The most violent place in Asia at the moment is Sri Lanka, and much of the violence emanates from the Sri Lankan state pursuing a fierce and no holds barred war to suppress the demands of the Tamils for equal rights and self-determination. Sri Lanka has been ravaged by this ethnic war since 1983, although there was a brief ceasefire in existence from 2001 declared by the Tigers, which was formalised with a ceasefire agreement (CFA) the following year, the present Sri Lankan government has honoured this agreement in the breach.

This war is often mistakenly portrayed in the media as a simple matter of one small terrorist group against the whole country. It is a fundamental conflict dating back to the inequalities and inequities contained in the independence settlement by the British in 1948, which divides a whole nation on ethnic lines. The British had found a country of two nations - the Tamils and the Sinhalese, with their two separate kingdoms in the 17th century but had contrived to create a non-homogeneous nation at the time of independence in the 20th century with the Sinhalese as the overlords and the Tamils a minority whose fundamental rights were to be compromised by the Sinhalese. For 35 years Tamils sought to achieve equality and parity in education, employment and language through parliamentary and democratic means. But successive Sinhalese governments continually frustrated the attempts of Tamil parliamentarians and unleashed Sinhala mobs to burn, loot, rape and murder Tamil civilians in regular pogroms to defeat the Tamils in their democratic campaigns. It was the eventual response of the Tamil youth to this violence against their people that grew into a civil war that is now consuming Sri Lanka. It has engendered over 70,000 deaths of innocent civilians, and the main protagonists to the conflict are the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tiger group, which control different parts of the country. There is no gainsaying that the majority of the Tamils in North-East Sri Lanka support the Tigers in their resistance to the Sinhala government's onslaught against the Tamils in their homeland.

In November 2005, Mahinda Rajapakse was elected President of the country with the support of extreme radical anti-Tamil parties such as the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) and the Jathika Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) on a joint programme to scrap the ceasefire agreement, to abrogate the agreement with the Tamil Tigers for a federal system of government in the merged northeast, to remove Norway as a peace facilitator and thereby reversing all the gains that have been achieved through many rounds of political negotiations from 2001. It is this indiscriminate war and violence against the Tamils in their homeland that is the cause of gross human rights violations by the government, which has caused serious concern among organisations such as Amnesty International, Asian Human Rights Commission, Human Rights Watch and UNHCR. Even friendly governments like the UK and the US have been compelled to hold back some aid in order to exert pressure on the Sri Lankan government to stop its armed forces and paramilitaries from committing acts of murder, rape, disappearance and wanton war. These forces have so far been allowed to commit these acts of human rights crimes with the knowledge that they would have the protection of their superiors from investigation and prosecution. This is a climate of impunity that fosters and encourages more and more violence against innocent Tamil civilians.

The free press in the country has been silenced from reporting these official crimes. Independent journalists have been killed, have disappeared or threatened by the government and its supporters. The President himself is not above using the telephone to intimidate and threaten newspaper editors and senior post holders. The judiciary has been corrupted by political patronage and the international commission of jurists (ICJ) have made a scathing report about it.

The idyllic nature of the country belies the lawlessness and endemic corruption prevalent within it. The West can no longer turn a blind eye to a continuing ethnic war that bleeds the economic strength and the political stability of the country. More than 40% of the country's GDP is spent on the war and the people are burdened by its cost and a rate of hyper inflation that literally steals the money in their pockets.

Although a veneer of democratic government and structure appear to the outside world, these are conformed through elections, legislature, judiciary and the executive, which are plainly a parody of the real thing. Elections are conducted through extreme violence including murder, and the judiciary and the executive are riddled with political patronage and corruption. In such an obviously failing state, the emergence of an extreme radical Buddhist Sinhala establishment with a radical and autocratic President can lead to the erosion of democracy in the country and the establishment of a fascist military junta with unforeseen consequences to the people of the country and to the cause of democracy in that part of the world.

The cancer that runs through this society is the denial of fundamental human rights to the Tamils and the cost of a war to maintain this evil. This is a country that has the potential to become the Switzerland of the East but has to start the long haul back to prosperity by finding the will for a political solution to its ethnic problem. The sad record of Sri Lankan government's human rights crimes (which is listed elsewhere) is the consequence of the political policy of ethnic cleansing in the hope of either killing or driving the Tamils out of their homelands. Nearly 1 million Tamils have been driven out of the country since 1983, and this is the cause of the large influx of refugees to India and the West. This policy is bound to fail as it is morally corrupt and it is with a similar policy that the Nazis could not exterminate all the Jews in the second world war and in more recent times, the Serbians could not do the same to their Muslims nor to the Kosovans.

We appeal to the APPG to request the British Government:

1. to call on the parties to the conflict to seriously sue for peace

Source: Tamil Writers Guild
Date: 14 June 2007