On the Way from "Peace" to War

(Originally published in "Open Democracy" on 15 May 2006. Available at http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-protest/srilanka_3544.jsp)

by Alan Keenan

Sri Lanka has returned to a state of war, albeit as yet undeclared. The 25 April attack in Colombo by a female Tamil Tiger suicide-bomber – which badly wounded the Sri Lankan army commander, killed a dozen soldiers, and wounded many others – ratified with a jolt what many had begun to fear: that the four-year old ceasefire had run its course. When the Sri Lankan military responded with two days of bombing of Tiger positions in the northeast of the island – killing or wounding dozens, at least some of them civilians, and displacing thousands – it seemed full-scale warfare might be imminent.

After a brief respite from serious incidents, the attack on 11 May off the northeast coast by LTTE gunboats on a Sri Lankan navy ship carrying more than 700 unarmed troops threatened further disaster. The troop-carrier, apparently with some help from the Indian navy, managed to escape into international waters, though at least one Sri Lankan navy vessel was destroyed (as well, it seems, as at least one LTTE craft). The Sri Lankan air force retaliated with another round of bombing of LTTE positions. The LTTE attack triggered universal condemnation from the international community, including the Scandinavian-staffed ceasefire monitoring mission, one of whose monitors was onboard the targeted troop-carrier.

Overall, more than 250 people have been killed in various forms of political violence over the last six weeks: daily mine and grenade attacks by the LTTE on Sri Lankan troops stationed in the north and east of the island; retaliatory killings by the military, often targeting Tamil civilians and politicians seen as sympathetic to the Tigers; back-and-forth attacks between the LTTE and forces loyal to the former Tiger eastern military commander Colonel Karuna, with support from the Sri Lankan military; and abductions and disappearances from all sides.

The peace process that began in December 2001 and led to the ceasefire agreement of February 2002 seems well and truly dead. Only a new process, built on different foundations, has any chance of eventually bringing sustainable peace to Sri Lanka.

The Karuna factor

The Sri Lankan peace process has, from its beginning, been a violent affair, especially in the areas in the north and the east that the Tamil Tigers either control or lay claim to as part of their Tamil homeland, Tamil Eelam. Soon after signing the ceasefire agreement, the Tigers took advantage of the access it granted them to government-controlled areas and proceeded to forcibly recruit thousands of children, murder hundreds of their Tamil political rivals, intimidate the Tamil-speaking Muslim minority in the eastern province, and generally clamp down on all forms of independent political activity. Despite the literally thousands of violations recorded by the ceasefire monitors, the Tigers were able with impunity to continue their violent quest for complete political domination of the north and east.

Political violence began to grow more complicated, and ultimately much worse, after Colonel Karuna broke with the Tigers in March 2004. Karuna was soon defeated in a three-day military campaign by the main northern faction of the LTTE, but escaped with many of his fighters and gradually regrouped. With the increasingly obvious support of the Sri Lankan military, Karuna's forces have established camps in or on the edges of government-controlled territory, from which they have been able to launch sporadic but effective attacks on the Tigers. All the main sides – the Tigers, the government and Karuna's men – protest their innocence of political killings, but the UN's special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, Philip Alston, has documented these in an incisive and devastating report dated 27 March 2006.

The LTTE's assassination in August 2005 of Sri Lankan foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar – himself a Tamil but one of the fiercest and most effective critics of the Tigers – was in part meant as payback for the government's support of Karuna. Perhaps intentionally, it also had the effect of strengthening the hardline Sinhalese parties that had been arguing that the Tigers could not be trusted and that the peace process was merely the latest means by which the Tigers were working to establish their separate state.

The road back

These sentiments, together with an LTTE-imposed boycott on Tamil voters, led to the election in November 2005 of President Mahinda Rajapakse. Running on a platform critical of the ceasefire agreement and the Norwegian role in facilitating the peace process, Rajapakse also promised to defend the "unitary" state against proposals for a federal solution to the conflict that would grant significant autonomy to the predominantly Tamil north and east.

Soon after Rajapakse's election, the Tigers began their first frontal attacks on the Sri Lankan military in the form of repeated claymore mine and grenade attacks. Nearly a hundred soldiers were killed in December and January alone. It was at this point, too, that the military began to sanction a range of retaliatory attacks on the LTTE and those seen as their supporters and operatives, sometimes acting with the assistance of former members of various Tamil militant groups now opposed to the Tigers.

After the government and the LTTE, both under intense international pressure, agreed to meet for talks in Geneva, political violence came to a temporary halt in late January and February. The cautious hopes of progress were further raised when the mid-February meetings produced an agreement by both sides to respect the ceasefire and prevent attacks on the other side.

But when it became apparent to the Tigers that the government was not, as they had hoped, committed to disarming Karuna's fighters (the Geneva agreement is itself ambiguous on this point), the Tiger assaults on Sri Lankan troops resumed. Today, both sides profess a desire to return to Geneva for more talks, though the Tigers have repeatedly placed obstacles to their return, apparently not convinced that there is much to be gained from talking.

The Tigers clearly intend their current wave of violence to raise the cost to the government and military of their support for Karuna. The attacks on government troops also seem designed to provoke the military and their supporters in Sinhala supremacist groups to lash out at Tamil civilians, thus solidifying Tamil support and lending credence to Tiger claims that Tamils can only be safe with their own state.

Unfortunately, the Sri Lankan military seems content to play according to the Tiger script. The past few months have seen rising numbers of political killings that have almost certainly been carried out by the military or their Tamil operatives. Most shocking was the violence unleashed in April against Tamil civilians in the multi-ethnic northeastern town of Trincomalee.

There, after a deadly Tiger bomb blast in a Sinhala market area on 12 April, the military and police stood by and watched as truckloads of Sinhalese thugs and nationalist hooligans were brought in to rampage through Tamil sections of town. It was only a call from the Indian prime minister to President Rajapakse that finally got the Sri Lankan security forces to halt the violence. In the end, thirty-five people lay dead, scores of Tamil shops and houses had been burnt out, and hundreds had been displaced. The dreadful ghosts of the anti-Tamil violence in July 1983, which was directly responsible for turning Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict into a war, were reawakened (see the Human Rights Watch report, and another independent report).

For much of the peace process, as the Tigers acted against their opponents and their "own" people with impunity, the fundamental challenge has seemed to be how to influence them to moderate their predatory and anti-democratic practices. So far, several initiatives have been tried without success:

-- the $4.5 billion in reconstruction aid promised by international donors to be shared between the government and Tigers should they be able to make progress towards a negotiated settlement;

-- the many forms of "constructive engagement" whereby the international community sought to train the Tigers in more peaceful and liberal ways;

-- more recently, the increased sanctions on the Tigers – the ban on travel to the European Union imposed after the assassination of Kadirgamar, or the recent decision by Canada to ban the Tigers as a terrorist group. The Sri Lankan government is now calling for additional countries to ban the Tigers and to help disrupt their lucrative international financial networks.

The way forward

The paradox that recent events suggests, however, is that effective pressure on the Tigers is possible only if and when the international community first steps in and demands that the Colombo government respect the basic rights of its Tamil citizens. This will require the government to rein in its death squads and actively prevent reprisal attacks on Tamil civilians. Such attacks, by conflating all Tamils with Tigers, effectively do the Tigers' work for them. Justice, and pragmatism, will also require the government to abandon their attachment to the "unitary" state and to develop a package of constitutional reforms that will offer Tamils real rights and an effective share in power. The rights of Tamils can no longer be held hostage to the Tigers' quest for power.

Pressuring the government to enact such reforms will amount to a fundamental shift in how the road to peace in Sri Lanka has been conceptualised. It means abandoning the idea that peace will come from a sequence of confidence-building measures limited to, and working within the comfort zone of, the government and the LTTE. It requires, instead, challenging the government to begin its long-overdue transformation in more plural and democratic ways, even as it is clear that this isn't what the Tigers themselves want. This in turn requires that the government and their international donors engage constituencies well beyond the Tigers: that is, the many Muslim, non-Tiger Tamil, and Sinhalese points of view that have been largely excluded from the failed peace process of 2002-2006.

All this amounts to the need for a new peace process – not the mere resuscitation of the old one, which is now (at best) on life-support. Sadly, due to the combination of militarism and failure of imagination of its political elites on all sides, Sri Lanka may well be forced to go through a period of devastation before a refashioned peace process becomes possible. In the meantime, international actors of all sorts must start making the paradigm shift necessary for a new peace to be possible, even as they pressure the two sides to minimise the cost of fighting on the hundreds of thousands of civilians who will be caught in the middle.

On the Brink: A New Approach to Peace is Urgently Needed if a Devastating War is to be Avoided

(written 5 May 2006)

by Alan Keenan

Sri Lanka’s beleagured peace process was jolted by another round of violence last week – the worst since the ceasefire between the government and the Tamil Tigers was agreed to in February 2002. With the news that a 21 year old Tamil Tiger suicide bomber had gained access to the Sri Lankan Army Headquarters and detonated herself next to the car carrying Sri Lanka’s Army Commander – wounding him grievously and killing eleven others – many assumed that the Tigers, after numerous hints, had finally chosen to return to war. Fears of war seemed confirmed when the Sri Lankan military quickly replied by bombing Tamil Tiger bases in eastern Sri Lanka. The raids damaged schools and homes, killed a dozen or more, including at least some civilians, and displaced thousands more from their homes. After a brief lull – as each side caught its breath and responded to international pressure with public reaffirmations of their commitment to peace – more violence has followed, as the Tigers have renewed their attacks on Sri Lankan military targets in the north and east of Sri Lanka and more and more Tamil civilians have been killed by Sri Lankan “security” forces in response.

The downward slide into something more and more resembling war has been gathering speed since last summer’s assassination of Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar. Kadirgamar, himself a Tamil, was a fierce critic of the Tigers, who jealously guard the right to be the sole political voice for Tamils. Violence picked up in frequency and intensity with the November election of President Mahinda Rajapakse, who ran on a platform that appealed to the fears of many of Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese that the ceasefire and peace process have facilitated the Tigers’ quest for a separate state in the north and east of the island. With the government allied with Sinhala political parties who advocate a tougher approach towards the Tigers than previous governments, the Sri Lankan military has begun to hit back covertly at the Tigers and those seen as Tiger supporters.

The most immediate cause for the cycle of violence lies in LTTE anger that the Sri Lankan military continues to assist the former LTTE eastern military commander, known as Col. Karuna, who broke off from the Tigers in early 2004 and whose forces have since been waging a low intensity guerrilla war against the Tigers. Given mounting evidence of government assistance in establishing Karuna camps and harboring his men in their own bases, repeated government denials of involvement are no longer believed by any independent observers.

This past December and January the LTTE launched a wave of attacks on the Sri Lankan military, killing more than a hundred soldiers and wounding many more in a series of grenade and claymore mine attacks, many of them carried out by recently trained civilian auxiliaries. While the Sri Lankan military has generally refrained from overt attacks on LTTE positions, they have chosen to respond through a disturbing return to the forced “disappearances” and political assassinations that were all too frequent in the 1980’s and 90’s. Over the past five months, scores of LTTE members and their civilian supporters – including a Tamil member of Parliament and a Tamil activist due to be chosen as his successor – have been abducted or gunned down either by the Sri Lankan military, Karuna’s forces, or by former Tamil militants now working with the government. There have been no serious police or judicial investigations into any of these murders. Indeed, a number of high-ranking military officials have made statements that amount to justifications of extra-judicial killings of Tigers and civilian Tiger supporters.
Despite protestations of innocence by the Tigers and the government, political killings by both sides and by Karuna’s men have been documented by the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Killings, Philip Alston, in an incisive and devastating report released just last week.

Political violence came to a sudden – but brief – halt in early February, once the Tigers and the government agreed to meet in Geneva later that month to discuss ways to strengthen the ceasefire. The talks initially seemed a modest success, with each side agreeing to uphold the ceasefire agreement and to meet again on April 19-21. When it became clear that the government did not, in fact, intend to disarm Karuna’s forces, despite the LTTE’s belief that this had been agreed to, the LTTE recommenced its daily grenade attacks on army sentries and claymore mine attacks on SL military convoys. Scores more soldiers have been killed and wounded over the past six weeks.

In addition to hoping their attacks might force the government to disarm Karuna – a project that would likely be resisted violently by Karuna’s men – the Tigers may also be hoping to provoke the Sri Lankan government into being the first to renounce the ceasefire officially. If that doesn’t work, their attacks could still help goad the military and police into sanctioning large scale anti-Tamil violence that would harm the government’s international standing and help legitimate Tiger claims that Tamils can be safe only with their own state. Any of these outcomes would benefit the Tigers.

Unfortunately, the Sri Lankan military seems increasingly willing to play according to the Tiger script. After a mid-April Tiger bomb attack in a Sinhala section of the multiethnic northeastern town of Trincomalee, the military and police stood by as truckloads of armed Sinhalese thugs were brought in to attack, kill, and burn out Tamils from their homes and shops. At least twenty people were killed and hundreds were displaced. The attacks – and the refusal of the state to protect Tamil civilians – were a chilling reminder of the week-long campaign of anti-Tamil violence in July 1983 that transformed Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict into full scale war. To this date, neither the President, nor any other high ranking Sri Lankan official, has offered any apology for the government’s failure to protect its own citizens. Reciprocal reprisal attacks on Tamil and Sinhala civilians are now almost daily occurrences.

While it is true that the central demand of the Tigers is for the government to disarm Karuna’s forces, however, it would be a mistake to see the government’s continued support for Karuna as the primary obstacle to a return to peace, as Tiger propagandists and some peace activists and journalists maintain. Such an interpretation ignores two related and much deeper problems.

It ignores, first of all, the role that the LTTE’s own behavior has played in provoking Karuna and the Sri Lankan military’s violence. Determined to consolidate their control over the north and east, the Tigers have used the last four years to murder hundreds of their unarmed Tamil political opponents, forcibly recruit thousands of children as soldiers, kill and harass Tamil-speaking Muslims who resist their rule, and assassinate scores of Sri Lankan military intelligence officers. Previous Sri Lankan governments have been either uninterested or powerlessness to stop this. It is only since mid-2004, after Karuna broke away and challenged Tiger dominance in the Eastern Province, that the LTTE have suffered any violence in return.

Had the government and the Norwegians respected Karuna’s repeated requests when he first broke from the Tigers to sign his own ceasefire deals with the GoSL and the LTTE, today’s cycle of violence might have been avoided. Instead, the Norwegians, the Scandinavian ceasefire monitors, and the government of then President Chandrika Kumaratunga all looked the other way when LTTE troops loyal to Tiger chief Prabhakaran crossed the ceasefire lines and defeated Karuna’s forces in a few days of fighting. Before he could be entirely crushed, however, Karuna disbanded his forces and went into hiding.

The Tigers have proven – both before and after Karuna’s defection – that they are willing and able to track down and murder any Tamil who publicly opposes their de-facto rule. It’s not surprising, then, that Karuna and his men have chosen to regroup and wage a low-intensity guerilla struggle to deny the LTTE control of the Eastern Province -- rather than return to what would likely be very brief lives as civilians. It is also not surprising that the military would lend his forces some support, especially as the Tigers have used the four years of ceasefire to build up their forces and prepare for war. The knowledge and skills of Karuna’s fighters could be of immense value to the Sri Lankan military should war resume – as grows more likely every day.

As this example suggests, though, there is an even deeper problem that underlies Sri Lanka’s present crisis. The Norwegian’s and their international backers have imagined that a lasting peace can somehow be achieved between the government and the Tigers without either party first showing any willingness to transform themselves in democratic or peaceful ways.

The Tigers, for instance, have faced only mild sanctions for their relentless human rights violations and systematic denial of Tamils’ freedom of political expression, which have made a mockery of their claims to be a liberation movement. The Norwegians and their supporters in the international community have instead consistently downplayed the importance of human rights protections, for fear of complicating the possibility of negotiations.

Nor have the Tigers ever expressed any interest in – or been pressured towards – negotiating a permanent solution to the ethnic conflict. The closest they came was their joint declaration with the then government of Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe in December 2002 to “explore” a federal solution. Four months later they pulled out of talks. When they did offer a proposal for an interim administration in the North and East in November 2003, it was grounded in no real federalist or democratic principles, and would instead have granted the Tigers an effective monopoly of power. Since then they have consistently refused to discuss any political proposals other than their own interim administration plan.

The government on the other hand, particularly in its present incarnation, has also failed utterly to respect the democratic rights of Tamils, as shown most blatantly in the complicity of the Police and military in the anti-Tamil violence in Trincomalee. While there is a long history of government-supported violence against Tamil civilians and political leaders, the impunity with which the Tigers have been able to carry out political killings and other human rights violations over the past four years has clearly angered and emboldened hard line elements in the military and elsewhere. Many now seem to consider their own extra-judicial killings as righteous retaliation and self-defense. Still largely prevented from attacking the Tigers frontally, Sinhalese militarists have chosen instead to hit back at Tamils.

Equally important, the present government has backtracked and rejected the previous consensus among mainstream Sinhala parties that a political solution to the war must involve a federal restructuring of the state that would grant a significant degree of political autonomy to the predominantly Tamil-speaking areas in the north and east. Having been elected on a promise to defend the “unitary” state, and allied to Sinhala supremacist political parties, President Rajapakse is very far from having anything he could offer Tamils in the way of meaningful political reforms.

For all these reasons, then, even if the LTTE decide to relax their push for war and return to Geneva for the postponed second round of ceasefire talks – which to date they have not seemed eager to do – this will provide temporary relief at best. The strategy of keeping the government and the Tigers talking, in the hope this might eventually “build confidence,” has now clearly exhausted what limited potential it once had. Rather than maintain a policy that further entrenches the two extremes, the international backers of the peace process – Norway, the EU, the US, and Japan – must begin publicly to challenge the human rights violations and lack of democracy that are central to how the LTTE and the GoSL both maintain their power.

This means, first of all, making continued international support to the Sri Lankan government contingent on its actually developing a package of reforms and political proposals that begin to address Tamil aspirations to be full citizens and equal partners in power – regardless of whether this fits in with Tigers’ plans to consolidate their own rule. This clearly will require going beyond the “unitary” state, even if the word “federalism” isn’t mentioned.

The government must also be pressed to implement the recommendations of the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings, especially that of signing on to the International Criminal Court and inviting the UN or other international body to send a human rights monitoring mission. Had these steps been taken earlier, today’s cycle of violence might not have gotten so out of hand.

Equally important, the government must also be told in no uncertain terms that it cannot continue to harbor anti-Tamil ideologues at the highest level of the defence forces, and that it must end its campaign of extra-judicial killings and disappearances waged against civilians suspected of being Tiger sympathizers. This is not only the morally correct thing to do, it is also strategic: only by genuinely reaching out to Tamils can the government start to call the Tiger’s bluff and put them under real political pressure. Equating Tamils and Tigers is to play the Tigers’ own game.

At the same time, the Tigers need to be told to cease their attempt to goad the GoSL into war and to return to Geneva without further delay. They must be given a clear and consistent message that the only route to an interim administration and a more permanent form of autonomy that would give them a major share in power is to start respecting basic rights – of Tamils, Muslims, and Sinhalese – and engaging in real political dialogue. Should the Tigers be serious about something less than a separate state, an offer of real dialogue would deny the government any further excuses to avoid grappling with the issues at the heart of the conflict.

It may, though, already be too late, war may be inevitable. If so, the international community, whose mistakes have helped bring Sri Lanka to the brink of a devastating war, has a grave moral responsibility to provide the humanitarian assistance and civilian protections that will be so desperately needed by the hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans who will, yet again, be caught in the middle.

New Year in Trincomalee: What is wrong with the Geneva Talks and the Peace Process?

The following is an intervention from the Sri Lankan civil society group known as the Coalition for Muslims and Tamils. It was published on April 27, 2006.

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New Year in Trincomalee: What is wrong with the Geneva Talks and the Peace Process?

In this analysis of the situation of war and peace following the recent violence in Trincomalee, the Coalition for Muslims and Tamils speaks for and pleads for once again placing people at the centre of peace and the need for the peace process to work towards justice for all peoples in this country.

The Coalition for Muslims and Tamils was formed during an intense period of violence last year between Tamils and Muslims in the East, culminating in the grenade attack on the Grand Mosque in Akkaraipattu in November, which took the lives of 6 persons and intensified the already strained relations between Muslims and Tamils in the region. Despite repeated pleas by the communities concerned, the State and civil society took little notice of this incident. Today, the killing continues. Killings that are politically and ethnically motivated and steeped in the violence that has become an intrinsic part of the peace process as we know it.

The peace process and its violences
The current peace process, Geneva Talks I, picks up the thread of negotiation from the stalled talks between the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL), the LTTE and the donor community that commenced with the Ceasefire Agreement of February, 2002. It adopted a two pronged approach to the conflict.

1. The idea of cementing good relations between the LTTE and the Government of Sri Lanka through confidence building measures.

2. Initiating talks on power sharing between these two actors.

This strategy was hailed as pragmatic and realistic by political scientists, diplomats, conflict resolution experts and others. Politicians, political analysts, activists and the business communities considered it as the way to peace. But the success story left out a crucial aspect, critical to any successful resolution or transformation of conflict. The realism of the strategy did not bring realistic relief to the people in the areas where the war and the conflict had been most intense. As a result, this approach to peace is flawed in its very fundamentals. The failures of the peace process can be categorized, not necessarily exclusively, as follows:

a. The singular focus on the LTTE as the main actor on behalf of the Tamils and the concern with cementing ties between the organization and the Government give undue legitimacy to the LTTE, riding roughshod over any concern over its outrageous track record of human rights where people of all communities, particularly Tamils and Muslims, have been the main target; its blatant and repeated acts of ethnic cleansing targeting Muslims and Sinhalese in the north and east; and its repeated reneging on its promise of desisting from carrying out violent acts against the Sri Lankan State, particularly the forces.

The current wave of attacks on armed personnel by the LTTE is strong evidence of the organization’s inability to transform itself into a democratic movement, concerned about solving the conflict and work within a ‘peace’ setup. Leaflets have appeared in Batticaloa announcing that war is imminent, while leaflets in Jaffna have called on people to vacate the area and go into the Vanni. The LTTE is able to function only within a language of militarism. This is most apparent in the way it conducts negotiations by flexing its muscle.


b. The Peace Process is sadly lacking in another aspect. It holds the State to no account over the lives of large numbers of ordinary people from different communities caught within the conflict. With immense pressure brought to bear on the government to concede to the demands of the LTTE at almost every turn in the name of confidence building measures, the substantive issue of devolution of power was relegated to the background. Most crucially in this regard, the important issue of Muslim representation, both within the peace process and in any solution to come, was deferred too. The Muslim question, whether it concerned the north or the east, was treated as a secondary and temporary problem of managing conflict and not as a fundamental part of the solution to the ethnic conflict. The State, dominated by diverse Sinhala dominant factions including chauvinist elements, has not committed itself to a peaceful and just solution, in which the interests and concerns of all communities in the north and east are addressed.

c) The peace process has also betrayed the people in the role played by donor community, especially the Norwegian facilitators. Heavy on conflict resolution theory and weak on their preparedness for the task at hand, the Norwegian facilitators were mostly concerned about going home with a success story for the media; they did not hear the bombs going off, the pistol cracking even in Colombo, the cry of a mother when her child was conscripted. The international communities and the Norwegian facilitators should look beyond the LTTE at the people; the Tamil, Muslim, Sinhala and other people in the north and east. The realistic approach of the international community should look at the needs of “real” people.

d) Discussions on power sharing have dealt largely with issues of rehabilitation of the north and east, particularly on dividing financial resources between the two parties. This is where the donor agencies were crucial to the settlement and the process. Whether it be discussion on the ISGA, P-TOMS or after the arrival of President Mahinda Rajapakse on the scene, RADA , power sharing has dealt with financial management of aid and other funds. The tsunami, which in its initial stages, brought the Muslim, Sinhala and Tamil people together, compounded ethnic tensions when aid poured in, bringing in its wake monies unaccounted for and a greater disparity between the haves and the have nots.

The peace process has miserably failed the people of Sri Lanka in healing old wounds; instead it has exacerbated those wounds and created new ones. While the LTTE, GoSL and the donor community carried on with their bargaining over the spoils of the tsunami, the north and east simmered with its own violences, new and old. In 2004, the break within the LTTE caught many political analysts and activists by deep traumatic surprise. Not knowing how to react, they pinned the ‘blame’ for the break up on the machinations of Colombo and India. Political wisdom in the country, caught up in the realism of aid, was neither able to identify the resistance welling up from within the Tamil polity nor understand and react to the increasing violence in the east in the past year or so. Preoccupied with cementing ties between the GoSL and the LTTE, they and we could not see LTTE implode, taking the east down with it.

The Violence of Trincomalee and the ongoing crisis on the ground

Over the past few years, Trincomalee has been at the centre of Tamil-Sinhala tension, most of which is aggravated by the LTTE on the one hand and Sinhala chauvinist and anti-Tamil political mobilizations on the other. ON 2nd January, 2006, personnel of the State forces, in response to a grenade thrown at a truck by unidentified persons, killed five young men who were mere bystanders at the incident. No State agency claimed responsibility for this wanton killing at that time. Given this scenario, the State should have been alert both to the LTTEÂ’s tactic of provoking armed personnel to retaliate against people and the mounting tension within the personnel as well. It should have taken measures to avoid further deterioration of relations between the Government and the Tamil people.

But when a bomb exploded in the market place on the 12th of April, killing a soldier and civilians belonging to all communities, anti-Tamil and -Muslim riots took place and spread to other places. While the rioting continued, the LTTE too did not let up. In further provocation, they undertook to kill Sinhala civillians, successfully turning such incidents into attacks on pockets of Tamil habitation in the Trincomalee district.

We watched with sadness the grief of the families of bereaved soldiers on the media as the President publicly consoled them. And in that same spirit, we also waited to hear a word of consolation for those families, Muslim, Tamil and Sinhala, who had lost their loved ones in the destruction, rioting and looting, but heard none.. Most of the families were Tamils and Muslims. This partiality is unwise politically. It serves to alienate minorities, Tamils in particular in this instance, from the State polity, pushing them heedlessly into the hands of the LTTE.

As the attacks on armed personnel in the north and east by the LTTE continue, thousands of refugees have crowded schools and other places in the Trincomalee District. While the LTTE is on a path of schizoid destruction, the State is waiting for the next round of peace talks in Geneva, hoping for calm. This waiting game brings no relief to the soldiers at the front, the LTTE cadres, many of whom are young and forcibly recruited, political activists, and ‘ordinary’ people. It brings no relief to those who feel they cannot expect justice from the State. It means nothing to those who are not represented either by the State or the LTTE, the majority of the people in the north and east. . The State must undertake the following measures to bring relief to those suffering people and to gain the confidence of minority communities.

1. The State must make provision for immediate relief to those who have been forced to flee their homes by the recent wave of violence in Trincomalee.

2. It must also develop mechanisms that protect Tamils at times of raids and checking, to safeguard them from Human Rights abuses at the hands of the forces.

3. There must be a check on the growing culture of impunity. The state must hold itself accountable for the acts of the armed forces. As an immediate measure, it needs to carry out an independent and thorough investigation of what happened in Trincomalee to provide justice for the victims of violence and ensure that the findings are made public.

Trincomalee cannot be looked at in isolation. What happened in Trincomalee in April 2006, is what happened in Akkaraipattu in November 2005; or in Batticaloa and Ampara in April, 2004; in Eravur in 1990, in Pesalai in February 2006; in the Northern Province on October 23rd 1990; in Anuradhapura in 1985; or in July1983 in Sri Lanka. Our task then as a community is to raise the cry of democracy, accountability on the part of the State for all its people, and to demand a people-centred approach to peace and not a war centred or partisan approach.

Toward Peace: what must the Process do?
The peace process must at this point prioritize above all the following issues.

a) De-militarize the north and the east by curbing all armed activity in the area,
Including that of the LTTE.

b) Safeguard the Human Rights of all communities.

c) Protect all communities against the terror of armed groups, above all that of the
LTTE and chauvinist forces.

d) Address the concerns of Muslims in the north and east.

e) Address security concerns of Sinhala people in the north and east, particularly in the border areas.

f) Address the fears and insecurities of minorities, especially Tamils in this instance, with regard to State forces and State patronage.

g) Immediately set to work on a programme of power sharing in the north and east and work toward a pluralist structure that would accommodate representation of all communities and political allegiances.


Coalition of Muslims and Tamils for Peace and Coexistence
The coalition of Muslims and Tamils is a Sri Lanka based organization comprising Muslim and Tamil identified persons who as a general principle are committed to pluralism and social justice in all its forms. Specifically, we are committed to the peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Tamils in the country, particularly in the north and east, and to a just and equitable solution to the ethnic conflict.

We can be contacted at: peaceandcoexistence@yahoo.com