Is Sri Lanka on the path to reconciliation?

President Sirisena is under pressure to fulfill his post-civil war promises of accountability and justice.




It's been seven years since the civil war in Sri Lanka ended.

The 30-year conflict fell largely along ethnic lines.

President Maithripala Sirisena has said reconciliation is one of his top priorities, but thousands of ethnic Tamils from the country's north still have not been able to return to their homes.

The government had promised to resettle them by the end of last month.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights gave a report on Sri Lanka's efforts last week.

He said progress has been made, but not quickly enough.



The Sri Lankan civil war my have started thirty years ago when the Liberation Tigers of Elam began fighting the government in Colombo for independence. But, the ground work for the conflict was laid years before when repressive laws were enacted which strictly limited their rights. Similar to what Turkey had done with its Kurdish minority. Restricting the use of language and repressing its culture and arts.

In 1948 immediately after Independence, controversial law was passed by the Ceylon Parliament, called the Ceylon Citizenship Act which deliberately discriminated against the Indian Tamil ethnic minority by making it virtually impossible for them to obtain citizenship in the country.[37] Approximately over 700,000 Indian Tamils were made stateless. Over the next three decades more than 300,000 Indian Tamils were deported back to India.[38] It wasn't until 2003, 55 years after independence, that all Indian Tamils living in Sri Lanka were granted citizenship but by this time they only made up 5% of the island's population.

In 1956 Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike passed the "Sinhala Only Act", an Act which replaced English with Sinhala as the only official language of the country. This was seen as a deliberate attempt to discourage the Sri Lankan Tamils from working in the Ceylon Civil Service and other public services. The Tamil speaking minorities of the Ceylon (Sri Lankan Tamils, Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Moors) viewed the Act as linguistic, cultural and economic discrimination against them.[39] Many Tamil speaking civil servants/public servants were forced to resign because they weren't fluent in Sinhala.[40] This was a prelude to the 1956 Gal Oya riots and the 1958 widespread riots in which thousands of Tamil civilians perished. The civil war was a direct result of the escalation of the confrontational politics that followed.[41]