In Sri Lanka, the question of whether to emphasise truth and reconciliation—embracing a “soft accountability” path—or to lay equal stress on investigation and prosecution of grave human rights crimes looms over the transitional justice debate. It is increasingly clear that the country’s transitional justice landscape will be determined by the contestation between the relative weight or sequencing of restorative and retributive justice measures. One crucial effect of this bipolarity is that it entirely sidelines distributive justice and questions of economic harms.
Even the World Bank acknowledges that the post-war northern and eastern regions now account for some of the highest concentrations of both monetary and multidimensional poverty in the country. Indebtedness and food insecurity have been major concerns for quite some time. While deficiencies in post-war housing programmes have catalysed the former, the latter seems to be worsening. A forthcoming study by the Centre for Poverty Analysis (CEPA) found overall food insecurity (as measured by coping strategies) to have significantly worsened for over 1,000 households first surveyed in 2012. Exposure to drought and floods, loss of land, and deficiencies in irrigation and other critical infrastructure have undermined agriculture, while illegal Indian trawlers, weakening state support and declining yields have affected fishing.
Since the war ended, governments (past and present), donors, international agencies and most NGOs have focussed on restoring livelihoods in the North and East by promoting self-employment through provision of training and credit, especially micro-finance. Billions have been poured into livelihoods programmes. For example, the Central Bank disbursed loans worth 719 million LKR (approximately 4.9 million USD) and 1 billion LKR (approximately 6.8 million USD) in the North and the East respectively in 2014 alone.
