More than 64,000 Sri Lankans have been killed in fighting since the war erupted in 1983. It is not known how many thousands more have died due to conflict-exacerbated poverty and neglect. Civilians in conflict-prone areas have suffered severe economic deprivation, made worse by security restrictions on their freedom of movement by both state forces and the LTTE that prevented them reaching employment, schools or adequate medical care. The lifting of these travel restrictions has been an enormous relief to residents, who are using the space provided by the cease-fire to rebuild their lives and shore up their families against the possibility of future conflict.

The MOU also required both parties to review security measures to prevent harassment of the civilian population. This was crucial. In government-controlled areas especially, discrimination against Tamils has been rampant. Security personnel who suspected Tamils of loyalty to the LTTE systematically singled them out for abuse, including arbitrary arrest and prolonged detention without trial, beatings and torture, including rape. Members of the military, the police and paramilitary organizations caused the "disappearance" of and extra-judicially executed many thousands of suspected LTTE members and civilian supporters. Children were not exempt, due in large part to the LTTE's recruitment of child soldiers.

The cease-fire has ended, at least temporarily, a cycle of violence and abuse that drove more than a million people to flee their homes. But even if talks are successful, the damage could take years to repair. Shelling and exchanges of gunfire between combatant forces often killed and injured civilians and destroyed homes; this now has stopped. The LTTE has also tortured and executed suspected critics and informers. Pressure on the LTTE's critics and its potential civilian resource base remains a serious problem, but arbitrary attacks on civilians are not being reported. At earlier stages of the conflict the LTTE massacred large numbers of Muslim and Sinhalese civilians in villages bordering their territory; government-linked home guards and security personnel burned homes and massacred villagers in Tamil areas. Such attacks had decreased noticeably even before the cease-fire, but have left a traumatic legacy. The violence and back-and-forth nature of the fighting, as both sides alternated in controlling territory in the north and east, created one of the world's worst displacement crises.

Perhaps most damaging to civil society in the north and east has been the near total abdication of responsibility for civil administration to armed groups' and their patronage networks. Although the war had its roots in conflict between members of the Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority over economic interests and cultural identity, it soon acquired an economic and political momentum all its own. Enterprising individuals with links to combatant forces--and sometimes several different forces with different ethnic allegiances--carved out niches for themselves that institutionalized abuse. These ventures have more to do with power and money than ethnicity.

For years, extortion and protection rackets run by both the LTTE and pro-government groups have targeted local businessmen and other civilians with financial resources. Tamil paramilitary groups linked to the army and the LTTE "taxed" goods produced by farmers and fisherman. Soldiers and police at local checkpoints confiscated and sold "excess" supplies destined for homes in LTTE-controlled areas. Grama Sevakas (local village administrators) charged illegal fees to villagers seeking vital documents necessary to receive relief assistance or to travel out of conflict areas in search of work or safety. They were also accused of cooperating with local military forces in more direct forms of abuse, such as providing household lists to the security forces when villagers were needed for forced labor, or to the LTTE for their conscription drives. The cease-fire agreement and its disarmament of former Tamil militant groups decreased the public profile of the army and police, and removed some of the LTTE's other competitors, but extortion and protection rackets remain a serious problem.