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Black July 1983: the Charge is Genocide
Having effectively disenfranchised the Tamil people, the
government then went on to announce that it proposed to expropriate all damaged
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 Wheen 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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