The Sri Lankan state is waging a brutal war on the island’s Tamil population. Yuri Prasad looks at some of the background to the conflict
A vicious and increasingly one-sided war is taking place on the island of Sri Lanka – a few dozen miles off the coast of south east India.
Utilising its own interpretation of the “war on terror” the Sri Lankan government is determined to crush the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who are better known as the Tamil Tigers.
In the process the military has effectively declared that all Tamil civilians are “terrorists”, hemming them into a strip of coastal land, the Jaffna Peninsula, while repeatedly bombing their schools, hospitals and shelters.
According to a recent United Nations report, up to 190,000 civilians have been sealed into this tiny area.
Last week the army’s guns targeted a makeshift hospital in the village of Putumattalan, killing dozens of the sick and injured. Countries in the West, including Britain, the island’s former colonial master, have supplied the weapons for this offensive.
On the rare occasions that the media cover the conflict it is presented as an unfathomable and ancient religious-ethnic rivalry, with the Buddhist Sinhalese government on one side, and the Hindu Tamils on the other.
But rather than an age-old clash between clearly defined groups, the civil war reflects the way that rival bands among the ruling class, and the middle classes that stand beneath them, have sought to use ethnic nationalism to further their own positions.
Just over 20 million people live in Sri Lanka, on an island about a quarter the size of Britain. The majority describe themselves as Buddhists and speak Sinhalese, but there are significant minorities of differing religions and languages.
Tamils in Sri Lanka, despite speaking a common language, are not a homogenous ethnic or religious group.
Sri Lankan Tamils, who make up around 4 percent of the population, have lived on the island for more than 600 years, and have, at various times, been represented in the upper echelons of society.
Indian Tamils were shipped into what was then British-controlled Ceylon in the middle of the 19th century. They were put to work on the tea plantations, and largely remain poor. The majority of Tamils are Hindu, but there are significant religious minorities among them.
Repeated and violent conflicts among the Sinhalese majority prove that it is also wrong to regard them as a single identity.
The British regime helped to lay the foundations for today’s conflict by using divide and rule to aid in its exploitation of the mass of the population.
It favoured the Tamil minority in order to encourage their loyalty. They were given preferences for lucrative jobs in government and were disproportionately represented in the island’s universities.
Nevertheless, there were few signs of animosity between Tamil and Sinhalese speakers prior to 1948, when Ceylon obtained its freedom from the British Empire.
As in so many countries, the collapse of the exiting authority led to a mass scramble for power among those who wanted to become the new elite.
To win elections, and divert attention from the acute class divisions on the island, politicians of all backgrounds attempted to cultivate support by appealing to people as ethnic and religious groups.
In Sri Lanka the key method of division was language. At the time of independence, English was the country’s official language.
The election of a new government on a ticket of replacing English with Sinhalese was a covert attack on the Sri Lankan Tamil middle class, who generally spoke English and Tamil.
The new government also proposed to deport hundreds of thousands of Indian Tamils back to India, while depriving those who remained of their right to vote.
This was an explicit attack on the left and the trade unions, which had successfully organised heavily among Indian Tamil plantation workers.
These acts marked the creation of a new and distinct Sinhalese identity.
In an effort to present a united response to the state’s discrimination, middle class Tamil speakers attempted to create an all-embracing Tamil identity. Both groups utilised and transformed religious symbols and legends to lend justification to their project. Initially there was little evidence of a mass following for these newly-constructed ethnicities.
For most people, the growing conflict remained a quarrel within the establishment. But within a few years the battle that began over language became the basis of a civil war.
Following a landslide election victory in 1956 the Sri Lanka Freedom Party made good on its promise to make Sinhalese the sole official language – a modest amendment to allow the “reasonable use of Tamil” led to a violent demonstration by Buddhist monks.
The new law brought a decline in the number of Tamil speakers in public employment. In the civil service Tamils went from being around 30 percent of all employees in 1948 to just 6 percent by 1970.
Many upper and middle class Sri Lankan Tamils now found themselves excluded from decent jobs, while their children stood little chance of getting a university education.
There were widespread anti-Tamil riots in 1958. Three years later, during a general strike by Tamils against discrimination, the government declared a state of emergency and sent troops into the Tamil heartlands in the central highlands and the north of the island.
Tamils became legitimate targets for pogroms and repression by the state.
The left in Sri Lanka should have been able to undercut the wave of ethnic tension unleashed by the government. Ordinary Sinhalese speaking workers and peasants had nothing to gain from the chauvinism of the ruling class.
The strongest socialist party on the island, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), was a Trotskyist party with a mass membership among all linguistic groups. For a time it was the country’s main opposition party.
But rather that appealing to working class unity, the LSSP, together with the Communist Party, joined the government and declared itself to be the authentic voice of nationalism.
In 1970 a new government made up of the UNP opposition party, in alliance with the left and a number of Tamil parties, took power promising an end to the conflict.
It planned a degree of regional autonomy in which Tamils would be given some power. Soon after coming to office the government faced a rebellion by educated Sinhalese youth demanding an end to Buddhist caste discrimination that excluded them from jobs. Some 10,000 people were killed in the fighting and state of emergency that followed.
The fragility of the ruling class was sharply exposed. The government’s response was to increase its vilification of Tamils in the hope of diverting attention away from its record.
At roughly the same time, younger Tamils, angered by the lack of change and the compromises made by their mainstream parties, started to take up arms against the state.
They formed a variety of groups, the Tamil Tigers chief among them, to demand a separate state in the north of the island. Within a few years they controlled much of the territory.
Sri Lankan authorities launched a crackdown in which thousands of Tamils were jailed and tortured. The Tigers responded with kidnappings and bombings. So began a spiral of violence that engulfed much of the country.
Rebellion
Rather than seeing possibilities in the rebellion sweeping the south, the Tigers characterised all Sinhalese speakers as complicit in their oppression.
Having neither mass support across the country nor enough firepower to defeat the state, the Tigers looked to India for backing. But the Indian state was to play a duplicitous role.
Having initially helped to arm the Tigers from bases in the Indian city of Madras, the Indian government later helped broker a peace deal that involved the sending of 75,000 “peacekeeping” troops to the island.
India feared that the collapse of the state in Sri Lanka could spread instability across the region and instructed its forces to disarm the Tigers. This resulted in fierce fighting and the scattering of Tamil refugees across the world.
Since the 1980s successive governments have used a mix of diplomacy and military offensives in an effort to break the Tigers.
Meanwhile, neoliberal economics and the 2004 Tsunami have laid waste to the livelihoods of millions of the island’s poor – regardless of their religion or language.
The government was recently forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a £1.3 billion loan, which is demanding austerity measures and privatisation in return.
The military defeat of the Tigers, far from bring a new era of peace and prosperity, looks certain to usher in a new era of attacks on the working class.
Rather than massive spending on the military, the country desperately needs health workers, engineers, and teachers. There needs to be a massive programme of public works to house, feed and tend to all those displaced by the conflict and environmental chaos. These are among the demands of the left in Sri Lanka.
We should demand that our governments condemn the military action and halt all arms sales to Sri Lanka.
Halting the Sri Lankan assault and winning vital improvements for the poor requires a united fight. But only a movement that is prepared to challenge the discrimination of the state, and the culture of chauvinism that has been encouraged by it, is capable of winning this struggle.
The following should be read alongside this article:
» Sri Lanka map
» Massive Tamil demonstration in central London demands Sri Lanka ceasefire
» Photos of Tamil demonstration in London, Saturday 11 April 2009
© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.
Peace and Justice Post 
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka
April 28, 2009Why Battering the Tamil Tigers Won’t Bring Peace
By MITU SENGUPTA | Counterpunch, April 28, 2009
Over the course of a long and brutal war with Sri Lanka’s armed forces, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE) emerged as one of the world’s most formidable insurgent groups. Besides engaging the Sri Lankan government in a bloody battle for more than 25 years, the LTTE (or, more informally, the ‘Tamil Tigers’) managed to seize substantial chunks of government territory, and operated these as a quasi-state for well over a decade. Today, however, the mighty Tigers are on the verge of total military defeat. Will their demise bring peace to Sri Lanka?
Unsurprisingly, the LTTE’s hammering has come at an enormous price. Since its beginnings in the early 1980s, the war has claimed more than 70,000 lives, rendered some half a million Tamils refugees in their own country, and driven an equal number out of Sri Lanka. The last six months of fighting have been particularly intense, with the Sri Lankan government at its most aggressive in decades. Reports from the United Nations, Red Cross and several other reputed humanitarian organizations indicate that the country is on the brink of a colossal humanitarian disaster. Some 6,500 civilians have been killed since January, and another 100,000 are caught – facing carnage, and without adequate food, shelter and medicine – in the crossfire between the Tigers and government forces. An additional 40,000 or so that have fled the war zone are being held in military-run camps, where conditions, according to the most recent reports, are similar to those in Nazi-run concentration camps (journalists and humanitarian workers have been banned from these camps for over a month).
Led by the United Nations, concerned voices in the international community have repeatedly pleaded for a halt to the fighting, or even a ceasefire of a reasonable length, in which more civilians may be moved to safety, and aid workers allowed access to the sick and wounded. Determined to run the Tigers to the ground, however, the Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, has remained undeterred, apparently confident that a full purging of the LTTE – now perhaps only days away – will have been worth the carnage and dislocation, and the palpable damage to his country’s international reputation. Rajapaksa evidently believes that a Sri Lanka free of the Tigers will be a Sri Lanka whither all good things will come.
Over the years, the LTTE has earned the reputation of being a ruthless organization; one that turns children into hardened soldiers; that has perfected suicide bombing as a tactic; that relies on extortion and smuggling for funding, and that has zero tolerance for critics and competitors. While there are no reliable measures of the extent of support for the LTTE among Tamils in Sri Lanka, or within the vast diaspora, Tamil human rights activists both inside and outside the country have spoken out against the LTTE’s cruel ways, totalitarian structure, and uncompromising, maximalist demands. The LTTE has duly assassinated many of these detractors. Indeed, given all of this, it is tempting to presume that Sri Lanka will be infinitely better off without the LTTE, and that its elimination will necessarily steer the country towards order, stability and reconciliation. But though appealing, this conclusion ultimately rests on a wrongheaded view of the Tigers’ role in the conflict. The LTTE is the product, not the cause, of Sri Lanka’s deadly politics.
To begin with, the conflict, if not the war, predates the LTTE by a few generations. Its origins may be traced to the effects of the nefarious “divide and rule” policies devised by British colonial administrators to govern Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The British used the island’s Tamil minority to keep its Sinhalese majority in check, and in return, gave Tamils the best government jobs and the benefit of English education. With independence in 1948, however, the Tamils were deprived of their patrons, and found themselves outnumbered and marginalized inside the new Sri Lanka’s unitary state and majoritarian institutional framework. With the Tamils rendered politically irrelevant, short-sighted politicians competed with each other for the Sinhalese vote, and soon discovered that the political party with the stronger anti-minority stance was almost always guaranteed electoral success.
Such “ethnic outbidding,” as scholars have characterized the dreadful process, led to the rise of a ferocious Sinhala nationalism that demanded revenge for the Tamils’ supremacy during the colonial period, along with a revival of Sinhala language and culture. It saw Sri Lanka as for the Sinhalese alone, and insisted that the Tamil minority submit to its second-class position or, better still, simply leave the island. In the first few decades following independence, Sri Lanka’s Tamils were systematically stripped of their erstwhile social and economic privileges, with the demotion of their language (Tamil) to secondary status, and the imposition of strict quotas that shrank their employment and educational opportunities. Sinhalese farmers were encouraged to settle in and around the island’s north-east, in an obvious attempt to reduce the concentration of Tamils in these areas.
Initially, the Tamils attempted to resist these changes through democratic means, forming political parties that pressed for federalism and various minority guarantees. While many sensible Sinhalese politicians warmed to such appeals, the forces of majoritarianism always seemed to triumph. Any government seen as making too many concessions to the Tamils was swiftly pulled down, a disheartening ritual that eventually left most Tamils alienated, and the Tamil parties largely discredited. By the late 1970s, the conflict had taken a violent turn, with the surfacing of several militant outfits, including the LTTE, which called for armed struggle and secession – the creation of a Tamil ‘homeland’ (‘eelam’) out of the Tamil majority areas in Sri Lanka’s north-east. The LTTE proved the strongest of these militant groups, and, out-powering its rivals, became locked in bitter conflict with the Sri Lankan state.
As an insurgent force, the LTTE has been remarkably successful. By the early 2000s, it had captured much of the north and east, and was governing these territories as though they were already a separate state (the LTTE provided schools, postal services, and even rudimentary hospitals). The LTTE brought forth a harsh and authoritarian regime, but one that was, perhaps, an inevitable response to the harsh and authoritarian regime that the Sri Lankan government had become. Human Rights Watch has characterized the Sri Lankan government as one of the world’s worst perpetrators of enforced disappearances. Indeed, in many ways, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan state have been reflections of each other’s total lack of generosity. Both have squandered numerous opportunities for peace, though it is unlikely that the Sri Lankan government would have agreed to negotiate at all – as it did in 2003, following a ceasefire – had it faced a lesser organization than the Tigers. The annihilation of the LTTE will mean that only one of the two fearsome, unbending contenders in the country’s long and bloody war will have left the arena and, that too, probably not for good. Far from being a recipe for peace, this will probably ignite a new cycle of grotesque injustice and pitiless retaliation.
One danger that looms heavily is that the Sri Lankan state will try to use its victory to seek a permanent solution to its “Tamil minority problem.” The government might begin by preventing Tamil civilians interned in its military camps from returning to their villages. These camps have already taken on an air of permanence, with the government arguing that no-one can be moved until the LTTE is fully flushed out, and the military demines the conflict zone. This could take months, if not years. It is entirely possible that while tens of thousands of Tamils languish in these camps, encircled by razor-wired fences, the government will move large numbers of Sinhalese settlers into the island’s north and east, thus stamping out, once and for all, the geographical rationale for a separate Tamil homeland. The counterpoint to the government’s expected belligerence might be an even darker phase in the Tamil resistance; one with a more lucid and focused fury that will bring great disquiet to Tamils everywhere.
To most governments, the bloodbath in Sri Lanka is the consequence of a sovereign power besieged by a brutal domestic insurgency. This is to be expected in a world where states are generally considered legitimate, no matter what they do, and those that challenge their authority are immediately viewed as criminal – a distinction that’s been sharpened, of course, by the menacing language around the “war on terror.” Indeed, following Sri Lanka’s success in having the LTTE proscribed as a terrorist organization by 31 countries, including the United States, the sense that the Sri Lankan state is on the right side of history has gone from strength to strength, which might explain the muted condemnation of its actions in the rapidly unfolding tragedy.
It’s probably too much to expect the US government – or any other government for that matter – to accept the argument, however rigorously advanced, that the Sri Lankan state and the LTTE have mirrored each other’s unyielding attitudes and methods, and, that ultimately, the noble sovereign power and the sinister terrorist organization are two sides of the same bloodied coin. The one, small opening for peace that the LTTE’s retreat may provide, however, is that without its looming spectre, the Sri Lankan government will be less able to shield its decaying democracy and ugly human rights record from the eyes of the world. It will, hopefully, be the subject of an international initiative that helps rein in the country’s majoritarian forces, thus barring any further acceleration of the vicious cycle of injury and retribution these tend to set in motion.
Mitu Sengupta, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Politics at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She may be reached by email: mitu.sengupta@gmail.com
Share this:
Tags:Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Sinhalese, Sri Lanka, Tamil minority, Tamils refugees
Posted in Commentary, crime, Human rights | Leave a Comment »