COLOMBO, 31 December 2005 — A new tsunami is gathering force in Sri Lanka. A country which lost over 35,000 people in last year’s catastrophe is facing a disaster which could dwarf that death toll. Yet the looming threat has hardly been noticed by the outside world.
Among decision-makers in Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese and Tamil communities a wave of war preparations is rising up. Assassinations of politicians and civic leaders happen with increasing frequency. Every day brings new violations of a four-year-old cease-fire. Attacks on government troops have been mounting with lethal intensity. Forty- four have died in three separate incidents this month.
Although the peace negotiations which followed the cease-fire stalled in April 2003, by and large the truce held until a few weeks ago. Now the situation has worsened dramatically. In three visits to the island since the talks collapsed I have never found such gloom among those who watch the country’s politics. The majority view is that all-out war is only weeks or, at most, months away.
In Indonesia’s tsunami-stricken province of Aceh, last year’s calamity pushed pro-independence rebels and the government into peace. In Sri Lanka it also raised hopes that both sides would settle their differences. The areas controlled by the autonomy-seeking Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were some of the worst-hit and the Tamil community in general, though smaller than the Sinhalese, suffered an equal number of deaths. Donor governments saw a chance to use the disaster to revive the peace process. They urged the Tigers and the Sri Lankan government to create a joint mechanism for distributing reconstruction aid. The idea was that by collaborating on practical issues, both sides would achieve a level of mutual trust which could feed back into the political stalemate and re-energize peace talks. In May they signed an agreement on tsunami funding. But Sinhalese nationalists took it to the Supreme Court as unconstitutionally giving the Tigers excessive recognition. When the judges came down in the complainants’ favor, the mechanism died. In November, Sri Lankans elected a more hard-line president who campaigned on a promise to revise the cease-fire agreement.
The gathering war will hit Sri Lankans all the more cruelly since tsunami relief has been largely a success. In the first hours food, tents and shelter in schools and temples reached the homeless with great speed. Temporary accommodation was set up while new houses were built. Competing foreign NGO’s have created some problems. Fishing boats, which look nice on donor websites, were handed out without enough nets or engines. Sewing machines were given to rural women without understanding that if there is only one middleman to buy their products he can lower his price, leaving a village as poor as before.
But local activists are pressing for reforms, using the UN motto, “Build Back Better”. They want poverty-reduction programs to help whole communities, not just tsunami-affected families. People displaced by the 19 years of war which ended in 2002 must not be overlooked. The villages of Telwatta and Peraliya on Sri Lanka’s west coast have produced the worst and the best. A year ago, following vague reports that a train had been washed away somewhere south of Colombo, I stumbled on the worst episode in the tsunami. Soldiers were already in action carrying hundreds of bodies out of the flooded carriages. An estimated 1,700 people drowned. The train carcass later became a meager source of income for local people. They charged visitors to peer at it. Last week the government moved it to Hikkaduwa station where for the price of a platform ticket you could see the rusting carriages, adorned with white ribbons fluttering in memory of the dead. A museum and memorial are planned.
At Peraliya the upper floor of a house has become a “community tsunami early warning centre”. Needing only modest funding to run it, villagers log on every half-hour to international websites that track Asian earthquakes. Linked to volunteers manning newly installed loudspeakers in population centers up and down the coast, they can warn people of threats and counter the false alarms that often still spread. The new system was in place faster than anything the government did.
Sri Lanka’s big need now is to heed the early warning of war. LTTE leaders recently gave an ultimatum that unless the new president offers Tamils self-governing autonomy the cease-fire will end in 2006. An LTTE campaign to capture the Jaffna Peninsula in the hope of negotiating from a position of new strength would follow. Though government-held, Jaffna is inhabited exclusively by Tamils, after the LTTE’s expulsion of the Muslims a few years ago and the gradual emigration of Sinhalese. The LTTE showed its muscle there by enforcing an election boycott in November, as well as a walkout by government employees, students, and shopkeepers this week. A creeping intifada is under way. A full-scale uprising, perhaps linked to a military assault, could drive the army out, observers say. But the government would not give up. Hard-line officers have been promoted to top positions, and it might try to bomb Jaffna back under its control, according to analysts.
What can be done? Tsunami victims who live near the front line are already fleeing their new homes for fear of war. LTTE and government leaders must take a deep breath and realize the dangers they are about to unleash. Foreign governments ought to step in immediately at the highest level. Along with Norway, the main facilitator, the co-chairs of Sri Lanka’s stagnant peace process are the EU, Japan, and the US. The Sri Lankan president also wants to bring India into the picture. The primary responsibility for reaching peace rests with Sri Lankan leaders, but foreign governments should enforce an arms embargo, threaten a cutoff in aid, and get the two sides talking again. How in good conscience can one reconstruct one half of a small island when the other half is about to self-destruct?
