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Sri Lanka's ethnic divisions still deep and dangerous
Melbourne Age - May 19, 2010
Matt Wade – In the dying days of Sri Lanka's civil war, the army liked to show off the military hardware it had captured from the retreating Tamil Tigers. During carefully managed tours to the front line, foreign journalists were taken to inspect neat rows of Kalashnikovs, missiles, landmines and artillery cannon.
A battle tank was the most impressive trophy; the most chilling a small wardrobe of suicide jackets. Photographs found with dead rebels showed proud young cadres standing with the reclusive Tamil Tiger supremo, Velupillai Prabhakaran. One fighter had a printed card commemorating Prabhakaran's last birthday in November 2008.
The weaponry and personal memorabilia were a testament to the formidable military force Prabhakaran had. He once controlled a third of the country thanks to his huge arsenal and devoted guerillas.
Exactly a year ago, battlefield resistance crumbled and Prabhakaran was shot dead. Images of his body on television marked the end of an era.
"Without Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tigers disappeared – like pricking a balloon," says Gordon Weiss, an Australian who recently stepped down as the United Nations spokesman in Sri Lanka.
A year after the guns fell silent, Sri Lanka's ethnic divisions remain deep and many questions raised by the war are still unanswered.
One of them is what happened in those horrific final months of conflict when 300,000 Tamil civilians were sandwiched between the rebels and advancing government troops. An investigative report by the International Crisis Group says "tens of thousands" of civilians died in the last five months of the war and blames the military's bombardment for most of the casualties. The group says an independent, international war crimes inquiry is needed to ensure long-term stability.
"Sri Lanka's peace will remain fragile so long as the many credible allegations of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law by senior government and LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] leaders are not subject to impartial investigation," it says.
The government has repeatedly rejected calls for an international investigation. It says civilians were never deliberately targeted and blames the Tigers for the casualties.
"Some people desperately keep on scratching that old wound so that it stays open," Sri Lanka's ambassador to the United Nations, Palitha Kohona, told the Herald.
"Instead of helping us to heal the wounds and move forward, they suffer from a one-size-fits-all approach to international conflict."
The President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is under little domestic pressure to pick over the war's bloody climax. A wave of support from the ethnic Sinhalese majority delivered him a thumping win in presidential elections in January and has made him even more dominant now than when he declared victory over the Tamil Tigers a year ago.
This has given him a historic opportunity to try to deal with the nation's ethnic divisions. While he has suggested a second chamber of parliament to allow greater representation for minorities, hopes for serious political reforms that respond to the aspirations of the Tamils are fading. Postwar rhetoric has focused more on economic progress than on political reform.
"Most people in Sri Lanka are not particularly interested in a political solution," said Jehan Perera of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka. "To the great majority ... the end of the LTTE has meant the end of terrorism and the end of what troubled them and the country."
For many Tamils survival is their main concern. More than 50,000 are still living in temporary refugee camps, unable or unwilling to leave. The tens of thousands who have left the camps are struggling to rebuild homes and livelihoods in war-ravaged villages.
The Rudd government has felt the after-effects of the Tigers' demise as hundreds of disaffected Tamils sailed for Australia.
If conditions for Tamils in the north of Sri Lanka – economic and political – do not show signs of improvement, more may be tempted to take to boats in the hope of asylum, regardless of Australian immigration policy.
Many Tamils are sceptical about meaningful change. "I don't see any signs of political reform," said an outspoken Tamil MP, Mano Ganesan. "The defeat of terrorism should not have been transformed into the defeat of the whole Tamil population, but that's how it's looking."
Another Tamil MP from the north, Sivagnanam Sritharan, said in his maiden speech this month that "at present Sinhalese have an attitude that they have conquered the Tamils and the Tamils have an attitude of pain and hate".
The size of Sri Lanka's war machine means a return to violent resistance by Tamils is unlikely in the short term. However, there is a longer-term risk that conflict could flare again if the aspirations of minorities are ignored.
"While the government's security apparatus is powerful and pervasive enough to suppress any rapid re-emergence of violent resistance, it will not be able to do so indefinitely so long as legitimate grievances are not addressed," the International Crisis Group warns.
A year after the winning the war, the Colombo government does not seem to agree.
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