After the war
January 16, 2012
Sri Lanka is still limping towards peace after 26 years of armed struggle. In 2009, General Sarath Fonseka’s army gained victory over the rebels and was widely commended for bringing an end to decades of violence.
While General Fonseka has paid the price for a political quarrel with President Mahindra Rajapakse and is now in jail, the President is also facing severe criticism from international rights groups for not allowing any objective investigations into possible war crimes.
A UN-backed report states that war crimes were perpetrated not only by the LTTE but also by the Sri Lankan army. Many of those killed included women and children, According to official UN records, more than 100,000 Tamils were killed during the civil war, 7000 of whom were slain in the final five months.
Civilian victims of war
It is believed that in the final days of the armed conflict, Tamil civilians were trapped on a small strip of land between the LTTE cadres and the government troops. The LTTE allegedly forced civilians to move with them when they were attack by the government’s troops and used them as human shields. Civilians who tried to flee to safe areas were killed by the rebels. Children were forcibly recruited and families were made to give up at least one child to join the rebel forces.
Meanwhile, the President has set up and inquiry into the war crimes. Amnesty and other human rights organizations are waiting eagerly for the report. But Amnesty International’s expert on Sri Lanka, Hubert Lowis, is pessimistic: “There have been reports on human rights violations but they have never been published and when you ask why they were not published, you can assume that government forces were involved in human rights violations.” He adds, “The UN will do everything to establish an independent international investigation which Sri Lanka, of course, doesn’t want to have.”
Lowis also points out that the government says it ran a humanitarian operation to free the civilians from the clutches of the LTTE. However there is a lot of evidence showing that this is not really true. “Hospitals were shelled by government troops and also areas that were densely populated by civilians,” he adds.
The history of the conflict
Sri Lanka’s civil war has a long history. For the predominantly Buddhist Sinhalese people, Sri Lanka is the country of Buddha, who is said to have visited the country three times. Under British hegemony in the 19th century, Tamil farmers were taken to the island to work on tea plantations and the educated ones served in the British administration. For this reason, most of the Sinhalese consider the predominantly Hindu Tamils as invaders and enemies.
After Sri Lanka became a sovereign nation in 1948, the Sinhala voters used their majority in Parliament to promulgate a law that required Tamil speakers to use only the Sinhala language for administrative purposes. Peter Schalk of the University of Uppsala in Sweden says, “There was a gradual discrimination of Tamil speakers in the administration, in language policy, in access to higher studies, in development of regions, in religion and in politics.” This slow development, according to Schalk, gave rise to the concept of a separate Tamil nation in 1956.
The proposal, put forth by a member of the Sri Lankan parliament at the time led to the setting up of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) in 1976. The TULF also supported the Tamil New Tigers, a militant group founded in 1972, which later renamed itself as the Liberation of Tamil Tigers Ealam (LTTE). “The LTTE,” says Schalk, “took up the idea of a separate state called the Tamil Ealam and made it its ultimate goal.”
Violence and after
The conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese escalated in 1983. The LTTE’s slogan was “Two nations, two states”, directed against the government’s call for “One nation, one state.”
At the end of the conflict, 280,000 displaced people had been forced into camps. Most of these people have now returned home, but a small number still remains in the camps. A central part of the problem revolves around the heavily mined regions in the northeast of the country.
Sulakshana Periera, the external relations assistant at the UNHCR office in Colombo, believes, “In general, returning to your village or returning to your home is a happy occasion but as long as demining is going on they will not be able to return because it is essential that they return to areas that are safe and where they will be able to restart their lives.”
Today, 25 percent of the Sri Lankan population is below 14 years of age. A whole generation was born and grew up in the struggles of the war. Even though the war still lingers in people’s minds, The wounds will take a long time to heal.
Author: Julia Thienhaus
Editor: Manasi Gopalakrishnan