Sri Lanka’s civil war lasted, with interruptions, from 1983 to 2009. There were ceasefires, negotiations and moments when a settlement appeared possible. Why did these opportunities repeatedly give way to renewed fighting?
Explaining why a war begins is different from explaining why it continues. Grievances can bring a country into conflict, but years of fighting create further obstacles to peace: institutions built around violence, leaders afraid of compromise, communities unable to trust promises and military commanders convinced that another offensive might improve their position.
Sri Lanka’s war endured because these obstacles reinforced one another. For much of the conflict, neither the government nor the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) could secure a decisive victory. Yet neither accepted a political settlement that the other could deliver.
The Norwegian peace process offered the clearest opportunity to escape this pattern. Its achievements were substantial, but the distance between stopping major hostilities and agreeing how to share a country proved too great.
A stalemate that encouraged talks without securing compromise
By the beginning of the 2000s, the conflict had imposed enormous military and economic costs. The conditions encouraged both parties to negotiate. The independent evaluation Pawns of Peace, commissioned by Norway’s development agency, describes the opening as a ‘hurting stalemate’: a situation in which continued war was costly and outright victory remained elusive.
But exhaustion does not necessarily produce agreement.
The difficulty can be understood as a problem of expectations. A leadership may enter negotiations because it needs relief while still believing that time, military recovery or international developments will strengthen its hand. Its opponent may interpret every concession as a potential strategic loss.
Under these conditions, a ceasefire creates an opportunity for peace while also creating fears about what the other side will do with the breathing space. Negotiations must overcome those fears before either party feels secure enough to make irreversible concessions.
Two different visions of the country
The central dispute concerned sovereignty: who would exercise authority, over which territory, and with what guarantees?
Sri Lankan governments defended the country’s territorial unity. The LTTE had fought for an independent Tamil Eelam in the north and east. A settlement required movement towards an arrangement that could reconcile Tamil self-government with a continuing Sri Lankan state.
In December 2002, negotiations in Oslo produced a significant opening. The parties agreed to explore internal self-determination through a federal structure within a united Sri Lanka. The statement also recognised that any solution had to be acceptable to all communities.
The word explore mattered. This was an agreement to investigate a possible settlement, rather than a completed constitutional bargain.
The practical questions remained formidable. What powers would a regional administration possess? Who would control policing, taxation and land? What would happen to the LTTE’s armed forces? How would Muslims, dissenting Tamils and other communities be protected?
The Oslo statement identified several of these subjects for negotiation. Naming them was progress; resolving them required commitments far beyond a shared communiqué.
What the Norwegian process achieved
The February 2002 ceasefire brought a temporary end to major military operations. That achievement deserves recognition even though the wider process failed. A reduction in fighting meant relief from some of the immediate dangers of war.
Norwegian facilitation also sustained communication between enemies and helped create space for political discussion.
However, the process placed considerable faith in gradual progress: stabilise the ceasefire, address practical needs and build towards a political settlement. The evaluation later questioned an approach that allowed the parties to postpone fundamental disagreements while continuing to pursue incompatible objectives.
The underlying problem was one of political authority. Mediators could help the parties negotiate, but they could not supply the consent, confidence or willingness to compromise that a settlement required.
A ceasefire without sufficient civilian security
The absence of large battles did not mean the disappearance of violence.
Human Rights Watch documented political killings and continuing LTTE recruitment of children during the ceasefire years. Its reporting also examined abductions and child recruitment by the breakaway Karuna group, including evidence of state security force complicity.
Such abuses damaged more than individual lives. They undermined the credibility of the peace process.
For a family facing intimidation or the recruitment of a child, diplomatic progress offered limited reassurance. For political activists, the ability to speak freely mattered as much as the absence of artillery fire. The LTTE’s coercion of Tamil opponents also raised a fundamental question: whose voices would be heard in any settlement?
The broader implication is clear. Negotiations become harder to sustain when people cannot see that restraint produces greater safety. Each killing strengthens the argument that the other side’s promises cannot be trusted.
The domestic price of compromise
A negotiator also has to survive politically at home.
In southern politics, concessions could be presented as threats to sovereignty or steps towards partition. Competition between parties made it difficult to establish a durable consensus behind a settlement. The rivalry between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe further weakened the government’s ability to speak with a consistent voice during the peace process.
This created a problem of credibility. Even where a government was willing to negotiate, could it implement an agreement and persuade its successors to respect it? The political risks of concession had an earlier precedent in the abandonment of the Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam Pact.
The LTTE faced a different challenge. Its record of suppressing political opponents sat uneasily with the pluralism that a lasting settlement would require. Meaningful peace would have involved changes in how power was exercised within Tamil society as well as between the north and east and the central government.
Compromise therefore threatened established forms of authority on more than one side. The political risks were immediate; the benefits of settlement depended on future promises.
Why negotiations lost ground to war
The balance of forces was also changing.
Karuna’s break with the LTTE in 2004 weakened the organisation. By 2006, the International Crisis Group identified both this split and increased pressure on overseas funding and arms procurement as factors affecting the LTTE’s position. Renewed confidence in military options made the bargaining environment still more difficult.
Major military operations resumed in 2006. The ceasefire framework could no longer contain the conflict.
Looking back, Pawns of Peace traces the movement from stalemate and negotiations through an escalating shadow war to the LTTE’s military defeat in May 2009. Its account also challenges explanations that place responsibility for the outcome principally on the Norwegian facilitators. Domestic political structures, the parties’ strategies and international changes shaped what mediation could achieve.
Ending the fighting and resolving the conflict
Sri Lanka’s war eventually ended through military victory. The human cost of its final stages remains central to any assessment: a UN panel subsequently found credible allegations of grave violations by both government forces and the LTTE, some potentially amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The war’s duration cannot be explained simply by an absence of talks. There were negotiations, intermediaries and proposals. What repeatedly failed was the conversion of temporary restraint into an agreement that the parties would implement and affected communities could trust.
The Norwegian process demonstrated that violence could be reduced. It also exposed the limits of a ceasefire when sovereignty remained disputed, civilians remained vulnerable and compromise remained politically dangerous.
Missed opportunities and failures form part of the historical horizon of Till the New Times Come, and raise the question: could Bandaranaike have prevented Sri Lanka’s civil war?The novel returns to Bandaranaike’s final twenty-four hours in 1959, long before the civil war began, while looking towards the consequences of political choices, broken promises and opportunities that would become harder to recover.
For the background to the conflict, read What Caused the Sri Lankan Civil War?