SRI LANKA: Wealthy Business Turns Peacemakers

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Nov 12 1998 (IPS) - Treading a bold path to peace, Sri Lanka’s wealthy business community has initiated a series of negotiations with the main players in the ethnic conflict to end the 15 year civil war.

Top businessmen leading the peace brigade have held separate meetings with President Chandrika Kumaratunga and opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, and say they are ready to talk directly to elusive rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.

The captains of Sri Lanka’s industry may be taking a cue from their business colleagues abroad, particularly in South Africa and Northern Ireland, who have played a leading role in helping end ethnic or race conflicts there.

The process was begun last month by heads of six top chambers of commerce and a businessman who issued a strongly-worded joint statement castigating politicians for failing to end the bloody ethnic conflict which has retarded economic growth.

Blaming Sri Lanka’s political parties for the ethnic and economic mess, they said massive problems of unemployment, poor infrastructure and poverty remained “unresolved to the detriment of the country”.

The hard hitting statement was followed up by a meeting on Oct. 22 to lay the groundwork for a national agenda to resolve the ethnic problem to which major political parties, non- governmental groups, diplomats and rights activists were invited.

A National Council, including business and representatives of political parties, is to be set up to formulate peace priorities and negotiation strategies.

Business it appears is no longer willing to wait for politicians to take the lead in ending the war, and this could partly be because Sri Lanka’s economy, though resilient despite the war burden, has shown signs of a slowdown in recent months mainly due to mounting costs of war and a global downturn that has hit certain sectors hard.

Sri Lanka’s Central Bank has already revised its gross domestic product (GDP) growth and financial deficit forecasts for the year – a warning that the reasonable 6.4 percent economic growth in 1997 is unlikely to be repeated.

Business interests have acutely suffered during the years of escalating strife with foreign investors preferring to wait-and- watch and the tourist industry hard put to convince foreign travellers to visit the island’s south.

The war between government troops and Prabhakaran’s well trained guerrilla army called Tamil Tigers though confined mainly in the north and east has sometimes spilled into the south but its economic impact is felt countrywide.

“Sixty billion rupees