About 30 percent of Sri Lanka's Muslims live in the three districts of the Eastern Province; of these the largest concentration (nearly 15 per cent of Sri Lanka's Muslims) live in the Ampara district. This naturally encouraged the hope that an ethnic political party would be a viable entity in the Eastern Province - at least as effective at protecting Muslim interests, if not potentially more so, than the prevailing system of Muslim representation through and within the main national political parties.

The Eastern Province Muslims have always had their own style of politics: a mixture of regional loyalties, disregard for party ties and a continuing loyalty to a powerful family group overriding party ties - the Kariapper family. Thus, Muslim political figures of national importance have frequently been rejected by Eastern Province constituencies in favour of local Muslims. A.R.A. Razik was defeated in Pottuvil in 1947, and B. Mahmud was much more comprehensively rejected in 1977 in Batticaloa.

Moreover, over the past 40 years the Kariapper family has enjoyed a remarkable, if somewhat unobtrusive, dominance in Eastern Province politics. Many, if not most, Eastern Province Members of Parliament of all political parties including M.H.M. Ashraff, the leader of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress have kinship ties with this family. It goes to show that Eastern Province Muslims have their own peculiar priorities.

Some Muslims contested on the Federal Party ticket in 1956 and won election to Parliament. But their loyalty to the Federal Party did not survive the bitter conflicts over language that broke out from the very first months of the third Parliament.

Soon the Muslims reconciled themselves to the new language policy introduced by the Bandaranaike government; the fragile alliance of Tamils and some Eastern Province Muslims as the 'Tamil-speaking peoples of the island' was shattered, never to be put together again.

M.H.M. Ashraff and the SLMC took the established Muslim political leadership associated with the UNP and the SLFP by surprise by a very successful entry into national politics at the provincial council elections of 1987 and 1988. Ashraff claimed that over 75 per cent of the Muslims had voted for his party. While this was clearly an exaggeration, it was nevertheless true that even if only 35 per cent to 40 per cent of the Muslims had voted for his party, it was still a remarkable political achievement. Ashraff had emerged as a politician to be reckoned with.

The signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord and its most conspicuous result, the entry of the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) to the north and east of the island, had brought the Muslims in the Eastern Province and the Mannar district of the Northern Province into conflict with the LTTE and its allies. Attacks on them by Tamil separatist groups increased in frequency and intensity and the IPKF had proved to be totally ineffective in protecting them.

Ashraff's argument that if the Muslims, like the Tamils, had a political party of their own, instead of being linked to the country's main political parties, their voices would be heard more readily and their wishes less likely to be ignored had a ready reception especially in the Eastern Province.

Thus, early in 1987, Muslim traders in parts of Colombo had, for the first time, closed their shops in response to a call from the SLMC to protest the killings of Muslims in the Eastern Province by the LTTE. Also a large section of the Muslims, the more articulate younger people, were upset at President Jayewardene's Israeli initiative, that is to say the approval given to the establishment of an Israeli interest section of the US Embassy in Colombo and the use of a small group of Israelis in the training of the Sri Lanka army. The SLMC exploited this sense of discontent with the UNP in gathering protest votes from the Muslim community.

The SLMC's electoral success appeared to give added significance to other developments within the Muslim community, especially in the spread of a militant, some tended to call it fundamentalist, form of Islam. The appeal of the new Islamic message was somewhat blunted by the range of conflicting political interests, from Saudi Arabian to Libyan and Iranian, at work, within the Muslim communities, with money available for political and religious activities from all these competing sources.

Sri Lankan political analysts began to take notice of the spread of a new 'Islamic' garb adopted by female Muslim students - school children - an ensemble of cotton trousers, blouses and headgear, generally all white.

At the time of the elections to the North Eastern Provincial Council, which was boycotted by the LTTE, Ashraff and the SLMC were active participants. They won all but one of the Muslim seats in the Eastern Province in the council. When the presidential election of 1988 came around, Ashraff and the SLMC were courted by the two main contenders, the SLFP and its allies, and the UNP. After associating with the former for a while, the SLMC swung to a more neutral posture, which was interpreted as a pro-UNP stance.

Once President Premadasa secured victory, Ashraff and the SLMC contested the parliamentary elections and secured election for himself and a small group of supporters. While the UNP had enough of a majority to do without their support within the legislature, Ashraff and the SLMC were not without influence there. When President Premadasa abruptly terminated the link with the Israelis in March 1990, it was widely attributed to the lobbying skills of the SLMC.

The Muslims had established a lock on one aspect of Sri Lanka's foreign policy, a virtual veto on diplomatic links with Israel.

The SLMC, as we have seen, was associated with the North Eastern Provincial Council dominated by the Eelam People's Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF). As a result it earned the hostility of the LTTE. The hostility was aggravated by the cordial relations maintained by the SLMC with the IPKF. This was one of the reasons why the Muslims of the Eastern Province came under attack from the LTTE the moment it became clear the IPKF was scheduled for an early departure.

The attack came in August 1990 in a most horrifying form, the butchery of nearly 300 Muslims by the LTTE, over 120 of them in one ghastly incident inside a mosque at prayer time. The idea at this stage was to force the Muslims out of some of the strategic villages which separate Tamil settlements in the east coast. The LTTE failed in this but succeeded in the north and north-west of the island, the Jaffna peninsula and the Mannar district.

Political analysts attributed the hostility of the LTTE to the Muslims of the Eastern Province in part at least to Ashraff's own views on the future of the Muslims in the region covered by the North Eastern Province. He was staking a claim for a Muslim Provincial Council, with the Ampara district of the Eastern Province as its core, and with 'cantons' covering the principal Muslim settlements in the Batticaloa and Trincomalee districts of the Eastern Province and, more ominously for the LTTE, in the Jaffna peninsula and the Mannar district of the Northern Province as well. To the LTTE, as the exponents of the Tamil dominance of the north and east, and as advocates of the case for the 'traditional homelands' of the Tamils, this was an intolerable challenge. Having failed in their attempt to expel Muslims from strategic villages in the Eastern Province, the LTTE turned to the more vulnerable and less numerous Muslims of the Jaffna peninsula and the Mannar district. In the latter part of October 1990 the entire Muslims population of the Northern Province (around 75,000 people at that time) were driven from their homes at gun-point.

A flavour of this exercise in ethnic cleansing by the LTTE comes through in this extract taken from a contemporary account:

"The mass expulsion of the Muslims from the north was carried out in the following manner. On 22nd October 1990, quite unexpectedly, the LTTE announced over loudspeakers in the streets of the Muslim settlements in the Northern Province that the Muslims must leave their homes, villages and towns, leaving all their valuables behind or face death. The ultimatum was that Muslims should leave this region within 48 hours from the 22nd of October 1990. In Jaffna town the time given was only two hours."

The LTTE was unrelenting in their pressure - the Muslims were expelled, their houses looted of their contents including cash, jewellery and other valuables. The people who were thus driven out took refuge in Muslim villages in the Sinhalese districts adjacent to the Northern Province. Nearly 90 per cent of the total Muslim population of the Northern Province, who became refugees went to the Puttalam and Anuradhapura districts where they live in appalling conditions. The hardships they endured have been only marginally alleviated by grants from the government and non-governmental organizations. The rest moved to other parts of the country.

Their plight was politically beneficial to the SLMC. For one thing it eroded the support the UNP had among the Muslims in the Eastern Province through this demonstration of the inability of the government to afford protection to the Muslims. The longer they remained as refugees the stronger became the appeal of the SLMC to them as potential saviours.

When the parliamentary election of 1994 came around, the SLMC, secure in its Eastern Province base, turned against the UNP. They succeeded in demonstrating their strength among the Muslims, not merely in the Eastern Province, but elsewhere as well. The votes of Muslims expelled from the Northern Province were added to the national tally of the party.

By August 1994, Ashraff and the SLMC joined the new SLFP led coalition government with Ashroff becoming a member of the Cabinet and two of his colleagues accommodated as Deputy Minister, and Deputy Chairman of Committees (the third in the hierarchy after the Speaker and Deputy Speaker) respectively. The Eastern Province had ceased to be merely a bridgehead for the SLMC, and had become a forward base that helped convert it to a national party which had successfully challenged the established Muslim organizations.
(Concluded)

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