The election of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake in late 2024 created space, however narrow, for a reset on Sri Lanka’s most stubborn governance challenge: the unresolved claims of the Tamil minority in the North and East. Early rhetoric from the new administration, including pledges to shrink the security forces and professionalize their role, briefly buoyed expectations. In March 2025, Dissanayake reiterated plans to downsize the military by 2030, acknowledging that Sri Lanka’s post-war garrison governance has outlived any defensible security rationale. Yet Tamil communities have heard promises before; credibility now rests on implementation, sequencing, and whether demilitarization is paired with meaningful devolution, land restitution, and justice. Human Rights Watch noted in January 2025 that the government has “promised to address longstanding human rights issues,” but the test is delivery, not intent.
In a decade and a half since the civil war ended in May 2009, successive governments erected a patchwork of reconciliation mechanisms. The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) reported in December 2011, urging demilitarization of the North, independent investigations, and steps towards devolution. Rights groups quickly warned that the LLRC “fails to advance accountability,” foreshadowing a pattern of partial uptake and non-implementation.
A more structured framework emerged after Sri Lanka co-sponsored UN Human Rights Council Resolution 30/1 in October 2015, which endorsed a “comprehensive approach” including a truth commission, a special court, an Office on Missing Persons (OMP), and an Office for Reparations. Parliament enacted the OMP Act in 2016 and the Office for Reparations Act in 2018. These are important institutional footholds: the OMP’s mandate is to “search for and trace missing persons,” while the reparations office is tasked with designing and delivering redress. But the centerpiece, a credible truth commission and judicial accountability, never materialized. In 2024, the government gazetted a draft Commission for Truth, Unity and Reconciliation (CTUR) bill and later revised it. UN human rights reporting recorded these steps; legal and civil-society analyses questioned the bill’s independence, powers, and victim trust. As one critique put it, the draft “lacks credibility and [is] unlikely to bring accountability.”
The process remains a proxy for the larger question: whether Colombo will accept a truth-seeking and accountability mechanism capable of commanding confidence in the North and East. If reconciliation is to move beyond forms to substance, demilitarization is unavoidable. For more than a decade, independent research has documented the security sector’s deep reach into civilian life, land administration, commerce, urban planning, and tourism. International Crisis Group observed as early as 2012–2014 that the North’s “reconstruction” was unfolding under military control; the group later wrote that facts on the ground belied official denials of over-militarization. Dr. Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu has called this “institutionalized militarization,” noting the military’s penetration into the education and the economy. These dynamics sustain everyday Tamil skepticism towards Colombo’s promises.
Concerns about demographic change compound mistrust. A 2022 study by People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL) described “state-sponsored Sinhalization of the North-East,” linking land grabs, archaeology-as-policy, and settlement schemes to the erosion of Tamil territorial claims. Whether every allegation will stand legal scrutiny is secondary to the political effect: many Tamils perceive strategic encroachment, not neutral development.
Based in Islamabad, the writer has done his Masters in Defence and Strategic Studies. He can be reached at daniyaltalat2013@gmail.com
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