate a sustainable reconciliation process in ethnically polarised and deeply wounded post-war Sri Lanka?

Statist Diplomacy

The approach proposed by Ms. Kumaratunga concerns with starting the process of reconciliation by resolving issues through direct government initiatives. This approach is clearly a traditional statist diplomatic approach that adopts frameworks and activities to reconciliation aiming at initially resolving issues through the ‘top’ level government initiatives.

However, as one of the subject experts and a practitioner, Professor John Paul Lederach, who adopts a practitioner’s approach to reconciliation emphasises, ‘the nature and characteristics of contemporary conflict suggest the need for a set of concepts and approaches that go beyond traditional statist diplomacy’. Accordingly, the most important task would be to adopt an approach to focus on restoration and rebuilding of relationships between divided groups, because reconciliation will endure if it is sustained by a society-wide network of relationships and mechanisms that reduces enmity which can regenerate destabilising tensions.

Weaknesses in the Approach                       Read More