Date, time	11 Mar, 10:15 - 16:00
Location	ALC Seminarieparken
Teacher	Bart Klem
Preparation	Please read the below and look at the instructions for the actors/group that you are part of. Read up on the Sri Lankan context.

We will start on Tuesday 11 March 2025 at 10:15 AM in ALC Seminarieparken.

Each of you is assigned to one of the nine players in this exercise. We will start in the plenary and will then break out in groups for each actor. The exercise than follows a sequence of discussions within your group, textual submissions and plenary discussions.

I (Bart) am one of the players (John Amaratunga, see below), but you can ask me for help if you need at any time. You may ask me questions about the exercise (ie clarification about context, tasks etc) or specific advice regarding your own role and positions).

I will be sharing textual details via the group pages for this seminar on canvas (under the people tab). This is also where you, as a group will need to submit your contributions.

The nine actors:

There are nine characters in this simulation

Lakshman Ratnasiri, Sinhalese Brigade Commander Sri Lankan Army, Trincomalee.
Sanjith Ranaweera, Sinhalese Presidential task force Disaster Response and Recovery, Colombo.
Joseph Xavier, Tamil Bishop and director of EHED (church relief), Batticaloa.
MH Thaufiq, Muslim MP and owner of paddy land, Kinniya.
Anna Vandezotte, Belgian humanitarian worker, rapid response pool MSF, Brussels.
Nguyen Hong, Vietnamese expat, humanitarian advisor UN Resident Coordinator, Colombo.
SMM Hameed, Muslim family head and manager of “Valimai Construction”, Tampalagamam.
P Sinnathurai, Tamil (female headed) family and chair of “Pengal Eeluga”, fishermen community, Uppuveli.
(BART) Mr. John Amaratunga, Sinhalese Government Agent Trincomalee.

General background

The simulation is set in Trincomalee District, eastern Sri Lanka in March 2025. Find a few basic details below to help you get oriented.

Sri Lanka is a multi-ethnic country with a Sinhalese majority of about 70%, a Sri Lankan Tamil minority of 11% (plus 4% “Indian” Tamils), a Muslim population that sees itself as an ethnic group of 10% and several the other ethnic groups. Muslims and Tamils speak the same language (Tamil); the Sinhalese speak Sinhala; English is a commonly spoken language among the elite, civil servants and civil society. The vast majority of Sinhalese are Buddhist; most Tamils are Hindu; both ethnic groups also comprise of a Christian minority.

The North is almost exclusively Tamil. The East is a multi-ethnic region with nearly equal shares of Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese (the former two interspersed along the coast, the latter mainly in the interior). The rest of the county has a firm Sinhalese majority, though all communities are present in the capital Colombo and the central hill country has a significant “Indian” Tamil community. Ethnic geography is heavily contested in Sri Lanka, not least because the government has historically used settlement schemes to “plant” Sinhalese farming communities in what were previously Tamil and Muslim dominated areas, thus changing the ethnic demography.

Colonial history endowed Sri Lanka with a fine-grained system of state institutions and relatively strong human development indicators for education, health, literacy, life expectancy and so on. The state apparatus is present at all levels: from the ward/village level “grama niladari” all the way up to national ministries and the (all-powerful) president. Central to this complicated institutional hierarchy is the Government Agent (another colonial legacy): an appointed civil servant who is head of district and whose apparatus (known as the “kachcheri”) serves as a clearing house between the top/centre and bottom/periphery for all government interventions.

Sri Lanka experienced a major civil war, which escalated in the 1980s and ended in 2009. The central dynamic underpinning this war is one of ethno-nationalism: the desire of Tamil nationalist for an independent state (“Tamil Eelam”, the north and east of the island), the opposition of Sinhala nationalists to grant rights and autonomy (let alone independence) to the Tamils, and the Muslim community getting stuck in between (and becoming more militant because of it). The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) emerged as the main Tamil insurgency. They became a formidable force in the 1990s and 2000s but were comprehensively defeated in 2009. After that, the government took a militaristic approach to consolidating its position. Military camps, military involvement in the public service and military involvement in economic enterprises loomed large in Sri Lanka’s north and east.

Though Sri Lanka has a long and proud history as a democratic state with well-functioning institutions, there have been growing concerns about the increasingly militaristic and authoritarian outlook of the government. Mahinda Rajapaksa (president from 2005-2015) won the war with quite draconian means. His younger brother Gothabaya was his Secretary of Defence (and self-claimed mastermind of the victory over the LTTE), and then became an even more draconian president in 2019. After the Covid-pandemic, and in part precipitated by it, Sri Lanka face an unprecedented debt crisis, where the government no longer had the foreign exchange to pay for its imports, yielding acute shortages for fuel, medicines and other everyday essentials. This then resulted in a public uproar – known as the “Aragalaya” – that culminated in the storming of the presidential palace and the ousting of the government.

Following a brief interlude (under president Wickremesinghe), new elections were held in September 2024, and this yielded a political landslide. For the first time in Sri Lankan history, a leftist and non-elite candidate, Anura Dissanayake of the National People’s Power (NPP) was elected, a victory that was consolidated at the parliamentary polls in November (where the NPP won 159 of the 225 seats). With a comprehensive pro-poor reform policy outlook and promises of major constitutional and political reforms, the NPP’s visions resonate closely with many of the topics we discuss in this course.

Sri Lanka has a long history of ‘natural’ disasters, most of which are frequent but minor in scale, including local landslides and seasonal flooding. It has also experienced devastating cyclones, but these were minor compared to those experienced by neighbouring states along the Indian Ocean. Plausibly because of climate change, severe cyclones on the Indian Ocean appear to become more common though. Last November, Cyclonic Storm Fengal skimmed Sri Lanka and then made landfall in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka (India), where it caused significant damage. The disaster that had an overwhelming impact on Sri Lanka was the December 2004 Indian Ocean “boxing day” tsunami, which was set off by a sea quake off the coast of Aceh, Indonesia and which wrecked coastlines across big parts of South and Southeast Asia. Sri Lanka was heavily affected, and the East in particular. There were large numbers of casualties, injured and displaced people. One to three kilometres of the entire eastern coastline were reduced to debris. This crisis (and the subsequent relief and recovery efforts) interacted directly with the civil war dynamic (though a ceasefire was in place at the time). The turf battles over ethnic identity, the distribution of benefits and the preservation of (claimed) ethnic territory severely complicated the tsunami response. Post-tsunami resettlement was shaped by a new coastal buffer zone (where houses were no longer allowed), which necessitated relocating people which in turn caused a welter of problems around ethnic, caste or religious affiliation, political dynamics, livelihoods and so on.

Fiction and reality

Given that this exercise comprises a fictional scenario in a real context, you are allowed to create your own information (i.e. to make things up), so long as they are within reasonable bounds. When you are asked to report on a particular issue or suggest a course of action, you can make claims that are not true but that could plausibly be true in the simulation we are doing. For example, you may say things like this based on your own imagination: “this area has been flooded”, “500 families have been affected here”, “shelter is the most urgent concern”, “our beneficiaries tell us they want such and such”. However, try to make claims that make sense within our context (Eastern Sri Lanka 2020) and from the perspective of the actor that you represent).

Time planning

10:15 Introduction (not in character)

10:25 Part 1

10:45 Part 2

11:30 Break

11:45 Part 2 continued

12:30 Lunch break

13:15 Part 3

13:45 Part 4

14:30 Break

14:45 Part 4 continued

15:30 Concluding reflections (not in character)

16:00 End