Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

Changing Dynamics of Minority Rights Discourse 2007-2008
As suggested in this paper, the arguments, discourses and policy options concerning
minority rights in Sri Lanka have been largely shaped by the trajectories of the civil war.
For two and half decades, the military strength of the Tamil secessionist campaign, the
capacity of the Tamil society to endure a protracted civil war and the resolve of the Sri
Lankan state to defeat the Tamil nationalist insurgency have conditioned the extent to
which minority rights should be acknowledged, accommodated or resisted. For example,
the arguments for minimal political reforms as well as wider state reforms for federalist
autonomy have been policy options that emerged in the Sinhalese polity in response to
the challenge of the Tamil nationalist insurgency. When the Tamil insurgency was
militarily strong, the Tamil nationalists could demand extensive regional autonomy, as
exemplified in LTTE’s proposals in 2003 for an Interim Self-Governing Authority
(ISGA). In 2007-2008, as the LTTE has been militarily weakened, the nature as well as
the terms of the political solution to the ethnic conflict has been undergoing a major
alteration. Below, I explore the changing dynamics of the minority rights discourse in
response to the anticipated defeat of the Tamil insurgency.
When hostilities between the newly elected Mahinda Rajapakse administration and the
LTTE broke out in 2006 and developed into an undeclared was in 2007, the process to
find a negotiated settlement to the ethnic conflict came to an effective end. For both the
government and the LTTE, the resumption of war seemed to be the preferred option. The
ruling coalition led by the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) – is a new political
configuration in which two hardcore Sinhalese nationalist parties, the Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna (JVP) and Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), play a key role in defining the
regime’s ideology, policies and approaches to the ethnic conflict. The JHU denies the
existence of an ethnic conflict or minority grievances. For the JHU, the LTTE rebellion is
pure terrorism. Terrorism calls for a military solution. There is no political problem that
requires a political solution. The JVP’s position is slightly different. The JVP
acknowledges the existence of minority grievances, but rejects the legitimacy of the
insurgency. The JVP wants the state to defeat the LTTE militarily and then offer
‘decentralization’, and not devolution, as a framework of accommodating minority
demands. The policies of President Rajapakse to the ethnic conflict seem to be a
pragmatic synthesis of the positions of both the JVP and JHU.
In 2004-2006 as the peace process foundered, it impacted quite negatively on the
prospects of resolving the ethnic conflict by political means within an autonomy
framework. xxii In December 2002 the United National Front (UNF) government and the
LTTE had arrived at an understanding, to ‘explore’ a federal solution to the ethnic
conflict within the parameters of a ‘united Sri Lanka.’ This understanding reached at the
Oslo talks initially created the impression of a breakthrough in Sri Lanka’s protracted
ethnic conflict that would enable minority aspirations to be constitutionalized in a manner
that would enjoy the concurrence of the majority as well. However, it took only a little
time for the Oslo understanding to be subsumed by the irreconcilability differences
between the government and the LTTE on how to take the peace process forward. The
LTTE’s decision to suspend its participation in peace talks until the government proposed
113