(July 18, Washigton, Sri Lanka Guardian) Two news articles this week raise important issues about the current situation in Sri Lanka. I think both are worth reading and discussing.
TIME magazine offers an interview with President Mahinda Rajapaksa. It is entitled: “The Man who Tamed the Tigers.” (External Link).
The article isn’t so much about how the president and government forces won the conflict against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as it is dealing with the consequences of that victory.
The second article takes a different approach to that same question. Lydia Polgreen’s front page report in The New York Times is headlined, “Displaced by War, Many Tamils Languish in Sri Lankan Camps,” (External Link).
Despite the headline, her piece looks at the challenge of sheltering and caring for the 280,000 displaced persons now in government-run welfare centers, and the obvious frustration those people feel about getting home.
Both articles touch on the most important question for Sri Lanka right now: What will the future bring?
In his TIME interview, President Rajapaksa notes that the government is already moving to establish an elected government in the North. Local elections will be held in Jaffna and Vavuniya on Aug. 8.
There has been a lot of criticism of conditions at the government centers, especially from human rights groups that have never been in them.
I have been in them. They are not luxurious, to be sure. Nor are they intended to be permanent, which is what some have alleged is Sri Lanka’s ulterior motive.
Polgreen writes that, “Conditions in the camps have improved since the early days in April and May,” and she reports that “Children are attending schools and health centers and hospitals are helping check the spread of infectious diseases.”
The last thing Sri Lanka wants, and the last thing it can afford politically and financially, is to keep thousands of people in the centers longer than necessary.
If one accepts that simple truth, the discussion of the future becomes hopeful, not cynical.
For instance, during the final months of the conflict, the U.S. and other Western governments insisted that Sri Lanka come up with a political solution that will heal ethnic strife for good.
But when Sri Lanka announced plans for the Aug. 8 elections, it barely drew Western notice. It received no mention in the New York Times article, which ignored the importance of those elections altogether.
What’s more, what the government plans for the North right now has already been accomplished in the East, where the LTTE was defeated earlier.
Like the North, several hundred thousand people in the East were displaced by fighting in 2006 and 2007. But they were peacefully and quickly resettled (most within eight months).
Compare this track record to other regions of the world where displaced people have lived in camps for years.
What’s more, in the East, local elections were held and local and national leaders were selected by Province residents. Several former LTTE leaders are now prominent political leaders.
Certainly this was an important step on the path to reconciliation, and it’s about to be repeated in the North.
It is true, as Lydia Polgreen’s article states, that the government is trying to discern just who is an innocent civilian and who is an LTTE militant posing as a civilian. This is a complicated process; we know there are hundreds of LTTE fighters among the displaced population. So free movement is an issue.
But her story doesn’t report what the U.S. Agency for International Development did in a July 9 update: more than 5,000 families in welfare centers have been re-united, and that a registration system has been established that allows displaced people to visit relatives in other zones.
The extensive de-mining that is required it barely noted in either story. But the USAID report states that groups from Denmark, England and Switzerland will received U.S. de-mining aid for their work in Sri Lanka. Those efforts, the update states, are, “expected to facilitate IDP returns and resettlement to areas of origin.”
TIME correspondent Jyoti Thottam asked President Rajapaksa if Tamils in the North would be self-governing? His answer:
“Don't say Tamils. In this country, you can't give separate areas on an ethnic basis, you can't have this. With the provinces, certainly there must be powers, where local matters can be handled by them.”
(The writer , Ambassador of Sri Lanka to the United States)
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