Former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa speaks to his supporters at his residence in Medamulana in this recent photo.

Sri Lanka is to have a new constitution. The aim, we are told, is to grant greater political power to the island’s Tamil minority with a view to preventing the sort of ethnic tensions that led to a long and bitter civil war. While any attempt to solve the conflict between Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority and Tamils is to be welcomed, we can’t blame Tamils if they have greeted the government’s announcement made on Jan. 9 with serious reservations. For one thing, it has taken one full year for the government of President Maithripala Sirisena to think of addressing a problem, which threw the island into endemic violence for 37 years.

It was with great hopes that the Tamils looked to the surprise victory of Sirisena over Mahinda Rajapaksa in January’s presidential election in which Tamils voted overwhelmingly for Sirisena who was a member of the Rajapaksa Cabinet until he parted company with the president just before the election.

Sirisena has drastically reduced the number of troops on the streets of Jaffna where Tamils are concentrated and lifted restrictions on diplomats, foreign tourists and journalists visiting Tamil areas. The roadblocks and military checkpoints in Tamil areas are gone too. But human rights groups cite the enduring displacement of Tamils, the appropriation of their land by the military, the government’s refusal to take the country off its war footing and the delay in investigating war crimes. According to an earlier UN report, around 40,000 ethnic minority Tamils were killed in a final offensive ordered by the government in 2009. The last is a sensitive issue for Tamils who want an inquiry by independent international experts while Sirisena insists on a domestic mechanism.

There may be two reasons for Sirisena’s opposition to an international inquiry. He was in charge of the Defense Ministry during the final phase of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Secondly, the Sinhalese are against such a probe. Tamils ask whether the kind of sweeping constitutional reforms that will grant them the sort of autonomy they want will not meet the same opposition from the Sinhalese hard-liners.

It was the systematic discrimination by the majority Sinhalese against Tamils in employment and education that led to a conflict, which claimed 100,000 lives between 1972 and 2009. Tamils were often favored for higher government positions under British colonial rule. After independence in 1948, many lost their positions as successive governments pursued language and other policies favoring the Sinhalese majority. This led to the demand for autonomy and later a separate state for Tamils after the LTTE became a formidable force and changed the shape of the ethnic conflict. The decimation of LTTE does not mean an end to the Tamil problem. Though LTTE has suffered a crushing defeat, its support base continues to remain intact. Any organization claiming to be the protector of Tamil interests can draw on that support and revive the conflict.

LTTE was one of the world’s most ruthless terrorist organizations. Rajapaksa is the only leader in recent history who can claim to have led a counterinsurgency campaign to a successful conclusion. But he failed to ennoble his battlefield victory with imaginative gestures and meaningful concessions to the Tamils at the negotiating table.

Can Sirisena succeed where Rajapaksa failed? The president last week reiterated that the government would address three key demands placed by the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) pertaining to a political solution, Tamil prisoners, and the issue of land grab in the north. These were some of the conditions the TNA put forward to Sirisena at the presidential polls in January last year. The president, unlike his predecessor, had already paid three visits to Jaffna, underscoring the importance of the region.

Though important, such gestures will not heal the wounds of a long civil war. What is needed is a durable political solution based on real autonomy under a federal structure.

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