The politics of internment

Throughout the years of the island's ethnic conflict, successive governments of Sri Lanka maintained that the war was against the LTTE and not the Tamil people. As such, with the end of the war in May, the world expected to see Colombo launch a process of reconciliation that would once and for all resolve the grievances and aspirations of all communities, and particularly the Tamil community. Then Sri Lanka could rebuild inter-community relations and settle into a path of democratic governance and economic prosperity. But such an opportunity and hopes are now being dashed by what is increasingly looking like the narrow interests and unprincipled politics of the administration of Mahinda Rajapakse. And what forces us to believe this is the continued internment of a quarter million Tamil civilians, who had suffered under the jackboot of the LTTE and narrowly escaped the war, while having lost many kith and kin.

This gruelling condition is as much a political crisis as it is a humanitarian one. The fundamental question facing the roughly 280,000 interned Tamil civilians today is one regarding their citizenship and their relationship to the Sri Lankan state. Rights of citizenship should ensure freedom of movement, expression and association – the absence of which in essence is, automatically, a suspension of democracy. If the LTTE disrupted the state's functioning by holding a population hostage within a territory it controlled by force of ar ms, the Rajapakse government is undermining the legitimacy of the state through these internment camps, which have suspended the rights of its citizens.