Jayadeva Uyangoda
The transition of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict into a civil war between the state and Tamil nationalist groups began in the late 1970s, and accelerated in the early 1980s, particularly after the anti-Tamil ethnic riots of July 1983.1 There is a pre-civil war phase to the ethnic conflict, running back to the early post-independence years. Since political independence in 1948, Sinhalese–Tamil relations, specifically the relations between the state and the minority Tamil community, had been characterized by tension and conflict. The Tamil community’s experience of discrimination and political exclusion had produced a particular project of minority aspirations translated into a demand for federalist regional autonomy. It is perhaps fair to say that Sri Lanka’s ethnic minorities were “unreconciled to the constitutional arrangements” that came along with political independence; but only a “few expected that the majority rule would be so quickly followed by discriminatory legislative measures.”2 The peaceful and parliamentary agitation for autonomy rights continued until the late 1970s, but with little success. As Kearney, Roberts, Wriggins, and Wilson have documented and commented on in great detail, there were many barriers to interethnic accommodation through political reforms.3 The failure of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam agreement of 1957 and the Senanayake-Chelvanayakam agreement of 1965 were crucial landmarks in the ethnic politics of accommodation failure. The inflexibility of Sinhalese nationalism in responding to minority ethnic grievances and aspirations as well as the electoral politics of “ethnic outbidding” have been crucial in shaping the breakdown of Sinhalese–Tamil ethnic relations throughout these years.4
The immediate circumstances that saw the transition of Tamil ethnic politics from a demand for regional autonomy to secession evolved in the late 1970s.The promulgation of a strictly unitary republican constitution in 1972 by the United Front government, ignoring the Tamil demands for regional autonomy, created conditions for a decisive rupture of Tamil trust in the Sinhalese political class.The resultant tension between the Tamil nationalist Federal Party and the United Front regime had produced some violence that included police killing of Tamil civilians and assassinations by Tamil radical activists. These incidents marked a shift towards confrontation in state–Tamil relations. At the parliamentary election of 1977, the newly formed Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) contested the seats in the Tamil-dominated Northern and Eastern Provinces, seeking a mandate from Tamil voters to campaign for independence. This was the beginning of the struggle for “Eelam,” a separate Tamil ethnic state. The TULF, having won 17 of the 19 parliamentary seats in the two provinces, seemed to have expected the ruling United National Party (UNP) to initiate negotiations so that some measure of autonomy could be won for the Tamils. But the UNP government under President Junius Jayewardene was not willing to concede regional autonomy to the Tamils. Instead, the government offered in 1981 limited administrative decentralization by establishing a system of district development councils (DDCs). The growing violence between incipient Tamil armed groups and the state in the Northern Province had by this time created an atmosphere of increasing tension in government–Tamil relations. The government’s resort to emergency law and the enactment of the Prevention of Terrorism Act in 1979 indicated that its priority was to defeat “Tamil terrorism” by means of law and order measures, rather than addressing the political demands of the Tamil minority.5 The government’s deployment of violence against Tamils in 1981 in Jaffna, the symbolic heartland of northern Tamil society, during the elections to the DDCs, sent the worst possible signal to the Tamils: the Sinhalese political establishment was not willing to concede even administrative decentralization to the Northern and Eastern Provinces. This provided the context for greater radicalization of Tamil nationalist politics. Thus, the politics of bargaining that the TULF had been practicing, even after obtaining an electoral mandate from the Tamil electorate, was increasingly replaced by the politics of “armed struggle” for “national self-determination.”
It was against such a backdrop of increasing tension in state–Tamil relations that the anti-Tamil violence occurred in July 1983. This ethnic violence appeared to have been sponsored by sections linked to the UNP regime and even tolerated by the government and its leaders. Sinhalese mobs, backed by nationalist groups, and often encouraged by sections of the state apparatus, attacked, wounded, killed, and even burnt alive Tamil citizens in the Sinhalese majority areas, including the capital city of Colombo. Property belonging to Tamil families, including houses and commercial establishments, were set on fire and destroyed almost as if in accordance with a premeditated plan.The most troubling aspect of this anti-minority violence was the government’s inaction to control mob violence for a few days. It indeed gave the impression that the government saw the violence as a politically necessary development in order to control a politically assertive ethnic minority. During the violence spread over a week in the month of July 1983 many thousands of Tamil citizens were displaced as internal refugees.The government sent many of them to the Tamil majority Northern Province, ostensibly for their safety. But it also gave the Tamils the unfortunate signal that the state could not protect them outside the Northern Province.6
The atrocities of July 1983 widened the chasm between the Sri Lankan state and the Tamil community. It also led to the effective replacement of parliamentary Tamil nationalist politics by an armed struggle for separation. Tamil militant groups that were active in sporadic guerrilla operations against the government found the post-July 1983 situation most favorable to claims for their legitimacy and the validity of their tactics. With support and solidarity from the Tamils in southern India, and access to new sources of recruitment and material support, a number of militant groups relaunched their “national liberation armed struggle,” seeking the establishment of the state of Eelam in the Northern and Eastern Provinces.
In the early days of the Tamil nationalist insurgency in Sri Lanka in the late 1970s, there was no unified resistance movement as such. There were a number of armed groups with different ideological commitments and organizational identities. All were Tamil nationalist in ideological persuasion, but some were Left– oriented. The Left–nationalist groups were the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS) and People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE). The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was the most nationalist of all the militant groups. After July 1983, all these organizations operated from southern India where they had obtained either political asylum or enjoyed the status of guests. Almost all these militant groups are reported to have received training in guerrilla warfare while in India. Some sources say that the Indian intelligence agencies were instrumental in providing military training for these groups, as well as weapons and material support, an allegation officially denied by India.7
In August 1984 the Tamil militant groups formed a united front to take part in the peace talks held in Thimpu, the capital of Bhutan. These talks were facilitated by the Indian government.The Tamil militant groups and the TULF, which was in exile in India at the time, seemed to be relying more on the outcome of the armed struggle than a compromise through negotiations. In the same vein, the Sri Lankan government showed no interest in meeting Tamil nationalist aspirations through negotiations. From the perspective of the dynamics of the civil war, it was too early for either party to move away from unilateral outcomes which they pursued through military means. The government’s overall objective was to defeat the Tamil insurgency militarily and “unify” the state. By the same token, the Tamil militant groups were committed to an armed struggle for secession.Thus, negotiations did not mean much for the strategies of either the government or the Tamil nationalist rebels. Although the Thimpu talks failed to produce an outcome leading to ethnic conflict resolution, the talks were significant in the sense that the Tamil groups formulated four principles which, from their perspective, were to constitute the essential framework for a negotiated settlement:
1 recognition of the Tamils as a distinct nationality in Sri Lanka
2 recognition of a Tamil homeland
3 recognition of the right of the Tamil people for self-determination
4 recognition of the right to full citizenship of all Tamils living in the island.8
The role of the Indian government in altering the trajectory of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict in the early and mid-1980s is crucial to an understanding of the ways in which the Tamil nationalist insurgency developed in that period. Although the Indian government of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi gave covert support to Tamil militants, there was also the apprehension among policy circles in New Delhi that the Tamil insurgency might become an unmanageable conflict with regional consequences. The Thimpu talks arranged on the initiative of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi gave a clear indication that the Indian political and bureaucratic elites were exploring a negotiated political settlement to the civil war.The Indian engagement with both the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil nationalist groups through diplomatic channels eventually led to the Indo-Lanka Accord of July 1987. The accord was signed in Colombo by the Indian prime minister and the Sri Lankan president.9 It proposed for the Sri Lankan government to establish a system of “devolution of power” in exchange for laying down of their arms by the Tamil militant groups, disbanding their guerrilla units, and joining the political “mainstream.”The Indian government was to act as the guarantor of the implementation of the accord.At the time it was signed, the accord appeared to be a major breakthrough in the direction of resolving the ethnic conflict by political–constitutional means.
The success of the Indo–Lanka Accord depended on two crucial factors: the willingness of the Sri Lankan government to constitutionalize the devolution framework and of the Tamil militant groups to accept the peace deal and give up the armed struggle. The government, despite resistance from within it and oppositionist Sinhalese nationalist forces, established provincial councils through a constitutional amendment before the end of 1987. Most of the Tamil militant groups also accepted the accord, surrendered their weapons, and agreed to join the parliamentary political process. The leading groups among them were the EPRLF, PLOTE, EROS, and TELO, but not the LTTE. The last had by this time emerged as a powerful military entity. The LTTE did not surrender weapons or accept the framework of political solution offered by the Indo–Lanka Accord. Instead, it continued the armed struggle. In October 1987 the Indian army was inducted in Sri Lanka, in accordance with the terms of the accord, to ensure the surrender of weapons by the LTTE.That engagement soon led to a new phase of Sri Lanka’s civil war between the Indian peacekeeping troops and the LTTE, which lasted until March–April 1990 when the new Sri Lankan government forced the Indian government to withdraw from its military engagement on the island.10
The Indian involvement in 1987 through the Indo-Lanka Accord in a way resulted in a significant transformation of Tamil militant politics in Sri Lanka. While it created conditions for the TULF to return to Sri Lanka from exile in India and re-enter parliament, it also provided political space for a number of Tamil militant groups to give up the armed struggle for secession. They came to the conclusion that a separate Tamil state was no longer a viable political goal. In 1988, the EPRLF became the governing party of the first provincial council of the Northern and Eastern Provinces. Subsequently, the EPRLF as well as the PLOTE, EROS and TELO, and the newly emerged Eelam People’s Democratic Party (EPDP) took part in parliamentary elections and their representatives were elected to parliament.The EPDP even became members of the SLFP-led cabinet.This transformation of Tamil militant groups stands in sharp contrast to the LTTE’s continuing commitment to the goal of Eelam, a separate Tamil state, through armed struggle.
Sri Lanka’s civil war has also been interspersed with a number of attempts at a negotiated political settlement.11 The first attempt, as already noted, was made in 1984.The Thimpu talks did not produce an outcome.The second attempt was the Indo–Lanka Accord of July 1987, with the involvement of the Indian and Sri Lankan governments. It produced a constitutional framework for a political solution—the provincial council system—and created conditions for a number of Tamil militant groups to give up the armed struggle and join parliamentary politics. But it did not lead to the termination of the civil war or the resolution of the ethnic conflict.
The third attempt at a negotiated solution was made in 1989–90 by President Ranasinghe Premadasa, who assumed office in January 1989 amidst a massive political crisis.12 The war between the Indian peacekeeping troops and the LTTE was raging and the armed insurgency led by the JVP against the government was at its peak. In April 1989 President Premadasa called on both the LTTE and the JVP for talks. While the JVP refused the invitation for talks, the LTTE responded positively.The two sides held talks for about a year. During these talks, the JVP intensified its armed attacks on the state in the belief that it could push the government out of power in the midst of the crisis. However, utilizing the breathing space created by the talks with the LTTE, the Premadasa regime launched a massive and ruthless counterinsurgency war against the JVP. By the end of 1989, the government managed to crush the JVP insurgency with deadly efficiency, resulting in 40,000–50,000 deaths. Meanwhile, the negotiations between the Premadasa regime and the LTTE during this counterinsurgency war seemed to be guided merely by the tactical consideration of both sides and not by any serious commitment to a negotiated settlement. The Premadasa regime’s immediate tactical goal was the management of the political crisis by defeating the JVP insurgency and sending the Indian peacekeeping troops back to India.The LTTE’s tactical goal was to make use of the Premadasa regime to get rid of the Indian peacekeeping troops, which had risen above 75,000 in numbers. When both sides were satisfied that they had achieved their separate objectives, there was no need for them to produce a tangible outcome from the talks or even to continue them. In June 1990, the LTTE broke the unofficial ceasefire with the government and resumed hostilities. Thus began the so-called Third Eelam War in Sri Lanka that continued till the next ceasefire of January 1995.
The change of government in 1994 led to another round of negotiations between the government and the LTTE. The newly formed People’s Alliance, led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) with some Left parties as coalition partners, campaigned for the parliamentary election of August 1994 and the presidential election of November that year on a “peace platform.” The initial talks between the two sides that began in September 1994 led to a formal Cessation of Hostilities Agreement (CHA), signed in January 1995. Although the two sides then held three rounds of direct talks and exchanged many letters, this engagement too failed to produce any agreement to bring the civil war to an end. Citing as its reasons the government’s lack of commitment to the restoration of peace, the LTTE unilaterally abrogated the CHA on 19 April, 1995.That created immediate conditions for the two sides to relapse into war. In this new face of the conflict, the People’s Alliance government, led by President Chandrika Kumaratunga, adopted a dual strategy of constitutional reforms and war.The constitutional reform package, announced in August 1995, promised greater devolution of power to the existing provincial councils in a framework approximating semi-federalism. The military dimension of the government strategy had two objectives.Weakening the LTTE militarily was the first. The government expected that a militarily weakened LTTE would eventually return to the negotiation table and then the government’s offer for enhanced devolution would constitute the basis for negotiations and a settlement agreement.The second objective was to appeal directly to the Tamil people and the non-LTTE Tamil parties to accept the government’s unilateral offer and then eventually isolate the LTTE both politically and militarily. None of these objectives was achieved.The war continued till the year 2001 with huge human, material and battlefield costs. Although the government succeeded in capturing the Jaffna peninsula from the control of the LTTE, the LTTE retreated to the Vanni jungles located south of Jaffna and engaged the state armed forces in a protracted war that combined both the guerrilla tactics and conventional warfare.
The next round of peace talks began in early 2002 after the change of government occasioned by the parliamentary elections of December 2001. The new United National Front government, led by Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe, signed a ceasefire agreement (CFA) with the LTTE on 22 February, 2002 and held five rounds of negotiations.The peace talks of 2002 set three specific conditions that were absent in previous negotiations. First, a ceasefire agreement jointly signed by the prime minister and the LTTE leader and monitored by an international (Nordic) monitoring committee provided a framework for managing violence. Second, a third party, the Royal Norwegian government, acted as the facilitator and mediator for the CFA as well as negotiations. Third, the international community, coordinated by the EU, the US, and Japan, came forward to provide direct economic assistance to peace building to encourage the parties to move towards a comprehensive peace agreement. Something closer to a breakthrough in the negotiations occurred in December 2002 when, during the Oslo talks, the government and the LTTE agreed to “explore” a solution to the ethnic conflict based on a “federal” framework within a “united” Sri Lanka. However, that exploration did not go far when the LTTE decided in March–April 2003 to suspend its participation in negotiations, alleging that the UNF government was slow in implementing promises made at negotiations. Attempts made by the international actors, local civil society groups and the government to persuade the LTTE to return to the negotiation table throughout 2003 did not succeed.
Meanwhile, in October 2003, the LTTE presented to the government a set of proposals for an interim self-governing authority (ISGA). The LTTE expected these proposals to be the basis for the resumption of stalled negotiations. In the ISGA proposals, the LTTE envisaged a framework of self-rule and autonomy for the Northern and Eastern Provinces that went beyond Sri Lanka’s existing constitution and even the conventional understanding of federalism. The ISGA proposals actually approximated a confederal model, although the LTTE described them as a framework for an “interim” solution. Soon after these proposals were submitted, a political crisis developed in Colombo, leading to the dissolution of the government by the president. At the parliamentary elections held in April 2004, the UNF, which had so far engaged the LTTE politically, lost power. A new Sinhalese nationalist coalition, led by the SLFP, won the parliamentary election after a campaign that portrayed the UNP–LTTE negotiations and the CFA as having endangered national security, state sovereignty, and the state capacity to fight terrorism by military means. In the new conditions of severe polarization of political forces on the question of war or peace, there was hardly any space for the new government and the LTTE to resume political engagement. The return to war by either side or both was prevented only by the CFA, monitored by the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM).
The year 2004 saw the steady erosion of the peace process that began in early 2002. Violations of the CFA by both sides went on unabated. The ceasefire monitors blamed the LTTE more than the government for the violations. In such a context of growing unease and tension in conditions of “no war–no peace,” the tsunami disaster occurred on 26 December, 2004. Coastal communities in areas under the control of the government as well as the LTTE suffered massive destruction. The great humanitarian tragedy of the tsunami offered an opportunity for both the government and the LTTE to resume engagement on humanitarian grounds. But they failed to take that opportunity forward to resume formal negotiations for ethnic conflict resolution. Even the initiative taken by the two parties to set up a joint mechanism for humanitarian cooperation through a post-tsunami operational mechanism (P-TOM) was thwarted by the judiciary, backed by the Sinhalese nationalist forces.13 The subsequent change of government that occurred after the presidential election of December 2005 did not lead to resumption of the peace process as such, even though two rounds of peace talks were held in Geneva.The period after 2006 saw a steady re-escalation of violence leading to full-scale war. The government and the LTTE fought an “undeclared war” until early 2007. When the government withdrew from the CFA in early 2007, the international monitoring too ceased to exist.
At the heart of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict, civil war, and violence is the question whether state power should or should not be shared among Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim ethnic communities.14 The capture of the state by the ethnic majority and the exclusion of the ethnic minorities from exercising state power were developments that led to the consolidation of a postcolonial Tamil nationalist project in the immediate post-Independence years. The formulation of a federalist demand took place as early as 1951, within three years of political independence, on the argument that the unitary state needed to be reformed to accommodate minority aspirations. The citizenship and franchise legislation of 1948 and 1949 enacted by the first post-Independence regime in fact discriminated against the Tamil-speaking minorities. The making of Sinhalese the official language of the state further entrenched the majoritarian character of the postcolonial Sri Lankan state. When the Tamil leaders formed the Federal Party in 1951, one key political assumption on which the demand for regional autonomy was formulated was that the Sri Lankan Tamils constituted a separate “nationality,” not just an ethnic minority. In the Tamil nationalist imagination, a separate nationality had the right to share state power in a federal framework. The notion of self-determination, in its initial phase, was interpreted in the Tamil nationalist project as the right to regional autonomy.15
It is precisely this demand by the Tamil minority for sharing state power on the basis of ethnicity that generated much resistance in the majority Sinhalese polity. Thus, the Sinhalese nationalism of the post-Independence years came to be defined not only in opposition to the European ex-colonial powers, but also against the politics of the Tamil ethnic minority. The competing projects of postcolonial state building had two perspectives and paths that were mutually exclusive: centralized unitary state or decentralized federal state. The Eelam demand, which the Tamil nationalists developed in the late 1970s, gave an extreme interpretation to the concept of national self-determination, namely, the right to form a separate territorial state. This transition of the Tamil nationalist goal from regional autonomy to statehood constituted the key dimension that characterized Tamil politics after the late 1970s. The civil war that began in the early 1980s highlighted the incompatibility of these two state formation projects.
A third dimension of state formation developed in the 1980s in the midst of the war between the state and Tamil rebels. That was the aspiration of the Muslim community for regional autonomy.The Muslims in Sri Lanka are a dispersed minority, but in the Amparai district of the Eastern Province, they constitute a regional majority. In the Batticaloa district of the Eastern Province, too, there is a sizeable concentration of a Muslim population. There have been such Muslim concentrations in the Northern Province as well. Conventionally, the Tamil nationalists had developed the formulation, “Tamil-speaking people in Sri Lanka” to include the Muslim community whose language was Tamil. However, in the context of repeated violence which the Tamil militant groups had unleashed against the Muslims in the north and east, a new Muslim political leadership emerged in the late 1980s to argue for a separate Muslim ethnic and political identity. Consequently, the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress was formed in 1988. Subsequently, a number of other Muslim political groups also emerged to campaign for Muslim rights in the conflict areas. A key argument developed by these Muslim groups is that Muslims should be a direct party to any negotiated settlement to the ethnic conflict and that, in any power-sharing arrangement between Sinhalese and Tamil political elites, regional autonomy to the Muslims in the north and east should be included.The Muslim demand for regional autonomy has been developed into the idea of a non-contiguous Muslim-majority unit in the Northern and Eastern Provinces.
One of the reasons why negotiations for a political solution to the conflict have repeatedly failed in Sri Lanka is the complexity of the question of state power that the negotiations failed to address.The Sinhalese political establishment that represented the Sri Lankan state was initially reluctant to reform the state at all in response to minority demands. They were committed to preserving and maintaining the unitary and centralized state with administrative decentralization granted to the periphery. Reforming the state in response to ethnic minority demands was seen by the Sinhalese political establishment as conduct unbecoming of the leadership of the majority ethnic community.The federalist demand of a relatively small ethnic minority was seen by the majority as an unreasonable demand. Meanwhile, the Tamil nationalists thought that the Tamils constituted a nation, or a nationality, that deserved an equal share of state power through a federal constitutional arrangement. When the Sinhalese political leadership began to show some willingness to consider power sharing, which occurred in response to the armed rebellion, the Tamil nationalists had by then moved far away from power shar ing towards secession. During negotiations in the mid-1980s and after, the gulf between the framework of solution acceptable to the Sinhalese political establishment and the Tamil nationalist actors was vast.A middle ground on which a compromise could be worked out could have been a framework of federalism, which was beyond the acceptable framework for the Sinhalese majority and much less than what the Tamil nationalism of the LTTE would have accepted as an alternative to secession. As a middle ground, a federalist framework still remains unwanted.
The Muslim demand for recognition and autonomy in the conflict has introduced a third dimension to the central question of state power to be settled in the process of a negotiated political solution. As mentioned earlier, the Muslim community in the Eastern Province demands territorial autonomy. The basis of their demand is that a two-party solution that would grant the Tamil community regional autonomy would make them, the Muslims, a permanently disempowered regional minority. A tripartite settlement, as they envisage it, would empower Muslims as a regional minority. The Sinhalese and Tamil political classes are quite reluctant to acknowledge this Muslim demand for a share of state power.
One key issue that has made political negotiations between the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE quite complex is the self-representation of the LTTE as the ruling stratum of an emerging or parallel “state” of the Tamil “nation.” The LTTE’s own concept of “equality of status” with the Sri Lankan government in negotiations was defined in this notion of a parallel state, which no Sri Lankan government or international actor has even acknowledged. Thinking and even acting like a parallel state, the LTTE took part in peace processes with a particular vision of a possible political solution, that is, winning regional statehood through negotiations.16 The ISGA proposals of October 2003, to which we have already made reference, were obviously conceived in this framework of thinking and acting like a parallel state. Such a maximalist perspective could hardly constitute the basis for negotiations for a settlement acceptable to the Sri Lankan government. Sri Lanka’s political reform agenda thus remained entrapped in the minimalism of the Sinhalese political class and the maximalism of the Tamil political class.
Can ethnicity-based state reforms provide a sustainable basis for a political settlement to Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict? This question has emerged in Sri Lanka’s political debate from time to time. Some argue that ethnicity-based devolution will further polarize the already divided ethnic communities, create ethnic enclaves and make interethnic reconciliation difficult. Others argue that devolution or federalism without a strong human rights framework would only create regional entities of authoritarianism in the name of peace.This constitutes a major dilemma in the conflict resolution process in Sri Lanka. The ethnic conflict and the protracted war have repeatedly reinforced the ethnic identities, ethnic politics, and ethnicized political visions. Sri Lanka’s ethnic communities see political emancipation from ethnic eyes. Ethnicity is a political reality that cannot be wished away. At the same time, solutions to ethnic conflicts may not necessarily be ethnic ones. Ethnic conflicts, as the debate over Sri Lanka’s future suggests, require democratic solutions.
In discussing the dynamics of the reproduction of war and violence in Sri Lanka, some analysts have pointed out that the protracted war produced a specific culture and economy of war. Rajasingham-Senanayake is among the earliest commentators to make the argument that the armed conflict had generated a specific logic and momentum, exceeding the ethnic roots of the conflict.17 This logic and momentum are also propelled forward by what has been termed a “hidden economy of war” that has provided violence and war with an internal momentum of its own. Rajasingham-Senanayake makes the further argument that the hidden economy of war moved the conflict away from its ethnic foundations: the war was not just about ethnic identities and ethnic agendas, but it propel led forward for its own sake.
Sri Lanka’s political economy of war seemed to possess a number of key dimensions, some open and others hidden.The capacity of the national economy to adjust itself to the continuing war amidst macroeconomic liberalization and structural adjustment programmes of the 1980s and the 1990s is noteworthy. As some economists point out, the war did not create a major economic crisis leading to the necessity of war termination.18 Bastian argues that Sri Lanka’s greater integration with the global economy after economic liberalization that began in 1977 had been a major factor that paradoxically protected the economy from war-induced crisis.19 The donor policy towards Sri Lanka during the conflict was to promote liberalization of the economy along with liberal political reforms. Humanitarian assistance and peace promotion, along with macroeconomic support from bilateral and multilateral sources, were fairly consistent throughout the period of civil war. Donor assistance for peace promotion was a particularly significant policy plank that became salient after the mid-1990s.20 In this context, it is important to recall that the argument for a peace dividend, highlighted in 1994–2000 and 2002–2003 by peace constituencies, failed to convince the policymakers, the bureaucracy or the citizens that there was a strong economic argument for termination of the civil war through a negotiated political settlement.
The hidden economy of war has generated another logic in conflict areas which can be explained in the language of Charles Tilly.21 It is about the emergence of informal regimes of illegal taxation, extortion networks, and protection rackets. In the conflict areas and in the so-called border areas where there is no clear political–military authority, these networks and rackets have emerged in the context of state collapse.The LTTE’s so-called parallel state could be considered as an institutionalization of this hidden political economy of war in a context of relative absence in some conflict areas of the Sri Lankan state, except in the form of its war machine. In the “border” regions, the agents of the hidden economy of war were multiple, including especially the military and a variety of paramilitary groups.
Concerning how Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict should end, there were five clearly discernible perspectives.Two of them were unilateral and extreme solutions. The LTTE’s goal of secession by mean of a protracted armed struggle and the Sinhalese nationalist goal of restoring the unitary state by militarily defeating the LTTE and Tamil militancy were the two extreme perspectives.A confederalist constitutional framework of two nations within one state having two political systems would have been the LTTE’s option to reconsider the secessionist goal. But as a model of a political solution, it had no takers outside the LTTE, certainly not in Sinhalese society. A federal framework was the fourth perspective, which had support among non-LTTE Tamil groups and in Sri Lanka’s civil society. It sought to expand the present framework of devolution by granting more regional autonomy to the provinces.The fifth was minimalist devolution that did not go beyond a limited implementation of the existing Thirteenth Amendment and the provincial councils. The formulation developed by Sri Lanka’s present government, “maximum devolution within a unitary state,” encapsulated this position. Whether any of these five options will eventually be adopted now that the LTTE has been defeated and its leaders killed is a difficult question.
The trajectories of Sri Lanka’s conflict have shown that its turns and developments were characterized by a strong element of unpredictability. Political scientists and conflict resolution professionals were particularly vulnerable to the temptation of predicting the future paths of the conflict, and specifically outcomes of peace negotiations. A sober lesson to learn from the past experience is that conflict outcomes are difficult to predict because every conflict has a specific dynamism with a constant propensity and capacity to redefine and reconstitute itself. For example, ceasefire agreements and peace negotiations did not lead to conflict mitigation or settlement, but to redefining the dimensions of the conflict, bringing new actors into the equation, new contradictions to the process, new fears and anxieties about the outcomes, and new priorities to the agenda. Inconclusive peace attempts reinforced the arguments for giving war another, fresh chance. Similarly, peace was never a clear concept throughout the conflict, although those committed to peace continued to believe in it as a shared moral goal for all. In fact, Sri Lanka’s experience has demonstrated that peace is intensely contested as a process, as an outcome and as a goal. For example, what the government envisioned as peace is not what the Tamil nationalists sought as peace. In the same vein, what the international actors perceived as peace in Sri Lanka was not what the domestic actors wanted as peace. In Sri Lanka’s civil war, both war and “peace” were mutually sustaining processes. In the absence of a commitment to a shared understanding of peace as a process, as an outcome and as a political goal, the conflict seems to possess the potential to reproduce itself for quite some time to come.
Summoning all the knowledge and experience one may have gained trough observing the ways in which Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict and civil war progressed, one can say only that de-linking the ethnic conflict from war and violence would have been a crucial precondition for ethnic peace.
1 The literature on the beginnings of the civil war is quite large. Some key writings are Keteshwaran Loganathan, Sri Lanka, Lost Opportunities: Past Attempts at Resolving Ethnic Conflict (Colombo: University of Colombo Press, 1996); K. M. De Silva, Reaping the Whirlwind: Ethnic Conflict and Ethnic Politics in Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Penguin, 1998); A. J. Wilson, Break up of Sri Lanka:The Sinhalese– Tamil Conflict (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1988); and John Richardson, Paradise Poisoned: Learning about Conflict,Terrorism and Development from Sri Lanka’s Civil Wars (Kandy: International Centre for Ethnic Studies, 2004). Anton Balasingham, War and Peace in Sri Lanka, Armed Struggle and Peace Efforts of Liberation Tigers (Mitcham: Fairmax, 2004) provides the Tamil nationalist— or rather the LTTE—perspectives on the origins and spread of Sri Lanka’s civil war.
2 Neelan Tiruchelvam, “The Politics of Federalism and Diversity in Sri Lanka,” in Yash Ghai (ed.), Autonomy and Ethnicity: Negotiating Competing Claims in Multi-ethnic States (Cambridge: University Press, 2000), p. 198.
3 See Robert Kearney, Communalism and Language in the Politics of Ceylon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967;Wilson; Howard Wriggins, Ceylon: Dilemmas of a New Nation (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1960); Michael Roberts,“Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka and Sinhalese Perspectives: Barriers to Accommodation,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1978), pp. 353–76.
4 For a detailed study of the politics of ethnic outbidding in the context of Sri Lanka’s party politics and electoral competition, see Neil DeVotta, “From Ethnic Outbidding to Ethnic Conflict:The Institutional Bases for Sri Lanka’s Separatist War,” in P. Sahadevan and Neil DeVotta (eds), Politics of Conflict and Peace in Sri Lanka (New Delhi: Manak, 2006), pp. 3–29.
5 N. Manoharan, Counterterrorism Legislation in Sri Lanka: Evaluating Efficacy, Policy Studies No. 28 (Washington, DC: East-West Center, 2006) provides a very useful account of the counter-terrorism legislation introduced in Sri Lanka in the context of armed insurgencies in the 1970s and 1980s and their contribution to the overall political process in the country.
6 For some useful accounts of the anti-Tamil violence of 1983, see V. Kanapathipillai, “July 1983:The Survivors’ Experience,” in Veena Das (ed.), Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press), 1990; James Manor (ed.), Sri Lanka in Change and Crisis (London: Croom Helm, 1984); and Jonathan Spencer,“Collective Violence and Everyday Practice in Sri Lanka,” Modern Asian Studies, 24 (1990), pp. 603–23.
7 Academic literature in English on Sri Lanka’s Tamil militant groups is extremely thin. However, there are useful accounts written by journalists who have had access to some of these organizations and their leaders.Two important works are Anita Pratap, Island of Blood (Bombay: Penguin, 2001) and M. R. Swamy Narayan, Tigers of Lanka: From Boys to Guerrillas (New Delhi: South Asia Books, 1995).
8 Loganathan (pp. 104–05) provides the best available account on the Thimpu talks. He was a participant at these talks, representing the EPRLF.
9 The Indian intentions and motives in pushing for the accord have been given different interpretations. For a firsthand account of it, see J. N. Dixit, Assignment Colombo (New Delhi: Konark, 1998). Dixit was India’s High Commissioner in Colombo during these crucial months. Krishna provides an academic critique of Indian motives, basically arguing that it was a part of the Indian ruling elite’s preoccupation with replicating its own political and nation-state model in South Asia; Sankaran Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India, Sri Lanka and the Question of Nationhood (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For a set of Sri Lankan perspectives on the theme see Shelton U. Kodikara, Indo–Sri Lanka Accord of July 1987 (Colombo: University of Colombo Press, 1989).
10 Literature on the Indian political and military engagement in Sri Lanka in 1980s is quite extensive. Some key texts are Dixit; Krishna; and S. D. Muni, Pangs of Proximity: India’s and Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Crisis (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1993).
11 There is a growing body of literature on peace negotiations in Sri Lanka. The two-volume anthology edited by Rupesinghe is most useful; Kumar Rupesinghe (ed.), Negotiating Peace in Sri Lanka: Efforts, Failures and Lessons (Colombo: Foundation for Co-Existence, 2006).
12 The literature on Premadasa government– LTTE negotiations is quite thin, but both Jayatilleke and Weerakoon provide some useful accounts of these talks; Weerakoon and Jayatilleka were insiders of the Premadasa regime. See Dayan Jayatilleke, “Premadasa-LTTE Talks:Why they Failed and What Really Happened,” in Kumar Rupesinghe (ed.), Negotiating Peace in Sri Lanka: Efforts, Failures and Lessons, 2nd edn, vol. I (Colombo: Foundation for Co-Existence, 2006), pp. 141–56; and Bradman Weerakoon, “Government of Sri Lanka and LTTE Peace Negotiations 1989/90,” in Rupesinghe, pp. 111–28.
13 Sri Lanka’s failure to use the humanitarian space of the tsunami disaster for peace building stands in sharp contrast to the experience in Indonesia where the government and the GAM rebels (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or Free Aceh Movement) signed a peace agreement to end the civil war. For a discussion of the political controversies surrounding the post-tsunami attempts at peace in Sri Lanka, see Jayadeva Uyangoda, “Ethnic Conflict, the Tsunami Disaster and the State in Sri Lanka,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (September 2005), pp. 341–52.
14 This point is further developed in Jayadeva Uyangoda, Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka: Changing Dynamics (Washington, DC: East-West Center, 2007).
15 The concepts “ethnicity” and “ethnic minority” entered Sri Lanka’s academic and political discourse only in the early 1980s. “Racial minorities” was the term previously used to refer to ethnic minorities. Similarly,“communalism” was the term used to describe what later came to be described as “minority nationalism” or “ethnic politics.”
16 There has been an interesting discussion on the issue of the LTTE’s building up of state-like structures in the areas under its control. Stokke’s characterization of them in the language of state building has been passionately resisted by Muthukrishna; see Kristian Stokke, “Building the Tamil Eelam State: Emerging State Institutions and Forms of Governance in LTTE-controlled Areas in Sri Lanka,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 6 (2006), pp. 1021–40; and Muttukrishna Sarvananthan, “In Pursuit of a Mythical State of Tamil Eelam: Rejoinder to Kristian Stokke,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 6 (2007), pp. 1185–95.
17 See, Rajasingham-Senanayake (1998) and her subsequent writings.
18 See, for example, Saman Kelegama, “Economic Costs of Conflict in Sri Lanka,” in Robert Rotberg (ed.), Creating Peace in Sri Lanka: Civil War and Reconciliation (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1999) and “Transformation of a Conflict via an Economic Dividend: The Sri Lankan Experience,” in Kumar Rupesinghe (ed.), Negotiating Peace in Sri Lanka: Efforts, Failures and Lessons, Vol. II (Colombo: Foundation for Co-existence 2006), pp. 205–39.
19 Sunil Bastian, “Foreign Aid, Globalization and Conflict in Sri Lanka,” in Markus Mayer et al. (eds), Building Local Capacities for Peace: Rethinking Conflict and Development in Sri Lanka (Delhi: Macmillan, 2003); and Sunil Bastian, The Politics of Foreign Aid in Sri Lanka: Promoting Markets and Supporting Peace (Colombo: International Center for Ethnic Studies, 2007).
20 The literature that provides discussions on the donor policy towards Sri Lanka amidst conflict and civil war are Bastian, The Politics of Foreign Aid; Kelegama, “Managing the Sri Lankan Economy” and “Transformation of a Conflict”; and David Dunham and Sisira Jayasur iya, “Economic Crisis, Poverty and War in Contemporary Sri Lanka: On Ostriches and Tinderboxes,” Economic and Political Weekly,Vol. 33, No. 49 (5 December, 1998) pp. 3,151–56; and Arve Ofstad,“Countries in Violent Conflict and Aid Strategies: The Case of Sri Lanka,” World Development, Vol. 30, No. 2 (2002), pp. 165–80.
21 Tilly counterposes the idea of state as a “social contract,” with the suggestion that at least in the European contexts, war making and state making have been analogous to organized crime. In civil war contexts, as repeatedly demonstrated in Sri Lanka, the practices of agents of the state and other multiple agents of war, violence, and terror approximates on Tilly’s characterization of war and state making. See Charles Tilly,“War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans et al. (eds), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: University Press), pp. 169–91.