A Decisive Blow At The Ballot Box
Kishali Pinto-Jayawardena
For too long, the international news focus on Sri Lanka had been overwhelmingly negative. A relentless civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and majority Sinhalese governments transformed this small island nation balancing precariously off the tip of Southern India from being the pride of South Asia at the time of shaking off its colonial fetters to the British Raj in 1948, to a land of profound agony.
Sri Lanka was able to foster an independent judiciary, a critical media and a strong public service for only a few decades after independence. Ethnic conflict was not the sole reason for this regression. In the 1970’s and more radically in the 1980’s, Southern Sinhala Marxist revolutionaries were brutally crushed by government forces which carried out reprisals against entire villages.
The State militarily combated (majority) Sinhalese revolutionaries and (minority) Tamil separatists without rationally identifying causes of unrest for either. Constitutional protection of civil liberties by a judiciary once respected throughout the Commonwealth yielded to political expediency. The consequences were devastating.
In the war ravaged North and East inhabited by predominantly Tamil speaking civilians, state forces targetedLTTE and innocent Tamils alike. In other parts of the country, the majority Sinhalese were targeted by LTTE suicide squads. The Muslims constituting Sri Lanka’s other minority were ruthlessly evicted by the LTTE from what they termed as Tamil homelands in the East. Sri Lanka brought itself under emergency rule amidst unprecedented human rights abuses by state and non-state actors. Journalists, human rights defenders and public interest lawyers began fighting to protect the few precious freedoms left, with their backs metaphorically – and sometimes literally – to the wall. Read More