After 74 years: Where has the reconciliation gone?

SWRD Bandaranaike and SJV Chelvanayagam shake hands soon after the Banda-Chelva Pact

Sri Lanka celebrates its 74th Independence Day today not as a successful nation or a stable state, but as almost a fragile state. Not only individual families, but also the government is having a hand to mouth existence which is clearly manifested by the country’s energy and power sectors.   

Nobody, even the most knowledgeable economist can predict how the government is going to feed the people in two months’ time as the country is facing a huge foreign exchange crisis, while everything including food, fuel and all other essential items has to be imported and a huge amount of money has to be paid as foreign debt obligations.  

The celebrations mark Sri Lanka gaining freedom from British domination but the country is currently under heavy foreign influence from several fronts. Powerful countries with conflicting economic and political interests in the region are at power games within the country, demanding various national resources in competition which Sri Lanka cannot deny due to possible political and economic repercussions.  

Despite lofty claims by the political leaders that every community in this country had contributed to the country’s Independence, actions of successive governments and the political parties divided on ethnic lines have resulted in a deep polarization among communities. Some of those who accepted the national anthem being sung in both Sinhala and Tamil at the first Independence Day are not prepared to allow it to be sung in Tamil now. Thus, they do not want to allow the Tamils to feel a sense of ownership to the national anthem and thereby to the country.   
Similarly, Tamils who jointly celebrated National Day 74 years ago have dissociated themselves from it by now, except for a few who just want to show their affiliation to the ruling parties or not to provoke the majority community. Today, many in the Northern Province deem their leaders raising the national flag as an insult to their lot or a betrayal of them. Tamils perceive rightly or wrongly that the Independence Day is a reminder of their alienation from the main body politic. Hence, some Tamil politicians take this opportunity to express their frustration and choose to protest against it. This deep psychological gap between the two communities is a fact and questions the very essence of the Independence.   

For about two decades since Independence, the two main political parties, the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) had a strong presence in the Tamil dominated north and the east, with Tamils holding ministerial portfolios. It must be recalled that the first major attack by Tamil armed groups was carried out against a Tamil Mayor, Alfred Duraiappa who represented the Tamil heartland, Jaffna and the ruling party of the day, the SLFP, in 1975. However, the situation changed in two years with the newly formed Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) resorting to demand a separate State within the Sri Lankan territory, at the 1977 Parliamentary election which led to an armed struggle by the Tamil youth.   

The emergence of the separatist demand, though a political absurdity given the geo-political realities in the region, was not an isolated incident in the history. It was an extension of a conflict between the State and the Tamil leaders since Independence which could have been averted had the leaders of both sides acted responsibly, without misusing the sentiments of their respective communities, for petty political ends.  

After a three-decade long war between the armed forces and the main Tamil armed group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Tamil electorate is almost totally divorced from the national politics. This has been evident in every election since 1977. The war and the Proportional Representation (PR) in the electoral system introduced in 1978 paved the way for the emergence of another strand of ethnic politics for the Muslims. This polarization was further consolidated by the emergence extremist groups among Muslims as well as Sinhalese which came to a head after the terrorist attacks on Christians on the Easter Sunday – April 21, 2019.  

Besides, past actions really committed or perceived to have committed by the leaders of the government and the armed forces during the war is haunting in the form of possible sanctions against certain political and military leaders as well as the country as a whole. This again indicates the foreign influence on the country and refreshes the psychological gap between the Sinhalese and the Tamils annually. Every year since 2012, the government has been dedicating the first three months to make arrangements to defend the political and military leaders from the allegations of war crimes and human rights violations raised at the March sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).   

Although the UNHRC has been somewhat lenient towards the Sri Lankan leaders compared to those of countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Cuba, the annual accumulation of world human rights body’s actions against Sri Lankan political and military leaders have reached a considerably critical point since last year. The resolution passed at the 46th regular session of the UNHRC last year recommended concrete action against those accused of human rights violations in Sri Lanka. The resolution requested the member UN member countries to prosecute those who have been credibly accused of violating human rights in their own countries under the principle of Universal Jurisdiction.   

As if a ritual the Sri Lankan Tamil leaders here and within the Diaspora have also been busy during the first three months of every year demanding action against those who are responsible for involuntary disappearance of thousands of people and death of another thousands of their brethren during the last lap of the war between the armed forces and the LTTE which ended some 13 years ago. In this endeavor they conveniently forget the crimes committed by the LTTE not only against the other communities but also against the Tamils.   

No community is prepared to accept the damage their leaders and the so-called representatives have done to the reconciliation and make amends. Rarely there have been occasions when some leaders had the audacity to openly accept some of the blunders committed in the name of their community. For instance, during a function organized by the government to mark the 21st anniversary of the anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983 which is generally called the “Black July,” the then President Chandrika Kumaratunga apologized to the Tamil community for the crimes committed to the Tamils during those riotous days. Similarly, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), after the release of the report of an investigation into the human rights violations by the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) in 2015 said that the Tamils have to accept the crimes committed in the name of their community. The report had accused both the armed forces and the LTTE for serious violation of human rights.   
However, those statements did not have any follow-up actions and had such an impact on the society that it is doubtful if at least 100 out of 22 million people in the country might remember them.