War Termination in Sri Lanka
This article has a central aim of explaining the catastrophic loss of civilian life in the last five months of the civil war in Sri Lanka. The article proposes that both the government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the LTTE are culpable for civilian deaths; the LTTE in an effort to stave off defeat so it might be able to re-constitute itself at a later time, and the GoSL in a determination not to allow the LTTE as an organization to survive the conflict. The article also argues that a preliminary explanation for the origins of the Sri Lankan civil war can be found in the GoSL program of transferring members of the Sinhalese population into the Northern and Eastern provinces of the country, regions held by the Tamil population to be their homeland territory. Key words : Population; Tamil; Sinhalese insurgency; Civilian; Territory
Negotiating National Identity and Self-Determination in Ethnic Conflicts: The Choice Between Pluralism and Ethnic Cleansing
The contradictions of ethnonational identity, which make it a prime force in both the promotion and the destruction of human dignity and social justice, have become more pronounced with the ending of the Cold War. It is necessary to reconceptualize national identity and develop new norms for accepting a group's right to national self-determination through establishment of an independent state expressing its national identity, and even far accepting its claim to national identity itself This article proposes that (1) implementation of a group's right to self-determination cannot be left to the group alone, but must be negotiated with those who are affected by that decision, particularly minority populations; and (2) national identity itself must be “negotiated” — explored and discussed — with those who are affected by the group's self-definition.
Ethnic Groups in Conflict
here, but often with some revealing new insight; and only an exceptionally eclectic and voracious reader would fail to find new material. Even so familiar a subject as the Indian railways produces some fresh touches: Headrick remarks that British investors, under the government guarantee system (of 5 percent return on their capital), were not gambling on the profitability of railway operation in India but on the continuing ability of the British Raj to collect taxes; and India was the only nation with a major rail network that failed to industrialize during its railway boom. He describes a masterful use of technical requirements to keep out commercial rivals while maintaining a free trade ideology and a later masterful use of procrastination and indecision to avoid a hard choice between a declining British industry and an emerging India. Ironies abound. Earnest and laborious, although underfunded, efforts produced successful agricultural research programs (for export cash crops, of course) in Indonesia, India, and Malaya. But although research in Indochina "had been disorganized, unfocused, and erratic," it didn't matter, "because neighboring colonies had developed profitable plants and techniques" (p. 231) readily borrowed or stolen by French planters. Nevertheless, the French regime established something the British Raj in India never did. Its Office Indochinois du Riz, established in 1930-31, applied modern research techniques to a major peasant food and subsistence crop. Some fascinating people figure in these case studies, from the Indian geologist Pramatha Nath Bose—whose work made possible the success of Tata Iron and Steel, but only after he resigned from the service of a British Indian government that opposed such efforts—to men like Nigeria's Herbert S. H. Macaulay, Africa's first black civil engineer, who was sent to England to study surveying, civil engineering, and piano tuning. Colonial administrators often thought of technical education in terms of preindustrial crafts and not modern professions, not just out of racism (although there was plenty of that). Many were conservative, in a sense refugees from their own industrialized cultures, who wished to protect and conserve the "best elements" of the colonial cultures from rapid change. Both colonizers and colonized had ambiguous attitudes, which made it easier to transfer technology for transport and communication but difficult to transfer technology for import substitution. Asians and Africans had entrepreneurial skills, but only rarely combined with capital and an understanding of Western technology; and even a great success, such as the Tatas in India or smallholder rubber growers in Malaya, were at the mercy of government policies.