Sri Lanka: The end of war and the continuation of struggle

Abstract

One of the world�s longest running civil wars �officially� ended on 18 May 2009 when the Sri Lankan army captured the town of Kilinochchi. �Peace�, the Sri Lankan government triumphantly claimed, had been achieved through a crushing military victory. Previous efforts to end the civil war had been frustrated by the fractured politics of Sri Lankan governments (Biswas 2009), the interplay of interstate and intrastate politics (Biswas 2006), global fear and insecurity fuelled by the �War on Terror� discourse and the growing extremism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) that also alienated a conflict-weary Tamil population. However, the concluding counterinsurgency campaign of the Rajapaksa regime undermined the rule of law and political pluralism (Lewis 2010) and its alternative narrative of the violence planted the seeds of a national trauma that will take years to heal. Show more