“The success of Jaffna-centric politics depended on dividing the people on racist lines and provoking the Sinhalese to attack the Tamils. It was the primary means of injecting hate politics to draw separatist borders with the blood of Tamils. In 1983 they succeeded dramatically after they sacrificed their people on a mass scale in the south. The cry of separatism gained considerable support after the outbreak of violence in 1983. Violence dominated and distorted the political landscape since then.”
Read Part 01
(August 14, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) The pose of injured innocence by the Tamil lobbyists, apologists and propagandists in the aftermath of “1983” was valid only up to a point. It was valid up to the point where the innocent Tamils civilians, who did not know anything about the machinations of their leaders to sacrifice them on the altar of an elusive Eelam, were forced to face the brunt of the wrath of the lower-level ethnic leadership of the Sinhalese.
However, it was not justifiable when they passed to buck to blame only the Sinhalese. The southern leadership at any level was not the primary cause that led to “1983” because “1983” was the direct outcome of the provocative peninsular politics to needle the “lower-level” ethnic leadership to “retaliate” against the Tamils living in the south. The Jaffna Tamil leadership, with pretentious claims to Gandhian ahimsa, had concluded decisively that provoking the Sinhalese was the best form intensifying their politics of separatism. They had no qualms about riding on the backs of the misguided youth to power. Kittu and his armed men who ambushed and killed the 13 soldiers in 1983 were the garlanded and pampered “boys” of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) committed to separatism.
They had rejected multi-ethnic co-existence and set their mind on establishing a mono-ethnic enclave in the north and the east when they launched Illankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi (Tamil State Party) in December 1949. The Tamil leaders and activists in Melbourne (where I live) were boasting that their “boys” were ready to sacrifice their lives for Eelam. This objective was also fully expressed in the Vaddukoddai Resolution of 1976. In high sounding rhetoric they had called the youth to sacrifice their lives to achieve Eelam. Not surprisingly, the aggressive politics embedded in the Vaddukoddai Resolution of 1976 exploded in the the riots of 1977. Provoking the south became the norm.
Justice Sansoni, after inquiring into the riots of 1977, placed the blame on the leadership of Jaffna. But that didn’t stop the official policy of violence endorsed in the Vadukoddai Resolution. The provocative tactics of the northern extremists got their first big breakthrough on July 23, 1983. It was the day when all their Christmases came at once. It was the day that gave the upper hand to the Tamil extremist lobby that was waiting hopefully for their engineered violence to produce the desired result of reaping political sympathy and mileage by provoking the south to retaliate against the Tamils. They did not have an army, navy or an air force to challenge the Sri Lankan government. But they had the Tamils living in the south who could be sacrificed in the first waves of confrontations with the Sinhalese to sharpen the ethnic divisions and draw international attention to their separatist goals. They were seeking legitimacy for separation by getting their people killed by the Sinhala mobs on a pre-planned program, as outlined by Prof. A. J. Wilson.
Before going any further it is essential to revisit and separate the myths from the realities of July 23-24, 1983. Getting down to the realities will help to grasp some of the hidden forces that provoked the Sinhala mobs to go on the rampage in the ethnic heat of the time. The violence that exploded in Colombo on July 23 did not begin at the Kanatte cemetery where the soldiers were to be buried. It began in the north after the Tamil Tigers ambushed a military convoy in the North of Sri Lanka on the evening of July 23, 1983 outside the town of Jaffna.
According to their pre-planned tactics the Tigers first detonated a remote control device beneath the jeep that was leading a convoy injuring at least two soldiers on board. When the soldiers in a truck behind the jeep dismounted to help their colleagues, they were ambushed by Tamil Tigers. In this clash, one officer and 12 soldiers were killed, while two more were fatally wounded. Later, Kittu, a regional commander of the LTTE, admitted to planning and carrying out the ambush.
When the government decided to bury the servicemen on July 24, some Sinhalese who had gathered at the cemetery, angered by news of the ambush, went on the rampage, looting and burning their properties in retaliation for what happened. While a number of Tamils fled the city, many of the Sinhalese and Muslim people tried to save the lives and properties of Tamils despite the activities of the gangs. Many Tamils were sheltered in government buildings, temples and Sinhalese and Muslim houses during the following days.
The government declared an emergency curfew in Colombo on the evening of the 24th. But there were reports that the Police were unwilling, or unable to enforce the curfew. The Army was then called in to help the Police. However the violence continued the next day, and began to spread all across the country,
By the evening of the 26th, the mob violence had abated, as the police and army patrolled the street in large numbers and began to take action against the rioters. The soldiers killed in the Jaffna ambush were quietly buried during the night curfew.
This is not the full story but only the bare bones. The estimated deaths vary from 300 -500 (BBC) to 10,000 (Tamil MPs). No one hand counted the dead. So the figures are not quite accurate. One thing certain is that if the Sinhalese neighbours and friends had not intervened the death would have risen to thousands. The intervention of the Sinhalese, and later the Police and the Army, establish that this was not a Rwanda where, according to latest reports, the French Ministers and the French soldiers who were at every level of the Rawandan administration too were involved. The Hutus massacred the Tutsis inside Catholic Churches with nuns and priests lending an ecclesiastical hand to decapitate heads and sever the limbs. Nor is this Srebrenica where the Serbs massacred the Muslims under the supervision of the Dutch forces. July 23-24 was closer to the massacre of the Sikhs in the riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The separatist forces of Khalistan and their provocations had threatened India’s territorial integrity. Earlier the Indian forces had attacked the sacred sites of the Sikhs. The assassination of Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh guards was the instant spark that ignited the riots against the Sikhs, some of whom also went into exile like the Tamil professionals.
Of course, India did not have to pay the price paid by Sri Lanka. Pressures of political morality invariably tend to increase or decrease according to the size of the country. Moral pressures decreased to the vanishing point in India because it was huge. But political pressures increased in Sri Lanka because it was too small. The demonizing of the Sinhalese that followed was quite out of proportion to the crimes committed by the incensed mobs. Theorists sprang up like mushrooms from heaps of cow dung to lay the blame on Sinhala-Buddhists. Neelan Tiruchelvam’s International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) focused exclusively on the south with the sole intention of denigrating the Sinhala-Buddhists. As a centre for ethnic studies it had an ethical obligation to engage in a comparative study the northern and southern forces that collided in 1983. But Neelan and Radhika Coomaraswamy, who took over from him after the Tigers assassinated her guru, hardly ever bothered to even peep behind the cadjan curtain of Jaffna. They bank rolled heavily, with funding from foreign agencies like the Ford Foundation, the probing of southern political forces (all in the name of “research”, of course) excluding the extremists forces of the north.
Their research, seminars, publications etc, which deliberately excluded contrary opinions coming from the south, were politically driven to boost the northern political platform of mono-ethnic extremism. If by any chance they referred to any negative aspect of northern politics it was painted as a reaction to the southern Sinhala “chauvinism” or the “majoritarian politics of Sinhala governments.” Even after Neelan’s father held the position of a Minister in Dudley Senanayake’s coalition government (1965 – 1970) which was acclaimed by Prof. Wilson as “the Golden Years of Tamil-Sinhala cooperation” they ignored the reality of a multi-ethnic state and cranked up repetitively their propagandistic accusations of “Sinhala chauvinism” and “Sinhala governments”. They never paused to ask how a government in which Tiruchelvam (Snr) participated as an influential Cabinet Minister, initiating and directing policy, could be a “Sinhala government”. In fact, Tiruchelvam (Snr) held the balance of power in the Coalition government which enabled him to win considerable concessions to the Tamils on several vital issues. And yet they labelled it as a “Sinhala government”.
The commanding positions held by the Jaffna Tamils in professional, private sector and government administrative services, made them the most powerful minority with considerable political clout to organize and mobilize forces more than any other community. Having mastered the art of projecting the victim syndrome their cries were heard the loudest rising above all other complaints of the minorities and the majority. They pursued politics of victimology to the nth degree. They started their anti-Sinhala campaigns in forties – long before the rise of Bandaranaike policies -- by complaining about “discrimination” which meant in essence gaining a bigger share in the public service even though this 12% minority held nearly 36% of the jobs in the state administration.
Addressing their grievances over time did not satisfy their insatiable political appetites. “Grievances” of the forties morphed into political “aspirations” by the seventies. They were intent not on just getting jobs but on an undue share of political power exclusively for the dominant Jaffna Tamil minority. The political journey of Jaffna Tamils never wavered from the initial point of grabbing a disproportionate share of jobs for their boys (namabda ahls) to grabbing a disproportionate political power in an equally disproportionate stretch of coastline: 12% of the population demanding 2/3rds of the coastline and its hinterland. This was self-serving extremism at the expense of other communities. Those opposing this extremism were labeled as “extremists”, “chauvinists”, “majoritarianists”, etc.
The ICES and other allied NGOs excused the uncompromising extremism of the Jaffna jingoists as the rightful claims of a minority oppressed by the majority. With openly declared policies of “little now and more later” (Chelvanayakam) the mono-ethnic politics of the peninsula moved incrementally to the extreme point of painting themselves into a corner of violence which they could not escape. The logic of their mono-ethnic extremism, which deliberately rejected multi-ethnic co-existence, forced them into that ineluctable corner. It was a creation that came out of the womb of Jaffna. While the Muslim and the Indian leaders were wise enough to keep their following within democratic and parliamentary cooperation – and at times even opposition – the Jaffna jingoist alone decided to take up arms. The people of Jaffna are now paying for the folly of their extremist leaders, who in the mythology of NGO politics, are painted as “moderates” even after they endorsed violence in the Vadukoddai Resolution. In short the Jaffna jingoist created their own hell. Now they are unable to either justify or face the horrendous consequences and the insufferable brutalities that flowed from their mono-ethnic extremism.
Not knowing how to get out of their moral and political responsibilities they have resorted to blame the Sinhalese. They are even saying that Prabhakaran was created by the Sinhalese. If that is true then we have to raise our hats to clever Sinhalese who first begat Ponnambalam, who begat Chelvanayakam who begat Prabhakaran to liquidate all the Tamils. According to this concoction the Sinhalese must be political geniuses who hatched the ingenious conspiracy to eliminate the entire Tamil leadership (which they couldn’t and wouldn’t do) by creating Prabhakaran.
The Jaffna Tamils are in a bind. On the one hand, they glory in the military adventures of Prabhakaran but they do not want to be associated with the evil that goes with his brutalities that had hit them the most. So they fall back on their favourite excuse of victimology. Take, for instance, the other example. Jane’s Weekly states that the Tamil Tigers rake in $200 – 300 million per year from the diaspora. That is a sizeable amount to feed, clothe, provide health care, and educate the 250,000 Tamil civilians under its pseudo-state. In fact, if that amount is added as a supplementary estimate to the free education, health, subsidized food etc provided by “the Sinhala government” the Tamils should be living in clover. But they are not. They are the ones who are suffering most. Why? Who is standing in the way? Who is diverting that money away from the Tamil people suffering the worse conditions?
The Churches, NGOs and the whole bunch of do-gooders come like a ton of brick on the Sri Lankan government without asking the most pertinent question: what on earth is Prabhakaran doing with $300 million? Prabhakaran can’t provide an aspirin or a piece of bread to his subjects in his pseudo state. But he can provide all the bullets, landmines, grenades to kill his own people. So who is to be blamed? Isn’t he using that money to violate every known cannon of international humanitarian law? Isn’t it the responsibility of his pseudo-state to feed, school and provide health care to his own people? If the Tamil diaspora and the do-gooders in NGOs, Churches accept the pseudo-state with its army, navy, air force, the kangaroo courts, police, concentration camps etc., isn’t it the responsibility of those who are in command of the one-man regime to care for its subjects? Why blame “the Sinhala governments” which, according to their definition, has the responsibility to only look after the Sinhalese? Taking their definition as a serious accusation, why should “the Sinhala governments” look after the Tamils?
The dilemma of Jaffna Tamils is in their confusion created partly by embracing blindly the political myths concocted for them by their political leaders and fellow-travelers in academia and NGOs and partly not knowing how to handle the monster that came out of the womb of Jaffna. Prabhakaran is the genetic product of the mono-ethnic extremism spawned in the womb of Jaffna. Extreme demands demand extreme violence. Prabhakaran is one chosen to carry out those extreme demands. Having chosen extremist violence it was inevitable that the Jaffna leadership should end up being trapped in the pit of violence. The living children of Jaffna have fallen into the pit dug by their political fathers. Peninsular politics never shied away from pursuing this Draculian politics of thriving on the blood sucked from the misled people of Jaffna.
All political movements, descending into violence, do so knowingly that the rank and file will have to sacrifice their lives in confronting their opponents. But Jaffna-centric movement was different. Their tactic was not to take an armed group to confront the Sinhala state. They neither had the military hardware nor the man power in 1983. At that time they had only the covert Indian backing but it was not forthcoming openly or adequately in “1983” (though Indian support had been trickling from 1977 when J. R. Jayewardene came into power) for them to wage a war against what they called “the Sinhala governments”.
So they adopted the easy way out by exposing the non-combatant Tamil civilians living with the majority Sinhalese (as they had done for centuries without any ethnic confrontation) to the provoked wrath of the Sinhala mobs. They were deliberately inciting and instigating the lower-level Sinhala ethnic leadership to attack their own Tamils living in the south for them to gain political mileage in the north. A popular saying in the colonial days summed up the relationship of the Jaffna Tamils public servants working in the south – a primary source of income to the peninsula -- to that of the fathers living behind the cadjan-curtain in the north. It said: While the son shines in Colombo the father gathers the harvest in Jaffna. In the post-Vadukoddai Resolution period this was changed to read: While the sons are forced to sacrifice their blood in the south the fathers suck it dry for their political survival in the north.
The success of Jaffna-centric politics depended on dividing the people on racist lines and provoking the Sinhalese to attack the Tamils. It was the primary means of injecting hate politics to draw separatist borders with the blood of Tamils. In 1983 they succeeded dramatically after they sacrificed their people on a mass scale in the south. The cry of separatism gained considerable support after the outbreak of violence in 1983. Violence dominated and distorted the political landscape since then.
It was “1983” that opened up avenues for Velupillai Prabhakaran to rise and kill his own comrades-in-arms whom he suspected of undermining his authority, Tamil political rivals, the entire Tamil leadership and the Tamil civilians who opposed him. It was “1983” that gave the virtual monopoly of violence. The state was playing a reactive or a secondary role to his violence. Attempts to contain his violence through appeasement failed repeatedly. It was the second coming of Mahinda – to be precise President Mahinda Rajapakse – that put an end to his claim to be “the sole representative of the Tamils” by virtue of being the sole representative of Tamil violence.
To be continued.
( H.L.D.Mahindapala: Editor, Sunday and Daily Observer (1990 - 1994). President, Sri Lanka Working Journalists' Association (1991 -1993). Secretary-General, South Asia Media Association (1993 -1994). He has been featured as a political commentator in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Special Broadcasting Services and other mainstream TV and radio stations in Australia.)
- Sri Lanka Guardian
Read Part 01
(August 14, Melbourne, Sri Lanka Guardian) The pose of injured innocence by the Tamil lobbyists, apologists and propagandists in the aftermath of “1983” was valid only up to a point. It was valid up to the point where the innocent Tamils civilians, who did not know anything about the machinations of their leaders to sacrifice them on the altar of an elusive Eelam, were forced to face the brunt of the wrath of the lower-level ethnic leadership of the Sinhalese.
However, it was not justifiable when they passed to buck to blame only the Sinhalese. The southern leadership at any level was not the primary cause that led to “1983” because “1983” was the direct outcome of the provocative peninsular politics to needle the “lower-level” ethnic leadership to “retaliate” against the Tamils living in the south. The Jaffna Tamil leadership, with pretentious claims to Gandhian ahimsa, had concluded decisively that provoking the Sinhalese was the best form intensifying their politics of separatism. They had no qualms about riding on the backs of the misguided youth to power. Kittu and his armed men who ambushed and killed the 13 soldiers in 1983 were the garlanded and pampered “boys” of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) committed to separatism.
They had rejected multi-ethnic co-existence and set their mind on establishing a mono-ethnic enclave in the north and the east when they launched Illankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi (Tamil State Party) in December 1949. The Tamil leaders and activists in Melbourne (where I live) were boasting that their “boys” were ready to sacrifice their lives for Eelam. This objective was also fully expressed in the Vaddukoddai Resolution of 1976. In high sounding rhetoric they had called the youth to sacrifice their lives to achieve Eelam. Not surprisingly, the aggressive politics embedded in the Vaddukoddai Resolution of 1976 exploded in the the riots of 1977. Provoking the south became the norm.
Justice Sansoni, after inquiring into the riots of 1977, placed the blame on the leadership of Jaffna. But that didn’t stop the official policy of violence endorsed in the Vadukoddai Resolution. The provocative tactics of the northern extremists got their first big breakthrough on July 23, 1983. It was the day when all their Christmases came at once. It was the day that gave the upper hand to the Tamil extremist lobby that was waiting hopefully for their engineered violence to produce the desired result of reaping political sympathy and mileage by provoking the south to retaliate against the Tamils. They did not have an army, navy or an air force to challenge the Sri Lankan government. But they had the Tamils living in the south who could be sacrificed in the first waves of confrontations with the Sinhalese to sharpen the ethnic divisions and draw international attention to their separatist goals. They were seeking legitimacy for separation by getting their people killed by the Sinhala mobs on a pre-planned program, as outlined by Prof. A. J. Wilson.
Before going any further it is essential to revisit and separate the myths from the realities of July 23-24, 1983. Getting down to the realities will help to grasp some of the hidden forces that provoked the Sinhala mobs to go on the rampage in the ethnic heat of the time. The violence that exploded in Colombo on July 23 did not begin at the Kanatte cemetery where the soldiers were to be buried. It began in the north after the Tamil Tigers ambushed a military convoy in the North of Sri Lanka on the evening of July 23, 1983 outside the town of Jaffna.
According to their pre-planned tactics the Tigers first detonated a remote control device beneath the jeep that was leading a convoy injuring at least two soldiers on board. When the soldiers in a truck behind the jeep dismounted to help their colleagues, they were ambushed by Tamil Tigers. In this clash, one officer and 12 soldiers were killed, while two more were fatally wounded. Later, Kittu, a regional commander of the LTTE, admitted to planning and carrying out the ambush.
When the government decided to bury the servicemen on July 24, some Sinhalese who had gathered at the cemetery, angered by news of the ambush, went on the rampage, looting and burning their properties in retaliation for what happened. While a number of Tamils fled the city, many of the Sinhalese and Muslim people tried to save the lives and properties of Tamils despite the activities of the gangs. Many Tamils were sheltered in government buildings, temples and Sinhalese and Muslim houses during the following days.
The government declared an emergency curfew in Colombo on the evening of the 24th. But there were reports that the Police were unwilling, or unable to enforce the curfew. The Army was then called in to help the Police. However the violence continued the next day, and began to spread all across the country,
By the evening of the 26th, the mob violence had abated, as the police and army patrolled the street in large numbers and began to take action against the rioters. The soldiers killed in the Jaffna ambush were quietly buried during the night curfew.
This is not the full story but only the bare bones. The estimated deaths vary from 300 -500 (BBC) to 10,000 (Tamil MPs). No one hand counted the dead. So the figures are not quite accurate. One thing certain is that if the Sinhalese neighbours and friends had not intervened the death would have risen to thousands. The intervention of the Sinhalese, and later the Police and the Army, establish that this was not a Rwanda where, according to latest reports, the French Ministers and the French soldiers who were at every level of the Rawandan administration too were involved. The Hutus massacred the Tutsis inside Catholic Churches with nuns and priests lending an ecclesiastical hand to decapitate heads and sever the limbs. Nor is this Srebrenica where the Serbs massacred the Muslims under the supervision of the Dutch forces. July 23-24 was closer to the massacre of the Sikhs in the riots that followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The separatist forces of Khalistan and their provocations had threatened India’s territorial integrity. Earlier the Indian forces had attacked the sacred sites of the Sikhs. The assassination of Indira Gandhi by her own Sikh guards was the instant spark that ignited the riots against the Sikhs, some of whom also went into exile like the Tamil professionals.
Of course, India did not have to pay the price paid by Sri Lanka. Pressures of political morality invariably tend to increase or decrease according to the size of the country. Moral pressures decreased to the vanishing point in India because it was huge. But political pressures increased in Sri Lanka because it was too small. The demonizing of the Sinhalese that followed was quite out of proportion to the crimes committed by the incensed mobs. Theorists sprang up like mushrooms from heaps of cow dung to lay the blame on Sinhala-Buddhists. Neelan Tiruchelvam’s International Centre for Ethnic Studies (ICES) focused exclusively on the south with the sole intention of denigrating the Sinhala-Buddhists. As a centre for ethnic studies it had an ethical obligation to engage in a comparative study the northern and southern forces that collided in 1983. But Neelan and Radhika Coomaraswamy, who took over from him after the Tigers assassinated her guru, hardly ever bothered to even peep behind the cadjan curtain of Jaffna. They bank rolled heavily, with funding from foreign agencies like the Ford Foundation, the probing of southern political forces (all in the name of “research”, of course) excluding the extremists forces of the north.
Their research, seminars, publications etc, which deliberately excluded contrary opinions coming from the south, were politically driven to boost the northern political platform of mono-ethnic extremism. If by any chance they referred to any negative aspect of northern politics it was painted as a reaction to the southern Sinhala “chauvinism” or the “majoritarian politics of Sinhala governments.” Even after Neelan’s father held the position of a Minister in Dudley Senanayake’s coalition government (1965 – 1970) which was acclaimed by Prof. Wilson as “the Golden Years of Tamil-Sinhala cooperation” they ignored the reality of a multi-ethnic state and cranked up repetitively their propagandistic accusations of “Sinhala chauvinism” and “Sinhala governments”. They never paused to ask how a government in which Tiruchelvam (Snr) participated as an influential Cabinet Minister, initiating and directing policy, could be a “Sinhala government”. In fact, Tiruchelvam (Snr) held the balance of power in the Coalition government which enabled him to win considerable concessions to the Tamils on several vital issues. And yet they labelled it as a “Sinhala government”.
The commanding positions held by the Jaffna Tamils in professional, private sector and government administrative services, made them the most powerful minority with considerable political clout to organize and mobilize forces more than any other community. Having mastered the art of projecting the victim syndrome their cries were heard the loudest rising above all other complaints of the minorities and the majority. They pursued politics of victimology to the nth degree. They started their anti-Sinhala campaigns in forties – long before the rise of Bandaranaike policies -- by complaining about “discrimination” which meant in essence gaining a bigger share in the public service even though this 12% minority held nearly 36% of the jobs in the state administration.
Addressing their grievances over time did not satisfy their insatiable political appetites. “Grievances” of the forties morphed into political “aspirations” by the seventies. They were intent not on just getting jobs but on an undue share of political power exclusively for the dominant Jaffna Tamil minority. The political journey of Jaffna Tamils never wavered from the initial point of grabbing a disproportionate share of jobs for their boys (namabda ahls) to grabbing a disproportionate political power in an equally disproportionate stretch of coastline: 12% of the population demanding 2/3rds of the coastline and its hinterland. This was self-serving extremism at the expense of other communities. Those opposing this extremism were labeled as “extremists”, “chauvinists”, “majoritarianists”, etc.
The ICES and other allied NGOs excused the uncompromising extremism of the Jaffna jingoists as the rightful claims of a minority oppressed by the majority. With openly declared policies of “little now and more later” (Chelvanayakam) the mono-ethnic politics of the peninsula moved incrementally to the extreme point of painting themselves into a corner of violence which they could not escape. The logic of their mono-ethnic extremism, which deliberately rejected multi-ethnic co-existence, forced them into that ineluctable corner. It was a creation that came out of the womb of Jaffna. While the Muslim and the Indian leaders were wise enough to keep their following within democratic and parliamentary cooperation – and at times even opposition – the Jaffna jingoist alone decided to take up arms. The people of Jaffna are now paying for the folly of their extremist leaders, who in the mythology of NGO politics, are painted as “moderates” even after they endorsed violence in the Vadukoddai Resolution. In short the Jaffna jingoist created their own hell. Now they are unable to either justify or face the horrendous consequences and the insufferable brutalities that flowed from their mono-ethnic extremism.
Not knowing how to get out of their moral and political responsibilities they have resorted to blame the Sinhalese. They are even saying that Prabhakaran was created by the Sinhalese. If that is true then we have to raise our hats to clever Sinhalese who first begat Ponnambalam, who begat Chelvanayakam who begat Prabhakaran to liquidate all the Tamils. According to this concoction the Sinhalese must be political geniuses who hatched the ingenious conspiracy to eliminate the entire Tamil leadership (which they couldn’t and wouldn’t do) by creating Prabhakaran.
The Jaffna Tamils are in a bind. On the one hand, they glory in the military adventures of Prabhakaran but they do not want to be associated with the evil that goes with his brutalities that had hit them the most. So they fall back on their favourite excuse of victimology. Take, for instance, the other example. Jane’s Weekly states that the Tamil Tigers rake in $200 – 300 million per year from the diaspora. That is a sizeable amount to feed, clothe, provide health care, and educate the 250,000 Tamil civilians under its pseudo-state. In fact, if that amount is added as a supplementary estimate to the free education, health, subsidized food etc provided by “the Sinhala government” the Tamils should be living in clover. But they are not. They are the ones who are suffering most. Why? Who is standing in the way? Who is diverting that money away from the Tamil people suffering the worse conditions?
The Churches, NGOs and the whole bunch of do-gooders come like a ton of brick on the Sri Lankan government without asking the most pertinent question: what on earth is Prabhakaran doing with $300 million? Prabhakaran can’t provide an aspirin or a piece of bread to his subjects in his pseudo state. But he can provide all the bullets, landmines, grenades to kill his own people. So who is to be blamed? Isn’t he using that money to violate every known cannon of international humanitarian law? Isn’t it the responsibility of his pseudo-state to feed, school and provide health care to his own people? If the Tamil diaspora and the do-gooders in NGOs, Churches accept the pseudo-state with its army, navy, air force, the kangaroo courts, police, concentration camps etc., isn’t it the responsibility of those who are in command of the one-man regime to care for its subjects? Why blame “the Sinhala governments” which, according to their definition, has the responsibility to only look after the Sinhalese? Taking their definition as a serious accusation, why should “the Sinhala governments” look after the Tamils?
The dilemma of Jaffna Tamils is in their confusion created partly by embracing blindly the political myths concocted for them by their political leaders and fellow-travelers in academia and NGOs and partly not knowing how to handle the monster that came out of the womb of Jaffna. Prabhakaran is the genetic product of the mono-ethnic extremism spawned in the womb of Jaffna. Extreme demands demand extreme violence. Prabhakaran is one chosen to carry out those extreme demands. Having chosen extremist violence it was inevitable that the Jaffna leadership should end up being trapped in the pit of violence. The living children of Jaffna have fallen into the pit dug by their political fathers. Peninsular politics never shied away from pursuing this Draculian politics of thriving on the blood sucked from the misled people of Jaffna.
All political movements, descending into violence, do so knowingly that the rank and file will have to sacrifice their lives in confronting their opponents. But Jaffna-centric movement was different. Their tactic was not to take an armed group to confront the Sinhala state. They neither had the military hardware nor the man power in 1983. At that time they had only the covert Indian backing but it was not forthcoming openly or adequately in “1983” (though Indian support had been trickling from 1977 when J. R. Jayewardene came into power) for them to wage a war against what they called “the Sinhala governments”.
So they adopted the easy way out by exposing the non-combatant Tamil civilians living with the majority Sinhalese (as they had done for centuries without any ethnic confrontation) to the provoked wrath of the Sinhala mobs. They were deliberately inciting and instigating the lower-level Sinhala ethnic leadership to attack their own Tamils living in the south for them to gain political mileage in the north. A popular saying in the colonial days summed up the relationship of the Jaffna Tamils public servants working in the south – a primary source of income to the peninsula -- to that of the fathers living behind the cadjan-curtain in the north. It said: While the son shines in Colombo the father gathers the harvest in Jaffna. In the post-Vadukoddai Resolution period this was changed to read: While the sons are forced to sacrifice their blood in the south the fathers suck it dry for their political survival in the north.
The success of Jaffna-centric politics depended on dividing the people on racist lines and provoking the Sinhalese to attack the Tamils. It was the primary means of injecting hate politics to draw separatist borders with the blood of Tamils. In 1983 they succeeded dramatically after they sacrificed their people on a mass scale in the south. The cry of separatism gained considerable support after the outbreak of violence in 1983. Violence dominated and distorted the political landscape since then.
It was “1983” that opened up avenues for Velupillai Prabhakaran to rise and kill his own comrades-in-arms whom he suspected of undermining his authority, Tamil political rivals, the entire Tamil leadership and the Tamil civilians who opposed him. It was “1983” that gave the virtual monopoly of violence. The state was playing a reactive or a secondary role to his violence. Attempts to contain his violence through appeasement failed repeatedly. It was the second coming of Mahinda – to be precise President Mahinda Rajapakse – that put an end to his claim to be “the sole representative of the Tamils” by virtue of being the sole representative of Tamil violence.
To be continued.
( H.L.D.Mahindapala: Editor, Sunday and Daily Observer (1990 - 1994). President, Sri Lanka Working Journalists' Association (1991 -1993). Secretary-General, South Asia Media Association (1993 -1994). He has been featured as a political commentator in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Special Broadcasting Services and other mainstream TV and radio stations in Australia.)
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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