Colombo: As he tries to win the hearts
and minds of Tamils in a post-LTTE era, Sri Lankan President
Mahinda Rajapaksa plans to constitute a committee to study the root cause of the ethnic question and ways to prevent a repeat
of such a conflict that claimed has 70,000 lives.
The proposed committee would also study the lessons
the Sri Lankan state learned since sections of the minority
Tamils took to militancy in the late 1970s and the rise and
fall of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which fought for
a separate state for Tamils for over three decades.
"The committee would study on the development of the
LTTE and the nearly three decades of war involving the
militant outfit besides the challenges in the post-Prabhakaran
era, among other things," Disaster Management and Human Rights
Mahinda Samarasinghe said recently.
The move comes close on the heels of the Tamil
National Alliance, a pro-LTTE Tamil ethnic party, saying that
the people in Sri Lanka's north and east took to the streets
demanding equal rights because of the "state-sponsored
colonisation (of Sinhala community)".
Samarasinghe said the President plans to appoint the
committee "in order to avoid such a conflict from occurring
again in the future."
After the end of the 30-year-old civil war in May last
year with the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran, Rajapaksa had
offered equal rights for minority Tamils through a political
solution but said it won't be "imported".
The Minister's comments come weeks after the UN
announced its plans to constitute a panel to go into the
alleged human rights violations in the last phase of the civil
war.
The Sri Lankan Government is also under pressure from
various countries, including India, to take steps to protect
the rights of Tamil minorities.
Soon after re-election in January this year, Rajapaksa
said he would soon unveil a political plan for the estranged
Tamils.
He had also said he would hold a dialogue with Tamil
leaders after the April 8 parliamentary elections before
unveiling the plan.
Tamils are minorities in Sri Lanka and constitute over
12 per cent of the total population in the island. North and
Eastern provinces of Sri Lanka are dominated by Tamils.
The over three-decade civil war in Sri Lanka that
began in 1975 with the establishment of LTTE ended in 2009
claiming over 70,000 lives.
PTI
First Published: Monday, March 15, 2010, 17:59