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INDICTMENT AGAINST SRI LANKA
Genocide '83
Expropriation of Tamil property...
Having effectively disenfranchised the Tamil people, the government then went on to
announce that it proposed to expropriate all damaged property. The Economist reported on
20 August 1983:
"...the soft spoken Cambridge educated Finance Minister, Mr. Ronnie de Mel is too
sophisticated to use the term on the tip of many Sinhalese tongues these days, the need
for a 'final solution' to the Tamil problem. But even for him, the 'only solution' is to
'restore the rights of the Sinhala majority'.. this is what the Sinhala mobs set out to do
when they put their torches to thousands of carefully targeted Tamil factories and shops.
Now the government is about to advance this process by expropriating all damaged property.
Many Tamils will assist them by leaving the country."
"The result will be a decisive shift in the balance of economic power in Sri Lanka
from Tamils to Sinhalese. The stated aim of the government's take over of riot ravaged
homes and businesses is to prevent distress sales and to promote an orderly reconstruction
programme. Government funds are to be injected into salvageable industries with export
earners a top priority. In exchange, government will take a share of equity and appoint
directors. In theory, former owners will be free to buy back government shares in time.
But ministers do not disguise their redistributive intentions."
''Many are talking about following Malaysia's example of writing preferences for the
majority community into commercial law. The trade minister has already reorganised rice
wholesaling to break the Tamil grip... Ravaged city centres such as the Pettah commercial
district in Colombo are to be redeveloped; when prime sites are reallocated, former
occupants will not necessarily get them back..."
''Now Mr.Jayawardene's government has announced that the state will take over the
damaged property, including housing and industrial premises, in the interest of rapid
reconstruction, an extra ordinary measure hardly calculated to win over dispossessed
Tamils... A government reconstruction programme is very much to be desired, but wholesale
nationalisation of Tamil property seems an eccentric and gratuitously dangerous way of
going about it.'' (The Guardian, 9 August 1983)
Speaking during the debate
in the Sri Lanka
Parliament on the 6th Amendment to the Constitution on 4 August 1983, Sinhala Industries
Minister, Mr.Cyril Mathew had no qualms in justifying the attack on the Tamils in these
terms:
''The Sinhala people want to know what you are going to do. They (Tamils) are like
maharajahs there. A Sinhala trader cannot even get a finger in. It is this injustice which
has been festering like a wound for 25 years. Only a spark was needed. The spark fell on
24 July.''
Francis Whelan commented in the New Statesman on 16 September 1983:
"A few minutes after arriving in Sri Lanka last month, I was sitting on the
pavement outside Katunayake airport watching the birds and dragonflies. A Sinhalese youth
sat down beside me, apparently keen to talk about the recent violence against the
country's Tamils. 'Tamils all gone from Colombo now', he said with a broad grin, 'Tamil
shops all burned. Perhaps all Tamils will go to India now.' His tone was gleefully
triumphant. 'Sri Lanka is for Sinhalese people' he concluded - though Tamils have
lived in Sri Lanka for over two thousand years, at least as long as the Sinhalese."
"If one wishes to know where these Sinhalese youths get their ideas from, one need
only to look at Junius Richard Jayawardene, Sri Lanka's 77 year old President. On Thursday
28 July, while Sinhalese thugs rampaged around the streets of Colombo and many other
towns, the President broadcast to the nation. He did not utter a single word of regret or
sympathy for the Tamils who had been massacred or made homeless. Instead, the man who
likes to think of himself as the grand old statesman of the Third World, announced that
the 'time had come to accede to the clamour and the national respect of the Sinhala
people', for all the world as if the Sinhalese were the victims..."
...continued...
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