Features

Fish, Fisherfolk and a Forgotten Sri Lankan Classic

Published

2 months ago

2026/07/26

Fisherfolk mending nets beside their canoes on the shore. Photograph by Reg Van Cuylenburg from Image of An Island – A Portrait of Ceylon (1962). Pathfinder Collection

From the Pathfinder Collection

By Jennifer Moragoda ✍️

Published in Colombo in 1954, J. A. R. Grenier’s Tales of Fish and People of the Ceylon Estuary is a small masterpiece: an angling memoir rich in natural history, practical fishing knowledge and tender observation of the fishing communities whose lives were bound to the sea.

During the Covid lockdowns, my husband’s uncle Nimal Jayawardena began sorting through his extensive collection of books on wildlife, natural history, fishing and hunting. Boxes arrived at our house in batches. Unpacking, reading and cataloguing the books brought welcome pleasure to days otherwise marked by uncertainty, isolation and restrictions on movement.

Fishermen hauling a fishing catamaran ashore after returning through the surf. Photograph by Reg Van Cuylenburg from Image of An Island – A Portrait of Ceylon (1962). Pathfinder Collection

“What Will the Day Bring?” Canoe beside a tranquil estuary. Photograph by Lionel Wendt from Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon (1950). Pathfinder Collection

In one of the boxes, I noticed a slim volume in a plain white dust jacket. Spartan in appearance, its only adornment was a small circular medallion showing two fish swimming in a ring around a rocky estuarine scene. The design was rendered largely in black and white, with a muted greenish-blue wash. At its centre appeared a title that promised far more than the modest artwork: Tales of Fish and People of the Ceylon Estuary. The cover did not even bear the author’s name.

Inscription by J. A. R. Grenier to Nimal Jayawardena, dated 29 July 1975, with Jayawardena’s signature opposite. Pathfinder Collection. Author’s photograph

Detail from the dust jacket of Tales of Fish and People of the Ceylon Estuary (Colombo, 1954), showing the distinctive fish medallion. Pathfinder Collection. Author’s photograph

Out of curiosity, I opened this unassuming book and began to read. Within its weathered pages, a succession of worlds began to unfold: that of the recreational angler, for whom fishing was an absorbing passion; the natural world of Ceylon’s estuaries and their fish; the practical world of tackle, bait and technique; and, finally, the world of the fisherfolk, whose lives depended upon an intimate knowledge of the waters.

Portrait of a fisherman. Photograph by Reg Van Cuylenburg from Image of An Island – A Portrait of Ceylon (1962). Pathfinder Collection.

At only 155 pages, the book is divided into two parts: “Fish,” devoted to the angler, the estuary and the practical knowledge of fishing; and “The People,” in which Grenier turns to the fisherfolk themselves.

The mystery of the angler

Grenier begins with a question that must have been put to anglers in every generation: why devote so much time, money and effort to an occupation involving discomfort, uncertainty and frequent failure?

His book is, among other things, an extended answer to that question.

In this, he belongs to a centuries-old angling tradition, familiar from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler, in which fishing is valued not merely for the catch but for the fellowship it creates and the intimacy with nature it permits. Grenier gives that tradition a distinctly Ceylonese expression.

For him, fishing satisfies the gambling instinct: every cast holds possibility, and every expedition begins with hope.

The appeal also lies in escape. The estuary is usually remote: there, Grenier writes, the river, “tired of being harassed by humanity along its banks, seeks solitude where it meets the ocean.”

Grenier describes the principal fish of the estuary and deep sea, their habits, feeding patterns and preferred habitats, observing how tide, season and weather shape their movements. He also preserves a detailed practical record of fishing: tackle, baits, traditional nets and fishing methods—knowledge accumulated through years of experiment, observation and conversation.

His discussion of angling is often enlivened by the companionship, banter and minor disputes of his fellow anglers. Grenier recalls an episode from A. H. Pertwee’s Ceylon Marine and Estuary Fishing. Notes on a Neglected Pastime, first published as a series of articles in The Times of Ceylon before appearing as a booklet in 1907. To convince doubters of the strength of Ringall bamboo rods, Pertwee staged a “Man versus Fish Competition” at the Calcutta swimming baths. The “fish” was Mr Mason, a powerful swimmer weighing more than ten stone—whom I cannot help imagining with a luxuriant handlebar moustache and a striped bathing costume. Harnessed to the line and given thirty feet of slack, he managed only seventy feet before Pertwee reeled him in foot by foot and finally “gaffed” him with a billiard cue.

From fish to people

Part Two, simply titled “The People,” is more than a change of subject; it alters the meaning of much that has come before.

Grenier opens by confronting the stigma attached at that time to Ceylon’s coastal fishing communities. Those who earn their living from the sea, he observes, are often judged by people who know little of the skill and endurance their work demands, or of the dangers they face. However sympathetic, the “land-encumbered” observer, as Grenier puts it, can never fully comprehend the rigours and terrors of the sea without having faced them.

The introductory chapter, titled “PRO” in capitals and quotation marks, makes Grenier’s regard for the fishermen unmistakable. They are the true professionals: men he came to admire and respect, and from whom he learned lessons extending far beyond fishing.

For the working fisherman, the sea governs every aspect of life. It provides his livelihood, but may also threaten his boat and his life. Danger, hardship and uncertainty are enduring conditions of his world. The sports angler by contrast chooses temporary discomfort and may return empty-handed but to a secure bed and meal.

Such conditions also help explain the fishermen’s reserve towards recreational anglers, whom they regard as outsiders whose inexperience may hinder the work and even jeopardise a catch. Grenier observes that a newcomer is fortunate if accepted within five years. Some of his happiest moments come when fishermen such as Jemma of the Kalu Ganga, Anthony of Negombo or Manuel of Mannar disclose a favoured fishing ground or allow him to join them in their boats.

Yet fishing can also produce a camaraderie capable of crossing barriers firmly maintained on land. Grenier’s acceptance is never assumed, but gradually earned through patience, shared experience and respect for the fishermen’s knowledge. An invitation into a boat or the disclosure of a closely guarded fishing ground signifies far more than access to better sport. It marks his admission into a fraternity.

From there, Grenier opens a window onto the fishermen and their communities through a succession of miniature biographies.

The “PROS”

There is Jemma, whom he calls the “King of estuary fishermen of Ceylon.” For thirty years he has fished at the mouth of the Kalu Ganga and knows every rock, obstruction and hidden danger in the estuary. So accustomed is he to sitting in his small canoe that, even on land, his legs creep beneath him into the same position when he becomes absorbed in conversation.

His tackle is modest but meticulously made. Grenier’s respect for his skill deepens when one of his seemingly fragile handmade lines lands a skate weighing some twenty pounds.

From Mannar comes Soosai, the shark hunter, whom Grenier describes as a “bronzed miracle of a man with limbs like jungle trees and shoulders as thick as a Dutch wall.” He lives amid the bones of his quarry.

Bemiya prefers the company of fish and animals to that of people and speaks only when necessary, yet has lovely names of his own for the fish he catches. His gift lies not so much in fishing with rod and line as in diving. His large, “plate-like” hands and long, double-jointed fingers seem made for work beneath the surface, where he moves with an ease he is denied on land.

Bemiya later disappears during a dangerous attempt to subdue a shark caught by his fellow fishermen. Grenier’s brief farewell to him is among the most affecting passages in the book.

The final and perhaps most powerful portrait is that of Anthony, the wise and kindly fisherman of Negombo who takes Grenier under his wing. Anthony teaches him not only how to fish, but also the fisherman’s code. Behind his patience and wisdom lies a history of personal loss.

The book closes with his account of the storm in which he lost his son. Boats remain at sea while the people on shore watch the horizon with the quiet dread born of bitter experience. Through Anthony’s recollection, Grenier evokes an entire village overtaken by grief, its cries of mourning rising against the gale and the breaking surf. Anthony bears his loss with a sad fatalism.

The sea, he tells Grenier, “makes us and breaks us.”

A society in transition

J. A. R. Grenier—known as Ronald—was born in Ceylon in 1912.

The world he evokes is that of late colonial and early post-independence Ceylon: government service, clubs, sporting friendships, coastal journeys and long-established personal networks, brought through fishing into close contact with communities bound by occupation, poverty and dependence upon the sea.

Moved by the book, I wanted to learn more about its author. My search led me to the website of his son, David Grenier, and to the life that lay behind its pages.

By the late 1950s, Grenier had concluded that his children’s prospects in Ceylon were uncertain. In 1959, his fourteen-year-old son David left for Australia with several family members, including his grandmother and aunts. Grenier followed three years later, in 1962.

The decision was practical and paternal, but came at great personal cost. According to David, his father knew before leaving that he would not be happy in the West and would dearly miss the ocean, the fish and the fishing people of Ceylon.

I had scarcely read those words before thinking, “he will never be happy there.” A few paragraphs later, David wrote that his father was never the same after the move.

Read with that knowledge, the book becomes not merely an account of fish and fisherfolk, but also a record of a landscape, a body of knowledge, and a way of life from which Grenier was soon to be separated.

The story of our copy

When I returned to our copy while preparing this article, I noticed that it bore an inscription by Grenier dated 29 July 1975. Puzzled, since I knew he had emigrated to Australia more than a decade earlier, I telephoned my husband’s uncle Nimal to ask about its circumstances.

Nimal recalled that Grenier had returned to Sri Lanka that year for a fishing journey “down memory lane” along the East Coast with their mutual friend Frank Kelly, who had also migrated to Australia.

In his younger days, Nimal had been an avid angler, deep-sea fisherman and sportsman who knew the eastern coastline and its jungles particularly well. Frank called at his house to borrow camping equipment for the expedition, and Grenier accompanied him.

By coincidence, Nimal was reading Tales of Fish and People of the Ceylon Estuary at the time. He brought the book downstairs and asked Grenier to sign it. The three men spent some time reminiscing about earlier days of fishing before Grenier and Kelly continued on their journey.

Nimal also knew Willie Obeysekera and Peter Jayawardena, fellow anglers whom Grenier thanks in the acknowledgements. After retiring, Peter worked as a guide for one of the family companies, based in Inginiyagala.

These connections place the book once again among the friendships and shared experiences from which it emerged. The inscription transforms our copy into a record of Grenier’s return—to waters, friendships and memories that had endured the years abroad.

Grenier in Australia

In later life, Grenier developed a rare and incurable illness that severely affected his health and wellbeing. He died in Queensland in 1988, aged seventy-five.

When I learnt of Grenier’s death, my thoughts returned to the hope he had once expressed for Bemiya: “I hope there are fish in the place he has gone to, for without them, he, like you and I, will never be happy.”

David later worked to preserve his father’s literary legacy, personally publishing Isle of Eden and Isle of Eden Revisited.

A forgotten Sri Lankan classic

Grenier’s work defies easy classification. It is a rare conjunction of fishing manual, angling memoir, natural history and social record. Within little more than 150 pages, he preserves an extraordinary body of knowledge about Ceylon’s estuaries: their fish, habitats, fishing methods, language and communities. It is, in effect, a compact cultural archive written in the form of an angling memoir, distinguished throughout by tenderness, restraint and quiet humanity.

Its appeal extends far beyond anglers. More than seventy years after its publication, there is still nothing quite like it. The book deserves to be read again.

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Features

Odds and Ends: Horse racing and the business of sports betting – IV

Published

23 hours ago

2026/09/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Prof. C. A. Saliya
(The fourth instalment in a five-part series on
the business of gambling, legal and illegal)

Here’s a puzzle worth thinking about. For well over a century, Sri Lankan law has treated a village card game as a criminal offence, punishable by fine or imprisonment. In that same period, it has treated betting on horse racing as a perfectly legitimate, taxable business, one the state has actively collected revenue from for generations, under a Horse Racing Betting Ordinance older than most of the country’s other gambling law. Same basic activity, risking money on an uncertain outcome, one version illegal since 1889, the other legal the entire time.

Why? Follow the money, and the class lines, back to the colonial era. Horse racing arrived in Ceylon as a pastime of the British administrative and planter class, a “sport,” played and watched at clubs and racecourses, with betting bolted on as a respectable, even sophisticated, accompaniment. Card games played by ordinary people in villages, on the other hand, were exactly the kind of activity the same colonial authorities were eager to label a vice and criminalise. It’s the same pattern we saw with casinos in Part 2: gambling done by the wealthy tends to get called a sport, a tradition, or an investment. Gambling done by everyone else tends to get called a crime.

That history matters, but the economics of horse racing betting matter just as much, because once you understand how a bookmaker actually prices a race, you understand something that applies to almost every form of sports betting on Earth, from a Colombo racecourse to a global football sportsbook.

How a bookmaker guarantees a profit

Imagine a simple race with only two horses running, and imagine, just for the sake of the maths, that both horses genuinely have an exactly 50-50 chance of winning. A perfectly fair bookmaker, offering perfectly fair odds, would price both horses at even money: bet 100 rupees, win 100 rupees plus your stake back, on either horse.

No real bookmaker does this. Instead, they’ll price both horses slightly below their true odds, say, offering odds that imply each horse has a 55 percent chance of winning, even though the true chance is only 50 percent. Add those two implied percentages together and you get 110 percent, not 100. That extra 10 percent is called the “overround,” or sometimes the “vig” (short for vigorish), and it is the bookmaker’s guaranteed margin, built directly into the prices on the board before a single horse leaves the starting gate. It doesn’t matter which horse wins. The bookmaker’s overround wins regardless, on every single race, all day, every day.

There’s a second, subtler effect that decades of studying racing data has confirmed again and again, all over the world: bettors as a group are slightly too generous to favourites and slightly too generous to long-shots. Favourites tend to win a bit more often than their odds suggest they should, meaning betting on the favourite loses you money slightly more slowly than average over the long run, while betting on the rank outsider, the 50-to-1 shot that everyone secretly dreams will come in, loses you money considerably faster than average, because the public consistently overpays for that lottery-ticket dream. Bookmakers know this. It’s baked into their pricing, and it has a name: the favourite-longshot bias.

It’s not just horses anymore

Horse racing used to be the flagship product of the entire betting industry. It still matters enormously, including here in Sri Lanka, where it remains one of the very few genuinely legal betting products, but globally, its share of the total betting market has shrunk as sports betting on football, cricket, tennis and everything else has exploded, especially since a landmark 2018 United States Supreme Court ruling opened the door to state-by-state legal sports betting across America.

The newest and, frankly, most dangerous evolution of all this is “in-play” or “live” betting, placing bets not before a match starts, but continuously, in real time, on what happens in the next five minutes: the next corner, the next wicket, the next point. Regulators studying gambling harm consistently find that in-play betting produces worse outcomes fo bettors than traditional pre-match betting, precisely because there are so many more moments to place a bet, so much less time to think between decisions, and so much more opportunity to chase a loss five minutes after you made it.

Where the skill actually is, and isn’t

Now, a confession from this column, which has spent plenty of ink over the years analysing racecards: professional handicapping, studying trainer and jockey form, course and distance records, the draw, the going, the weight a horse is carrying, is a genuinely real skill, and it can meaningfully improve your chances of picking a winner compared to a random guess. That’s not a myth. Good handicapping works, in the narrow sense that it improves your odds of identifying the horse most likely to win any given race.

But “improving your odds of picking a winner” and “beating the house edge” are two completely different things, and this is the single most important distinction in this entire series. Even the sharpest, most statistically literate handicapper in the country is still betting into odds that already have the bookmaker’s overround baked in. Skill can narrow the gap. It essentially never closes it completely over the long run, for the simple reason that the house built the gap on purpose, and prices every race to make sure it stays open.

When the “form” is fake: Virtual meetings

One genuinely strange wrinkle worth flagging here: some betting products dress themselves up in the full costume of horse racing, trainer names, jockey silks, past form lines, even fake race commentary, while actually being nothing more than a random number generator behind the scenes, deciding the winner with no horses, no trainers, and no real race involved at all; just a computer simulation.

These “virtual racing” products exist specifically to borrow the credibility that real handicapping has earned over more than a century, and apply it to something that has no skill element whatsoever, chance and chance alone. It’s worth knowing the difference, because the two products look almost identical on a betting slip, and only one of them rewards the kind of analysis this column has always tried to teach.

Are manipulations possible?

Bookmakers don’t secretly insert horses into races to beat favorites instead they simply publish odds based on form and betting demand. The real risk comes from insiders with knowledge, such as trainers or syndicates, who can exploit undervalued horses to stage betting coups. These events are rare but welldocumented, leaving a lasting mark on regulation. In the past, bookmakers were reactive, allowing coups to succeed before odds adjusted. Today, they are far more proactive, using AI systems and integrity units to detect anomalies quickly. Even so, insider coups still occur, though they are rarer and swiftly investigated. The balance has shifted: bookmakers now lose less often, but punters continue to chase “value” in overlooked horses, keeping the contest alive between house margins and human ingenuity.

Betting Coups: When the Odds Tilt

Horse racing has always carried a mystique of glamour and risk, but behind the silks and starting gates lies a business model designed to ensure bookmakers never lose. As explained earlier, the “overround”, that invisible margin built into every price, guarantees profit before the first horse even breaks stride. Yet history shows that punters, syndicates, and insiders have occasionally turned the tables, staging coups that shook the industry and exposed its vulnerabilities. Timeline of such incidents are shown in the Table.

These stories remind us that while bookmakers build their margins into every race, the human element, ambition, deception, or sheer audacity, can still disrupt the system. Today’s safeguards, from AIdriven monitoring to integrity units, make coups rarer, but not impossible. And that tension between certainty and surprise is precisely what keeps the public fascinated. Horse racing is not just about speed and stamina; it is about the eternal contest between the house edge and human ingenuity.

The road ahead for racing in Sri Lanka

Horse racing’s legal status in Sri Lanka looks set to remain intact under the new Gambling Regulatory Authority, folded alongside casinos and licensed online sports betting operators. What’s new is that offshore online platforms, which have long taken bets from Sri Lankan customers without local approval, are now—at least on paper—being brought under the same regulatory umbrella as the racecourse. Whether this shift results in genuine oversight or simply adds a licence requirement that foreign operators quietly ignore remains an open question, one to be explored in the final instalment of this series as we assess what fair, joinedup gambling regulation would truly require.

Next week:

Part 5, the final instalment, Closing the Book, on what real gambling reform would look like, and whether Sri Lanka’s new law gets us there.

(Prof. C. A. Saliya, is a charted accountant, academic, researcher and former banker. He is the author of SAMAJA GAVESHAKAYA and Springer Publication DOING SOCIAL RESEARCH. He can be contacted at saliya.ca@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the organisations with which he is affiliated.)

Features

When slogans meet scrutiny

Published

23 hours ago

2026/09/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

An unhealthy politics still rents the finished war — and that is why society stays divided

by Mahil Dole
Senior Superintendent of
Police (Retd.)

True national stability requires a transition this country has postponed for seventeen years: from a military victory to civic reforms that penalise divisive actors and build a unified identity. Last week showed, with unusual clarity, why that transition keeps failing. It was not a failure of slogans. It was a failure of consistency. Democracy, in the narrow sense of ballots and benches, is still standing. What is unhealthy is the use to which those ballots and benches are put. An unhealthy politics does not close a war. It rents it.

Three scenes, one week

In Chavakachcheri, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake told a housing gathering that racism would not be tolerated in any form, against Sinhalese, Tamils or Muslims, in the North, South or East. He named the old kindling: heritage sites and religious places still used to ignite tension. He spoke of houses for the displaced and a stadium for children in Jaffna. Those are the right words for a head of State. A country that meant them would be doing the unglamorous work of peace: making the next generation less useful to anyone who needs a quarrel.

In Anuradhapura, on an SLPP stage, a different performance was under way. Jaffna Member of Parliament Archchuna Ramanathan referred to himself as a “Tiger” and to the elected President as a “fox”. The name of a proscribed organisation was spoken in a town that carries the memory of the sacred-city attack. Party figures who have spent years treating any mention of the LTTE as contamination were reported to have cheered. By Monday a civil-society group styling itself the “Joint Opposition” had taken a complaint to the CID. The Police confirmed receipt. Opposition voices had already raised the alarm on Sunday.

Let the record be exact, because the rumour was not. The complaint now on the CID file is that remarks on an SLPP stage, and the cheer that met them, crossed from political insult toward promotion of a banned group. The government, for its part, has said there is no room for LTTE promotion and that remembrance of the dead is another matter. Those are two different files. Mixing them is itself a kind of politics.

A third voice belonged to the same week. Professor Savitri Goonesekere spoke with the clarity that public law, when it is still a discipline and not a campaign colour, can still produce: thoughtful, articulate, addressed to the country rather than to a faction. The speech deserves the praise it has received. The caution it invites is as important as the praise. Worthy slogans, unity, an end to racism, one law for all, are easily hijacked. They are most easily hijacked by those whose own conduct is under scrutiny, and who need the language of virtue more than they need the discipline of it. A speech of that quality raises the standard. It does not lower the duty to watch who picks the slogan up next.

What an unhealthy democracy does

People vote. Governments change. Parliament sits. That is not a failed democracy in the textbook sense. It is also not a healthy one. A healthy system converts a military victory into civic rules that bind the winners as well as the defeated, and that make division expensive. An unhealthy system keeps the war useful. It farms fear. It treats identity as a turnout machine. It issues a guarantee against racism in one district and applauds a banned name in another. That practice is not a lapse of taste. It is a structural reason society remains split.

Duplicity is the method. The same platform that built a career on the defeat of terrorism can, when the arithmetic of a rally requires it, tolerate the self-description of a Tiger. The same voices that demand a ban on LTTE propaganda can discover, the following week, that a rival’s meeting is the real offence. The same guarantee against racism can be issued in the North on one day and left unenforced in the South on the next. Two standards, again — not between Colombo and an overseas capital this time, but between the microphone and the statute book.

The LTTE remains a proscribed organisation. That is law, not a mood. Remembrance of the dead is a human act and must be protected as such. Glorification of the organisation that killed them is not remembrance. A serious State draws that line once, publishes it, and applies it without regard to who is speaking and which party owns the stage. Selective outrage is not law enforcement. It is campaigning.

The same is true of the word “racism”. No President can abolish it by declaring that he will not tolerate it. The declaration is necessary. It is not sufficient. Racism in this country has rarely been only a private vice. It has been a public business model: a way to harvest fear, postpone reform, and keep a constituency enlisted after the guns fell silent. Heritage sites and religious places become kindling because someone lights them. Universities become martyr theatres because someone books the hall. A Member of Parliament can call himself a Tiger on a southern stage because someone calculated that the cheer would be louder than the cost.

Why this divides a people

Division is not produced only by the last war and not only by those who live outside the island. It is produced, week by week, by a politics that cannot address a crowd except through Sinhala, Tamil or Muslim injury. A politics of that kind is not representing a community. It is farming one. The young, who have no memory of the last bunker, inherit the quarrel instead of a country. Serving officers watch the treatment of their predecessors and the theatre of their politicians and draw a rational conclusion about what the country values. Families who lost their own to the LTTE hear “Tiger” cheered and conclude that their dead have been repriced. Families who lost their own to the State hear a pledge against racism and wait to see whether the pledge runs south as well as north.

That is how an interval is mistaken for peace. The guns are silent. The inventory is not. “Tiger” and “traitor”, “racist” and “patriot”, remain stock in trade. So long as those words pay, in applause, in airtime, in a complaint that wounds an opponent, someone will keep them in circulation. Professor Goonesekere’s warning sits exactly there. Leadership means going beyond rhetoric. The law is not written for those who already respect it. It is written for those who violate it. When violation carries no cost, the slogan itself becomes a form of impunity.

What civic reform would actually look like

The work is unglamorous, which is why it is avoided. First, equal enforcement. If the organisation is proscribed, the prohibition travels with the speaker. An SLPP stage in Anuradhapura and a commemoration in the North are not two legal systems. The CID complaint now on the file should be treated as a test of that rule, not as a trophy for whoever lodged it.

Second, an end to ethnic first-identity as an electoral method. A civic identity, Sri Lankan first, faith and language held without being turned into a passport, will not appear by exhortation. It appears when the dividend for division falls and the dividend for competence rises.

Third, a cost for lighting kindling. Heritage sites and religious places are not campaign props. Universities are not martyr calendars. Media that carry a charge must carry the correction. Records that hold an untested allegation must not shadow a working life after the allegation has failed.

Fourth, one standard for those who served the State and those who fought it. Wrongdoers on every side belong in a court, not in a diplomatic weather system and not in a rally chant. Collective punishment of a profession is not accountability. A cheer for a banned name is not unity. A slogan against racism is not a policy until it binds the speaker’s own side.

None of this requires a new brand of commission. It requires a State that stops allowing division to be a career. South Africa’s imperfect bargain at least tried to bind both sides inside one process. Colombia wrote one jurisdiction for guerrillas, paramilitaries and State forces. We have preferred two international ledgers and a third, domestic one on which the war is rented out by the evening. Last week’s scenes, a guarantee in Chavakachcheri, a cheer in Anuradhapura, a serious speech that must not be stolen, are not opposites. They are the same unfinished settlement, spoken in three registers.

The President’s sentence should be kept, and then made expensive to break. Professor Goonesekere’s standard should be kept, and then applied to those who clap for it. Racism will not be defeated by a rally, and a proscribed organisation will not be dissolved by a complaint. They will be reduced only when the State, and the parties that live off the State, stop treating the finished war as inventory. True national stability is not the memory of a victory. It is the construction of a civic order that no longer needs that victory to be refought, in Anuradhapura or in Geneva, in order for someone to remain relevant.

The writer is a retired Senior Superintendent of Police who served in intelligence and counter-terrorism. He is the author of Security Beyond Enforcement: Practical Approaches for a Safer Nation. This column is a stand-alone extension of an earlier argument on two standards in one conflict. Views expressed are his own.

Features

Defend civic space upon which peace is built

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/22

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Jehan Perera

International Peace Day was observed on 21 September. It finds Sri Lanka with a genuine achievement to record and a demanding test to meet. The UN’s theme this year was “Invest in Peace: For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day.” It also honoured the “everyday architects of peace”—people driving local action and building a lasting peace from the ground up. In the 2026 Global Peace Index, Sri Lanka rose 30 places, from 97th to 67th among 163 countries. Over the same period, global peacefulness declined for the twelfth consecutive year to its lowest level since the index began, and South Asia suffered the sharpest regional deterioration. The test is whether the government will protect the civic space in which those architects of peace work.

Sri Lanka’s improvement is real and deserves acknowledgement. In this year’s review, issued a few weeks ago, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights acknowledged progress in the form of action against corruption, arrests and investigations linked to political killings, enforced disappearances and the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, and continued official denunciation of racism. A ranking, however, records conditions at a particular moment. It does not guarantee that they will last. Sustainable peace will depend on three factors. These are whether the government addresses the unresolved causes of conflict, whether it strengthens accountability for past and present abuses, and whether it protects the civic space in which peace is built from below. On the first two the record is incomplete. On the third, the draft NGO law threatens to weaken the very organisations that press for the other two.

What holds Sri Lanka back from a higher place are the same things that fed the war at home and also feed international conflict that rages elsewhere in the world. These are racism or ethnic nationalism that is narrow-focused, corruption and lawlessness. Equality, accountability and the rule of law are their remedies. The present government has committed itself to these, and is a significant improvement over governments of the recent past. But these pillars are not held up by governments alone. Peace is made in villages, workplaces and university campuses. It is made by families who insist on the truth about their disappeared, by journalists and lawyers who expose abuse, and by community organisations that bring Tamils, Muslims and Sinhalese into practical cooperation.

Unfinished Work

The UN High Commissioner’s report to the current Human Rights Council session, covering October 2025 to July 2026, shows how much remains to be done. The Prevention of Terrorism Act is still being applied, producing arbitrary arrests and long detention without charge. The report calls for a moratorium pending repeal and for the release of long-term detainees. Military-occupied land has not been released, memorialisation lacks support, and tensions over land and religious sites persist. The Batticaloa district illustrates how such problems endure. In the past three years, two Presidents, Ranil Wickremesinghe and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, have visited and instructed that the dispute over grazing land in Mailaththamadu and Mathavanai be resolved. It is a dispute between Tamil cattle farmers and outside Sinhala cultivators, and it has not been resolved. When two Presidents issue instructions and nothing changes, the fault lies in the machinery of State. An unresolved dispute does not stand still. It hardens into the next grievance.

Accountability shows the same pattern. The report documents torture and deaths in custody, and surveillance and intimidation of activists, journalists and civil society. Serious cases remain stalled for years, among them the killing of seventeen aid workers of Action Contre la Faim in Muttur two decades ago. Sharper still is the case of the Eastern University refugee camp at Vantharamoolai, where in 1990 the army took away 158 persons in a single day. They were never seen again. The camp’s officer-in-charge, Dr T. Jayasingam, later Vice Chancellor of the university, identified the officers responsible. More than three decades on, those officers have not been questioned. These cases are still remembered because families, survivors and independent witnesses have refused to let them be forgotten. Meanwhile several commissions of inquiry have completed their investigations but nothing further has happened.

What South Africa, Argentina and other post-conflict societies have found indispensable are four pillars of what is called “Transitional Justice” which are truth, accountability, reparations and non-recurrence. In Sri Lanka’s circumstances, truth means credible, independent investigation of what happened to the disappeared, and support for memorialisation. Accountability means prosecuting Muttur, Vantharamoolai and comparable cases, and removing credibly accused persons from senior office. Reparations mean compensation for victims and the return of military-held land. Non-recurrence means repealing the Prevention of Terrorism Act, releasing those held under it in the meantime, and resolving local disputes such as Mailaththamadu before delay hardens them. A country that buries its past does not escape it. The past returns in the next generation.

Civil Society

It is against this background that the draft NGO law is most troubling. The proposed legislation contains sweeping provisions for State oversight and control of civil society organisations. Among these are enforcing a licensing requirement on NGOs, which is to be renewed every three years, and severe penalties for not submitting reports on time, or for spending on emergency flood relief (for instance) when the NGOs mandate is peacebuilding (as an example) with possible sanctions including deregistration and having to shut down. Civil society groups have warned that it would confer excessive discretion over their registration and operations. Officials in Sri Lanka have abused such powers in the past. Additional power without effective checks invites further abuse. Sound regulation would have clear criteria for registration, an independent registrar and a right of appeal to the courts. What cannot be justified is a regime in which registration becomes a licence to be withheld from organisations that scrutinise policy, expose abuses or advocate for the rights of citizens.

Democracy is based on checks and balances. Those who press for accountability are part of those checks. The contradiction is plain. A government that has pledged accountability, equality and the rule of law ought not to be preparing to weaken the very organisations that press for their fulfilment. The organisations most exposed are those working on disappearances, land, memorialisation and reconciliation in the North and East, where the State’s record is weakest and the need for independent witnesses greatest. Silencing them would not remove the grievances they document. It would remove the channel through which those grievances are addressed peacefully. The government appears to be relenting, which is welcome, but a pause is not a withdrawal. The bill should be withdrawn and any replacement drafted in genuine consultation with those it would govern.

Investment in peace as called for by the UN in its International Peace Day theme implies commitment over time, with returns that come slowly. Sri Lanka’s 30-place rise on the Global Peace Index is a first dividend and nothing more. It can be built upon only if the government matches its commitments with action: withdrawing or fundamentally redrafting the NGO law, repealing or suspending the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and bringing Muttur, Vantharamoolai and Mailaththamadu to resolution. A higher place in a global index is not a certificate of success. Sri Lanka’s higher ranking is an encouraging start, but it will endure only if the space in which citizens speak, question and organise is protected. Peace is built from below, and a government that is serious about it will treat civil society as a partner rather than a threat.