Sins of Their Founders
Where Singapore would set out to make the most of all its people on its path to prosperity, Sri Lanka chose petty ethnic chauvinism. This powerful book is a haunting reminder of the price countries in the developing world pay for the flawed choices of their founders.
Few places conjure up such contrasting images as Sri Lanka, the island nation of 21 million people off the southern tip of India. For the tourist in search of an exotic getaway—off the well-worn path of Bali or Phuket—Sri Lanka brings to mind pristine beaches, elephant safaris and therapeutic ayurvedic spas. But for much of the international community, the country stands for perhaps Asia’s single most egregious human-rights violation in this century. The United Nations estimates that between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians were killed in the closing stages of a 26-year civil war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam that ended with the terrorist group’s annihilation in 2009.
In “The Cage,” Gordon Weiss, an Australian journalist and former United Nations official in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, sets out to chronicle the conflict, with a particular focus on its gruesome dying stages. Tens of thousands of civilians found themselves crushed between one of the world’s most brutal terrorist outfits—best known for perfecting suicide bombings in the 1990s—and an army willing to flout the laws of war by shelling hospitals, executing prisoners and blocking medical supplies.
Mr. Weiss lays most of the blame for the carnage at the door of the Sri Lankan government, which tends to dismiss virtually all criticism as propaganda by the country’s enemies. He takes exception to Colombo’s “insistence on cloaking its victory in a Potemkin-like pretense at bloodlessness.” Instead he wants Sri Lanka to look its violent past “full in the face” in order to achieve a lasting peace. Mr. Weiss deplores the crude ethnic chauvinism of the ruling Sinhalese Buddhist majority government over the vanquished, and largely Hindu, Tamil minority, who constitute about a fifth of the country’s population.
Most observers date the formal start of the Sri Lankan civil war to 1983, when, in response to a Tiger ambush that killed 13 government troops, Sinhalese mobs lynched between 1,000 and 3,000 Tamil civilians in Colombo. “Black July” spurred a large-scale emigration of frightened Tamils to the West, where the diaspora now numbers about a million people. Another 60 million ethnic Tamils live across the narrow Palk Strait in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
But the roots of Sri Lanka’s troubles go back to the country’s independence. In 1948, Sri Lanka arguably had better prospects than the British Empire’s only other multiethnic colony with a large Tamil minority: Singapore. Sri Lanka was blessed with an educated population, a history of limited self-government and a strategic location. Of the two countries, however, it is Singapore that has thrived while Sri Lanka has yet to live up to its founding promise.
Instead of embracing an inclusive view of citizenship—like Singapore or neighboring India—Sri Lanka marginalized its Tamil minority. Many Sinhalese chose to view their country primarily as the lone remaining outpost of South Asian Buddhism, once the region’s dominant faith but long since extinguished by a combination of Hindu resurgence and Islamic conquest.
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