It's even more complex than Elliot presented it. We're not just talking about a double minority complex; we're talking about a triple minority complex, if we include the Muslims in the east. We have to look at the heterogeneity within the Tamil and the Sinhalese communities.
If we talk about Prabhakaran as the great leader of the Eelam movement, after 2004, that was challenged with the splintering of what subsequently became the pro-government Tamil paramilitaries in the east. There are social caste reasons for the grievances among eastern Tamils. But when we talk about Tamils in Sri Lanka, we need to talk about Jaffna Tamils, east coast Tamils, Plantation Tamils, and Tamils in Colombo that have lived there for generations. So it's very complex.
When we're thinking through the various possibilities and modalities for a post-conflict scenario, we should be talking about questions of governance and leadership. We do ourselves a disservice to hang it all on this one figure.
On the question of investment and equitable development, we have to start from where we are right now. Governance structures, economic and political, have been decimated. But on the economic front, we have to realize the dependency of the economy of Sri Lanka on this conflict. Economic figures that I have seen in Sri Lanka from early 2000-01 indicated that 31% of the economy in the southern part of the country was dependent upon military remittances. Soldiers—men, women, and children—send remittances back to those villages. That's three times larger than the largest poverty alleviation program in Sri Lankan history. War has become a business that perpetuates itself. If we could snap our fingers and declare peace, we'd still have a massive economic problem to deal with. That's something we have to bear in mind at the outset.