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Feb. 27, 2005 According to Stoddard ‘A failed state results when the leadership and institutions of the state are weakened and discredited to the point where the state can no longer fulfill its responsibilities or exercise sovereign power over the territory within its borders’. In the above definition, the inability of the state leads to its classification as a failed state. What do you call a state that wages a genocidal war on its ethnic minority? At the least we could call it a failed state but here the actions of the state, rather than its inability, lead to its classification as a failed state. The South Asian island nation of Sri Lanka is home to Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim ethnic communities. The Sinhalese believe that the island of Sri Lanka exclusively belongs to them. This belief comes from the Mahavamsa, a chronicle which states that the Sinhalese race was created by the union of a lion (the word ‘Sinha’ means lion in Sinhalese) and a human princess. Soon after the independence of Sri Lanka from Britain in 1948, the Sinhalese government started discriminating against the Tamils and Tamil Speaking Muslims. Sinhalese was made the only official language and Sri Lanka was declared a Buddhist state. Tamils were discriminated in all socioeconomic domains and denied equal opportunity in employment and education. The policy of discrimination took its natural path and soon turned into oppression. The Tamils who initially protested peacefully against the discrimination took up arms to fight oppression. By the mid eighties Sri Lanka had gone beyond oppressing and was waging a war against its own citizens, bombarding them with napalms, with genocidal intentions. Sri Lanka probably is the only Country in the world to unleash its armed forces on a murderous campaign against Tamils in the North-East, - its own citizens, and call it ‘War for Peace’. Although the Sri Lankan armed forces have committed numerous atrocities against the Tamils in the North-East, the Sri Lankan state has been successful in covering it up through disinformation campaigns and discrediting of the Tamil freedom struggle as a terrorist problem. However the attitude of the state in dealing with the post-tsunami relief has exposed its true nature to the International Community. Post Tsunami Relief The Asian tsunami disaster brought the best of humanity in people around the world with nations and peoples rushing to provide assistance to the divested states and its people. Sri Lanka was one of the worst affected countries, with its North- East coast populated by the Tamils and Tamil speaking Muslims and South coast populated by Sinhalese taking the brunt of the killer waves. Over 35,000 died in Sri Lanka of which at least 20,000 from the Tamil speaking North-East. Hundreds of thousands of people were made homeless. Unfortunately even a natural disaster of such epic proportions did not change the attitude of the Sri Lankan government towards the Tamil people of the North-East. The Sri Lankan Government took four days before sending any kind of assistance to the North-East. In a 2 hour long emergency cabinet meeting held to discuss the relief operations, just 5 minutes was spent discussing the North-East relief operations. When the United Nation’s secretary general Kofi Annan expressed his desire to visit the Tamil areas it was blocked. Armed soldiers who once waged a bloody war against the Tamils were deployed in the refugee camps to intimidate the refugees and disrupt the relief efforts of civic bodies and NGOs. In an attempt to disrupt the relief operations of the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization(TRO), an NGO praised by the International Community for assisting the people in the North-East, the Sri Lankan government imposed duty on all tsunami relief material arriving for NGOs at Sri Lankan ports. Out of approximately 100 containers that were seized by the authorities about 50 belonged to the TRO. Although Sri Lanka received generous assistance in the form of funds, men and material all the relief efforts were focused in the Southern Sri Lanka and the North-East was ignored. Whilst the North-East people are still struggling to clear the debris and house the homeless, the Sri Lankan government is planning the redevelopment of the affected South. In a recent report produce by the World Bank, Asian Development Bank and Japan Bank for International Cooperation it was estimated that $1.5 billion was required for reconstruction of the Tsunami ravaged Sri Lanka. The report estimated that 64% - majority of this fund is needed to reconstruct the North-East. However a report produced by Sri Lanka estimated $3.5 billion for reconstruction purposes. In this comprehensive report produced by Sri Lanka there were plans to build a new township with houses, schools, hospital, stadium and commercial complexes in the South to replace the tsunami damaged Hambantota. However there was no similar blue print to reconstruct the villages and towns wiped out in the North-East. The Sri Lankan state which consistently failed the Tamil speaking people since independence, once again failed them after the tsunami by neglecting their needs and cry for assistance. By any definition Sri Lanka is a failed state. Bibiliography 1. Stoddard, A. (2000) Ethnonationalism and the Failed State: Sources of Civil State Fragmentation in the International Political Economy, e-merge: A Graduate Journal of International Affairs, Volume 4, Carleton University, Canada 2. Various articles from CNN 3. Various articles from BBC 4. Various articles from TamilNet ------------ Email Thamilan: another_thamilan@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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