Sri Lanka - challenges and opportunities - Part II:

Complexities in land issue being addressed

Public lecture delivered by External Affairs Minister Prof. G.L. Peiris, at Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington DC, recently.

We have already done away with the whole edifice of emergency regulations which at that time was a necessity for the protection of life and limb. But the government of Sri Lanka was quite determined to bring that regime to an end as soon as the hostilities were over. Hence, the regulations are no longer operative in any part of the island, and High Security Zones which were established during that period under these extraordinary circumstances visited upon us by a ruthless terrorist organisation are now in the process of been dismantled. There is only one high security zone today in the Northern peninsula - that is in the Palaly area, and 43 percent of that has now been given up. And it will shrink further during the next few weeks.

We have established a database which enables people to gather information relating to members of their families whose whereabouts are not known. Advertisements have been inserted in all three media indicating to the relevant people the steps that they ought to take to access this information.

Civil administration

We are also addressing very complex and convoluted issues relating to land. These are incredibly difficult. The historical background to the problem is that the terrorist group evicted the lawful owners of these lands and put into possession members of what they called ‘Mahavir Families’ - the families of the LTTE cadres. They were put in possession and now, with the return of peace and tranquillity, the former owners are coming back to reclaim what belongs to them, and the government is in the process of handling this multifaceted problem in a situation where the authentic title deeds are no longer available, since the terrorists destroyed those deeds in the areas of which they had been in effective control at the relevant time. So the land issues are also being addressed.

It is my profound conviction, not just as a politician and a Cabinet minister, but as an educationist, as Mr. Hathaway pointed out to you a few minutes earlier, I spent 26 years of my life in higher education teaching two generations of Sri Lankan students.

It is my experience in the university system of Sri Lanka that one of the basic causes of aggravation of tensions was the kind of stratification of society that was brought about by considerations relating to language. If we speak about the young generation in Sri Lanka today, in our schools and universities, we have the problem that the Sinhala community is not able to talk to the Tamil community, and vice versa, as neither community speaks the language of the other, and neither community is really comfortable with the use of English.

When I was an undergraduate myself, we were not overly conscious of racial identity because we could speak to one another in English. And friendships were made on the basis of shared interests and values rather than on factors rooted in ethnicity. For that reason, the President of Sri Lanka has rightly acknowledged, accepting one of the recommendations of the LLRC, that there ought to be, as a matter of priority, a programme which promotes bi and tri-lingual competence.

This was a programme inaugurated in our country about five months ago with the participation of the former President of India, Dr. Abdul Kalam, a renowned scientist, who accepted with pleasure the invitation that was extended to him by the President of Sri Lanka to visit Colombo for the purpose of inaugurating this exciting and obviously relevant programme.

Parliamentary Select Committee

We have also taken action to appoint a large number of Tamil speaking Police officers to man Police stations in the Northern part of the country and, during the last ten months, no less than 850 such Tamil speaking Police officers have been appointed.

The government of Sri Lanka is acting rapidly and effectively to ensure the greater use of the Tamil language in judicial administration and in civil administration. All of this is now happening.

Then, moving on to the longer term measures, the government is about to set up a Parliamentary Select Committee which is a forum that enables all the political parties in the Sri Lankan Parliament to come together, to give their attention to constitutional changes that are appropriate in my country at the present time.

Some difficulties were experienced in prevailing upon some of the major Tamil political parties to enter into this process - there were reservations on the part of some of these parties but recently, two days ago, there was an important meeting in Colombo to try to break this deadlock and to enable these deliberations to commence.

You are aware that during the last 12 years several successive governments of different political complexions made attempts to put some of these constitutional amendments in place. Unfortunately, none of these attempts succeeded for one fundamental reason - the lack of a sufficient consensus in the country at large in support of the reforms that were proposed.

It is very much in our interest to avoid history repeating itself. We don’t want to add another leaf to the thicket; we don’t want to come up with a series of recommendations that would gather dust on a shelf. The critical need this time is for implementation, and this is why we need every political group in the Sri Lankan Parliament to have the opportunity of articulating their views on the changes that are desirable at this time. Everybody is included in the process; they are stakeholders in the process. Nobody feels excluded, and that is the only way to achieve a set of reforms that would be actually implementable on the ground.

These are the main issues that we are dealing with, and I would like to emphasise one matter in conclusion.

We are conscious of the opportunity that has been presented to us at this moment. Nobody is more conscious of it than the government and the people of Sri Lanka. But we also realise that if changes are to be effected, then the process that is to be adopted must be seen by the country as a domestic process, sensitive to the aspirations of our people, harmonising with our culture, and there should not be a perception in the country that this is some kind of donor driven or excessively foreign owned process; because if that feeling is engendered in the country, inevitably it would trigger a reaction that would be unhelpful in terms of implementing reforms that are required at this moment in our history.

The nuances of the situation are therefore important. This does not mean that we are not prepared to listen to our friends from abroad, that is by no means the case, but at the end of the day, the solution that emerges must have a home-grown quality to it.

Legal and political system

This is amply recognised by the international legal and political system which accords priority to the principle that domestic remedies and domestic procedures must have precedence.

The government is dealing with a set of problems which did not arise yesterday or the day before. It has been a historical process; it has been an accumulation of issues over a protracted period of time. There cannot be impatience; these are not matters that can be sorted out overnight. What is required is a process - a realistic, sustained process to address these issues.

It is very much our wish to share our thoughts and perceptions with policy makers in Washington. There is much that the United States and Sri Lanka can do together in the new situation that has presented itself in Sri Lanka. We have more than 5,000 Sri Lankan students studying in universities in the United States.

The United States is one of the major markets for our exports, particularly for our apparel products. We have in operation right now, a trade and investment agreement between Sri Lanka and the US. All the ingredients are in place, and I welcome this opportunity, Mr. Chairman, to come here and share these thoughts with you on what is being done in Sri Lanka at the present moment, the magnitude of the problems that we have to deal with, our perception of priorities, steps that we have put in place for the well being of the people of Sri Lanka as a whole.

Concluded