Sri Lanka
From Tea Time With Terrorists:
Sri Lanka is a piece of land covered with food. There is no need for laws that are based on models of scarcity. Sri Lanka is so rich in food, and so covered with it, that you could set down a healthy person, naked, on one side of the island, and that person could walk to the other side of the island, hundreds of miles across, without dying from starvation. The entire island is smeared thick, like a layer of butter on toast, with food. Starvation would never even remotely be a question. Not a day would pass without at least four different kinds of fruit to be picked from the trees. People here don’t know what it feels like to come out of a five-month winter and see buds on trees. It’s a perpetual growth season. Scarcity is scarce, so they don’t know the need for greed since food is growing everywhere and always. They have no need of money for the same reason, and they don’t know why we have shopping malls, overpasses, and models that are grinning and squirming on the covers of diet magazines.
There’s a healthy dose of unsupported assertions and noble-savage-worship in the book but it was worth the quick read to give me some context on the place before I visited. I found much less extreme poverty than I expected (although I didn’t venture much beyond the tourist corridor). There are not many marquis tourist attractions unless you have the time to spend a couple of days in the car to the UNESCO sites in the center of the island. I only found out later that one of my friends lived there for 4+ years and could have provided some great tips in Colombo – but if you are going I’ll get his tips for you.
And on the genesis of the conflict (and the perils of democratic elections):
Appeasing the [Sinhalese] majority seemed the best water to throw on the fire so Solomon Bandaranaike, another “Brown Englishman,” in a 1956 bid to claim the office of prime minister, offered to make Sinhalese the official language. He felt as though it was the only way to avoid the dispute; after all, in a democracy, the majority rules. Or at least that was his reasoning. Acting quickly, he proposed the Sinhala Only Act, a decree stating that Tamil [Sri Lanka's minority ethnic group] would not be used in schools or in government institutions. Twenty-four hours after he proposed the legislation, it narrowly won, with fifty-one of the ninety-five available votes, and over a million Tamil taxpayers became officially illiterate. The majority of Sri Lankans had been appeased, but the eighteen-hundred-year-old differences between the Sinhalese and Tamils had not been erased. History aside, the passing of the Sinhala Only Act meant that from then on, Sri Lanka would distance itself from both its English and Tamil populations. This meant that Ceylon would be a Sinhalese country, as opposed to a Tamil and Sinhalese country. History has shown it to be one of the worse decisions made, because it incited the civil war by denying dialogue with the Tamil minority.