This is a brilliant article! Well done to both authors. It is very thoughtful and even-handed.

Thank you for this article; even though i find it slightly long winded, it gives a clear picture of where Sri Lanka is at, 2 years after the war.
i'm a resident of SL, living in a Tamil area. On a daily basis i'm concerned, not to say horrified, by the reality of Tamil young men.
The combination of poverty, war, alcohol and trauma (tsunami) equals "f....d up". Not a single job has been created here, with unemployment at 90% (and i shrink every morning when i bring breakfast from the roti-shop to my family and have to pass 25 families who will not eat this morning - i'm way under the poverty line myself, but we're at least eating).
If the government doesn't provide a future fast for f....d-up young men, major trouble is once again on the horizon. my personal belief is that that is exactly what the government wants...

Not their intention of course, but this is the best article I've read describing the catastrophe in the making that is multiculturalism policies.

I know the PC, & the bleeding hearts don't want to admit it, but Sri Lanka has been the ultimate result of anywhere where integration did not occur.

Well done.

Hasbeen I think you have spectacularly missed the point. This article outlines the failure and catastrophe of mono-racialism and mono-culturalism.

The Sinhalese excluded and persecuted the Tamils. This lead to the Tamil Tigers (LTTE). The LTTE then tried to exclude all the Sinhalese and Muslims from the North.

In reality, Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims etc had actually lived in Sri Lanka for 2500 years without any major dramas. The Sinhala-Tamil enmity was invented for political advantage. Multiculturalism does work - it just needs the racists to be kept in check.

This seems like a good summary (though admittedly I haven't actually read the ICG report!) and I appreciate the authors' relating the situation in SL to the government's treatment of the asylum seeker issue. I think this has a lot to do with the problem, actually. Australians as a whole really aren't very good at building their level of awareness of the "outside world", so I think it's important to take every opportunity to give people in this country a reminder every now and then that it's not just all about them.

David Jennings, people like Hasbeen don't even look for the point, they just look for some skerrick of confirmation of their own one-eyed world view in anything they read, then confabulate their interpretation out of all proportion. Take no notice.

David & Sam, it is you who miss the point. If the Tamils were not there in the first place, there would have been no tigers, ever.

I can not think of any mixed populations, where rejection & fighting has not occurred, sooner or later.

It is only with assimilation, that a cooperative community can evolve. Would you care to suggest one that worked long term, say a few hundred years, even with powerful dictators trying to control problems.