Racial intolerance in Sri Lanka

Press, 5 August 1983, Page 16

Racial intolerance in Sri Lanka

JOHN CUNNINGHAM,

of the “Guardian”, assesses the

enmity between Tamil and Sinhalese that is driving the Government of this Commonwealth country towards martial law.

Under a pall of mass killings, looted shops, vandalised property, and burned-out vehicles, Sri Lanka’s worst fear lies exposed: the conflict between the Tamil separatists and the Sinhalese majority is now of the scale where island-wide terrorism and martial law are in view.

As if in a grisly fulfilment of President Jayawardene’s no doubt rhetorical vow to eliminate the Tamil separatists, 35 of them were murdered in a Colombo gaol by other prisoners.

The Government’s announcement last week of this mass killing, coming after the week-end killing of 13 Sinhalese soldiers in a Tamil ambush, is additional confirmation that racial enmity is beyond the bounds of any easy reconciliation. Sri Lanka’s drift from serendipity towards a racial war seems inexorable in the face of the President’s inability to offer the Tamil community concessions sufficient to restore a social and economic status which they allege is being cut away by the Sinhalese, who outnumber them by four to one in a population of 15 million.

The island, with its Buddhist culture intact but with its tolerance sundered, is getting used to violence: there were 30 deaths following the 1977 elections. These brought President Jayawardene’s United National Party (U.N.P.) overwhelmingly to power.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that more than 60 deaths: (not counting the gaol killings) have occurred in the last few days.

The scale and extent of violence has escalated as the 76-year-old President has brought in measures which show that the terrorist groups, who have long outflanked their Parliamentary arm, the Tamil Unitied Liberation Front (T.U.L.F.), are now causing the Government to veer towards martial law.

In the last week, the state of emergency has been extended. A partial curfew covers the island, press censorship covering guerrilla activities has been brought in, and unversity leaders have been removed in a bid to clamp student unrest.

For the last six weeks, the terrorists have rekindled the campaign in their stronghold, the northern province of Jafna. they

wrecked local elections, sabotaged railway lines, and attacked staterun buses.

Citing the cumulative total of casualties of terrorist action in the last six years — it includes 37 police and nine politicians killed — President Jayawardene last month failed to get effective Opposition support for planned anti-terrorist measures.

The largest Opposition party, T.U.L.F. — has 17 seats — was not invited, and has said it may quit Parliament. Indeed, the opposition is numerically so small that Jayawardene, who last year used a referendum to get the life of the present Parliament extended by six years, is considering some form of extra representation. This would help T.U.L.F. and the six member Sri Lanka Freedom party, led by the former Prime Minister, Mrs Bandaranaike. But it is an offer that comes too late. For the thrust of the Tamil struggle — to take a third of the territory and

a fifth of its population, into a Tamil state - is well outside the feeble and lop-sided Colombo Parliament

At most, a degree of regional autonomy for the provinces in the north and east-dry, lightly populated regions occupied principally by the Indu Tamils — is likely to be offered by a government as a late response to violence. In a country as tiny and poor as Sri Lanka, the notion of a secessionist state is a non-starter in economic terms. The Government has stressed this point, and its slow response is measured also by divisions within the Tamil community. Indeed, there are two historically different communities. The newest of them, less than 6 per cent of the population, were brought from India by the British to work on tea plantations, mostly in the last century. As a group, they are comparatively docile compared with those Tamils living in the north, who have a far older stake in the country and who, indeed, had a kingdom separate from the Sinhalese when the first Europeans

arrived. These Tamil nationalists claim that the equal citizenship which the two communities enjoyed under the British has deteriorated since independence to their disadvantage. If there is an element of overelaboration in their claim for an enclave state — reinforcing links with Tamil Nadu in South India — it is a measure of how far they feel they have fallen behind. Tamils see discrimination by the Buddhist majority in the relegation of their language to a secondary role, the restriction of Tamil university admissions, a reduction in their numbers in government service. They resent also Sinhalese settling in areas traditionally regarded as theirs, and they allege economic neglect of their parts of Sri Lanka. The northern Tamils — the most militant — have also argued the case for the plantation workers, whose servitude is such that they have had little to say themselves about their exploitation as an underpaid labour force, long denied political freedoms and social rights.

It is an historic quarrel, but it cannot be written off as such any longer. The present violent expression of the imbalances in a tiny society are happening as the developed West and the developing Third World are beginning to offer economic lifelines to Sri Lanka.

It is not just that tourism is transforming the west and south of the island — the Sinhalese areas — but for the first time, the small, labour-intensive high-producing Asian states — particularly Singapore and Hong Kong — are considering investment in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is still largely in the grip of agriculture, but Singaporean businessmen would like to see electronics equipment assembled, if not manufactured there by a first-generation industrialised workforce.

That much-needed boost will slip if stability goes. It begins to sound unreal, even, as the country surprises itself with its intense capacity for violence, similarly when the equally-unreal notion of Eelam - the ancient name for the Tamil kingdom in pre-colonial times — is revived. The federalism which might save the day is a late entry.