Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka is an island, roughly the size of West Virginia, at the southern tip of India. It is separated from its large neighbor, India, by about 29 kilometers (18 miles) of sea. The Sinhala, who constitute about 75 percent of the island's estimated 2003 population of 20 million, are mostly Buddhists and unique to the island. The Sri Lankan and Indian Tamils who make up approximately 17 percent of the population are mostly Hindus and have counterparts in southern India.

British colonizers signed a convention in 1815 agreeing to maintain Buddhism as the official state religion in Sri Lanka, known as Ceylon until 1972. However, the introduction of Christianity, the English language, and other Western institutions resulted in violations of that agreement. Sri Lankan Tamils as a group gained political and economic advantage over the Sinhala Buddhist majority. Nevertheless, with the introduction of universal franchise and a parliamentary democracy in 1931, the Sinhala Buddhist majority began to dominate the political scene. A social welfare state providing free education, health care, and subsidized food was also inaugurated with political democratization in 1931.

In 1948 Sri Lanka gained its political independence under the leadership of the Westernized constitutional elite of the United National Party (UNP) led by D. S. Senanayake (1884–1952). With the victories of the breakaway Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) headed by Solomon West Ridgeway Dias (S.W.R.D.) Bandaranaike (1899–1959) in 1956 and later his widow Sirimavo (1916–2000), the state used its power to reclaim a special place for Buddhism and to make Sinhala Sri Lanka's official language. These policies undermined the privileges of powerful Christian and Sri Lankan Tamil minorities and resulted in ethnoreligious conflicts and violence. This disaffection was not restricted to ethnic and religious minorities, however. Many Sinhala youth from rural areas were also experiencing limited access to state employment and upward mobility. The insurrection of the Marxist-based Jatika Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in 1971 resulted from their dissatisfaction with Sinhala elites.

When J. R. Jayawardena (1906–1996) came into power in 1977, an open economy and a new constitution were introduced. The 1978 Constitution of Sri Lanka replaced the previous Westminster-style parliamentary government with a presidential system modeled after France, one with a powerful chief executive. It included substantial provisions for Tamils, including national language status for the Tamil language and the elimination of restrictions on Tamils seeking to enter the university system or gain state employment. Nonetheless, by the early 1980s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the "Tamil Tigers" or LTTE) were engaged in an armed struggle in the hope of creating a separate and exclusive Tamil nation-state. That struggle developed into a civil war between the Sri Lankan government and Tamil Tigers that continued for nearly twenty years.

However, beginning in late 2001, both parties declared ceasefires and began fragile peace negotiations that in 2004 produced much-reduced levels of violence. Decades of civil war and political turmoil have taken their toll on citizen rights in Sri Lanka. Persisting partisan conflict between President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga (b. 1945), daughter of the former prime ministers S.W.R.D. and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and opposition Prime Minister Ranil Wickramasinghe hampered peace efforts, as well as effective government, until 2004. In that year, the president's party won a plurality, although not a majority, in parliamentary elections. However, continued child recruitment, killing of Tamil dissidents, and other violations of human rights and democratic norms by the LTTE pose serious threats to the achievement of a sustainable peace.

Presidential Systems.

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