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The government and the LTTE must come together to forge a covenant that eschews bickering and instead build frameworks for the sustainable development of regions affected by the disaster. The trust relationships created in this exercise would be invaluable in the larger processes of peacebuilding. Conflict-sensitive approaches must be mainstreamed into every aspect of long-term relief. Consonant with a renewed call for the introduction of Freedom of Information legislation, relief efforts must always be open to the rigour of public scrutiny. It is only by the creation of accountable and transparent structures that one can avoid further erosion of ethnic and communal harmony, and counter perceptions of favouritism or bias in aid delivery and relief work.
All communities in Sri Lanka, especially the Muslim and Tamil communities in the northeast, must be equal partners in the long-term relief efforts to ensure that partisan bias does not creep in and undermine the sustainability of relief efforts. Long-term relief needs to be looked at holistically–from a media that acts in the public interest to enabling legislation that strengthens the accountability of relief mechanisms, the myriad of ways in which Boxing Day 2004 can change, for the better, the contours of the larger peace process remain uncharted to date.
The long-term relief efforts are also not merely about development as something that is uncontested and straightforward. It is unfortunate that even today, the state is openly eschewing a participatory approach to the myriad of tasks that lie ahead, instead taking a position that all aid and operations should be funnelled though its failed (or failing) apparatus. The incomprehensibility of this stance is more acute when we realise that it was on account of the inability of the state to meet the aspirations of communities and identity groups in Sri Lanka that gave rise to the ethnic conflict in the first place. The imperatives of a holistic and conflict-sensitive development process make it imperative that southern politics realises the acute need to reach out to communities in the northeast. Furthermore, notions of neo-liberal development, which governments of the day have a peculiar penchant for, must also be contested. There is a significant corpus of literature that strongly suggests that economic development that does not have roots in the communities it is supposed to liberate by a high GDP growth, that does not endogenously develop community resources, that does not transfer knowledge and creates vicious dependencies, that draws a simplistic linkage between high growth and economic empowerment, do not, in the long term, result in an equitable and just social system. While the argument is also not to revert to a pastoral Marxism, blueprints drawn up in non-consultative ways are bound to be rife with problematic normative assumptions of developmental theories, which if allowed to take root, may severely affect politico-social relations in the future and again lay the seeds for violent conflict.
It is imperative that we do not let the events of 26th December 2004 derail our nation’s progress. It is our response to the tsunamis that will forge our mettle–to have used the tsunamis as a watershed to create a more just social order, to heal strained ethnic relations and make the government more responsive to the aspirations of all communities in Sri Lanka. One recalls the emotive words of John Hume: “All of us are asked to respect the views and rights of others as equal of our own and, together, to forge a covenant of shared ideals based on commitment to the rights of all allied to a new generosity of purpose.”
The danger of not doing so is to turn our country into a sarcophagus of hopelessness from which we may never escape.
The world is watching us.
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Sanjana
Sanjana Hattotuwa is a Rotary World Peace Scholar presently pursuing a Masters in International Studies from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The views expressed here are his own. He can be contacted at hatt@wow.lk.
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