Sri Lanka's Conflict - A Historical Perspective

The bloody conflict in Sri Lanka is very much in the news these days, as government forces appear to be on the verge of destroying the Tamil Tigers, at the cost of tremendous suffering to people trying to flee the devestation. In the spring of 1985, I spent a month in Sri Lanka to try to better understand how the island came to be torn apart. The following article, part of a series, first appeared in a newspaper in California. But I believe the background information helps to shed a light on the current situation in Sri Lanka.

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka -- It is early morning.

A damp, predawn chill creeps out of the nearby harbor and roams through the labyrinth of narrow, dimly lit streets and alleys that make up the Pettah, this city's old bazaar.

The shops are still closed at this hour; the only sound comes from the red-and-white-striped mosque on Second Cross Street.

Several crows are bickering over which one gets to sit on top of the half-moons crowning the minarets. Once the argument is settled, the loser flies off toward the Indian Ocean. A few minutes later, the dispute is forgotten and the market becomes quiet again.

Suddenly, a brass gong rings out.

And as if by magic, the harsh, metallic "clang-clang-clang" from a nearby Hindu temple brings the bazaar to life. Before long, it is crammed with noise and sunlight. The air becomes thick with the smell of clove, cinnamon, tropical fruits, and fresh leather. The hot, dusty streets are crowded with men in sarongs, women wrapped in brightly colored saris, and Buddhist monks in saffron colored robes.

Until recently, the Pettah would also have been swarming with tourists.

Ever since the first ambassadors from Sri Lanka (until recently known as Ceylon) arrived in Rome in 45 A.D., travelers from the West have come to this Indian Ocean island to enjoy the lush jungles, palm-laced shores, and ancient, ruined cities. Few have disagreed with the 13th century Italian friar who wrote, "And from Seyllan (Ceylon) to Paradise...is a distance of forty Italian miles."

But no more.

Like Dorian Gray's picture, the island's image has deteriorated. More and more Sri Lanka is beginning to be compared with Northern Ireland, Lebanon or Cyprus.

Nearly one-third of Sri Lanka is now a battleground as separatist Tamil guerrillas are escalating their rebellion against the predominately Sinhalese central government. The campaign for a separate, independent state of Tamil Eelam in the island's northern and eastern provinces has included massacring Sinhalese civilians, blowing up railroad tracks, ambushing military patrols, and assassinating suspected informers, who are then hung from lamp posts.

The Tamils are Sri Lanka's largst minority, representing 12.6 per cent of the island's 15 million pople. Mostly Hindu, they are descendants of Dravidians, the original inhabitants of India.

The Sinhalese, on the other hand, make up 74 per cent of the population. They are predominately Buddhists and are descendants of a group of Aryans who came here from northern India.

Faced with a growing insurgency, President Junius "J.R." Jayewardene's administration has given his undisciplined, mostly Sinhalese army a blank check to put down the rebellion.

The army has cut off the arid Jaffna peninsula in the north, the heart of the rebellion, from the rest of the tropical island, hoping to contain the insurgency. Meanwhile, the military road block at Elepehant Pass, the gateway to the northern peninsula, ensures that foreign journalists are kept out of the area.

"The government," said a European diplomat here in the capital, "doesn't want outsiders to see what the army is doing to the Tamils in the north."

According to information gathered from human rights organizations, both local and interntional, several foreign diplomats, and citizens committees in the troubled areas, close to 1,000 people -- mostly innocent Tamil civilians -- have been killed since November, and approximately 13,000 Tamil peasants and fishermen forced out of their villages by the army.

Within the last few months, about 1,000 "boat people" have fled to India, which already has 50,000 refugees who left Sri Lanka after the bloody anti-Tamil riots of July 1983.

"Mass arrests of Tamil youths are being carried out," the Civil Rights Movement of Sri Lanka complained recently in a statement to the press. "Detainees in the custody of the state have been killed. Some members of the security forces have carried out massive reprisals against the civilian population and, in the course of their operations, have killed many people, and have caused much damage to private property, burning and destroying homes and farms."

Radhika Coomaraswamy, a noted Tamil scholar and associate director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies, fears the situation is "deteriorating into a tribal war."

So far, the United States has stayed out of the conflict. When National Security Minister Lalith Athulathmudali flew to Washington recently, one of the English-language papers here reported that he would make a "strong bid to ascertain the possibility of obtaining United States military assistance to combat terrorism." But U.S. officials turned down the request. Instead, they urged a political solution to the problem.

"Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union," said Kumari Jayawardene, a social scientist and historian, "will interfere in this matter. They don't want to antagonize India. They feel that Sri Lanka belongs within India's sphere of influence."

In many ways, both this country's Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority are prisoners of the past. They continue to see each other through a prism of myths and fears thousands of years old.
"There is a history of Sri Lanka, written by Buddhist monks over the centuries, called the Mahavamsa," said Reggie Siriwardene, a Sinhalese scholar at the International Centre for Ethnic Studies. "It is similar to the Old Testament. In it is promoted the idea of the Sinhalese pople as the chosen people of God, and Sri Lanka as the holy country. Tamils were subhuman."

A strong feeling persists among many Sinhalese that ever since their ancestors arrived in Sri Lanka, they have been subjected to one invasion after another by Tamils from Southern India, and with each succeeding invasion the Sinhalese have ben pushed farther and farther south.

Even today, Sinhalese government officials honor the memory of Dutugemunu, the legendary king who around 2,000 years ago led his army on a campaign in the north, where he killed the Tamil king and took back from the "invaders" the land that the Sinhalese considered rightfully theirs. The national security minister and minister of lands and land development recently placed a garland on the statue of Dutugemunu in Anuradhapura, the ancient Sinhalese capital on the edge of Tamil territory.

Who arrived first in Sri Lanka -- Sinhalese or Tamil -- is a matter of debate. What is known with certainty, however, is that both groups have lived on this island for over 2,000 years, with large concentrations of Sinhalese in the south and Tamils in the north and east. They ruled themselves independently at various periods of their history, preserving their language, religion and culture.
During 150 years of Portuguese colonial rule, followed by another 150 years undr the Dutch, the two communities were still allowed to basically administer themselves. But with the arrival of the British in 1796, the entire island was governed by a single administration for the first time.

The British favored the Tamils, who had access to English language education since the late 18th century when U.S. missionaries from New England established schools in the Tamil areas. Because the land in the north is arid, the Tamils saw in education the means of obtaining employment. The Buddhist clergy had vehemently opposed setting up Christian missionary schools in the Sinhalese part of the country.

As a result, Tamils dominated the civil services and outnumbered the Sinhalese in many other professions.

For the Sinhalese another cause of resentment was the introduction in the 19th cntury of Tamils from southern India. The British brought them over to work on the tea estates in the central highlands. Today, their descendants number aproximately 825,000 and make up 5.6 per cent of the population. Most of them still work on the tea plantations in the heart of Sinhalese territory.

With independence in 1948, the reins of power were transferred from the British colonial government to Sinhalese leaders. What followed was a series of anti-Tamil policies to divest what the Sinhalese community felt was a privileged minority.

One of the first acts of the new government was to disenfranchise 900,000 Tamils of recent Indian rigin, mostly tea estate workers. As a result, the Sinhalese easily came to hold 80 per cent of the seats in the legislature.

In 1956, Sinhalese was made the official language. The 1972 constitution raised Buddhism to the level of a state religion. Also in the early 1970s, the Sinhalese government introduced a "standardisation" system, which meant that Tamil studens had to get higher marks on exams than Sinhalese students to be admitted to a university. Without a university education, more and more Tamil youths found themselves barred from well-paying jobs.

Along with the anti-Tamil legislation, Sri Lanka has had three anti-Tamil disturbances, the first in 1958, followed by others in 1981 and 1983.

The worst race riot was in July 1983. Well-organized mobs burned and looted Tamil owned businesses and homes, while, in several cases, police and military stood by and watched. The Tamil shops in the Pettah were leveled. More than 400 peopl were killed -- some burned alive.

K. Sivapalan, a retired vice principal, moved his family out of Colombo and back to their hometown on the east coast after a mob killed his youngest son. "We lost everything," said Sivapalan. "Our house, furniture...everything."

The government's approach to th ethnic crisis, said R. Balasubramaniam, secretary of the Jaffna Citizens Committee, is "alienating the civilians" in the Tamil areas. Indiscriminate killings of civilians and mass arrests, he said, are creating widespread sympathy for the guerrillas.

"In the north," said Balasubramaniam, "the army is acting like a foreign army of occupation. Most of the soldiers can't even communicate with the local population. They speak only Sinhalese."

Balasubramaniam and other Tamil leaders have objected strenuously to the government's proposed plan to resettle 30,000 rmed Sinhalese families in traditional Tamil areas. They fear such a move would provoke an all-out civil war.

In December, one of the guerrilla groups attacked four Sinhalese fishing villages in the Mullaitivu district. The rebels massacred the villagers, including women and children, as a warning against further Sinhalese encroachment on traditional Tamil lands.

"The Sinhalese people," said Vincent J. Fernando, an official with the Ministry of National Security, while displaying color photos of the dead villagers, "have never said that only Sinhalese people should be allowed to live in their areas. Tamils also live there, as well as Muslims and others. How would you like it if the Mexicans and Mexican-Amricans of California decided that only people with Spanish surnames should be allowed to live there?

"The Tamils," added Fernando, "are among the most pampered minorities in the world."

The only solution to the ethnic problem, according to Balasubramaniam, is to grant the Tamils regional autonomy: a federal state that would be part of a United Sri Lanka.

In 1975, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) was formed. Its goal was, and remains today, a "separate, free, secular, sovereign socialist state of Tamil Eelam." Despite its name, the TULF opted for non-violent means of achieving its goal and won 18 seats in Parliament. Since then, the TULF has insisted that it has a mandate from its people to set up a separate Tamil Eelam. TULF leaders, however, have said that they would be willing to accept "any viable alternative."

Meanwhile, militant Tamil youths have turned to guerrilla warfare to establish Tamil Eelam.

There are currently seven rebel organizations, collectively known as the Tigers. It is estimated that they have about 5,000 recruits, with only about a third of them armed or trained to fight. In comparison, the Sri Lankan army has about 11,000 trained men under arms. A few of the groups have turned to the Palestinian Liberation Organization for their training. The association came to light when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon and captured several Tamils who were fighting alongside PLO combatants.

So far, the guerrillas have been able to operate out of India, about 20 miles from Sri Lanka, across the Palk Strait. There, the insurgents have found sympathy and support among India's 60 million Tamils.

Some political observers believe India is merely using the guerrillas to put pressure on Sri Lanka's government to come to terms with the TULF.

Hopes for a negotiated settlement have now all but faded. Frustrated with the government's hard-line stance, TULF leaders are now exploring the possibility of an alliance with the guerrillas. The guerrillas, in turn, are stepping up their attacks, while the government is rallying the Sinhalese behind its arm.

"Like Abraham Lincon did," said a member of Parliament recently, "we must prepare for civil war."