COLUMNISTS M. Chandrapala may not be your typical Sinhalese Sri Lankan. Dressed in an ankle-length lungi and standing outside his modest home in Trincomalee, on the east coast of this beautiful but tragic island, he tells me that Tamil citizens must be given political rights if the fragile peace reached this year is to hold. A former justice of the peace turned organic farmer, Mr Chandrapala is also an advocate of mixed schooling, which he says is essential to foster understanding between Sinhalese and Tamil communities cleaved by language, culture and religion. “Children should quarrel in school and learn how to get on,” he says. “If we don’t solve these problems, the war will come again.”
In May, the Sri Lankan army under General Sarath Fonseca ended 26 years of brutal civil conflict with the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The war had cost more than 70,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. It had also spawned one of the most ruthless secessionist groups in the world, prepared to terrorise its own people as well as the Buddhist majority. The finality of the government’s victory was underlined when grisly footage of the moustachioed corpse of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers’ founder, was paraded on television. Even Tamils with little sympathy for the bloodthirsty organisation that had fought in their name could not help feeling that an era had passed.
