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INDICTMENT AGAINST SRI LANKA
Black July 1983: the Charge is Genocide
On 15th Anniversary
Year 16: the Holocaust Continues
S Sathananthan & Sabiha Sumar, 28 July 1998
A moral weakness
The five days, from 25th to 29th July 1998,
constitute the 15th anniversary of the Holocaust of July 1983.
Fifteen years ago the Tamil people living outside the Northern and
some parts of the Eastern Provinces were targets of the pogrom,
unprecedented in its scale and brutality. The events of that fateful
week have been burnt into Tamil memory as Black July.
The
anniversary brought forth numerous retrospective commentaries on the
Holocaust. Some writers accurately noted the evidence indicating how
senior members of the then United National Party (UNP) government
had a direct hand in meticulously organising the pogrom; and how the
State security forces colluded with the armed Sinhalese men who
killed and raped defenceless Tamil civilians and looted or destroyed
their property. Indeed they deplored the instances where the
security forces participated in the pogrom; and they underlined the
refusal of the then President JR Jayawardene to hold a judicial
inquiry into the Holocaust, which omission amounted to a cover-up
and in effect confirmed the complicity of the State. Some writers
demanded that an official inquiry should be held � however belatedly
� to investigate the events and identify the perpetrators of the
tragedy.
Hardly any commentary dealt with the fact that the
Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) did not aggressively demand an
inquiry into the Holocaust, whether in 1983 or at any time
thereafter. In effect the TULF collaborated with the UNP government
in the cover-up. An objective of TULF�s opportunistic collaboration
was to ensure that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is
made the scapegoat so that the TULF could retain the political
leadership of the Ceylon Tamil people.
The writers who conceded that the violence was premeditated and
was orchestrated by the State nevertheless apportioned a share of
the blame to the LTTE. They viewed as a terrorist act the killing of
13 soldiers by the LTTE in the ambush, in which an army vehicle was
blasted by a land mine, two days earlier in Tirunelvely on the 23rd
of July 1983. They held the LTTE�s deliberate attack responsible at
the least for intensifying Sinhalese hostility against Tamils and
for providing the Sinhalese ultra nationalists within the UNP
government the opportunity to launch the pogrom.
The more
reactionary writers deceptively described the violence as �a
communal riot�. They disingenuously placed almost the entire blame
for it upon the LTTE by portraying the pogrom as an unfortunate but
involuntary response of some sections of the Sinhalese people to the
killing of the 13 Sinhalese soldiers by the Tamil LTTE. They
misleadingly projected the Holocaust as �an episodal defection from
the democratic norm� and absolved the vast majority of the Sinhalese
by shifting the responsibility for the atrocities to the lumpen
elements within the Sinhalese community.
What is remarkable
is the convergence of views among writers from across, virtually,
the entire political spectrum. They equated as violence the killing
of the Sinhalese soldiers in the course of battle by their
adversary, the LTTE, to the murder of defenceless Tamil citizens by
the armed minions of the duly constituted Sri Lankan government,
which is bound by the Constitution to protect all citizens. The
intention of the writers may have been to maintain so-called
�neutrality�.
But the two cannot be compared and the result
of �neutrality� is the crippling moral weakness. Almost all writers
are incapable of making the crucial political distinction between
the violence of the aggressor and the violence of the victim, that
is, between the repression by the aggressive Sri Lankan State and
the resistance of the victimised Tamil people.
Informal
and formal State terror
In the Tamil view, the Sinhalese consensus that the
Holocaust was not repeated after 1983 is pure political fiction. The
violence never stopped.
Between 1983 and 1987, the pogroms
continued albeit on a low key. Tamils remember the repeated and
brutal attacks they suffered whilst travelling between Jaffna and
Colombo. They were waylaid in trains. They died of sniper fire in
the coaches. Buses to and from Jaffna were frequently intercepted
and Tamil passengers were dragged away, and rarely seen again.
Indeed travel through Sinhalese-majority regions, particularly in
the north-central part of the country, became for Tamils a deadly
game of Russian roulette. Not one Sinhalese person was convicted for
these crimes.
The military systematically mowed down Tamil
civilians by the hundreds in the Tamil-majority Northern and Eastern
Provinces under the pretext of attacking the LTTE and other Tamil
resistance groups. The slaughter was characterised by Mr Narayan
Swamy as �the dance of death� (Tigers of Lanka, 1994, p.170). In
1987, the State escalated the violence when it unleashed Operation
Liberation to conquer Jaffna, the cultural heartland of Ceylon
Tamils.
Ceylon Tamils view the military operations as
extensions of the Holocaust to the two Tamil-majority provinces. The
Tamil people correctly understood the violence as State terror,
unleashed by the Sinhalese-controlled State. In a refreshing
departure from the beaten path, Mr Izeth Husssain focused on State
terrorism as the central problem (Social Justice, no 135, 1998).
Furthermore, Tamils drew a clear difference between informal State
terror (pogroms) from formal State terror (military repression).
Informal State terror against Tamils is carried out by non-uniformed
minions of the State and it began with the pogrom of 1956. Formal
State terror is executed by the uniformed men and women of the armed
forces, which were first deployed to crush non-violent Tamil
resistance in Jaffna in 1961. The conquest of Jaffna in December
1995, the atrocities and disappearances in the North-Eastern
Province (NEP), the current Operation Jayasikurui and the alleged
existence of mass graves of Tamils in Chemmani are manifestations of
the continuing formal State terror against the Ceylon Tamil people.
Apology for formal State terror
The claim that Black July has not been repeated
since serves to mask formal State terror. It lends credence to the
military fiction, disseminated by official propaganda, that the war
is only against the LTTE and not directed principally at the Tamil
people. Whether or not all those who make the claim are aware of its
diabolical implications is not the point. The effect of their
argument is, however, to legitimise formal State terror as
�counter-insurgency� military operations.
Formal State terror
is also legitimised by reinforcing the political fiction, that Black
July was not repeated, with the political myth that the Peoples
Alliance (PA) government seeks to devolve power in order to reach a
negotiated settlement to the Tamil Question. For instance, Dr
Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu asserted not only that �there has been no
repetition of the carnage� but also that �the political agenda has
been moved far to accommodate devolution� (Social Justice, no 135,
1998, p.17).
Those who believe in that political myth should
reflect on the following provisions of the 1972 and 1978
Constitutions and the October 1997 Report of the Parliamentary
Select Committee (PSC) on Constitutional Reform. They are sufficient
to indicate the implacable opposition of the PA government to the
devolution of power.
(a) The delegation of principle
legislative power was made discretionary under the 1972 Constitution
drafted by the United Front (UF) coalition government, led by the
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP): �The National State Assembly may not
abdicate, delegate or in any manner alienate its legislative power
nor may it set up any authority with any legislative power other
than the power to make subordinate laws� (Art 45(1)).
(b) In the 1978 Constitution of the UNP government, the word
�may� is replaced by �shall� to make the devolution of power
unconstitutional: �Parliament shall not abdicate or in any manner
alienate its legislative power, and shall not set up any authority
with any legislative power� (Art 76(1)). The use of the word �shall�
makes the provision mandatory and, in the words of President JR
Jayawardene, �all but closed the door on federalism� .
(c)
October 1997 Report of the PSC on Constitutional Reform of the PA
coalition government, led by the SLFP, also seeks to make the
devolution of power unconstitutional: �Parliament shall not abdicate
or in any manner alienate its legislative power and shall not set up
any authority with any such legislative power� (Art 92(1)).
The above provisions allow the establishment only of local
government institutions. The Provincial Councils (PCs), for example,
set up under the 13th Amendment without the repeal of Article 76(1)
were dishonestly palmed off as institutions for the devolution of
power. In fact they are glorified Municipal Councils entirely
irrelevant to resolving the Tamil Question. Given Article 92(1), the
claim that power could be devolved through the Regional Councils
(RCs) proposed by the PA government is similarly an unconscionable
deception.
Toward genocide
Having abdicated the moral responsibility to
distinguish between the repression of the aggressor and the
resistance of the victim, the writers in general internalised
government propaganda and treated the war as a conflict essentially
between two armed groups, the Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE.
The following observation by Dr Jehan Perera typifies this
ahistorical perspective: �as in the case of the riots, the civilian
population is more or less disengaged from the direct fighting, but
remain on the sidelines giving each side necessary logistical
support� (Social Justice, no. 135, 1998, p.27). The above view
deliberately ignores the carpet-bombing and artillery shelling of
Tamil civilian areas in the north. The unprecedented Tamil refugee
population of about half million in the NEP is very unlikely to
concur with Dr Perera, that they are perched �on the sidelines�.
Moreover, the cultural myopia of most writers has blinded
them to the unfolding tragedy of genocide. For the PA government has
created famine conditions by severely curtailing the supply of food,
agricultural inputs and fuel. The restrictions imposed on the
supplies of antibiotics and essential drugs have placed the lives of
Tamil children at great risk. The government announced in early July
1998 that the meagre supplies will be pruned further in August.
The deprivation of food and medicines to civilians by the PA
government qualifies as genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention,
which specifies that actions calculated to create conditions in
which a part or whole of a people could be destroyed constitute
genocide. This point has been cogently argued by the Law Foundation
Professor at the University of Houston and Co-Chair of the
International Criminal Law Interest Group, Professor Jordan J Paust
(�The human rights to food, medicine and medical supplies, and
freedom from arbitrary and inhuman detention and controls in Sri
Lanka�, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, vol 31, no 3,
1998).
What is needed is not impotent breast-beating, however
cathartic it may be, over past atrocities. What is more important
and urgent is to reveal the past within the present. The need of the
hour is to condemn the continuing Holocaust, the draconian war
against the Tamil people and to expose the genocidal intent of the
Sinhalese-controlled State.
Are those who grieve Black July
capable of forcing the Sinhalese-controlled State to stop
unconditionally the genocidal war? Are they ready to demand and
struggle for the immediate withdrawal of the Sinhalese armed forces
from the NEP?
Or will they continue to effectively condone
the genocide of Ceylon Tamils on the spurious ground that the
withdrawal of the armed forces from the NEP will strengthen the
LTTE? |
