ABSTRACT
A Dawn of the East victory celebration was held in Independence Square, Colombo, on 11 July 2007 to mark the Sri Lankan government's successful military campaign in the east. With some 290,000 civilians displaced and a continued heavy military presence in the east, the government launched its flagship Eastern Re-awakening (Nagenahira Navodaya) programme. The stated goal of the programme was to promote economic development in a region devastated by almost three decades of civil war. The government's strategy of combining counter-insurgency with early recovery/development in the east constituted a dress rehearsal for the campaign that followed in the north. A sustained military assault led to the final defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on the battlefields of Mullativu in May 2009. As in the east, aid organizations came under pressure to make their programmes ‘coherent’ with a government-promoted and donor-funded ‘stabilization’ operation, involving a combination of humanitarian action, resettlement and reconstruction, in the shadow of a highly effective counter-insurgency campaign, that was subsequently legitimized through elections.
