Sri Lanka from Ethnocracy O.Yiftachel
Yiftachel O. (2006), Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Pennsylvania Press, p.368
Sri Lanka
The island state of Sri Lanka (previously Ceylon) in composed to of two main ethnonational groups. Sinhalese, who are mainly Buddhist, make up 75 percent of the state's 19 million inhabitants. Tamils, who are mainly Hindu, make up 18 percent. Historical accounts of ethnic settlement are hotly contested, although there is evidence that both groups have existed on the island for more than two millennia (Perera 1990). Sri Lanka gained its independence from Britain in 1948 after an anticolonial struggle dominated by the Sinhalese groups but shared by Tamils, as well as other ethnic groups on the island. However, in the decade following independence the state gradually turned toward a Shinhalization strategy. This orientation intensified owing to Tamil resistance and an ensuing process of ethnic polarization.
Sri Lanka was formed as a democratic state, with formal institutions and governing procedures following, initially, the Westminster model (Little 1993). But in later, the Sri Lankan state was gradually appropriated by the Sinhalese community, mainly owing to its demographic advantage and strong sense of ethnonationalism (De Silva 1986; Uyangoda 1994). The Sinhalese used their dominance in the legislative, judiciary, and executive arms of government to advance an explicit Sinhalization process. As declared in 1983 by the Sri Lankan development minister, "Sri Lanka is inherently and rightfully a Sinhalese state … This must be accepted as a fact and not a matter of opinion to be debated. By attempting to challenge this premise, Tamils have brought the wrath of the Sinhalese on their own heads; they have themselves to blame" (Nissan 1984, 176).
This approach found expression in several key policies and programs, beginning in the 1950s with the adoption of religious Buddhist state symbols, which denote, in the Sri Lakan context, a purely Sinhalese affiliation. Another major step was taken in 1956 when Sinhalese was declared the only official state language. The state's official cultural was also developed around a series of Buddhist invented histories, symbols, and values, glorifying the link between the Buddha and the Sinhalese "guardians" of "his" island (Little 1993), and glorifying the images of the of the Sinhala nation as the indigenous "sons of the earth," and hence the only rightful owners and controllers of the state (Uyangoda 1994).
A further aspect of the Sinhalization strategy was in Sri lanka's demographic and citizenship policies. More than one million long-term Tamil residents who migrated to the island during the period of British rule, mainly as plantation workers, have been denied citenship as part of the Sinhalization approach being officially classified as "Indian Tamils." This move forced large sections of this community to leave the island and settle in India during the 1950s and 1960s. The rest of the group has remained to date without full citizenship or voting rights. The Sinhalese majority has thus managed to contain the size of the Tamil community and reinforce geographical and political intra-Tamil cleavage between Indian" and Sri Lankan" Tamils. Geographically, inhabit the island's northern and eastern regions. Politically, the disenfranchised Indian Tamils became totally dependent on the Sinhalese regime for basic rights and services and hence remained politically immobilized. Consequently, Indian Tamils have rarely participated or assisted in the militant resistance staged by Sri Lankan Tamils against the Sinhalizing state.
The island's ethnocratic policy – the Sinhalization of contested space. The British rulers had already encouraged the Tamils to immigrate into Sinhalese areas, breaking a centuries-long tradition of (mainly voluntary) spatial separation. Likewise, the Sri Lakan government encouraged Sinhalese to settle in the central and eastern regions, which previously were dominated and claimed by Tamils as part of their "own" regions.
This has been most evident in the large-scale Mahaweli irrigation and settlement project carried out predominantly during the 1970s and 1980s (Roded 1999). The project opened large tract of agricultural land in the island's central and northeastern regions, which offered mostly o landless or impoverished farmers. Bt 1993 1.1 millions people ( the vast majority of whom were Sinhalese) were resettled in these regions, creating a new Sinhalese regional lower-class collectivity and exacerbating the conflict with the Tamils, who considered the region part of their historic “Elam” (Peiris 1996).
Subsequently, the regions in question became a destination for large-scale (and mainly unauthorized) Tamil countersettlement. As the two populations increasingly intermingled in competitive setting (largely as a result of settlement initiatives like the Mahaweli project), antagonism and discrimination against the minority deepened, intensifying the breakdown of social and political order since the early 1980s.
The civil (ethnic) war, which has dominated the Sri Lankan state since the early 1980s, has brought to the fore the military as a major agent in the Sinhalization of contested space and the reinforcement of Sinhalese dominance in Sri Lankan politics. The army gradually extended state (that is, Sinhalese) control north and eastward, confining the resisting Tamil group to the Jaffna Peninsula at the state’s northeastern end. It has also caused a major internal refugee problem, with some 550,000 residents losing their homes during the fighting, 78% percent of them Tamils (de Silva 1996). During the same time, a series of emergency and “security” legislation reduced the protection of Tamil citizens against arbitrary state oppression (Uyangoda 1998). A parallel constitutional change increased the power of popularly elected president at the expense of the previouslu powerful legislature. Earlier, in 1978, several Tamil parliamentarians were disqualified on the basis of “acting against the Sinhalese state,” reducing the already limited Tamil political power (Little 1993).
The accumulating alienation of Tamils fro the Sri Lanjkan sate drove them to boycott the political process altogether. From 1978 until 2001, the majority of Tamils boycotted the Sri Lankan elections and only rarely participated in other state affairs. The state, on its part, did little to induce the Tamils back into the political arena until 1987, when further constitutional rewforms attempted to ease ethnic tensions by decentralizing state authority and granting autonomy to regional authorities. However, the Tamils did not accept the plan that was prepared without their participation, claiming that: (a) it compromised their drive for self-determination, and (b) it legitimized the “unlawful” Sinhalese domination of the eastern regions (Nissan 1996). Further, the state maintained ultimate control by classifying “national projects” that could bypass the proposed decentralized forms of decision making (Gunasekara 1996).
The Sinhalization strategy generated widespread Tamil resistance. The Tamils initially struggle for territorial –political autonomy within the Sri Lanakan state. Some autonomy was indeed offered to the Tamils in a (failed) Peace Plan, following a 1987 Indian invasion, seen by most Tamils as part of the government effort to control their regions. Following the state’s ethnocratic policies and brutal oppression a dialectical process of violent escalation began leading to Tamil disengagement from the state and eventually the breakout of civil war. When it was offered then, autonomy did not suffice. The fighting reached a peak of massive interethnic violence and terror during the mid-1990s, exacting an immense toll estimated at 70,000- 80,000 causalities, most civilians. In parallel the militant Liberation Tigers of Elam (LTTE) gained a position of sole Tamil leadership following a violent campaign against all other Tamil groups and leaders (Bloom 2003).
Only in 2002 was a ceasefire declared, when the Tamil leadership agreed to return to negotiations after the Sinhalese promised serious constitutional amendments and made more genuine attempt to include the Tamils in devising a new, highly devolved state structure. But the road to reforming the Sri Lankan ethnocracy is still fraught with several difficulties. In December of 2003, real advances in negotiations toward genuine Tamil autonomy in the northeast created a political crisis and a return to government of political forces objectiong to Tamil self-rule (even if limited). In addition, the highly ethnicized nature of the conflict has caused the more than one million Sri Lankan Muslims to form collective political demands, thereby complicating the task of rebuilding Sri Lanka.
The case of Sri Lanka thus illustrates well the emergence of ethnocratic and the inherent tensions between formal democratic procedures and a parallel state project of ethnicizing contested spaces and political institutions, while marginalizing and radicalizing the minority. It demonstrates the inability of an ethnocracy to be sustained for the long term and its need to reform structurally in order to survive as a state.
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