Holiday in Sri Lanka (1): introduction
Top of my bucket list is the wish – so long as I have reasonable health and adequate wealth – to have visited as many countries as my age. I am 69 next month and my latest holiday is to my 70th country: the island of Sri Lanka. It is a two-week organised tour with Voyages Jules Verne. My only previous visit to the Indian sub-continent was a holiday in India and Nepal in 2003.
Following successive colonisations by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, in 1948 (the year of my birth) Ceylon gained its independence from Britain and, in 1972, the country was renamed Sri Lanka.
From July 1983 to May 2009, there was a ferocious civil war between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamil with the government’s military pitted against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) or Tamil Tigers. The 26 year long war cost up to 100,000 lives. Then, in the final bloody weeks, some 40,000 non- combatants were killed in what many have classed a war crime by the Sri Lankan army. The Tamil word for the war was ‘prachanai’ which simply means ‘the problem’.
In preparation for my trip, I have been reading “This Divided Island: Stories From The Sri Lankan War” by Samanth Subramanian.
Sri Lanka today is a country with a population of approaching 22 million, 75% of whom are Sinhalese who are mainly Theravada Buddhist and 15% of whom are Tamil who are mainly Hindu. Then there are Moors who comprise 9% of the population and are Muslim.
Sri Lanka has a parliament of 225 seats elected every five years. The island’s politics is dominated by two political parties, the socialist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the conservative United National Party (UNP). The SLFP is the main constituent of the currently ruling United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) headed since 2015 by the current President Maithripala Sinisena. He replaced the controversial Mahinda Rajapaksa who served for 10 years of increasingly authoritarian rule, so politically the situation in the country is now more stable and encouraging.