Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0337/03370.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 36KB | 541 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03370}
$Pretitle{296}
$Title{Sri Lanka
Introduction}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Peter R. Blood}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{tamil
sri
government
lanka
sinhalese
india
lankan
indian
tigers
island}
$Date{1990}
$Log{}
Country:     Sri Lanka
Book:        Sri Lanka, A Country Study
Author:      Peter R. Blood
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1990

Introduction

     Sri Lanka was not immune to the spirit of the global and monumental
change that swept the world in the late 1980s, promising to usher in a new
international order in the 1990s. Indeed, at this writing events on the
troubled island nation somehow seemed more under control than they had been in
the immediate past. Yet Sri Lanka still had to cope with many of the same
daunting and unresolved security problems that it faced in 1983, when a
vicious separatist war broke out in the north--a situation later aggravated by
an altogether different but equally debilitating insurrection in the south.

     Sri Lanka's descent into violence was especially disturbing because for
many years the nation was considered a model of democracy in the Third World.
A nation with one of the world's lowest per capita incomes, Sri Lanka
nevertheless had a nascent but thriving free-market economy that supported one
of the most extensive and respected education systems among developing
countries. Sadly, in 1990 the recollection of a peaceful and prosperous Sri
Lanka seemed a distant memory.

     Prospects for an enduring peace, however remote, lingered as the new
decade began. On February 4, 1990, as Sri Lanka celebrated its forty-second
Independence Day, the president, Ranasinghe Premadasa, who had assumed power a
little over one year before, once again appealed directly to the island
nation's more than 16 million people for an end to the long-standing
communally based friction between the majority Sinhalese and the largest
ethnic minority group, the Sri Lankan Tamils. He also pleaded for a cessation
of the internecine struggle among competing groups within the Tamil community
and of the open warfare by Sinhalese extremists against the government. The
collective strife on the island nation, according to international human
rights groups, had over the previous year alone taken as many as 20,000 lives
and over the span of a decade killed thousands more. The economy was crippled,
the democratic values of the country threatened, and the national memory
scarred.

     Soothsayers had characterized Premadasa's assumption of power in early
1989 as auspicious. Sri Lanka needed a person of stature and vision to guide
the country in its healing process. Many thought Premadasa could fill that
role. For the first time since independence, Sri Lanka had a leader who did
not belong to the island's high-born Sinhalese Buddhist caste, the Goyigama.
Premadasa came instead from more humble origins and was viewed by many Sri
Lankans as more accessible than his predecessor, Junius Richard (J.R.)
Jayewardene, under whom he had served as prime minister for ten years. One of
Premadasa's first actions on assuming office in January 1989 was to lift the
five-and-a-half- year state of emergency declared by his predecessor. Six
months later, Premadasa was praised by both the Tamils and the Sinhalese for
his unyielding opposition to the presence of the Indian Peacekeeping Force
(IPKF), a military contingent sent into Sri Lanka in 1987 after an agreement
between former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and Jayewardene. The IPKF,
originally a small force tasked with performing a police action to disarm
Tamil separatists in the north, became increasingly entangled in the ethnic
struggle and guerrilla insurrection and had grown at one point to as many as
70,000 troops.

     By mid-1989 Premadasa was demanding from a sullen India the quick
withdrawal of the remaining 45,000 Indian soldiers then on the island.
Considering the resentment most Sri Lankans--both Sinhalese and Tamil--had by
then developed toward India, the entreaty was both popular and politically
expedient. Yet, having to rely on the Sri Lankan military's questionable
ability to control the island's mercurial political milieu was a calculated
gamble. Still, in June 1989, hopes soared as delicate negotiations were
initiated between the government and the most powerful of the Tamil separatist
groups, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). But by then Premadasa was
faced with more immediate challenges. A spate of assassinations in the south
and a nationwide transportation strike were orchestrated by Sinhalese
extremists who had been in the forefront of political agitation against the
presence of Indian troops on the island and also against any concessions the
government made to Tamil demands for increased autonomy. Premadasa was forced
to take urgent action, and he reimposed a national state of emergency, giving
his security forces new and draconian powers of enforcement. As bickering
between the Sri Lankan and Indian governments over a timetable for the Indian
troop withdrawal continued, the Sri Lankan government unleashed a brutal
campaign against the Sinhalese extremists. Reports of "death squads" composed
of army and police officers who in their zealous pursuit of the subversives
also claimed the lives of many innocent victims attracted the attention and
ire of Amnesty International and other international human rights groups.

     In late March 1990, India withdrew its last troops from Sri Lanka,
thereby ending its much maligned three-year period of foreign entanglement,
which had inflamed rather than defused the island's communal and political
passions. The pullout created a power vacuum in the island's Tamil-dominated
Northeastern Province that was expected to be filled by the resurgent Tamil
Tigers. The Tamil Tigers, represented by their own political party, The
People's Front of the Liberation Tigers--cautiously recognized by the
government--were expected to combine political as well as military pressure
against the rival Tamil groups favored by the Indians. Without waiting for the
completion of the Indian departure, the Tamil Tigers already were reasserting
their control, waging a vigorous and thus far successful military offensive
against the Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front, which headed the
provincial government, and several secondary Tamil politico- military groups
and their allied militia--the India-armed and trained Tamil National Army.
Politically, their prestige enhanced by a reputation honed by their prolonged
and skillful combat against the Indians, and what they called their Tamil
"quislings," the feared Tamil Tigers were in a good position to win the
elections for the Northeastern Provincial Council to be held later in 1990.

     In their dialog with the government, the Tamil Tigers no longer
emphasized full secession and seemed instead to be more intent, in the absence
of their Indian adversaries, on consolidating their military and political
power over rival Tamil groups. The government, aware that the Tamil Tigers had
not formally renounced the concept of a separate Tamil state, however,
realized that the hiatus in fighting could end in renewed fighting and in what
could ultimately be the "Lebanization" of the country.

     What went so tragically wrong for the beautiful island sometimes referred
to as Shangri-la? The answer is elusive and can only partly be explained by
the duress experienced by a multifaceted traditional culture undergoing rapid
change in an environment restrained by limited resources. A close reckoning
also would have to be made of the island's troubled past--both ancient and
recent.

     Sri Lanka claims the world's second-oldest continuous written history--a
history that chronicles the intermittent hostility between two peoples--the
Indo-Aryan Sinhalese or "People of the Lion," who arrived from northern India
around 500 B.C. to establish magnificent Buddhist kingdoms on the
north-central plains, and the Tamils of Dravidian sto