A year and a half since declaring victory over the Liberation Tigers, Sri Lanka’s proposed military expenditure for next year (almost $2bn) is an increase of 20% over 2009's and will dwarf the proposed budget for resettlement ($16m).
Meanwhile, the development budget is $680m, according to figures reported in the state media.
The government will unveil the budget in Parliament on Nov 22.
Sri Lanka’s armed forces, including police, number 500,000 and are overwhelmingly Sinhala.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain displaced from large tracts of territory occupied by the armed forces during war-time offensives and now enclosed in High Security Zones (HSZs).
Even when the Norwegian peace process began, the number of internally displaced Tamils stood at 800,000,international donors said at a landmark conference in Tokyo in 2003.
The government has said the HSZs will not be dismantled, despite the end of the war.
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