By Vishwamithra –

Continued from March 10th column… ‘Maturation Of Racial Politics: Tamils Were More Sinned Against Than Sinning‘

“A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.” ~ Socrates

The relationships between Sinhalese Buddhists in the south and Northern Tamils were already fragile and seemed extremely unstable. Suspicion on both sides of the racial equation grew exponentially brittle in the wake of the Sinhala Only Bill passed during the Bandaranaike regime in the mid fifties. Recruitment to government service was based on one’s ethnicity rather than on pure merit of educational qualifications. Sinhalese political leaders envied highly educated Tamils and almost all Tamils barring a very few, suspected the Sinhalese psyche. The quiet and fragile friendships and robust relationships that existed up to the time developed into mutual suspicion, lack of understanding and fast approaching a never-to-return to mutual understanding and compassion. Links of mutual amity were about to burst asunder, never to fuse again. Inter racial connections were crumbling, a harbinger of grave consequences to generate thousands meeting their ultimate fate, death or decapitation for life.    

One nation, Ceylonese or Sri Lankans, began on her dangerous path to near destruction; obscene signs of break up and collapse of cooperation manifested in every corner of the land, whether it was deep in the south or behind the Palmyra curtain. What Chelvanayakam, GG Ponnambalam, Naganathan, Amirthalingam and Sivasithamparam were engaged in was a nonviolent peaceful demonstration of their collective expression of protest and disagreement with the policies of the majoritarian Sinhalese rule. Tamil youth could not wait any longer. They wanted immediate action based on what was declared on May 10, 1976 as ‘Vaddukodai Resolution’. They wanted a separate Tamil homeland: a State of Elam.

However much our northern brethren demanded a separate state, a Tamil Homeland, Sinhalese majority, whether they were Buddhists, Christian or Catholic, would not grant, not even one inch of the land to Tamils as their homeland. That was a nonstarter from the beginning. All-party conferences, separate peace talks between the Sri Lankan government and the militant groups and unofficial conventions had all been convened but to no avail. Prabhakaran and his Tigers were hellbent on establishing an Elam even beyond the imagination of C Sunderalingam, former Minister in the D S Senanayake Cabinet.

In the late eighties, under the JR government pogroms executed by both sides reached a pinnacle of intensity when the massacres committed in the Dollar and Kent Farm Camps in Mullaitivu district. In the Dollar Farm and Kent Farm villages, the separatists killed a total of 62, 33 an 29 respectively. Amongst the dead were women, adolescents and babies. Terror had reached its most inhuman and uncivilized climax. Tamil militants drew no thresholds for their attainment of Tamil Elam. Atrocities being committed in far away distant villages could not be related to the comfort zones of those who lived south of Vavuniya. Sinhalese or Tamil, when racial dimensions become the only parameters with which ‘good’ or ‘bad’ could be measured, atrocities so executed become blurry and foggy. The human touch and the spirit of right and wrong becomes measured only in how many were killed yesterday, which could be surpassed today. All sanity and poise flew out the window.

The decade of nineteen eighties, despite it’s vast economic improvement from the pathetic years of Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s experiment with a mixed economy, explosions in major city centers and distant villages, both north and south of Vavuniya, continued to claim their numbers. The Arantalawa massacre of thirty four Buddhist Monks, including a few Samanera Bikkhus (unordained Monks), sent chills down many a spine, except perhaps those who committed such a dastardly crime.

Killings committed by the LTTE and JVP continued. The JVP’s murderous spectacle had enigmatic effects on the psyche of average Sri Lankan youth. Its unique methods of claiming lives of those who opposed Rohana Wijeweera‘s ideological position awakened the latent craving for violent expression of opposition to the status quo. Its acceptance or rejection depended on the economic conditions of those who committed them. Those who had more than a comfortable life were struggling to come to terms with the chain of massacres that were executed while those who lived under the poverty level, those who were considered to be non-elite may have had a different judgment on the violence so executed by an ideologically driven set of youth whose political leanings were outright left-wing and quasi-Marxist. They were, in actual fact, giving credence to the saying attributed to Vladimir Lenin: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands; let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky, Zinovief and Volodarski, let there be floods of the blood of the bourgeois – more blood, as much as possible.” The JVP youth indeed were closely affiliated to Lenin’s theory and action.

Terence Perera, a Deputy Inspector General(DIG), serving as the Director, Counter Subversive Unit  and my close friend, Harsha Abeywardana, Chairman of the UNP were gunned down in broad daylight. Batalanda served as a torture center for those who were suspected as the alleged perpetrators. The seeds of Batalanda were neatly and carefully planted amidst the human tragedies that were taking place all over the country.

On 23 July 1983 at around 11:30 pm, the rebel group LTTE ambushed the Four Four Bravo military patrol in Thirunelveli, near Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka. What followed from that ’83 July 23 and afterwards during the ‘Black July’ left an unerasable stain on the country’s image. More than her image, what she suffered as a united nation cannot be told as one that could be forgotten nor revisited. Many a bond burst asunder and the gravity of its consequences are being felt even today. Polarization of the country along ethnic lines could not have been avoided. Failure of successive governments to provide an affordable living to all countrymen became more pronounced when the Rajapaksas came to power and abused that very ethnic divide in order to obtain more and more Sinhalese majority votes at the elections. Downward spiraling began in its brutal fashion until the country was declared bankrupt in 2022. But that is to anticipate events to follow.

Sinhalese political leaders, especially those who represented the United National Party (UNP) were assassinated in a row. First President Premadasa, followed by Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake all ended up killed on the streets in Colombo. Both Premadasa and Gamini were victims of suicide bombers while Lalith was at the receiving end of a gunshot. Entry of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the very aggressive diplomatic initiatives led by J N Dixit, the former Indian Ambassador to Sri Lanka into the country’s polity awakened the latent dislike and suspicion of India amongst most Sri Lankans.

The 1988 Presidential Elections and 1989 Parliamentary elections were held when the JVP was running amok in the south of the country. Display of headless bodies on culverts and bridges were were a regular weekly occurrence. Violence as a mode of expression of opposition to the status quo was taken for granted. When the eighties rolled over to the nineties, men, women and children were in fear of attending to their routine chores. Cruel insensitivity on the part of the national leadership, corruption beginning to seep down to every level of the bureaucracy and the people at large coming to terms with corruption and bribery became the ineffaceable  character of the nation.

In the 1994 Presidential Elections, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was elected President and she missed a rare opportunity to create history by opting for Lakshman Kadirgamar,  a leading Tamil intellectual, to be the first Tamil Prime Minister in the country. Mahinda Rajapaksa along with his pseudo-Sinhalese nationalists challenged CBK and she had no alternative but to make Mahinda Rajapaksa the Prime Minister. The rest, as the cliché goes, is history, to be told another day…

To be continued…

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com