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The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
Libarary of Congress Country Studies
October 1988
"..The historian, K.M. de Silva, calls the
1971 JVP insurrection "perhaps the biggest revolt by young
people in any part of the world in recorded history, the
first instance of tension between generations becoming
military conflict on a national scale." Although it
suppressed the poorly organized revolt with little
difficulty, the Bandaranaike government was visibly shaken
by the experience. Fears of future unrest within the
Sinhalese community undoubtedly made it reluctant, in a
"zero-sum" economy and society, to grant significant
concessions to minorities..."
The leftist Sinhalese Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna drew worldwide
attention when it launched an insurrection against the Bandaranaike
government in April 1971. Although the insurgents were young, poorly
armed, and inadequately trained, they succeeded in seizing and
holding major areas in Southern and Central provinces before they
were defeated by the security forces. Their attempt to seize power
created a major crisis for the government and forced a fundamental
reassessment of the nation's security needs.
The movement was started in the late 1960s by Rohana Wijeweera, the
son of a businessman from the seaport of Tangalla, Hambantota
District. An excellent student, Wijeweera had been forced to give up
his studies for financial reasons. Through friends of his father, a
member of the Ceylon Communist Party, Wijeweera successfully applied
for a scholarship in the Soviet Union, and in 1960 at the age of
seventeen, he went to Moscow to study medicine at Patrice Lumumba
University. While in Moscow, he studied Marxist ideology but,
because of his openly expressed sympathies for Maoist revolutionary
theory, he was denied a visa to return to the Soviet Union after a
brief trip home in 1964.
Over the next several years, he participated in the pro-Beijing
branch of the Ceylon Communist Party, but he was increasingly at
odds with party leaders and impatient with its lack of revolutionary
purpose. His success in working with youth groups and his popularity
as a public speaker led him to organize his own movement in 1967.
Initially identified simply as the New Left, this group drew on
students and unemployed youths from rural areas, most of them in the
sixteen-to-twenty-five-age- group. Many of these new recruits were
members of lower castes (Karava and Durava) who felt that their
economic interests had been neglected by the nation's leftist
coalitions. The standard program of indoctrination, the so-called
Five Lectures, included discussions of Indian imperialism,
the growing economic crisis, the failure of the island's communist
and socialist parties, and the need for a sudden, violent seizure of
power.
Between 1967 and 1970, the group expanded rapidly, gaining control
of the student socialist movement at a number of major university
campuses and winning recruits and sympathizers within the armed
forces. Some of these latter supporters actually provided sketches
of police stations, airports, and military facilities that were
important to the initial success of the revolt. In order to draw the
newer members more tightly into the organization and to prepare them
for a coming confrontation, Wijeweera opened "education camps" in
several remote areas along the south and southwestern coasts. These
camps provided training in Marxism-Leninism and in basic military
skills.
While developing secret cells and regional commands, Wijeweera's
group also began to take a more public role during the elections of
1970. His cadres campaigned openly for the United Front of Sirimavo
R. D. Bandaranaike, but at the same time they distributed posters
and pamphlets promising violent rebellion if Bandaranaike did not
address the interests of the proletariat. In a manifesto issued
during this period, the group used the name Janatha Vimukthi
Peramuna for the first time. Because of the subversive tone of these
publications, the United National Party government had Wijeweera
detained during the elections, but the victorious Bandaranaike
ordered his release in July 1970.
In the politically tolerant atmosphere of the next few months, as
the new government attempted to win over a wide variety of
unorthodox leftist groups, the JVP intensified both the public
campaign and the private preparations for a revolt. Although their
group was relatively small, the members hoped to immobilize the
government by selective kidnapping and sudden, simultaneous strikes
against the security forces throughout the island. Some of the
necessary weapons had been bought with funds supplied by the
members. For the most part, however, they relied on raids against
police stations and army camps to secure weapons, and they
manufactured their own bombs.
The discovery of several JVP bomb factories gave the government its
first evidence that the group's public threats were to be taken
seriously. In March 1971, after an accidental explosion in one of
these factories, the police found fifty-eight bombs in a hut in
Nelundeniya, Kegalla District. Shortly afterward, Wijeweera was
arrested and sent to Jaffna Prison, where he remained throughout the
revolt. In response to his arrest and the growing pressure of police
investigations, other JVP leaders decided to act immediately, and
they agreed to begin the uprising at 11:00 P.M. on April 5.
The planning for the countrywide insurrection was hasty and poorly
coordinated; some of the district leaders were not informed until
the morning of the uprising. After one premature attack, security
forces throughout the island were put on alert and a number of JVP
leaders went into hiding without bothering to inform their
subordinates of the changed circumstances. In spite of this
confusion, rebel groups armed with shotguns, bombs, and Molotov
cocktails launched simultaneous attacks against seventy- four police
stations around the island and cut power to major urban areas. The
attacks were most successful in the south. By April 10, the rebels
had taken control of Matara District and the city of Ambalangoda in
Galle District and came close to capturing the remaining areas of
Southern Province.
The new government was ill prepared for the crisis that confronted
it. Although there had been some warning that an attack was
imminent, Bandaranaike was caught off guard by the scale of the
uprising and was forced to call on India to provide basic security
functions. Indian frigates patrolled the coast and Indian troops
guarded Bandaranaike International Airport at Katunayaka while
Indian Air Force helicopters assisted the counteroffensive. Sri
Lanka's all-volunteer army had no combat experience since World War
II and no training in counterinsurgency warfare. Although the police
were able to defend some areas unassisted, in many places the
government deployed personnel from all three services in a ground
force capacity. Royal Ceylon Air Force helicopters delivered relief
supplies to beleaguered police stations while combined service
patrols drove the insurgents out of urban areas and into the
countryside.
After two weeks of fighting, the government regained control of all
but a few remote areas. In both human and political terms, the cost
of the victory was high: an estimated 10,000 insurgents- -many of
them in their teens--died in the conflict, and the army was widely
perceived to have used excessive force. In order to win over an
alienated population and to prevent a prolonged conflict,
Bandaranaike offered amnesties in May and June 1971, and only the
top leaders were actually imprisoned. Wijeweera, who was already in
detention at the time of the uprising, was given a twenty-year
sentence and the JVP was proscribed.
Under the six years of emergency rule that followed the uprising,
the JVP remained dormant. After the victory of the United National
Party in the 1977 elections, however, the new government attempted
to broaden its mandate with a period of political tolerance.
Wijeweera was freed, the ban was lifted, and the JVP entered the
arena of legal political competition. As a candidate in the 1982
presidential elections, Wijeweera finished fourth, with more than
250,000 votes (as compared with Jayewardene's 3.2 million). During
this period, and especially as the Tamil conflict to the north
became more intense, there was a marked shift in the ideology and
goals of the JVP. Initially Marxist in orientation, and claiming to
represent the oppressed of both the Tamil and Sinhalese communities,
the group emerged increasingly as a Sinhalese nationalist
organization opposing any compromise with the Tamil insurgency. This
new orientation became explicit in the anti-Tamil riots of July
1983. Because of its role in inciting violence, the JVP was once
again banned and its leadership went underground.
The group's activities intensified in the second half of 1987 in the
wake of the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord. The prospect of Tamil autonomy
in the north together with the presence of Indian troops stirred up
a wave of Sinhalese nationalism and a sudden growth of
antigovernment violence. During 1987 a new group emerged that was an
offshoot of the JVP--the Patriotic Liberation Organization
(Deshapreni Janatha Viyaparaya--DJV). The DJV claimed responsibility
for the August 1987 assassination attempts against the president and
prime minister. In addition, the group launched a campaign of
intimidation against the ruling party, killing more than seventy
members of Parliament between July and November.
Along with the group's renewed violence came a renewed fear of
infiltration of the armed forces. Following the successful raid of
the Pallekelle army camp in May 1987, the government conducted an
investigation that resulted in the discharge of thirty-seven
soldiers suspected of having links with the JVP. In order to prevent
a repetition of the 1971 uprising, the government considered lifting
the ban on the JVP in early 1988 and permitting the group to
participate again in the political arena. With Wijeweera still
underground, however, the JVP had no clear leadership at the time,
and it was uncertain whether it had the cohesion to mount any
coordinated offensive, either military or political, against the
government.
The Emergence of Extremist Groups
Courtesy Doranne Jacobson
During the 1980s, extremist groups operating within both Tamil and
Sinhalese communities were a grave threat to political stability and
democratic institutions. Like Northern Ireland and Lebanon, Sri
Lanka had become a country in which the vicious cycle of escalating
violence had become so deeply entrenched that prospects for a
peaceful resolution of social and political problems seemed remote.
Extremism was generationally as well as ethnically based: many
youth, seeing a future of diminished opportunities, had little faith
in established political and social institutions and were
increasingly attracted to radical solutions and the example of
movements abroad like the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine.
Perhaps surprisingly, the first major extremist movement in
postindependence history was Sinhalese and Buddhist rather than
Tamil and Hindu. The JVP, an ultra-leftist organization established
in the late 1960s by Rohana Wijeweera, attracted the support of
students and poor Sinhalese youth in rural areas. In April 1971, the
JVP led an armed uprising that resulted in the death of thousands of
the rebels at the hands of the security forces (one estimate is
10,000 fatalities). The historian, K.M. de Silva, calls the 1971 JVP
insurrection "perhaps the biggest revolt by young people in any part
of the world in recorded history, the first instance of tension
between generations becoming military conflict on a national scale."
Although it suppressed the poorly organized revolt with little
difficulty, the Bandaranaike government was visibly shaken by the
experience. Fears of future unrest within the Sinhalese community
undoubtedly made it reluctant, in a "zero-sum" economy and society,
to grant significant concessions to minorities.
Although the JVP was recognized as a legal political party in 1977
and Wijeweera ran as a presidential candidate in the October 1982
election, it was banned by the government after the summer 1983
anti-Tamil riots in Colombo and went underground. By the late 1980s,
it was again active in Sinhalese-majority areas of the country. The
JVP cadres organized student protests at Sri Lanka's universities,
resulting in the temporary closure of six of them, and led sporadic
attacks against government installations, such as a raid on an army
camp near Kandy in 1987 to capture automatic weapons. But they were
also suspected of establishing links with Tamil militant groups,
especially the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students (EROS).
Government intelligence analysts believed that the JVP, in tandem
with EROS, was attempting to organize a leftist movement among
Indian Tamils in the Central Highlands. This was a disturbing
development since the Indian Tamils had traditionally been docile
and politically apathetic.
In 1987 a splinter group of the JVP, known as the Deshapremi Janatha
Viyaparaya (DJV--Patriotic Liberation Organization), emerged. The
DJV threatened to assassinate members of Parliament who approved the
conditions of the July 29,
1987 Indo-Sri Lankan Accord, which it described as a
"treacherous sell-out to Tamil separatists and Indian expansionists"
and said that it would take the lives not only of parliamentarians
who approved it but also of their families |
