Originally published on the CGS blog on February 13, 2015.
Recently elected Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena is seeking reconciliation after the end of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2009. His predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa is credited with ending the war, but the social conditions that led to it, including the discrimination and persecution against the Tamil population, continue to exist.
Rajapaksa refused international inquiries into the human rights abuses that occurred during and at the end of the civil war, as well as persisting conditions like abuses in the internment camps. He also started a domestic war crimes commission that was criticized outside of Sri Lanka as grossly inadequate.
However, Sirisena is planning on starting up a new domestic inquiry into the human rights abuses that occurred during the Sri Lankan Civil War, especially at the end of it when many Tamils were trapped in refugee or internment camps.
However, a government spokesman said that the new Sirisena Administration would welcome foreign experts to come in and help if the need arose. Sirisena also realizes that military action alone is not enough to prevent a renewed civil war, especially if the conditions that led to it in the first place are not resolved.
Newly elected President Sirisena seems to have lots of support from nearly all segments of Sri Lankan society. But some sources such as the BBC say that he didn’t do much to reach out to ethnic and religious minorities and that these groups voted for Sirisena only because they wanted to vote incumbent Rajapaksa out of office.
However, Sirisena did reach out to followers of other religions as his English political campaign manifesto shows (especially on pages 5 and 25). Besides being written in English and Sinhala (the official language), this manifesto was also written in Tamil. His manifesto calls for eliminating religious extremism and encouraging peaceful religious and multicultural coexistence.
Sirisena has promised to allow the Tamil people freedom to move about and has vowed to give them back most of their land that was held by the military after the war ended.
President Sirisena has his work cut out for him, but if he can unite Sri Lanka as one nation regardless of religious, ethnic, or linguistic identity, he can bring peace to a nation that suffered needlessly after gaining independence.
In order for peace to thrive in Sri Lanka, as in any conflict-ridden area, a holistic approach is needed to resolve the factors that led to the conflict in the first place.
