How will Sri Lanka reconcile after a bitter war?

The campaign against the Tamil Tigers appears to be ending. But deep ethnic divides behind the conflict remain.

from the April 24, 2009 edition

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This week, the UN estimated that 6,400 civilians had been killed in this year alone, and some 14,000 people injured. The government has also been widely accused of human rights abuses against Tamils, including the abduction and murder of hundreds of young Tamils in Colombo.

On Friday, two top Indian officials met with Sri Lankan President Mahindra Rajapaksa to pressure him to stop the government offensive against the rebels. The government has disputed charges that there is a humanitarian crisis in the country's northeast.

After the Army bust into the Tigers' last sanctuary, designated a "no-fire zone" by the government, television images showed tens of thousands of exhausted civilians escaping, many of them with serious injuries. Although the government claims that the rebels bombed the area, many nongovernmental (NGO) workers claim that the violence came from the Army.

NGOs working in the area also report that the government camps that house those who have escaped from the war zone are crowded, poorly run, and running short on supplies. Doctors Without Borders says that there is little freedom of movement within the camps.

Indeed, the human cost of the war in the north has been so heavy that the usually reserved International Committee of the Red Cross has described the situation as "catastrophic." US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that Sri Lanka had caused "untold suffering" in its military campaign against the Tigers. The same day, the UN Security Council asked the government to allow greater UN humanitarian access to up to 100,000 displaced people who had escaped the no-fire zone.

Many observers says that if the government is serious about bringing lasting peace to Sri Lanka, it must act quickly to help those refugees by giving them proper care in the camps, and then resettling them as quickly as possible.

But in the longer term, they say, some measure of devolution in the northern and eastern areas of Sri Lanka is now necessary.

"There has to be a political settlement," says Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of Colombo's Center for Policy Alternatives and a leading Tamil intellectual. "Otherwise, there is always the danger that, having won some sort of respite from the rebels, there will be new support for them."

President Rajapaksa has appointed an All Party Representative Committee to draw up plans for devolution in Tamil-dominated areas, but there are concerns that they will not be properly implemented.

The east of the island, from which the Tigers were chased by the Army in 2007, offers little encouragement over the prospects for devolution. A year ago, elections were held to elect a provincial council. But power has not yet been devolved to that council, and a recent report by the International Crisis Group (ICG) alluded to "violence, political instability, and reluctance to devolve power to provincial administrations."

Nonetheless, even the government's harshest critics sound a hopeful note about Sri Lanka's opportunity now to forge a lasting peace that embraces both Sinhalese and Tamils.

"Before, we were stuck with a stalemate, with two sides just fighting it out," says Mr. Perera, himself Sinhalese. "Now, one of those sides has been eliminated. Now we must move forward – without Sri Lanka's Tamil population being left behind."

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