23 November 2012, Colombo, Sri Lanka: The Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Committee presented their much awaited report on Dec 16 2011. Following a war which lasted almost 30
Chairman LLRC Mr. CR De Silva handing over the Report to President Rajapakse
years, and resulted in death, destruction and devastation, this report is the result, after 18 months, of a presidential commission of inquiry studying the failure of the ceasefire agreement of 27/2/2002, highlighting lessons learnt, and aiming to promote national unity and reconciliation among all communities. This can be said to be one of the most important documents in the history of Sri Lanka.
Firmly believing that civil society has an important and constructive contribution to make to the conflict transformation process in Sri Lanka, the Center for Policy Alternatives (CPA) intends to promote a democratic dialogue at community level on the contents and recommendations of the LLRC report (and the resulting Action Plan) and to channel resulting opinion into a national discourse on implementing the LLRC, while increasing overall awareness of the LLRC report, among the public at large.
As part of this programme initiated by CPA, brief, reader friendly resource materials on LLRC were prepared for wider dissemination in Sinhala and Tamil, to interested parties.
These include the Guidebook on the LLRC Report, which translates and simplifies the original report, and the Saama Vimarshi/ Samadana Nokku(Peace Monitor) publication on the LLRC.
CPA also directly translated the Chapter on Recommendations as well as the Action Plan, which latter has to date, not been officially translated.
In order to reach out to the public at large CPA is working with district level partners; 48 trainers from a similar number of district organizations were trained to conduct awareness sessions on LLRC in their respective districts within the next couple of months. A thousand such sessions are targeted which will reach at least 30,000 individuals. Dialogue at the local level will feed into an action oriented comprehensive report on implementing the recommendations of LLRC which will be shared with key actors at the national level at the end of the two months.
The project team are also conducting interviews with a number of the witnesses who went before the LLRC hearings, to compose their feedback and expectations on implementing the recommendations.
If your organisation or individuals you know are interested in further information of this programme or wish to hold awareness building sessions on this important national document, please contact the trainers numbers attached for assistance in this regard.
Please forward this information to anyone who may be interested. You can also contact us for hard or soft copies of the relevant resource materials and the translations.
Lionel Guruge
Unit Co ordinator
Outreach Unit ,
Centre for Policy Alternatives,
No. 105,Fifth Lane,
Colombo 03.
Tel : 011 2 370801-4
Fax : 011 2 370802
Mob : 0777 316441
