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Summary

Sri Lanka is a constitutional democracy with relatively high educational and social standards. Political, social, and economic development has, however, been seriously constrained by ethnic conflict between the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil ethnic groups. Since 1983, a separatist war costing at least 70,000 lives has been waged against government forces by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a rebel group that seeks to establish a separate state or internal self-rule in the Tamil-dominated areas of the North and East. The United States designated the LTTE as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in 1997 and demands the Tigers lay down their arms and foreswear the use of force before that status can change. A Norwegian-brokered peace process begun in the late 1990s produced a February 2002 "permanent" ceasefire agreement. The Colombo government and the LTTE held their first peace talks in seven years in 2002, with the rebels indicating they were willing to accept autonomy rather than independence for Tamil-majority regions. The two sides agreed in principle to seek a solution through a federal structure. Yet the period 2004-2005 witnessed increasing instability within the ranks of both the Colombo government and the LTTE. This was exacerbated by wrangling over administration of foreign aid in response to a massive December 2004 tidal wave that killed up to 35,000 citizens in Sri Lanka's worst-ever natural disaster. Political rivalry between the Sri Lankan Freedom Party (SLFP) and the United National Party (UNP) has long hindered peace efforts. The United People's Freedom Alliance, a coalition of the SLFP and the staunch Marxist People's Liberation Front (JVP), won a slim majority in 2004 parliamentary elections and defeated the UNP to replace its then-Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe with perceived hardliner Mahinda Rajapaksa, who himself went on to win the presidency in a narrow 2005 electoral victory. Rajapaksa stabilized his position by enticing the defection of several UNP and Muslim party parliamentarians in early 2007, but his government has faced constant pressure from the JVP and from hardline Buddhist-nationalist parties that are part of the ruling coalition. Meanwhile, the LTTE suffered a major schism in 2004 when a top commander in the East known as Colonel Karuna broke away with up to 6,000 cadres and began collaborating with government forces. Ethnic violence spiked in mid-2006 and, with major government military offensives in 2007 and Colombo's formal withdrawal from the ceasefire agreement in January 2008, full-scale civil war again appears to be at hand. U.S. policy supports peaceful efforts to reform Sri Lanka's democratic political system in a way that provides for full political participation of all communities; it does not endorse the establishment of another independent state on the island. Since Sri Lankan independence in 1948, the United States has provided more than $3.6 billion in assistance funds, about two-thirds of this in the form of food aid. Direct non-food aid for FY2007 is estimated at $9.4 million. Serious human rights problems in Sri Lanka are blamed on all major parties to the ethnic conflict and have led to some limited U.S. and international aid sanctions. This report will be updated periodically.

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