All of my research so far has shown me that here, in this rural area, to the everyday person, ethnicity is not an issue. Tamil, Muslim and Sinhalese communities are certainly separate from one another, but whenever I ask anybody about tensions between the ethnicities I am told there are none.
And then I read this online:
“In August the Sri Lankan government celebrated the fourth anniversary of its victory over Tamil rebels in the civil war that ravaged the country for a quarter of a century. Yet peace remains unstable as the government has not yet resolved the root causes of the war – bitter tensions between the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the largely Hindu Tamil minority” (Zimmerman, Q., 30/08/13, on peacedirect.org).
This is clearly a very complex issue – I’ll send out some emails tonight and hopefully I might be able to organise some focus groups with some activist groups regarding the matter. I feel it would be helpful.
Sri Lanka: A Research Project 