[Fresh Ink] Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka

[Richard Menec]

http://www.irr.org.uk/2009/july/ha000021.html

Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka

By A. Sivanandan 9 July 2009

The Institute of Race Relations' director explains the roots of ethnic 
cleansing in Sri Lanka in a speech to 'Marxism 2009'.

'It's difficult to talk dispassionately about what is going on in my 
country, when the horror of what the government is doing to a civilian Tamil 
population - already shelled and burned out of their existence and now 
herded into concentration camps and starved of food and medicine - revisits 
me to the pogrom of 1958 when my parents' house was attacked by a Sinhalese 
mob, my nephew had petrol thrown on him and burnt alive, and friends and 
relatives disappeared into refugee camps. I was a Tamil married to a 
Sinhalese with three children, and I could only see a future of hate 
stretching out before them. I left with my family, and came to England.

There is nothing, nothing, so horrendous as communal war, ethnic war. 
Overnight your friend becomes your enemy, every look of your neighbour is 
laden with threat, every passer-by is an informant. You walk the streets on 
tiptoe, casting nervous glances over your shoulder; you are tight, on edge, 
the sky lowers with menace.

Only one thing is worse - and that is when your government exploits communal 
differences, stokes ethnic and religious fears, all in the pursuit of power. 
In the process, it engenders a political culture of censorship and 
disinformation, assassination of journalists who speak out, extra-judicial 
killings by police and army, government without opposition - a culture that 
has to be broken if it is not to descend into dictatorship.

And it is with that in mind that I want to examine briefly the 150 years 
(more or less) of British rule, the sixty years of independence, the fifty 
years of ethnic cleansing within that and, within that, the twenty-five 
years of civil war that have brought Sri Lanka to this pass.

The Portuguese and the Dutch had occupied the Maritime Provinces in the 
16th-18th centuries in pursuit of the spice trade and strategic sea routes. 
But it was the British who from 1815 came to occupy the whole of the 
country, turned paddy fields into tea estates, dispossessed the peasantry 
and brought in indentured labour from South India to work in the 
plantations. English was made the official language and Christianity the 
favoured religion and a pervasive British culture won over the subject 
peoples to their own subjection. Incidentally, it is important to 
distinguish between the Tamils who were brought to Ceylon by the British and 
the indigenous Tamils who have been there from time immemorial.

Ceylon got its independence in 1948 on the back of the Indian nationalist 
struggle. Hence it did not go through the process of nation building that a 
nationalist struggle involves. Instead, it was regarded as a model 
colony -with an English-educated elite, universal suffrage, and an elected 
assembly - deserving of self-government.

These however turned out to be the trappings of capitalist democracy 
super-imposed on a feudal infrastructure - a democratic top-dressing on a 
feudal base. But then, colonial capitalism is a hybrid, a mutant. It 
underdevelops some parts of the country while the part it develops is not 
consonant with the country's needs or growth. Nor does it throw up 
institutions and structures that sustain democracy. Capitalism in the 
periphery, unlike capitalism at the centre, does not engender an organic 
relationship between the political, economic and cultural instances. It is a 
disorganic capitalism that produces disorganic development and a malformed 
democracy.

Power, then, was still in the hands of the feudal elite, the landed 
aristocracy. And almost the first thing that an independent government under 
D. S. Senanayake, "the father of the nation", did was to disenfranchise the 
"plantation Tamils" who were now into their third and fourth generations - 
thereby establishing a Sinhalese electoral majority in the upcountry areas. 
This was followed by colonisation schemes that settled Sinhalese peasants in 
the predominantly Tamil-speaking north-east - thereby changing the ethnic 
demography of the area. And although elections were on party lines, the 
parties themselves - with the exception of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party 
(LSSP) Trotskyists and the Communist Party (CP) - operated on feudal 
allegiances. Hence the government that ensued was government by dynasty. The 
first prime minister was succeeded by his son, Dudley Senanayake, and 
subsequently by his nephew, Sir John Kotelawela and so on. So that the 
ruling United National Party, (U.N.P.), was more appositely known as the 
Uncle Nephew Party.

The breakthrough came in 1956 when the Oxford-educated Solomon West Ridgeway 
Dias Bandaranaike decided that the only way that a distant relative like him 
could break into the dynastic succession was to resort to the ethnic 
politics of language and religion that would guarantee him a ready-made 
electoral majority. The Sinhala speaking population, after all, amounted to 
something like 70 per cent (the Tamils around 20 per cent) and they were 
mostly Buddhists. All he was doing, as a nationalist and patriot was 
returning power to the people, restituting their ancient rights. And so he 
came to power on the twin platforms of making Sinhala the official language 
and Buddhism the state religion. The language policy was to be introduced 
within 24 hours of his taking office - and all government servants would 
have to learn to conduct business in Sinhala within a given period if they 
were to keep their jobs. Sinhala would also constitute the medium of 
instruction in schools.

Bandaranaike had struck at the heart of Tamil livelihood and achievement. 
Coming from the arid north of the country, where nothing grew except 
children, the Tamil man's chief industry was the government service, and 
education, English education, his passport. And Britain's divide and rule 
policies encouraged and reinforced the growth of a class of Tamil 
bureaucrats. So that at independence they were over-represented in the 
administrative services and the professions.

Bandaranaike's policies were meant to put an end to that but, in the event, 
they degraded the mother tongue of a people who held up Tamil as an ancient 
language (which it was) and its considerable literature as their bounteous 
heritage. In protest Tamil leaders staged a mass non-violent sit-down in 
front of the Houses of Parliament and were beaten up by government-sponsored 
goondas for their pains - giving meaning to the phrase sitting ducks.

And there begins the two trajectories of ethnic cleansing: the "legal" and 
the illegal, the civil and the military, the parliamentary and 
extra-parliamentary, each overlapping and reinforcing each other. Ethnic 
cleansing is a process not an isolate, genocide its logical conclusion.

The prime minister, having divested himself of his Oxford bags for national 
dress, Christianity for Buddhism, English for Sinhala, was caught now 
between his social democratic principles and his nationalist practice, and 
proposed to make Tamil a regional language. But his ministers and the 
Opposition upped the racist ante and the Buddhist monks, whom Bandaranaike 
himself was instrumental in bringing out of the monasteries and on to the 
hustings where their influence was decisive, demanded that he return to his 
original remit. Peaceful Tamil demonstrations were met with police violence, 
participants travelling to a Tamil convention in the North in May 1958 were 
taken off the trains, cars and buses and beaten up by goon squads organised 
by Sinhalese politicians. Attacks on Tamils in their homes, on the street 
and work-places right across the country followed. Bandaranaike vacillated 
and a monk shot him dead. The chickens had come home to roost.

>From then on the pattern of Tamil subjugation was set: racist legislation 
followed by Tamil resistance, followed by conciliatory government gestures, 
followed by Opposition rejectionism, followed by anti-Tamil riots instigated 
by Buddhist priests and politicians, escalating Tamil resistance, and so 
on - except that the mode of resistance varied and intensified with each 
tightening of the ethnic-cleansing screw and led to armed struggle and civil 
war.

I do not want to go into the details of that sequence here (for those who 
are interested there is a 1984 article of mine on the IRR's website which 
goes into the specifics and is entitled 'Sri Lanka: racism and the politics 
of underdevelopment'). It is enough to note the key acts of successive 
Sinhalese-dominated governments that led to the spiralling cycle of 
repression and resistance. If Mr Bandaranaike had cut out the mother tongue 
of the Tamils, it was left to Mrs Bandaranaike to bring the Tamils down to 
their knees - by using the language provision to remove and exclude Tamils 
from the police, the army, the courts and government service generally, 
further colonising traditionally Tamil areas of the north-east with 
Sinhalese from the South, repatriating the already disenfranchised Indian 
Tamil plantation workers and, more crucially, requiring Tamil students to 
score higher marks than their Sinhalese counterparts to enter university - 
on the grounds that Tamils should not continue to be over-represented in 
higher education and the professions.

At one stroke, Mrs Bandaranaike had cut the ground from under the feet of 
Tamil youth. At one stroke she had blighted their future. You take away a 
people's language and you take away their identity. You take away their land 
and you take away their livelihood. You take away their education and you 
take away their hopes and aspirations. They had seen their parents try 
reason and reconciliation, but to no avail. They had seen them try 
non-violent resistance only to be met with violence. They had seen their 
representatives in the Federal Party running between the government and the 
Opposition with their electoral begging bowl. And they had seen the Left, 
the Trotskyists and the CP, who had once stood square against racist laws 
and for the parity of language, succumb at last to Mrs Bandaranaike's 
blandishments of nationalisation in exchange for dropping their call for 
parity, and join her United Front government.

The Left in Ceylon, and the Trotskyist LSSP, in particular, had hitherto had 
a noble history. Formed in the 1930s, during the malaria epidemic and led by 
doctors, they had set up people's dispensaries in the villages to treat 
patients free of charge. They had, along with the CP, politicised the urban 
working class and engendered a flourishing trade union movement. And in 
1953, when the UNP government withdrew its subsidised rice ration at a time 
of rising food prices, they brought out the country in a hartal (cessation 
of all work) and drove a beleaguered cabinet into the safety of a ship in 
the harbour. But 1953 also marks the Left's failure - for instead of 
pressing home the advantage, a middle-class leadership took fright at the 
enormity of its own success, agreed to talks and called off the hartal. The 
moment of revolution had passed, and from then on Parliament became the 
Left's pitch - landing them, as I mentioned before, in Mrs Bandaranaike's 
racist government. But the final degradation was yet to come. Asked to frame 
a new constitution, Dr Colin R de Silva, LSSP historian, now made a 
constitutional proviso for the repatriation of disenfranchised Tamil 
plantation workers.

There was still the self-styled Marxist Sinhala youth movement, the JVP, the 
People's Liberation Front, whom the Bandaranaike government had to contend 
with. But their insurrection in 1971 was ruthlessly put down and their 
protagonists murdered by the army and the police. Their politics though 
claiming to be Marxist stirred up racial animosity by stoking fears of 
"Indian expansionism". Their second coming in 1987-89, though laced with 
anti-Tamil propaganda, was even more mercilessly put down by the Jayawardene 
government. Today they are the most virulent racists in the Rajapakse 
coalition government - second only to the Aryanists of the JHU, National 
Heritage Party of the Buddhist monks.

The degradation of the Left engendered the degradation of the intelligentsia 
who now turned to middle of the road reformist politics. The Tamil youth 
looked around and saw no allies in the South. Nothing and no one seemed to 
work for them. They had only themselves to rely on. They had no choice but 
to take up arms. (The violence of the violated is never a matter of choice, 
but a symptom of choicelessness - and often it is a violence that takes on a 
life of its own and becomes distorted and self-defeating.)

The youths began with robbing a bank or two, stealing arms from police 
stations - and making their getaway on bicycles. The north, and Jaffna in 
particular, is not orthodox guerrilla country with mountains and forests to 
hide in, but its villages - a maze of narrow twisting lanes and by-lanes 
tucked away behind large dense palmyrah-leaf fences - are bicycle country 
inhospitable to motor vehicles. Bicycles, besides, were the Jaffna man's 
chief mode of transport even in the towns, and "the getaways" were lost 
among them. And as the frustrations of the police increased and the stories 
of the hold-ups became legend, the parents and elders closed ranks behind 
their young. Their generation had been stereotyped as weak and cowardly and 
they had been brought down to their knees by government after Sinhalese 
government. Their young had now set them on their feet. They were "their 
Boys" and "Thambi" (younger brother) their leader. They would keep faith by 
them, give them sanctuary, let them disappear among their midst - be water 
to their fish.

But the romance of the Robin Hood period turned sour and vicious in the late 
1970s when the Jayawardene government let the police loose in Jaffna to 
break up peaceful demonstrations, arrest and torture Tamil youth, burn down 
the Jaffna bazaar when refused free foodstuffs - and generally lord over it 
the Tamil people. And this in turn led to the reprisal killings of policemen 
by the Boys. In 1979 the government passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act 
and sent the army to Jaffna with instructions to "wipe out terrorism within 
six months". The imprisonment and torture of innocent Tamils that followed 
in the wake of the PTA drove the civilian population further into the arms 
of the emerging militant groups, all demanding a separate Tamil state, 
Eelam, the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) the most militant of 
them.

In 1981 security forces burnt down the Jaffna library, with its "ola" 
manuscripts and rare literature, the epicentre of Tamil learning and 
culture. In the same year Gandhiyam, a refugee camp turned farm, set up by a 
Tamil doctor to restore refugees to some sort of normal life, was over-run 
by the police - and its organisers killed or imprisoned. In 1983 the Tigers 
killed thirteen soldiers in Jaffna and the government brought their bodies 
to Colombo and put them on display before an angry Sinhalese crowd and so 
provoked "the riots"(pogroms really) that followed culminating in the 
killing of Tamils prisoners in Welikade jail, awaiting trial under the PTA, 
by Sinhalese prisoners whose cells the guards forgot to lock!

That's when the civil war began in earnest - with each side, the government 
and the guerrillas, ratcheting up the terror count, with the occasional 
pause for "talks" or peace mediation, during which each side refurbished its 
forces and came out more intransigent than ever. The government now added an 
official military dimension to civil ethnic cleansing by letting loose its 
private armies to terrorise Tamils and drive them from their homes. Refugee 
camps were attacked, its inmates killed or driven out, Tamil plantation 
workers were forcibly taken from their houses and dumped hundreds of miles 
away by thugs in the pay of the Minister of Industries in trucks provided by 
him. (The state against its Tamils.)

The LTTE's guerrilla struggle, likewise, had degenerated into ad hoc 
militarism with suicide bombings and assassinations. And politics went out 
of the window. The military tail had begun to wag the political dog - and 
instead of winning people to their cause, whether among the Sinhalese or 
their own people, the Tigers began to eliminate anyone who stood in their 
way, be it one of their own dissenters or the Indian prime minister - an act 
of self-defeat in that it alienated the Tamils of India. Two years later, 
1993, they assassinated Sri Lanka's President Ranasinghe Premadasa. The 
final self-defeat came in 2004 with the defection of Muralitharan, their 
military strategist and their second-in-command to the side of the Rajapakse 
government. And it was the inside information that he and his men provided 
on guerrilla positions and strategies that helped the government to finally 
overcome the Tigers. He is today the Chief Minister of the Eastern province 
and a member of the Rajapakse government and held up as a symbol of the 
government's goodwill towards the Tamils, and an indication of its intention 
to afford them some sort of regional government.

But the President's own actions since the defeat of the Tigers and, more 
importantly, the political culture that his government, even more than all 
the previous governments, has created, belies any such democratic outcome. 
For what has evolved in sixty years of independence is an ethnocentric 
Sinhala-Buddhist polity reared on falsified history reinforced by feudal 
customs and myths, with a voting system that seals the ethnic majority in 
power for ever - while reducing the party system to a war between dynasties, 
flanked by monks and militias.

And within that polity the Rajapakse government or, rather cabal (he has 
three brothers in the cabinet) has instituted a regime of blanket censorship 
under cover of which it has conducted a ruthless war not just against the 
equally ruthless Tigers but against harmless Tamil civilians, a "war without 
witness" someone termed it, while feeding the Sinhalese public with 
government-manufactured facts and seeing off any journalist who dared to 
criticise the government. (You will all remember the case of Lasantha 
Wickramatunga, the editor of the Sunday Leader, who sent a letter to his 
friend President Rajapakse, excoriating him for murders of outspoken 
journalists and predicting his own at the hands of government thugs. And so 
it came to pass.)

What, in sum, we are faced with in my country today, is a brainwashed 
people, brought up on lies and myths, their intelligentsia told what to 
think, their journalists forbidden to speak the truth on pain of death, the 
militarising of civil society and the silencing of all opposition. A nation 
bound together by the effete ties of language, race and religion has arrived 
at the cross-roads between parliamentary dictatorship and fascism.

It is for the Sinhalese people I fear now - for if they come for me in the 
morning, they'll come for you that night.' The Institute of Race Relations 
is precluded from expressing a corporate view: any opinions expressed are 
therefore those of the authors.


Related links

Download a copy of A. Sivanandan's article: 'Sri Lanka: racism and the 
politics of underdevelopment' (pdf file, 2mb) Race & Class, Vol. 26, No. 1, 
(1984)