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who almost accidentally put together a collection of high-end boutique hotels that are
famous worldwide, not just in Asia. (He is also the brother of an old friend and colleague
of mine from the Washington Post. )
Both Cooray and Dobbs were intrigued by an experiment, mentioned in my talk, that
had occurred in Guatemala, where the government and tourism experts used new tour-
ism to help once-warring communities work together. The results had been mixed, but I
suggested that the idea could be transplanted to the island of Sri Lanka. Both Cooray and
Dobbs had given their time, money and leadership to help the southern part of the island
recover from the 2004 tsunami and knew from that experience that Sri Lanka's communit-
ies were capable of rebuilding tourism from the ground up. Cooray thought Sri Lanka
might be able to replicate the Guatemala experience of inviting former warring neighbors
to design a new look for tourism.
Dobbs was dubious about using tourism to bring together the Tamil and Sinhalese
communities. The war was so long and the wounds so deep, he said, “We'll need a czar
here.”
The Sri Lanka civil war pitted the minority Tamils, who are mostly Hindus, against the
majority Sinhalese, who are Buddhists. After suffering under a government campaign of
intimidation and repression, the Tamils launched a war in 1983 for a separate homeland
in the northeast corner of the island. The fighting dragged on until 2009, with increasingly
vicious fighting. The Tamil Tigers used suicide bombers. The government routinely ig-
nored human rights and tortured and killed people they considered suspicious. Even the
war's end was a nightmare of ruthless overkill, and the United Nations called for an in-
quiry into war crimes.
I had seen that war five years earlier, when the capital's Bandaranaike airport was
covered in filthy shrouds of heavy plastic to hide damage from an earlier rebel attack. Only
three international airlines were willing to fly in then—and one of them was SriLankan
Airlines. I presumed that tourism had largely died in Sri Lanka during the war, as it had in
Cambodia.
Somehow, though, throughout those years of terror, intrepid tourists remained loyal
and came for sunshine holidays, sticking to the safety of the southern coast. At the begin-
ning of the war half a million tourists visited every year. At war's end that figure hadn't
changed: 500,000 tourists had traveled to Sri Lanka in 2008.
Then peace arrived and the island was up for grabs. Libby Owen-Edmunds, a thirty-
one-year-old Australian and a tourism consultant in Colombo, met me for coffee at the
Cinnamon Grand Hotel. She told me her phone started ringing in June 2009, a few weeks
after the government declared victory. Private helicopters were ferrying investors, ready to
spend money, over the sandy white beaches of the former rebel base, circling the area and
evaluating which area would make the best new resorts. The land grab was on. Rumors of
high-level corruption and murky real estate deals were in the air.
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