Editorial

If US President Franklin Roosevelt referred to the day Pearl Harbour was attacked as a date that will live in infamy, July 24, 1983, would also be considered the same way by many Sri Lankans of recent vintage.

That day, 40 years ago, tomorrow, was a watershed moment in the contemporary history of this country; just 35 years after Independence. The anti-minority Tamil riots that erupted changed the course of modern Sri Lanka in many ways. Thousands of innocent citizens were targeted by mobs with a bogus sense of patriotism on their sleeves. Scores decided to leave this country for good and a part of them, now citizens and voters of the countries they made their home, formed themselves into a potent Diaspora becoming a virulent anti-Sri Lanka pressure group.

At home, the pogrom plunged a dagger into the open economy with foreign investors pulling out of one of the first Free Trade Zones in the South Asian region. A full-blown insurgency followed thanks to the active support of a foreign country. The swelling of the Defence budget and a run around the world for weaponry ensued, with a diplomatic dilemma at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva which continues to this date.

The stage was already set for an ethnic explosion. The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) had declared the right to self-determination in 1976 and in its 1977 parliamentary election manifesto called for the independence of the state of Tamil Eelam by “peaceful means or by direct action or struggle”.

Fast forward to the months before July 1983 and the escalation of the agitation. In May, two mainstream UNP candidates (Tamils) standing for local council elections were shot dead. All UNP candidates withdrew from the polls. A soldier was shot dead outside a polling booth. Democratic elections were to be disrupted; the radicalisation of the youth was in its nascent stage and foreign spy agencies were grooming them for bigger things.

Neither the northern politicians nor the Government saw the writing on the wall.

In June, state transport depots in Jaffna were attacked and so too was the ‘Yal Devi’, the Colombo-Jaffna train, in a symbolic gesture of breaking the links between the North and the South. In Vavuniya, two soldiers of the Raja Rata Rifles were killed and their funerals in the South ended with arson on Tamil-owned shops in their hometowns.

Storm clouds were clearly gathering, yet no one expected the bloodbath that was to follow. All that was needed now was one big incident, and that occurred on a full moon night on July 23, 1983, at Thinnaveli, Jaffna. Thirteen soldiers were ambushed and killed by armed and trained youth. To avoid sending the bodies to 13 different villages in the South, fearing rioting around the countryside, it was decided to bring all the bodies of the fallen troops to Colombo. It turned out to be the wrong decision.

Anti-Tamil riots, a pogrom was unleashed in Colombo on the night of the 24th as emotions ran sky high and elements with other agendas took advantage of the situation. Disgruntled soldiers gave the ‘thumbs up’ to the mobs on the streets in tacit encouragement of the rampage against innocent citizens and their properties. It was unmitigated savagery; a nightmarish period for tens of thousands. Several friends and colleagues were taken into their homes for safety by the majority community, but the entire community was tarred with the same brush.

President Jayewardene feared a mutiny. When a mob marched towards President’s House, then Defence Secretary Sepala Attygalle ordered the guards to shoot in the air. The presidential guards followed orders.  The mob dispersed, unlike the similar experience faced by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa last year.

Bitter lessons were nevertheless learnt from those grisly days and nights, by ‘all sides’. The separatist ‘war’ that followed, however testing it was on the people, did not witness a communal clash again. The entire country began getting accustomed to the bloody conflict where thousands of innocent citizens paid the ultimate price. As the riots abated, many politicians in the South defended the ‘goondas’ who wreaked havoc that July, and in the North, the politicians defended ‘The Boys”, as they were affectionately referred to. Both shielded the wrongdoers and argued their cases. Most of them are not alive today, having left a legacy of communal disharmony, some, the victims of the very terrorist groups they defended.

One of the few mainstream politicians of that era remaining is President Ranil Wickremesinghe. He will recall those nights when he went with others like President Jayewardene’s brother, H.W., and close confidant Paul Perera from police station to police station in Colombo urging the reluctant khakied gentry to get onto the streets and control the marauding mobs. Today he is still trying to close the North and the South divide.

This week he gave another shot at offering to reactivate the 13th Amendment that provides for power-sharing. The northern politicians, now back in the scene after the LTTE’s elimination from the politics of the north, shunned the offer demanding Police powers as well. They have baulked at fresh attempts at a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), an initiative on the insistence of the UN Human Rights Council.

The northern politicians are refusing to join the mainstream. They are too obliged to the Diaspora. They are too obliged to India. They can’t even safeguard the northern fishermen from Indian fishermen poaching in Sri Lankan waters. The 13th Amendment and the TRC are not receiving acceptance from the South—and the North. Old wounds that are healing with the passage of time may well be reopened. Universal jurisdiction against Sri Lankan political leaders will be exercised, come what may. There’s too much time, tongue and resources wasted on the subject. After all, Canada has shown that no proof is required to sanction Sri Lankan leaders.

But fast-forwarding whatever remains to be done through domestic mechanisms to provide redress to all the remaining victims of the past, irrespective of race, is imperative. This should be the focus, rather than going on a futile voyage trying to win over the northern politicians who still beat the communal drum and play the outdated communal card refusing to bring the peoples of the North to join hands with the South, wanting their little ethnic enclave within a united, but not unitary Sri Lanka.