INDICTMENT AGAINST SRI LANKA
Sri Lanka's Continued Ethnic Cleansing ...
- after Tamil Armed Resistance Ends on 17 May 2009
- the Record Speaks...
- Ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka
A.Sivanandan,
Director
Institute of Race Relations, 9 July 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.'
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