World Examples for a 'New Solution Process': Part 4

Rastinews — The Tamil Tigers and Sri Lanka's conflict

The country now known as Sri Lanka faced deep ethnic and religious divisions after gaining independence. The Sinhalese make up roughly 74 percent of the population, Tamils about 18 percent. Religiously, most Sinhalese are Buddhist, while most Tamils are Hindu.

Sri Lanka's conflict has therefore never been purely ethnic. It is an identity dispute carrying religious weight as well.

Its roots reach back to the colonial era. Under British rule, Tamils gained significant advantages in public administration and education, while the Sinhalese felt shut out.

After independence, the balance reversed. Political power passed to the Sinhalese majority. The new government built the state largely around Sinhalese identity and imposed restrictive policies on other languages and cultures.

Tamil communities grew increasingly convinced they faced exclusion and discrimination. A 1956 law made Sinhala the country's sole official language. The country's name was later changed from Ceylon to Sri Lanka.

Many Tamils read these moves as redefining the state around the majority community alone. The identity disputes that followed laid the ground for the conflict to come.

As Tamil nationalism hardened, several armed groups emerged. The most powerful, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — the Tamil Tigers — completed its organizational structure in 1976.

Its goal was an independent Tamil state across the north and east, where Tamils were concentrated. It launched an armed campaign against Sri Lankan security forces to pursue that goal.

The Tamil Tigers built a wide network fast, growing to thousands of armed fighters. Support from the Tamil diaspora abroad fed that growth.

As the group's military reach expanded, Sri Lanka's government declared the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organization in 1978 and handed security forces emergency powers.

From there, low-level violence hardened into a long civil war. Clashes intensified in 1983, pushing both the Tamil and Sinhalese communities toward radicalization.

Tamil Tiger attacks won the group more support among Tamils, while hardening Sinhalese backing for tough security measures. In the same period, Sinhalese mobs carried out mass attacks on Tamil civilians, killing or displacing thousands. Those events, remembered as "Black July," became one of the war's defining turning points.

Trust between the two communities largely collapsed after Black July. Tamil nationalism hardened further, and hardline sentiment spread among the Sinhalese too. Both sides turned increasingly on civilians, driving up the war's human toll.

The Tamil Tigers drew notice for suicide bombings and other attacks, while government forces faced accusations of serious human rights abuses.

As the fighting grew, outside powers stepped in. India, though initially sympathetic to the Tamil cause, shifted toward a more balanced stance, wary of stirring its own large Tamil population.

Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's mediation produced a 1987 agreement between Sri Lanka's government and the Tamil Tigers. India then deployed about 10,000 peacekeeping troops.

The agreement fell short. The Tamil Tigers came to view the Indian troops as an occupying force, while Sri Lanka's government grew uneasy over India's presence. Indian forces pulled out of the country in 1990.

Fighting resumed, and the Tamil Tigers scored significant military gains in some areas. But the group's tactics steadily cost it international backing. The 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the 1993 killing of Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa dealt heavy blows to the Tamil Tigers' international standing.

After those killings, many countries took a harsher view of the organization. Fighting dragged on through the 1990s, with neither side gaining decisive ground.

In 2001, the Tamil Tigers declared a unilateral ceasefire and called for talks. Negotiations brokered by Norway brought the two sides to discuss a federal governance model.

For the first time in years, a political settlement looked genuinely possible. But the talks produced no lasting result. Divisions among Sri Lanka's political factions and persistent mutual distrust stalled the process within a short time. Negotiations collapsed in 2003, and the conflict flared back up.

One of the sharpest blows to the organization came when a senior commander known as Karuna broke away with roughly 6,000 fighters. The split cost the Tamil Tigers military strength and handed the government valuable intelligence on the group's structure and operations. The breakaway seriously weakened both its military and political power.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, elected president in 2005, took a harder line against the Tamil Tigers. His government also pushed an intensive diplomatic campaign to secure the group's international recognition as a terrorist organization.

Peace talks continued in fits and starts, but no trust took hold, and negotiations went nowhere. The Tamil Tigers tried to regain momentum through high-profile attacks in this period, but operations against its leadership and mounting military pressure drove its losses steadily higher.

The elimination of the group's senior leadership in particular sped its unraveling. Attacks in 2008 that also killed civilians further drained its international support.

Sri Lanka's army launched sweeping operations, retaking territory under the group's control piece by piece. The Tamil Tigers called for ceasefires at several points, but the government kept up its offensive. In May 2009, the killing of the group's leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, along with senior commanders, brought the Tamil Tigers to final military defeat. A civil war of roughly three decades ended in a military victory for the state.

After the war, the Tamil political movement tried to carry on through various parties in democratic politics, though none became a major force. One of the war's most significant gains was the recognition of Tamil as an official language. Even so, many of the political and social problems that fed the conflict cannot be said to have been fully resolved.

The influence of external actors is also notable in Sri Lanka's case. Mediation efforts by Norway and other international players repeatedly clashed with the regional interests of India and China. The prolonged civil war also battered the country's economy, leaving Sri Lanka saddled with a mounting foreign debt burden.

The Tamil Tigers case shows how hard it is for negotiations to succeed when the parties fail to bring genuine, lasting will to a settlement.

Human rights violations occurred throughout the conflict. Both sides committed grave crimes, leaving deep wounds in society. Armed struggle did not ease the path to a solution — it did the opposite, costing many lives and causing massive destruction and lasting social trauma.

The Sri Lankan experience therefore stands as a key example showing that military victory alone cannot secure social peace, and that lasting resolution also requires political, legal and democratic steps.