In a submission to a conference organised by Berghof and GTF last month, Tamil civil society actors from the North-East advocated for a "referendum wherein the Tamil people could freely express their aspirations for a political solution", after an outline of a proposal for a political solution is drafted from a bottom-up process, echoing work done by the Scottish Constitutional Convention which eventually led to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament.
Dismissing an incrementalist state transformation process as unworkable given the exclusivist character of the Sinhala Buddhist state which the authors argued had "zero appetite" for such transformation.
Asserting that it was "both undesirable and morally unethical for the Tamils to do politics on behalf of the Muslim and the Up Country Tamil Community", the authors encouraged Muslim and Up Country political parties "to articulate the political aspirations of their people.
See here for submission in full. Extract from the preamble is published below:
"The ethnic conflict is fundamentally about how we characterize the Sri Lankan state which is at present exclusively Sinhala Buddhist. For Sri Lanka to become a non-Sinhala Buddhist state, the Sinhala Buddhist polity will have to first recognize that there needs to be a new social contract drawn between the different constituent nations in Sri Lanka through which would emerge a new state – a new Sri Lanka. For this the Sinhala Buddhist polity should recognize the Tamil polity’s right to be an equal partner to this social contract. This would mean recognizing Tamil nationhood and their right to self-determination."
