Sri Lanka | South Asia

Detailed conflict history

CrisisWatch database

Recent reports and briefings

Sri Lanka has been wracked by violent conflict for most of the past 25 years, suffering more than 150,000 deaths in conflicts in both the north and south. Successive attempts to resolve the ethnic conflict between Sri Lankan Tamils, who have traditionally inhabited the northern and eastern regions, and Sinhalese, concentrated in the central and southern regions, have been tried since the 1950s, but with no success.

The nature of the main Tamil nationalist organisation, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has made any peace settlement particularly hard. The LTTE has been banned in many countries because of its use of suicide bombers and child soldiers, widespread human rights abuses, and its intolerance of any dissent among Tamils.

Sinhalese-dominated political parties have consistently failed to reach consensus on reasonable power-sharing or devolution proposals that might be acceptable to the majority of Tamils. Party politics has interfered with any common approach to the conflict, and extreme nationalist parties have frequently derailed any attempt to offer concessions. Without a two-thirds majority in parliament – which no single party can achieve under current electoral rules – no constitutional reforms are possible. The LTTE has shown no interest in even the most generous devolution proposals offered by recent governments.

A peace process began in 2002, but talks broke down due to misunderstandings, lack of will on both sides, and the LTTE’s numerous violations of the ceasefire. The ceasefire agreement was effectively over by early 2006, and full-scale military conflict began again in July of that year.  Government forces took back control of the entirety of Eastern Province by mid-2007, and fighting escalated in early 2008 when the government formally withdrew from the ceasefire and expanded its offensive into LTTE-controlled territory in the Northern Province.

By early 2009, heavy fighting in the northern Vanni region had produced a major humanitarian crisis, with hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped between government and LTTE forces in the shrinking areas under LTTE control. Grave human rights abuses were committed by both sides. While the LTTE forced thousands of civilians to fight and physically prevented people from fleeing the war zone, the Sri Lankan military repeatedly bombed and shelled densely populated areas, including its unilaterally-declared “no fire zone”. With the LTTE refusing international calls for a negotiated surrender, the government ignored the pleas of UN and Western governments for a humanitarian pause in the fighting to allow relief supplies to reach civilians and facilitate their evacuation. UN agencies estimated more than 7,500 civilians killed and over 15,000 wounded between mid-January and early May 2009.

Following a final offensive in mid-May that may have killed thousands more civilians, the Sri Lankan government declared victory, releasing pictures of the body of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. With the entire LTTE leadership killed in fighting, the military phase of Sri Lanka’s three decade long civil war appears to be over, though some LTTE rebels remain operative in the Eastern Province.

Formidable obstacles to finding a lasting and just peace remain, however. Nearly 300,000 civilians, many wounded, malnourished and traumatized after months caught in the fighting without adequate food and water, are now held in overcrowded government-run internment camps in the Northern Province. Aid agencies face serious restrictions on their access and conditions in the camps fail to meet international standards on numerous counts. There are signs that many of the displaced could remain in the camps for years.

The government must also still devise a political and constitutional settlement able to address the long-standing concerns of Tamils and other minorities while also gaining approval of the Sinhala majority.

  Visit our "Sri Lanka: After the War" advocacy page

Click here for a more detailed history of the country/conflict.

Crisis Group’s Sri Lanka project is focusing on the various factors that sustain the conflict and examines how the international community can assist the parties to find a lasting solution.

Our reports on Sri Lanka are listed below, beginning with our most recent.

Crisis Group, The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), and Sri Lanka