By Nilan Fernando

Nilan Fernando is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Sri Lanka. He can be reached at nfernando@asiafound.org.

Situated at Sri Lanka’s highest point, the Nuwara Eliya District is one of the county’s most popular tourist destinations with refreshingly cool breezes that offer a respite from the sultry tropics of the lowlands. The hillsides shimmer a vibrant green from the tea bushes that produce the famous Ceylon tea enjoyed throughout the world. The residents of this mountain retreat, however, have a far different story to tell.

A combination of factors, including erosion, heavy rains, and urbanization, have greatly increased the risk of landslides in the area, making residents of Nuwara Eliya vulnerable. In January, 2007 alone, for example, landslides and flooding displaced over 18,000 people from Walapane and Hanguranketha, resulting in a massive need for shelter and aid. While immediate aid is obviously crucial, much of the area’s infrastructure and morale was also badly damaged, making long-term, post-disaster rehabilitation and development essential.

When disasters occur, those affected rely on the local government for immediate relief and short- and long-term rehabilitation. Without comprehensive relief and aid, affected areas are also in danger of experiencing conflict between host communities and the internally displaced.
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By Nilan Fernando

Nilan Fernando is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Sri Lanka and is based in Colombo. He can be reached at tafsrilanka@asiafound.org.

The civil war in Sri Lanka has taken a terrible toll. No one knows for sure how many people have died, but it is probably not an exaggeration to say that, on average, 5,000-10,000 people have died annually for the past 25 years. Most of these casualties, both Tamil and Sinhalese, have come from the ranks of the poor. The war has triggered massive displacement and migration and the country’s demographic makeup has been altered, probably forever. For Tamils in the North, the war has been particularly disastrous.

Now, after two years of intense fighting, the 25-year-old civil conflict in Sri Lanka is reaching a climax with the government on the verge of victory. The 2002 Ceasefire Agreement between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) unraveled in 2006 and, having largely cleared the Eastern Province of the LTTE in 2007, the government focused on winning back the Northern Province in 2008. The last LTTE fighters and their leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, are now clinging to a sliver of territory on the northeast coast, hiding behind what the government and members of the international community have called a “human shield” of around 100,000 Tamil civilians.
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By Nilan Fernando

Nilan Fernando is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Sri Lanka. He can be reached at nfernando@asiafound.org.

In Sri Lanka, legal aid is implicitly recognized as a fundamental right of all citizens under the constitution. Both the governmental and non-governmental sectors are committed to common goals for legal aid service delivery, service providers operate independently, and beneficiaries indicate a high level of satisfaction with services provided to them, according to a study released by The Asia Foundation. However, the study also determined that rapid expansion of legal aid services has led to a lack of coordination among service providers, and it calls for a national strategy on legal aid that puts social empowerment and financial and institutional sustainability at its core.

The Legal Aid Sector in Sri Lanka: Searching for Sustainable Solutions provides a comprehensive map of Sri Lanka’s legal aid system. The report findings identify gaps in services and challenges, discuss the opportunities available for sustainable legal aid services, and propose recommendations for an improved legal aid system that is accessible to all.
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By Melody Zavala

Melody Zavala is Director of The Asia Foundation’s Books for Asia Program. She can be reached at mzavala@asiafound.org.

International Women’s Day brings attention to the enormous challenges and opportunities that women from developed and developing countries alike face in their pursuit for equality in schools, the workplace, and community and political life. At Books for Asia, we are especially proud of the increased access to education our program extends to girls and women throughout Asia.

Unfortunately, female literacy rates still remain far lower than that of males. According to the International Women’s Day website, women represent two-thirds of the over 1 billion illiterate adults who have no access to basic education. In many countries, girls are still denied basic education and women lack marketable skills they need to earn an income, resulting in a vicious cycle of poverty, illiteracy, and ill-health for them and their children. Nowhere are these problems more serious than in Asia, home to more than half the world’s female population.
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The Policy Advocacy Handbook for Improving Economic Governance published by The Asia Foundation’s Sri Lanka office is now available. This handbook provides private enterprises, government institutions, and other organizations in Sri Lanka with basic information on how to become effective advocates in establishing and safeguarding their rights. It was prepared by The Asia Foundation in Sri Lanka, through its Local Economic Governance Program, with financial support from the Australian Agency for International Development and the Department for International Development (UK). The handbook is largely adapted from a publication on policy advocacy for Small and Medium Enterprises in Indonesia, prepared by The Asia Foundation in Indonesia.

By Erik Jensen

Erik Jensen is The Asia Foundation’s Senior Legal Advisor, a lecturer at the Stanford Law School and co-director of the law school’s Rule of Law Program. He is also an advisor to Stanford’s Afghanistan Legal Education Project.

From 1985 to 1989 I was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and a law consultant to The Asia Foundation’s office in Colombo, Sri Lanka.  During that time, I also taught in Sri Lanka’s law schools. Last December, I was back in Sri Lanka and learned that a book I wrote during my days there, An Introduction to International Law from a Sri Lankan Perspective (Open University Press: 1989), was still the standard text.  I suppose that I should have been flattered, but I was disappointed and saddened that they weren’t using a newer, updated text.  There have been no updates to the book in nearly twenty years, two decades in which incredible developments in international law have taken place.

The Asia Foundation is deeply concerned about the quality of legal education across the developing world. 
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By Nilan Fernando

Nilan Fernando is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Sri Lanka. He can be reached at nfernando@asiafound.org.

Amidst the escalating war between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the north, voters in the multi-ethnic Eastern Province will vote on May 10 for a provincial council for the first time since 1988. In 1987, the Indo-Lanka Peace Accord merged the Eastern Province with the Northern Province; a referendum was to make the merger permanent but was never held. In 2006, the Supreme Court voided the merger and the two provinces were subsequently de-merged. According to the 2001 census, the ethnic composition of the Eastern Province is 45% Tamil, 32% Muslim, and 23% Sinhalese. The potential for conflict between the communities looms large if post-election power-sharing arrangements are mismanaged.
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By Thomas Parks

Thomas Parks is The Asia Foundation’s Regional Director for Conflict and Governance.

Violent conflict presents enormous challenges for development and security in Asia. Many of Asia’s worst cases of instability and political violence are a direct result of sub-national conflicts involving areas in remote or border regions. In these peripheral areas, the state tends to have very limited capacity and its authority is challenged by armed non-state actors. Conflict-affected peripheral regions are usually home to disaffected minorities or marginalized populations that hold significant grievances with the central government and political establishment. These center-periphery conflicts raise an important set of questions that largely fall outside current policy discourse on fragile states.
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By Nilan Fernando

Nilan Fernando is The Asia Foundation’s Country Representative in Sri Lanka.

The Sri Lankan government’s decision to abrogate the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) with the LTTE on January 2 is the final act in the long, slow unraveling of Sri Lanka’s peace process. The CFA has only existed on paper for the past two years; both the government and the LTTE abrogated it long ago through their actions. Now the CFA is no more in word as well as in deed. While it marks with some finality the end of one campaign — the formal search for peace between the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE ” it marks the beginning of another: the campaign for the next parliamentary election, now two years away, based on new political and social divisions. It draws a sharp battle line between two opposing camps. On the one hand are nationalist forces led by the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) ” that are unequivocally committed to the destruction of the LTTE. On the other hand is an opposition led by the United National Party (UNP) that vacillates between wanting to appear just as tough on terrorism in order to appeal to Sinhalese voters, but not so tough that it alienates minority voters ” an important element of its vote bank — and the international community which it has tried to use as a counterweight to a popular president.
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By Thomas Parks, Amy Weinbaum and Birger Stamperdahl

Thomas Parks is The Asia Foundation’s Assistant Director for Governance, Law, and Civil Society; Amy Weinbaum is a Junior Associate for The Asia Foundation; and Birger Stamperdahl is Give2Asia’s Director of Marketing.

The devastation of the 2004 tsunami came on the heels of two separate, decades-long conflicts between insurgent armies and the governments in Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia. These conflicts had led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, but they progressed very differently after the disaster: Aceh moved toward peace, while Sri Lanka was engulfed by increasing violence. Of course, the roots of these conflicts existed before December 2004, and it can be argued that the tsunami accelerated changes already in progress.
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