|
Remembering
1983
The encounter is still vivid in my memory. A couple of years ago, on a
Sunday morning, I met two Sri Lankan Tamil girls in the Pilliar Kovil in
Kandy. Eyes closed, they were praying before the Lord. There was something
strange about them. They were dressed in skirts and T-shirts; there was no
pottu on their forehead, and there were no flowers adorning their hair. When
they got up, we started talking. Learning of my background and the fact that
I was a Visiting Professor in the Peradeniya University, the girls started
speaking freely. They belonged to Jaffna and were registered for M. Phil
degrees in the Science faculty. They had their education in the Tamil medium
and did not know the Sinhalese language. They did not want to be identified
as Tamils and, therefore, they had discarded their traditional Tamil dress.
I was deeply pained. A proud community like the Sri Lankan Tamils has been
compelled to discard its symbols of identity in order to live in Sinhalese
areas. It was an offshoot of the sense of fear and alienation that had
engulfed the Tamils following the genocide of July 1983.
The `riots', which began on the night of July 24, 1983, saw Sri Lanka go up
in flames by early August. The Government maintained that the violence was a
spontaneous backlash of the killing of 13 soldiers in Jaffna by the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). No one believed the propaganda, for
it was clear that there was planning behind the `spontaneous'
counter-violence. Paul Sieghart, the Chairman of the British section of the
International Commission of Jurists, wrote in his report on the tragedy:
"Clearly this was not a spontaneous upsurge of communal hatred among the
Sinhala people. It was a series of deliberate acts, executed in accordance
with a concerted plan, conceived and organised well in advance." What,
however, must not be missed is the silver lining: many Sinhalese risked
their lives to save their Tamil friends from the marauding mobs.
Carrying voters' lists and addresses of Tamil houses, the rioters ran amok
in Wellawatte, Dehiwela and Bambalapatiya. Factories and industrial
establishments owned by the Tamils were reduced to ashes. Still worse, the
complicity of the authorities became evident in the massacre of the Tamil
prisoners in the high security Welikade prison on July 25 and 27. The
murdered included two political prisoners, Jegan and Kuttimani. Sinhalese
prisoners, convicted for murder, rape and burglary, were hand picked by the
officials for the deadly job. They were served alcohol and let loose on
Tamil prisoners. According to survivors' accounts, the bodies were piled up
in front of a Buddha the statue in the jail courtyard and were set ablaze.
The riots, which began in Colombo, spread to Gampaha, Kalutara, Kandy,
Matale, Nuwara Eliya and Trincomalee, areas where Sri Lankan and Indian
Tamils were concentrated. Within Colombo alone, nearly 100,000 Tamils were
displaced. The Government admitted to a death toll of 250, but reliable
non-governmental sources estimated it at 2,000. There was hardly any Tamil
family in Colombo that escaped death, destruction or displacement.
The communal holocaust was an awful turning point in Sri Lanka's recent
history. During the last two turbulent decades, the savage `low intensity'
conflict, which has converted Sri Lanka into one of the most notorious
killing fields in the world, has taken a toll of nearly 65,000 lives and has
displaced 800,000 people. What is more, the prolonged conflict has
brutalised Sri Lankan society. With the benefit of hindsight, observers
point out certain significant errors of judgment and misguided policies
pursued by key dramatis personae. Such an exercise has to be undertaken so
that all concerned can learn from the mistakes of the past.
The first big mistake was the failure of the Sri Lankan political
leadership, especially the then President, J.R. Jayewardene, to rise to the
occasion. JR, as he was known, could have easily entered into serious
discussions with the moderate Tamil leadership soon after his landslide
victory in the parliamentary election held in 1977. The United National
Party (UNP) manifesto had spelt out, in a fair manner, the accumulated
grievances of the Tamils. Unfortunately, JR failed to take the initiative,
as a result of which the militants began to sideline Tamil moderates. Within
the UNP, Sinhala chauvinists led by Cyril Mathew began to emerge as a strong
pressure group. When Sri Lanka's day of reckoning came in the last week of
July 1983, Jayewardene not only failed to offer any words of sympathy for
the Tamil victims; he more or less justified the violence unleashed by the
lumpen sections of the Sinhalese. He did not act as an impartial,
non-sectarian head of state. During the last days, JR admitted his failure
to take decisive action for the resolution of the national question, and
began to refer, in informal conversations, to the 1983 violence as
"genocidal." In retrospect, the Indian involvement also contributed to the
exacerbation of the ethnic conflict. It paved the way for the emergence of
the LTTE as a Frankenstein monster. The number of Tamil militants — both
armed and unarmed — at the end of July 1983 was around 300. The Indian
Government's policy of mediating in the ethnic conflict while, at the same
time, arming the Tamil militants was an unwise move of calamitous
proportions. What is more, the competitive nature of Tamil Nadu politics,
with the two Dravidian parties vying with each other to support the Tamil
cause, resulted in the State becoming a sanctuary for Sri Lankan Tamil
guerrillas. The unfortunate experience of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF)
in the North and the East of the island between 1987 and 1990 has been
analysed in several accounts; nearly 1200 Indian soldiers sacrificed their
lives and a much larger number suffered injuries of various kinds. The
assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by a suicide squad of the LTTE in May 1991
swung the pendulum to the other extreme. There is a sense of revulsion
against Velupillai Prabakaran and the ideology of the LTTE throughout the
country, but much more so in Tamil Nadu. As a consequence, New Delhi adopted
a `hands off' policy towards the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka.
President Ranasinghe Premadasa's policy towards the LTTE was far worse than
anything that came before. At a time when, owing to the sustained military
pressure of the IPKF, the Tigers were bottled up in the jungles of Vavuniya,
Premadasa provided considerable money and arms to Prabakaran. When the IPKF
left the shores of Sri Lanka, the Tigers moved in without a fight to take
more-or-less full control of the North and the East. But the honeymoon could
not last long. The negotiations were a non-starter and the President himself
became a victim of the cult of violence perfected by the LTTE. In retrospect
both the Indian and Sri Lankan Governments, through unwise policies designed
for short-term gain, contributed to the strengthening of the Tigers. Like
Banquo's ghost, these realities will continue to haunt us for a quite a
while.
During this period, Indian commentators made drastic alterations in their
assessment of Prabakaran as a political leader. In the days following July
1983, academics and journalists alike tended to rationalise the violence of
the Tamil militants as a natural response of the victim to state violence.
However, after the LTTE's massacre of innocent Sinhala civilians in
Anuradhapura, the Indian perception of Prabakaran began to change slowly.
The growing intolerance of the Tigers, the systematic annihilation of
political opponents, the ethnic cleansing in the Jaffna Peninsula, the
attack on Dalada Maligawa and the forcible conscription of children into the
LTTE's `baby brigade' — these and many other Pol Potist crimes have
convinced most Indian observers that the gun was not only the source of
power and glory, but also the instrument of terror and fear. As a result,
Sri Lanka watchers in India today make a clear distinction between what the
LTTE stands for and the just demands and genuine aspirations of the Tamils.
Rohini Hensman graphically describes the agony and suffering undergone by
the ordinary people. She narrates the story of Anna's family — the wife was
a Sinhalese and the husband a Tamil. In 1983, their home in Dehiwela was
attacked and all their belongings were burnt. After spending a few months in
a refugee camp, the family moved to Batticaloa and began to rebuild its
life. Taking the members of the family to be Sinhalese, the LTTE attacked
them — and the family was compelled to take shelter again in a refugee camp.
Anna's mother remarked: "The problem is that neither the armed forces nor
the Tigers are the least bit concerned about people... They are fighting for
their own reasons... In Colombo, they wanted to kill us, because we were
Tamil; in Batticaloa they wanted to kill us because I speak Sinhala and they
thought I was Sinhalese. There is no freedom anywhere in this country. "What
we need is peace, not Eelam." That sums up the main lesson of 1983.
(The writer is former Director of the Centre for South
and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Madras, Chennai.) |