Symposia & Conferences
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Item The Peace Process in Sri Lanka and the Role of Civil Society(University of Kelaniya, 2005) Shammika, D.I.A.H.The ongoing peace process and what type of peace work civil society actors engage in, the obstacles to the creation of a people’s movement to peace in Sri Lanka, and some challenges to civil society in the current peace process are discussed here. We have since three years back a ceasefire agreement, which was planned to put a stop to the violence, which means an improved situation for the war weary people in Sri Lanka. We have to realize that a large amount of patience is needed in this difficult process. The importance of having a third party keeping up the dialogue between the parties, and investigating accusations of violations of the ceasefire agreement cannot be underestimated in a conflict where mistrust has throughout the years grown strong between the involved parties. Since the late 22 years, organizations for peace have been expressing ideas that were not commonly accepted: they have stressed the need for a negotiated, political settlement, and the futility of the military strategy. People have organized around narrow ethnic identities, and mobilized around prejudice, hatred or fear against the ethnic other. At the moment, popular support for the peace process is strong. Very few people would like to go back to the war situation. But as the peace process has made serious difficulties, or come to a standstill, people get increasingly frustrated. The ongoing peace process is a top level one. There is thus an urgent need to get the peace issue on the agenda of people and for people to receive correct information about what is going on and why. As obstacles we can list difficulty to being mobilised, ethnically division of civil society, vague definition of peace, being Colombo based and dependency on foreign funding. Challenges for Civil Society in the Peace Process are: to continue voicing people's support, to continue awareness raising about the background to the conflict, to show that there are other voices to be heard and to build bridges among the north, East and south of Sri Lanka .Item Ideological Warfare: Role of Foreign Funded NGOs and the Death of Civil Society in Sri Lanka(University of Kelaniya, 2005) Goonatilake, S.The explosion of foreign funded NGOs is a result of the New Policy Agenda in the Western world undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In countries such as India, Malaysia, Singapore with their strong defence and sovereignty oriented posture foreign funded NGOs have been largely limited to welfare work or to support of broad social causes. In none of these countries are foreign funded NGOs allowed to impinge on defence and sovereignty. In Sri Lanka, foreign funded NGOs have advocated erosion of sovereignty and have often acted as ideological proxies for the LTTE. The paper discusses the actions of several foreign funded NGOs such as the National Peace Council, International Alert, Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Berghof Foundation in eroding sovereignty, calling for two near states, promoting demilitarisation of the armed forces, and inciting the armed forces to go against the country’s unitary constitution. Outside those foreign funded NGOs directly promoting a pro LTTE agenda are some organisations purportedly studying Sri Lanka from a social science perspective. These organisations include the ICES (Colombo) and SSA both of which have acted as major clearing houses for much of the anti Sri Lanka, and specifically anti Buddhist propaganda couched in an academic garb. Those associated with ICES Colombo have written a variety of fiction masquerading as social science whose implied messages have been against the nationalist renaissance in Sri Lanka. Some in the SSA have explicitly called for the unmaking of the Sri Lankan nation. The paper examines in general terms the activities of these organisations as ideological warfare conducted against Sri Lanka and its people and as proxies acting for foreign interests bent on recolonization. The paper examines in greater detail activities of International Alert, the National Peace Council, and the Berghof Foundation as particular obnoxious examples. It also gives evidence that many of these organisations are run by a small coterie of persons who hold several interlocking positions in the different organisations. It is posited that the Sri Lanka's situation is a unique example of the reassertion of global Western power at a time when Asian states are getting stronger. It fits into an attempted recolonisation agenda.