Sri Lanka's civil war
Please note that the views expressed by the author of this feature do not necessarily reflect the views of Asia New Zealand Foundation.
A country too broken to fix
When two small Czech-built planes flown by Tamil Tiger pilots made a daring attack on the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, in February 2009 it brought home the intractable nature of the country’s separatist conflict.
The two propeller-driven aircraft were eventually brought down, one badly damaging a tax office of the inland revenue, killing two people and injuring some 45 others. It was a public relations victory for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and an embarrassment for the government, which earlier claimed to have destroyed all the rebels’ airfields and to have shut down their makeshift air force.
Nevertheless, the strike, using aircraft smuggled into the country then reassembled and fitted with improvised bomb racks, could do little to alter the outcome of a war that was being driven ever deeper into territory the rebels had long held in the north.
Facing defeat: Tamil Tiger losses
Following President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s election vow to crush the rebels’ fight for a separate Tamil homeland, and his abandonment in early 2008 of a Norwegian-mediated ceasefire, the campaign against the LTTE has been relentless. By March 2009 it was clear that, militarily at least, the Tigers faced almost certain defeat.
One after another their strongholds ringing the Jaffna Peninsula fell, among them Elephant Pass, a strategic causeway to the peninsula, Kilinochchi, the rebels’ political and administrative centre, Mullaitivu, an important base, and Puthukkudiyiruppu, their last significant town. All that remained to them were a handful of small coastal villages and a shrinking enclave of jungle.
Military defeat also promised the dismantling of what was once a separate de facto state, Tamil Eelam, a 15,000 sq. km zone in the north and northeast of the country with its own banks, police force, health and education boards, and courts. Once controlled by the LTTE, this experiment in autonomy was gradually depopulated as the Tigers retreated, driving before them tens of thousands of local Tamils.
One thing is clear. The fearless and single-minded — some say brutal and megalomaniacal — Tamil leader Velupillai Prabhakaran will not give in. More adept at fighting than negotiating, he is likely to revert to the guerrilla-style warfare with which he began his separatist struggle in the 1970s.
Escape to India is unlikely — Prabhakaran is wanted there for alleged involvement in the murder of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. But since the death from cancer in 2006 of the Tigers’ main ideologue, Anton Balasingham, and the killing of Tamil figurehead SP Thamilselvan in 2007, Prabhakaran is operating in something of a vacuum and his options are limited. It is likely that, whatever course of action he decides on, the Tamil diaspora will find ways to continue supporting him.
And while the West may continue to brand the LTTE as a terrorist organisation, its supporters maintain that the civil war can be traced ultimately to the historical actions of European overlords and of American evangelists.
Tamil and Sinhala: the history of an uneasy coexistence
Contrary to the official Sri Lankan government line that Tamils were late arrivals, they have a presence confirmed by archaeology which dates back thousands of years.
When Portuguese traders arrived in 1505 they discovered a Tamil dynasty ruling over an independent Jaffna kingdom in the north and northeast of the country and coexisting more or less peacefully with several Sinhalese kingdoms to the south. Both the Portuguese and later the Dutch conquerors upset the status quo by making converts among the largely Hindu population and by creating a plantation economy.
But it was left to the British to lay the foundations of civil war. By 1815 they had taken control of the whole of what was then Ceylon and for administrative convenience amalgamated the island’s Tamils with the Sinhala nation. Disproportionate room was then found in the new bureaucracy for educated Tamils.
Meanwhile, the activities of American missionaries in the north had triggered among the largely Hindu Tamil population a renewed sense of cultural identity which was to find no safeguard in the post-occupation political climate.
At independence in 1948, the three million Tamils and 17 million Buddhist Sinhalese inherited a relatively stable country with a strong economy. The possibility of creating an enduring bicultural state, however, was jeopardised by a series of disastrous political measures, including the passing of legislation which rendered more than a million Tamils of Indian origin stateless; many were later deported. Furthermore, in 1956 a language act defined Sinhalese as the only official language. It gradually became apparent that there was to be little room for Tamil culture in the face of what came to be seen as Sinhala chauvinism.
Tension between the two groups reached a new low in 1981 when, against a backdrop of spreading ethnic violence, Sinhala police torched the Jaffna library with its 97,000 rare books and manuscripts — one of the largest such collections in Asia.
A worsening situation
In 1983 an island-wide pogrom that saw 3000 killed and 150,000 forced to flee overseas convinced many Tamils that safety and cultural survival lay in political autonomy. The military defeat of the often brutal Tamil Tigers has done nothing to change that. Quite the opposite.
A case has been made that some of the army’s actions constitute war crimes. However that may be, the repressiveness of Rajapaksa’s war, not just against the LTTE but against all forms of dissent, has further polarised Sri Lankan society. Its increasingly intolerant stand against even moderate criticism has disturbed many Sri Lankans, especially supporters of the opposition United National Party.
Since Rajapaksa came to power in 2004, 14 journalists have been murdered in what some see as government-sponsored, or at the very least government-inspired, attacks. The latest victim was Lasantha Wickrematunge, one of Sri Lanka’s best-known journalists and editor of the Sunday Leader, who was killed by unknown assailants in January.
Days before his murder, gunmen with grenades ransacked offices of the country’s largest private television broadcaster. Indeed, advocacy groups claim that Sri Lanka is becoming one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists.
The tragedy for Sri Lanka is not merely that Asia’s longest-running civil war is not over; that the carnage which has seen more than 70,000 killed since 1983 will, in one form or another, go on. It is that the demands of ‘national security’, the ‘war on terror’ and the worsening climate of fear will further undermine democracy and make civil society just a dream for an increasing number of the country’s citizens, Tamils and Sinhalese alike.
by Vaughan Yarwood
Image credits: Creative Commons, Wikipedia
