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Rajapaksa’s has
done very little to convince Tamils
Jeremy Page
 
When President Rajapaksa of Sri Lanka declared
victory over the Tamil Tigers in May, he reached
out to the Tamil minority that the defeated
rebels had claimed to represent over 26 years of
civil war. Speaking in Tamil, as well as
his native Sinhalese, he told Parliament in
Colombo that the war against the Tigers was not
a war against the Tamil people, and declared
that everyone in Sri Lanka should live with
equal rights. Since then, however, he has
done little to convince Sri Lanka’s three
million Tamils — let alone the 74 million-strong
diaspora — of either of those points, and has,
in fact, tolerated or condoned much to persuade
them that the opposite is true. In the
celebrations that followed his victory, he
appeared to revel in comparisons to King
Dutugemunu, a legendary Sinhalese sovereign who
routed a rival Tamil monarch and unified Sri
Lanka.
More than six weeks after the Tigers’ defeat,
his Government still has not allowed UN staff
and aid workers unfettered access to the 300,000
ethnic Tamil refugees in army-run internment
camps.
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Critics of the Government continue to be
harassed and intimidated, the most recent
example being a popular astrologer who was
arrested last week after predicting that Mr
Rajapaksa would lose power in September.
This week, his Government announced that it
planned to add another 50,000 people to its
armed forces — already at a record strength of
more than 350,000, almost all Sinhalese.
In its defense, the Government says that it has
set a date of August 8 for elections to
representative bodies in the Vavuniya and Jaffna
areas, as part of a broader plan to democratize
the Tigers’ former territory. However, if
the Government continues to indulge Sinhalese
nationalists, drag its feet on resettlement,
harass its critics and spend public money on the
military rather than reconstruction, even
moderate Tamils say that the elections will be a
meaningless gesture.
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