The Sri Lankan Civil War: From Conflict to Peacebuilding
The present study approaches the hypothesis according to which, the Sri Lankan war was very hard to handle. On the 25th of July 1983, a date which is also known as “Black July”, groups of Sinhalese civilians brutally attacked the Tamil community, provoking numerous deaths, fires and robberies. This is commonly considered the beginning of the civil war, which has officially ended 26 years later, in 2009. It could not be settled even after several rounds of peace talks, international mediation with India and Norway as facilitators, and a very supportive international context. It is very important to note that failed and inconclusive mediation not only did not put an end to the war, but made it re-escalate to a level of terror unprecedented in the history of the country – the LTTE was labeled as a terrorist organization by 32 countries. The present study conviction is that there is one factor in particular that can be considered a huge obstacle in the way of ethnic reconciliation and sustainable peace: the unaddressed ethnic issues which caused the war in the first place. The military victory over the LTTE left these issues still not brought up for solution, since state actors were oriented towards “solving the problem” and ending the war at all costs, and promoted it as a successful defeat of terrorism. This does not guarantee that their conflictive potential has been entirely spent.
