Abstract
Sri Lanka is an island republic of about 65,000 km2 located 22 miles south of India. (CIA 2008; ABC Radio Australia 2008) In 2005 the population was 20,743,000 (United Nations Statistics Division 2008). Sri Lanka has been a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society for two millennia and currently has three national languages Sinhala, Tamil and English. Between the early 1500s and 1948 Sri Lanka successively hosted three European powers: the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British. In 1948, Sri Lanka then gained full independence from Britain and became a member of the Commonwealth of Nations (Government of Sri Lanka 2008a).
For many decades tension increased between the two largest ethnic groups, the Sinhalese and the Tamils. In the early 1980s it erupted into a terrible civil war which has not ended. The Sinhalese who are generally Theravada Buddhist have maintained dominating numbers in the national government. The minority Tamils are mainly Saivaite Hindu (USDS 2007) and are anxious for equal status and opportunities. Significant territory is now administered in the north by Tamil separatists (BBCNews 2008). The significance of religion in the violence is complex and arguably secondary to ethno-historical factors.
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Bouma, G.D., Ling, R., Pratt, D. (2010). Sri Lanka. In: Religious Diversity in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3389-5_11
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