ETHNIC INTEGRATION as a Permanent Aid to Communal Harmony & National Security

Integration of the different ethnic communities of Sri Lanka into a single people with a single Sri Lankan identity is the only permanent solution to that can bring communal harmony and national security to Sri Lanka. ETHNIC INTEGRATION, as defined here, does not refer to mixing of people on a genetic basis. For example, it does not imply intermarriage between Sinhala and Tamil people, although when men and women are neighbors and work together, they do fall in love, marry and produce children of mixed ethnic heritage. Although that is perfectly normal, that is not what I mean here by ethnic integration.

By Ethnic Integration, I mean is that policies are implemented to homogenize the distribution of all ethnic communities throughout the land, as far as possible, towards the average ethnic distribution in the country as whole. Thus, ideally, we would have the same percentage of Sinhala, Tamil, Moslem and Burgher people in every province, district, city, town, village, school, in work places, public institutions, defense forces, and so on. Ethnic diversity and cultural richness in people as individuals would still find expression in the proper sphere: in their homes, at their places of worship, in community centers, in ethnic restaurants, etc.

The benefit is that no region of the country would be dominantly mono-ethnic, and no one community would be able to claim any region as a separate mono-ethnic state. Every community is, and all communities are, would be present at each and every location. This also means, that children of all communities would learn together, eat together, play together, and grow up together during their formative years. Adults of all communities would work together, grieve together, eat together, and help each other through their lives. In this way, people of all communities would get to see and appreciate our common humanity, rather than the abstract differences defined sharply by separate existences out of contact with each other.

In the United States, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese, Indian, Hispanic and African American families live amicably together in the same neighborhood. They often meet at neighborhood parties, at work in their gardens and garages, and strike up personal friendships. This was largely how it was when I was growing up as a child in Sri Lanka in a suburb of Colombo. Through such contacts one begins to empathize with people of different ethnic backgrounds, and to instinctively recognize that our differences are only superficial.

If ethnic integration, as I advocate here, is implemented in Sri Lanka, then the Sinhalese will be the ethnicity of the majority community everywhere in the land, but the society as a whole will not be MONO-ETHNIC, but MULTI-ETHNIC, with the minority communities present everywhere. The attainment of that goal will completely eliminate any basis for future separatism based on communal differences in Lanka.

The remedy we propose here is no different from that in evidence in the United States, for example, where the majority of the people everywhere are of non-Hispanic European extraction, yet everywhere there are ethnic minorities, to varying degrees. Due to different birth and immigration rates, this may change in the future from a non-Hispanic to a Hispanic majority. The movement of American people between states in search of jobs, and less expensive retirement friendly locations, seem to be the primary drivers for homogenization of ethnicities previously set by historical immigration and settling patterns. Hopefully, US demographic and income patterns will not become severely biased regionally in the future to set the stage for communal separatist movements, as overpopulation, environmental and economic pressures increase, and rabble-rousing politicians move to exploit the situation to propel themselves into power.

Unfortunately, in Sri Lanka's past, this kind of intimate contact between communities was attained only in the major cities, making it easy for isolated communities to demonize each other: unseen, unheard, unfelt, untouched. Through a policy of ethnic integration, we are proposing to make intimate contact between different communities an ubiquitous feature in every part of Sri Lanka, and to build a single Sri Lankan identity as one people who have transcended their superficial differences to join hands in celebration of their common humanity.