About Us
Disaster Services is an organization setup to carry out disaster related work including manmade disasters. Through a project, we started documenting the events, media, social media, recovery and legal processes in a preliminary fashion. Our work builds on the staff, advisors and projects of the Federation for Environment, Climate and Technology over the last three decades.
We are undertaking documentation, maintaining a database of affected, assisting the affected with their documentation needs, monitoring the recovery of the affected and give voice to the affected, recovery with reconciliation programs.
Introduction
Sri Lanka is emerging from sectarian civil conflict/war with a focus on the minorities in the North and the East of the country but generally with consequences across Sri Lanka and internationally. Flash mob violence reminiscent of the early stages of this civil war has occurred in the South, Western, and Central Sri Lanka. The response of the state has been often inadequate. It is in this light that the organized mob violence visited across Kandy District towards the Muslim minorities in the first week of March 2018 showed multiple failures of the state and others to provide security. To be able to learn the lessons from Kandy, and to reduce the risk of future violence, there needs to be systematic documentation.
Our Contribution
In March 2018, mob violence peaked in an arc from Digana to Akurana about 10-20 km to the periphery of the city. We have responded to the immediate needs of the affected with an allocation of office space, dedicated staff and other resources. Understanding the need to document what had happened, we have also collected key data. We brought our expertise, tools and networks with “natural” disasters to address the risks of the human-induced hazards as well. Further, through this, we addressed the immediate needs of the risks and recovery support and building a network of social services community. The goals were to document the events of March 2018, its drivers and address the factors that led to conflagration and assess the failures and successes in ameliorating conflict. Such documentation, assessments and diagnosis shall help assess the drivers of conflict, help us identify the risk factors and eventually come up with community-based risk prediction.
