BMS World Mission is a partner of Leads (Lanka Evangelical Alliance Development Service), a faith-based relief and development organisation which seeks to serve the people of Sri Lanka through long-term community development projects, advocacy, shelter, and relief and rehabilitation after disasters. Recently it has provided hygiene packs and sleeping bags to families in many of the IDP (internally displaced person) camps throughout the island. It is also directing a feeding programme at one camp in the northern town of Vavuniya which was in the front line of the civil war. The daily expenses for the feeding programme are running to 200,000 Lanka Rupees (approximately £1,100). BMS has given a relief grant of £15,000 to Leads, to facilitate this feeding programme.
A long and bitter civil warSri Lanka was brought under the control of the British East India Company at the end of the 18th century and it was declared a Crown Colony in 1802. BMS began work in Sri Lanka ten years later, making it one of the oldest BMS partner countries. The island won its independence in 1948 largely through the protests of the main ethnic group, the Sinhalese, who then went on to model a Sinhalese state, marginalising the second-largest ethnic group, the Tamils. In 1983, a faction of the Tamil population responded by creating the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) an organisation whose aims were to create an independent state named Tamil Eelam. For the last 26 years the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE have been embroiled in deep-seated disputes resulting in horrendous damage to the people, the environment and the economy.
On 19 May 2009, the President of Sri Lanka, Makinda Rajapakse, officially claimed that the LTTE insurgency had ended, following the death of the founder and leader of the LTTE, Velapillai Prabhakaran. It seems that the period of civil conflict has ended but the dreadful effects of this conflict will, most certainly, remain.
Hope
BMS’ long-term mission co-ordinator Janet Quarry said, “We are thankful that peace has come to Sri Lanka but are of course aware of the enormous need for healing, reconciliation and prayer that remains. We thank God for the work of Leads as they work with so many dispossessed and damaged people.”