Sri Lanka: Stranger Than Fiction

The 20 odd year conflict in Sri Lanka defies easy explanation much of the time.

The special report in the latest Economist “A War Strange As Fiction” makes for excellent reading in trying to comprehend the conflict’s evolution.

The Conradian imagery is appropriate. There is something strange about Sri Lanka’s 24-year ethnic war, a mismatch of high and low intensity, of first world and third, that almost savours of fiction. Horrors like that visited upon Radikhela and her family should not be happening in Sri Lanka. With an income per head of $1,350, almost twice India’s, it is a bright star of South Asian development. Its economy grew by an average of 5% during the 1990s, even as the war raged. It grew by around 7% last year, when the war was re-ignited after an unprecedented three-year pause. And this growth also came despite the devastating tsunami of December 2004, in which 35,000 Sri Lankans died.

What is more, Sri Lanka is an unusually delightful war-torn country. Half a million tourists last year are a sign of that. It has well-watered hills, rolling green tea estates and miles of palm-fringed white sands. Sri Lanka’s almost wholly literate inhabitants, 75% of them Sinhalese and 12% Sri Lankan Tamils, share an understandable pride in their island. Away from the war zone—despite a history of pogroms and other discrimination against the minority group—they seem to rub along reasonably well.

In fact, almost half of Colombo, the island’s seaside capital of a million people, is Tamil or Tamil-speaking Muslim. More Tamils live peaceably in government-controlled areas than in the north-eastern enclave held by the rebels, whose full name is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In the way of ambitious minorities, these Tamils thrive in business, as do Sri Lanka’s Muslims.

It also overturns several reasonable assumptions the masses hold, mainly about the nature of democracies, the role of expansive mass education and the easily corruptible tenets of honorable faiths.

Its useful to explore whether these are exceptions to the rule or common problems that ideological blinkers may prevent many from acknowledging.

1. Vis an authoritarian government, does the democracy in Sri Lanka hamper the prospects for peace?

While the violent 2005 elections boycott the LTTE (Tamil Tigers) enforced among Tamils certainly played a key role in the defeat of the “pro-peace” candidate for president of Sri Lanka’s vibrant democracy, strident Sinhalese popular nationalism continues to maintain a dark influence upon the negotiation process and the consistent dedication to a military solution to a problem, that terrible the LTTE leadership may be, is a political problem first and foremost.

Within the democracy of Sri Lanka, constant political competition and jousting within coalitions and among parties negates many advantages the government could have, forcing those in power to often make unsavory or unwise decisions and compromises to stay in power.

Nationalist and hard-line factions (like the formerly insurgent JVP) are able to exploit the democratic process to achieve their narrow needs and goals at the expense of everyone else. Democracies waging the sort of brutal civil war and counter-insurgency Sri Lanka has faced over the past 25 years are few and far between, and for good reason. Victory does not come easy in a conflict that features so many conflicting voices and agendas. Bold, decisive, even patient leadership, becomes a rarity in such a wartime environment.

What could a determined group of leaders or elites achieve if they seized power in Sri Lanka? While a relatively healthy democracy, Sri Lanka may one day experience this development, especially with hopes for peace with the LTTE so unlikely in the near to mid-future.

2. Does Buddhism afflict Sri Lanka’s hopes for peace?

Economist:
Those nationalists—led by a bigoted Buddhist clergy, whose small but shrill political party shares power with Mr Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party—considered the ceasefire a precursor to splitting the country. Since in their view the Sinhalese are the sole owners of Sri Lanka, and all minorities are alien to it, this was unacceptable. Though the monks’ orange-robed parliamentary leader, the Venerable Athuraliye Rathana, wants peace for most sentient beings, Tamil rebels are clearly excluded. “Day by day we are weakening them with our military force,” he says. “Talk can come later.”

A significant minority of Buddhist monks who display a xenophobic mentality towards minorities (like the Tamils, Christians and Muslim) have played a destructive role in the recent history of Sri Lanka, from the monk assassin who killed one of the earliest proponents of political compromise with the minorities to the hard-line monks who have formed their own political party and applaud tough action against the LTTE and oppose among other things, foreign interference (i.e. the Norwegians who negotiated a near 4 year ceasefire early this decade) and the types of political compromise that would help raise hopes for a lasting peace.

This behavior is at odds with the popular perception of Buddhism and offers an alarming blueprint for those who fear the recent push by monks in Thailand to define the nation as a Buddhist state at the expense of other religious sects, especially the Muslims in the bloody southern provinces where an insurgency currently rages. More than anything else, it testifies to a basic truth people should recognize; that any religion can be twisted and perverted to justify monstrous political and ethnic divisions and oppression.