SRI LANKA: Business Came Late but Made a Difference in Peace Calls

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Sep 4 2002 (IPS) - When widespread rioting against minority Tamils broke out in July 1983, a top Sri Lankan minister shook his head in despair and said: “There goes away our dream of being another Singapore.”

He was referring to how the South Asian island nation had, since 1977, been liberalising a previously inward-looking economy at a pace that some said was far ahead than India and even some South-east Asian nations. At the time, the country could nurse hopes of being a top financial capital in Asia.

“Our plan at that time was by 1990 we overtake Singapore (at Singapore’s level of development in 1980) and probably by the year 2000, we would be the number one economy between Dubai and Singapore,” then finance minister Ronnie de Mel recalled to IPS.

De Mel, finance minister for more than 10 years, was the architect of Sri Lanka’s economic reforms in the late 1970s.

Nineteen years after the 1983 riots, after thousands of lives have been lost and an economy devastated by a bloody campaign by Tamil guerrillas fighting for a separate homeland, Sri Lanka’s business community — hoping to restore the economy to its former glory — is leading the civil society movement toward ending the war.

“We have all realised that we cannot go forward without peace. We believe in the peace process and want it to work,” said Neela Marikkar, spokeswoman for Sri Lanka First, a business group that has in the past year led the involvement by peace-shy businesses.

On Sep. 16, the day Sri Lanka starts peace talks with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in Thailand, a group of high-powered business leaders will accompany Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe to New York for an ‘Invest in Peace’ promotion jointly undertaken by the government and the private sector.

As part of this initiative, Wickremesinghe will meeting top investors and bankers in a bid to attract investment into Sri Lanka with peace prospects up ahead.

He will also be addressing U.N. general assembly on Sep. 18, where he will unveil a new peace vis-a-vis development plan to turn around the fortunes of a country that, economists say, should have been one of Asia’s tiger economies if not for the war.

Indeed, when Tamil rebels attacked Colombo’s airport on Jul. 24 last year, the already-battered business community was shell-shocked.

In the following months, tourism arrivals sank from 100 percent to five percent of bookings in all resort hotels. Foreign insurers raised premiums on planes and ships calling over at Colombo, raising airfares and raising the cost of exports.

The Sep. 11 attacks in the United States further aggravated the situation in Colombo. “It was a wake-up call for us,” says Jagath Fernando, president of Sri Lanka First and deputy chairman of John Keells Holdings, Sri Lanka’s biggest company.

Bringing together 14 associations and chamber groups — which include the cream of the export sector, tea trade, industry, garments, hotels and travel operators, airline agents, shipping agents and freight forwarders — Sri Lanka First launched a media blitz on peace.

On Sep.19, the group and other associations drew more than one million people to Colombo’s streets and several districts in a ‘hold-hands-for peace’ human chain. It was the biggest-ever peace demonstration in Sri Lanka.

But business-peace promoters have been dogged by many questions from the media and civil society. They ask why the private sector stayed aloof from Sri Lanka’s war and other problems over the years, and stepped in only when their bottom line was hit.

“The business community (generally) has no noble objectives and only comes in when its bottom line is affected,” says Economic Reforms Minister Milinda Moragoda. “But I think its current involvement is part of a cumulative process. There is more realisation now than in the past that we would be in deeper trouble if we don’t do anything about it.”

“People think this is the last chance and are willing to give the peace process a try,” explains Moragoda.

An economist and former banker, he will be handling the peace talks on behalf of the government along with his cabinet colleague Professor G L Peiris, chief negotiator for Colombo in the Thailand talks.

Apart from the human toll of the conflict – some 64,000 people killed since 1983 – its impact on the economy has been staggering.

More than 600 billion rupees (6.2 billion U.S. dollars) has been taken away so far from development work and spent on campaigns to quell the Tamil rebellion, economists estimate.

Foreign investment, though recovering slowly over the years, has also taken a hit. “Who would want to invest in a war-torn country?” asked an official of a local company, whose foreign joint venture partner revoked an investment decision after a major bomb blast in the capital.

Without the war, Sri Lanka’s economy — dependent on remittances from its overseas workers, garments and tea exports — should have been growing by 7 to 8 percent a year.

But this has settled to 4 to 5 percent in the last decade, except last year when the economy contracted by 1.4 percent, triggering the alarm bells that galvanised the business community into action for peace.

Sri Lanka First campaigners concede that the business community had waited too long with its ‘this is for the government to handle, our job is to create jobs and make money’ attitude.

“In hindsight, we realise the number of missed opportunities. We would have been far ahead of other countries if 1983 did not happen,” agrees Marikkar, adding however that it is better late than never to get involved in the peace process.

She say that many companies and individuals had their own actions on peace, but that business’ collective approach came after the 2001 airport attack. “That was the turning point. That was the difference,” Marikkar recalls.

Lalith Kotalewala, chairman of a large private sector group and a peace campaigner who was attacked by anti-peace groups at rallies last year, says that business people have as much stake as everybody in a permanent end to the Tamil conflict.

Besides, Kotalewala adds: “If anyone should hate the LTTE and its leader, it is myself. I have been permanently disabled in one eye in the rebels’ attack on the Central Bank in 1996. It is just that myself, as a member of the business community, believe in peace for the cause of the country.”

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