For some time, The Island has gallantly accommodated a bevy of writers who have asked what "the problem" of the Tamils is that demands a "political solution". The best answer to this question is contained in Dayan Jayatilleka’s moving tribute to the memory of his father Mervyn de Silva (The Island, 22/6/2009). Below is Dayan’s eloquent statement, which needs to be quoted at length:

"At the same time Mervyn would stress that the issue of the alienation of the Tamil people and the complex challenge of accommodating Tamil ethnic identity within the Sri Lankan state and society, reconciling it with historic Sinhala fears and ancient memories, emphatically do not lend themselves to a military solution. In his travels through the Middle East, Mervyn saw (and I was there with him) how the scintillating Israeli military victories of 1967 and to a lesser extent 1973 (Sharon’s counter attack) turned into an endless quagmire because of the policies of permanent displacement, settler-colonization of the lands of the displaced and the refugees, increasingly fundamentalist religiosity, annexation masquerading as antiquarian archeological exploration, and harsh military occupation with its myriad daily humiliations and lacerating lived experience."

"…Mervyn would have cautioned that designing the postwar order in Sri Lanka through purely or primarily National Security lenses, and worse still, attempting to impose Sinhala over-lordship on the overwhelmingly Tamil North, would erode Sri Lanka’s standing and legitimacy even among its neighbors, undermine the national interest and de-stabilize national security itself. Had he been around long enough, it would have been typically Mervyn-ish to write, perhaps as columnist Kautilya in The Island, that Sri Lanka’s problem is not an ancient, pervasive Sinhala Buddhism, but an obsolescent, lingering Sinhala Buddhism."