Reconciliation Is Not Happening In Sri Lanka, And The Problem Isn’t A Question Of Time
By Sivakami Rajamanoharan -August 23, 2012
Dr. Sivakami Rajamanoharan
Three years since the armed conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ended, the Tamil speaking areas remain gripped by repression, ethnic tension and widespread suffering, rather than emergent reconciliation and peace – and the problem is not a question of time.
The war itself ended in a cataclysm of violence in which, according to a UN expert panel’s report, over 40,000 Tamil civilians were massacred, largely by government shelling of safe zones and hospitals. The period after the war’s end in May 2009 saw the internment of hundreds of thousands of shell-shocked civilian survivors in squalid camps (run by Sri Lanka’s ethnically pure Sinhala military), from which reports of deprivation, abductions, torture and rape were persistently emerging. Although after intense international pressure the camps were eventually closed, large numbers of Tamils are still prevented from resettling.
It is against this recent history, quite apart from the decades of ethno-political strife and quarter century of war, that today, ‘reconciliation’ is being discussed as a necessary step towards a lasting peace. So it is unsurprising that the question of how to achieve reconciliation or, more importantly, what exactly it entails, has only become more contentious.
Whilst the Tamils, eminent human rights organisations and leading democracies have called for accountability for the horrific war crimes and crimes against humanity, alleged to have been committed by both sides, as the first step towards meaningful reconciliation, Sri Lanka dismisses such calls as ‘neo-colonialism’. Instead the Colombo government has tried to enforce its own brand of reconciliation – one that denies the military’s slaughter of large numbers of Tamil civilians, refuses to meaningfully address the Tamil people’s long-standing political grievances, and seeks to ruthlessly impose its own idea of what ‘national’ identity should be.
