Shortly after the end of the war in 2009, President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared that in Sri Lanka there would no longer be an ethnic majority or ethnic minorities but only a majority who loved the nation and a minority who were traitors.

Apart from the warning inherent in this statement to those who were political dissenters, there was also the implication that a political solution based on the notion of ethnicities and majorities and minorities based upon them would be unnecessary after the defeat of the separatists Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The logic of this position is that a political solution was only discussed because of the pressure of the LTTE, and now with its destruction there was no need to take that discussion forward.

In keeping with the president’s immediate post-war policy statement and despite the passage of nearly five years since the end of the war there has been no fundamental shift in the government’s approach to the ethnic conflict.

The talks with the main Tamil opposition party, the TNA, and the government’s effort to form a Parliamentary Select Committee to discuss a political solution has gone nowhere.

This is not the government’s failure alone. Nearly all public intellectuals from the Sinhalese community who support the government, which is the politically dominant voice in society, appear to have also taken the cue from the president that there is no ethnic conflict to resolve. But Tamil minority voters have repeatedly challenged this assumption.

So long as there are unresolved ethnic grievances the electorate will tend to vote along ethnic lines. The government’s policy of formulating and promising policies of economic development as an alternative to political reform have been repeatedly rebuffed by the ethnic minority electorate.

Although the government’s delivery of economic infrastructure development may be appreciated it too was not able to provide the government with the votes of the ethnic minorities either in the North, East or in Colombo where the ethnic minority vote predominates.

Fresh elections

Elections to the Western and Southern provincial councils were not due till the end of this year. The announcement of early provincial elections at the end of March, which is the very period when the UN Human Rights Council is expected to vote on the resolution on Sri Lanka, can only have one purpose. It is to negate the impact on the people of Sri Lanka of a negative resolution that seeks to penalise the government and its leadership. The government will make maximum use of international pressure for domestic political gain. It will also seek to obtain a resounding people’s mandate that will wipe out any discredit that comes out a resolution of the UNHRC. The direction of the government’s political campaign in these circumstances can be anticipated.

Already the signs are evident as to what the government’s electoral campaign will centre on. The government campaigners will seek to bring the threat to national sovereignty and territorial integrity to the fore, and thereby submerge all other grievances that the people may have.

The concerns about corruption, rising cost of living and the criminal impunity of those connected with political power will be relegated to the margins by the threat to the nation.

Election strategy

There is a belief that a presidential or general election will be held later this year or early next year, following on the provincial elections. The government’s reluctance to accommodate a political solution to minority ethnic grievances at this time would seem to come from its calculation that it cannot afford to lose its hold over the Sinhalese majority electorate in the context of impending elections.

This is an electorate that can give the government a permanent majority and the prospect of long term rule so long as it does not fracture. The issue on which the Sinhalese electorate is most likely to get divided on is that of a political solution to the ethnic conflict. Therefore the government is unwilling to change its policy with regard to the ethnic minorities.

While this winning formula is to the benefit of the current government it is not so for the country.

The government emphasis on the past war, and on alleged continuing threats to the unity of the country, creates and recreates ethnic polarisation within the country.

It serves to justify to the Sinhalese majority the government’s militarised approach to the governance of the North and the failure to implement the devolution of powers.

If the government is not prepared to win the support of the majority community to take the country in the direction of a just political solution, the conflict is bound to continue and to get aggravated.

However, this pragmatic and election-winning political approach, which is power-cantered and not problem-solving, will not resolve the main problem facing the country.

The ethnic conflict is the problem that gave rise to three decades of war. The answer to the conflict has to be a just sharing of power between ethnic majority and minorities. It is in the context of failure to evolve an internal answer that the answer to the government’s failure has come to be seen as international pressure.

—The Island-Asia News Network