By Feizal Samath
COLOMBO, Oct 12 1998 (IPS)

As the long-drawn civil war escalates in Sri Lanka’s north with a bloody battle claiming 2,000 lives over three days recently, public opinion in the island’s south has swung in favour of non-military solutions to the war.

In an opinion poll published last week, the Sinhalese majority who dominate the government and mainly live outside the war zones, overwhelmingly rejected military solution as the only route to long-lasting peace in the island.

More than 77 percent of the 2,000 heads of household surveyed by researchers from Colombo University polled a definite “No” to the question, “do you think a military solution can solve the problem.”

In response to another question as to what steps should be taken to find a lasting solution to the ethnic conflict that is bleeding the island, 65 percent said they favoured non-military options like a political solution, policies devoted to ensuring equality, amity and harmony and confidence building.

The independent survey by the Centre for Anthropological and Social Studies of Colombo University, was supervised by Prof. Siripala Hettige and covered the entire island except the battle zones where access is restricted because of heavy fighting.

The main focus of the study was to ascertain the views of the majority Sinhalese population regarding the 15 year civil war, and its solution. Almost three-fourths of Sri Lanka’s 18 million people are Sinhalese.

Ironically the results of the opinion poll were released during a week of very heavy fighting when both the government and Tamil Tiger militants claimed victory and the capture of two northern towns, Mankulam and Kilinochchi respectively.

Tamil Tiger rebels who claim they represent Sri Lanka’s 2.5 million Tamils living mainly in the north and east, are fighting for a separate homeland. The seeds of the insurgency were planted by discriminatory government policies regarding education, employment and land-use introduced to favour the Sinhalese.

Radical Sinhalese politicians and some sections of the Buddhist clergy aver that Sinhalese public opinion strongly backs the deployment of the military as the only way to peace.

This was a commonly-held view some years ago, but with the military unable to convincingly crush the Tamil Tigers, considered to be the world’s deadliest guerrilla army, many more people have come around to believing in the futility of war.

Since 1995 when the Sri Lankan military recaptured Jaffna town from the Tamil rebels who had been running a parallel government in the north from there, government troops have not been able to consolidate their position.

Operations conducted over months to wrest a road linking the Jaffna peninsula with the mainland from the rebels have been unsuccessful and the Sri Lankan military is bogged down in bruising battles.

Sri Lanka’s government led by President Chandrika Kumaratunga and the main opposition United National Party agree that only peace can end the ethnic conflict, but they are at loggerheads over how this should be done.

After one round of peace talks with the rebels failed in 1995, within the first year of her coming to power, President Kumaratunga has been pushing ahead with a tough military campaign in the hope of forcing the rebels to the negotiating table on the government’s terms.

The opposition has urged the government to adopt a war and peace strategy – peace talks and war running together, which Kumaratunga has rejected. The government’s peace plan, offering more political and administrative autonomy in Tamil-dominated areas, has not met with opposition approval either.

Suggestions from moderate sections of Sinhalese for a resumption of peace talks to end the bloody fighting, has been fiercely resisted by nationalist groups and some Sinhalese political parties.

The Colombo university survey is the first transparent yardstick of public opinion. Political analyst Jehan Perera said that there have been public opinion surveys on previous occasions on some aspects of the ethnic conflict but their results and the methodology have been shrouded in secrecy.

“Some appeared to have been commissioned by political parties, and so they seem to have a partisan purpose, which vitiated their trustworthiness,” he wrote in the ‘Island’ daily.

He said the results of the survey rejects the view that a

majority of the Sinhalese community believes that the ongoing war is simply a terrorist problem that can be ended only through a military solution.

Prof. Hettige, in releasing the results of the survey, said that people at the grassroots level have an understanding of the complexity of the Sri Lankan situation.

“They have given honest answers because they have no vested interests. They are more open minded than opinion makers who have vested interests. They also have no illusions about quick fix solutions,” he said. Whether the findings will influence political opinion remains to be seen.

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