Sri Lanka's Ethnic Conflict: Will Peace Prevail or Conflict Return?

• Author: Rajat Ganguly
• Pages: 270-285

Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict

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Sri Lanka’s Ethnic Conflict: Will Peace

Prevail or Conflict Return?

R A J A T G A N G U L Y

East Anglia University

16

Introduction

After the withdrawal of the Indian Peace

Keeping Force (IPKF), which had been invited

to Sri Lanka by President Junius Jayewardene

in 1987 under the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord,

from the island in early 1990 the ethnic conflict

in Sri Lanka came to acquire two disturbing

characteristics: first, both the LTTE and the Sri

Lankan government reposed more faith in a

decisive military confrontation to break the

deadlock, which marked the onset of a dirty

war with large-scale human rights violations

committed by both insurgents and incumbents;

secondly, with the Indian disengagement from

Sri Lanka in the 1990s, the conflict took on

an orphaned look as the major powers as well

as other prominent international actors

decided to stay out as well. Because of the

heavy destruction and human suffering that

this orphaned dirty war caused, there was

widespread national and international support

for Norway’s initiative in the late 1990s to

facilitate a dialogue between the Liberation

Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the main Tamil

insurgent group, and the Sri Lankan

government. Patient diplomacy by Norwegian

facilitators over several years finally led to the

signing of a cease-fire agreement between

the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government and

put into motion a peace process that allowed

LTTE and government representatives to hold

several face-to-face meetings aimed at

finding a negotiated solution to Sri Lanka’s

decades-old ethnic conflict. Will the Norway-

facilitated peace process succeed in

deepening and consolidating peace in Sri

Lanka or will it form another saga in a long

and sorry tale of missed opportunities and

broken promises that mark the Tamil-

Sinhalese conflict? After describing the nature

of the ethnic war in Sri Lanka in the 1990s, I

offer an explanation for the onset of peace

talks and explore whether peace negotiations

would be able to consolidate peace if a return

to armed conflict is more likely to mark the

future.

Sri Lanka’s Ethnic War in the

1990s

Onset of the Dirty War

By late 1989, neither the Sri Lankan

government nor the LTTE wanted the IPKF’s

presence in Sri Lanka. President Ranasinghe

Premadasa, who assumed office in 1988,

began direct negotiations with the LTTE and

called for the IPKF’s withdrawal. In India, too,

public opinion strongly favoured the return

of the IPKF to India. The IPKF finally left Sri

Lanka in March 1990 and its departure was

followed for a short while by peace between

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the government and the LTTE. This peace did

not last long as the Premadasa government

annulled the merger of the Northern and

Eastern Provinces in preference to Sinhalese

sensitivities and the civil war resumed in the

north and east.1 The intensity with which this

war was fought suggested that neither the Sri

Lankan government nor the LTTE believed any

more that a negotiated political solution to the

conflict was possible and put their faith in an

all-out military showdown to break the

deadlock. While the civil war went on in the

north and east, in the south of the island the

Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) insurrection

had become even bloodier than the Tamil-

Sinhalese conflict. The Premadasa government

responded to the JVP threat by organizing pro-

government death squads consisting of off-

duty security personnel and United National

Party (UNP) supporters, which were

responsible for killing thousands of youths and

students belonging to or sympathizing with the

JVP throughout the summer and fall of 1989.

In November 1989, the leader of the JVP,

Rohana Wijeweera, and his immediate

followers were captured and immediately

killed.

In 1993, a LTTE suicide bomber

assassinated President Premadasa. In the

presidential elections that followed in 1994,

Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga,

belonging to the Sri Lankan Freedom Party

(SLFP) and the People’s Alliance (PA) coalition,

emerged victorious. Kumaratunga’s victory

initially held out a ray of hope for the peaceful

resolution of the civil war as her coalition had

promised to find a peaceful solution to the

Tamil-Sinhalese conflict in its election

manifesto. In January 1995, the Kumaratunga

government entered into a cease-fire

agreement with the LTTE and promised to

come up with a new set of proposals for the

devolution of power.

After waiting in vain for the new proposals

for the next three months, the LTTE repudiated

the cease-fire agreement on April 29, 1995

and armed clashes between the LTTE and the

Sri Lankan military intensified. In August 1995,

President Kumaratunga finally released her

‘peace proposals’ only to find that there were

no takers among the Sri Lankan Tamil

community.2 In frustration, in December 1995

she ordered the Sri Lankan armed forces to

launch its largest military operation

(codenamed Riviresa or Sunrays) in order to

re-establish government control over the

northern city of Jaffna, the main LTTE

stronghold. By June 1996, the Sri Lankan

military was able to recapture Jaffna City. This

was a big achievement for the Sri Lankan

military and a major setback for the LTTE.

Military success, however, came at a price

for the Sri Lankan armed forces since it was

heavily criticized by human rights bodies such

as Amnesty International and other NGOs and

activists for the indiscriminate killings of Tamil

civilians in Jaffna during its reoccupation of

the area. For the LTTE and other Tamil

organizations the Sri Lankan military’s

behaviour towards the local Tamil population

was tantamount to a government-sanctioned

de facto policy of ethnic genocide.

After lying low for a while and regrouping,

the LTTE retaliated through a series of

spectacular terrorist attacks on civilian and

military targets throughout 1997 and 1998.3

Outraged by these attacks, especially the

bombing of a sacred Buddhist shrine in Kandy

in January 1998, Sinhalese hard-liners forced

President Kumaratunga to declare the LTTE

as an outlaw organization and rejected the

government’s plan to grant regional autonomy

to Tamil areas and to create a civilian

administration in Jaffna. On its part, the LTTE

thwarted the government’s attempt to strike a

deal with more moderate Tamil organizations

such as the Tamil United Liberation Front

(TULF) and the People’s Liberation

Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) by

assassinating the leaders of these