From Spices to Suicide Bombers: A Study of Power, Politics and Terrorism in Sri Lanka

None of the shocks that have hit Sri Lanka since the British left in 1948 - including the devastation of December 2004 - could have been foreseen by the people of the island, once a Garden of Eden in the Indian Ocean. Dr Mahen Tampoe's speciality is management, and here he paints a vivid picture of a mismanaged state - a nation united by its colonisers, then split apart by racial discrimination, internecine strife, suicide bombers, dispossession and undeserved poverty. What on earth (it certainly wasn't in heaven) made the newly independent government of the 1950s establish the Buddhist/Sinhalese group as the dominant element, relegating the Tamils of the north, and the English language, to second-class status? Why Ceylon went wrong, and what needs to be done to rectify the situation and place the island on a par with her successful multi-ethnic neighbours, Malaysia and Singapore, is the business of this book. Dr Tampoe contends that a secular, even-minded government could maintain the fragile peace, stop the bombing and lead Sri Lanka to a happy future. Just how is detailed in this elegant and scholarly work, written with an exile's sharpened pen. The book includes discussion papers exploring the governance of multi-ethnic democratic states and the origins of terrorists and suicide bombers, which can be used as self-contained supplementary texts in the study of political science and ethics.