Sri Lanka: inter-communal problems and their solution
Twenty-six years ago, at the beginning of the conflict
in Sri Lanka, we wrote an article denouncing the Sri Lankan government’s policy
of discrimination against the Tamils but at the same time pointing out the
incorrectness of the demand for self-determination, both in point of theory and
practicability, for the Sri Lankan Tamils.
Twenty-six years and more than 70,000
deaths later, events have proved our viewpoint to be correct. We take no
pleasure in making this assertion. What is scandalous is that the so-called
left have learnt nothing from these past 26 years of tragic conflict in Sri Lanka and continue to mouth mindlessly the demands for self-determination for the
Tamils of Sri Lanka. This is both theoretically incorrect and extremely
reactionary in practice.
We are reproducing below the article
that we published in our September 1983 issue, for it still points to the way
forward for all Sri Lankans, Tamils as well as Sinhalese.
Editor
Economic
crisis
On Sunday 24 July [1983], the ambush by the Tamil
Tigers, a separatist Tamil organisation in Sri Lanka, of a military patrol in
which 13 soldiers were killed near Jaffna, the main centre for Tamils in the
north of the island, provided the perfect pretext for the government-inspired
pogrom against the Tamil minority that followed this ambush. The UNP government
of President Junius Jayawardene is in deep economic and political trouble and
its economic policies are in a shambles. In 1982, Sri Lanka’s current account
balance of payments deficit rose to $490 million and was attributed to poor
exports and the rising level of imports. Its total external debt in January
1983 stood at $1.7 billion. The economic plight of the Sri Lankan masses –
both Tamil and Sinhalese – is extremely miserable. The impending austerity
measures, by which the exploiting classes of Sri Lanka hope to solve this
economic crisis through passing all its burden to the masses of poor people,
will make their plight even more unbearably miserable. The government of
President Jayawardene has for quite some time been looking for a scapegoat.
The ambush of 13 soldiers came in as a gift from heaven and provided the
perfect setting for unleashing an anti-Tamil orgy of violence, looting,
burning, pillage and murder. The government is engaged in a calculated and
cynical act of diverting the frustration and anger of the Sinhalese masses,
whom it has betrayed, against the Tamil minority.
Orgy of death and destruction
In last month’s orgy of death and destruction,
between 400 and 600 people, mostly Tamil, were done to death. What is
significant about these murders is that either the security forces took direct
part in these heinous, racist and chauvinist crimes, or indirectly aided these
crimes by initiating them or standing by as helpless onlookers while the mobs,
spurred on by the government and army-inspired Sinhala chauvinism, set to work
on their unfortunate victims with surgical, not to say devilish, efficiency.
52 Tamil political prisoners, including Kuttimani and Jegan, detained under the
Prevention of Terrorism Act in the maximum security at Welikada, were massacred
on 1 August in their cells by the security forces who, having committed this
foul deed, put out that the prisoners had died in two spontaneous ‘prison
riots’ at the hands of some Sinhalese convicts who, having been angered by the
news of the death of 13 soldiers at the hands of Tamil separatists, wanted to
take revenge on the Tamil political prisoners. More than 80 Tamils were killed
by the troops in the north and more than 200 others were killed by the mobs in
Sinhalese areas.
Tamil houses, shops and businesses were
systematically looted and burned down, in some cases whole areas going up in
flames. While groups of Sinhalese thugs, according to eye witnesses, were
stopping vehicles, beating up their Tamil occupants, setting fire to the
vehicles and robbing the Tamils of all their possessions, the soldiers in army
trucks that passed by, far from stopping these thugs, were waving at them and
encouraging them, while and the thugs were shouting ‘victory’ (Jayawera)
to the soldiers. Soldiers in civilian clothes also actively participated in or
initiated the attacks on Tamils. When the government, after a good many hours
of unmitigated arson, looting and murder, imposed the curfew, the police and
the army, instead of using their authority to shoot the looters after a
warning, only used their bullets to open gates and doors of Tamil shops and homes
that the looting thugs were unable to open with the aid of sticks or iron
bars. The army and the police appeared to find eternal satisfaction at the
sight of Sinhalese looters carrying off their loot – bales of textiles, bottles
of brandy and beer, rice and sugar – and going about happily on a
Tamil-catching spree. According to the Sunday Times of 31 July 1983, “On
Tuesday night [26 July] 130 men of the navy garrison in Trincomalee, the
major port on the east coast, broke open the armoury. They then entered the
town, which has a mixed population of Singhalese and Tamils, and shot up parts
of it … They only agreed to return to barracks the following morning after they
had received guarantees against disciplinary action.”
In a short space of between a week to 10 days, the
Sinhalese mobs spurred on by the government-inspired anti-Tamil hysteria, and
actively encouraged and assisted by the ‘law enforcement’ machinery and
‘security’ forces, put their torches to thousands of carefully targeted Tamil
factories, shops and houses. The purpose was to dislodge the Tamils from what
the Sinhalese chauvinists regard as “their disproportionate influence over
the Sri Lankan economy” by way of a ‘final solution’ to the Tamil problem.
If the crude and thuggish elements use terms such as the ‘final solution’, the
sophisticated and suave Sinhalese bourgeois say the same thing by talking about
the need for “restoration of the rights of the Sinhalese majority”. “The
Tamils have dominated the commanding heights of everything good in Sri Lanka,” shrieks the Cambridge-educated finance minister, Mr Ronnie de Mel. There
seems to be operating a kind of division of labour between the government and
the Sinhalese mobs. The latter go on the rampage and loot and destroy the
property and businesses owned by Tamils, while the former then goes on to
expropriate all damaged properties under all kinds of hypocritical pretexts,
but with the real aim of effecting a decisive shift in the balance of economic
power in Sri Lanka from Tamils to Sinhalese.
Damage to the economy
The above chauvinistic policy of terrorising the
Tamil minority, far from bringing any material benefits to the Sinhalese
masses, will, on the contrary, only serve to damage the precarious economy of Sri Lanka and thus make the conditions of the masses, both Tamil and Sinhalese, even worse
than they are today. According to The Economist of 20-26 August 1983, “The
preliminary estimate of $150 million worth of damage [caused by anti-Tamil
mobs] to commercial and residential property – equivalent to about 4% of Sri
Lanka’s GNP – is almost certainly too low, because it is based on book value;
replacement costs might be five to ten times higher. It also excludes the
value of stocks, lost output and lost export orders.” Continues The
Economist, “The destruction of nine coconut mills for example, could cost Sri Lanka its position as the world’s second largest exporter of coconut oil.”
Seventeen industrial units were destroyed in the Colombo area alone, with a
loss of 6,000 jobs. Most of these factories were manufacturing export goods,
with the consequent loss of hard currency. Add to this the loss that will
inevitably be suffered by the tourism industry and the brain-drain of Tamils,
and you get a complete picture of the devastation caused by Sinhalese
chauvinism. Thousands of Tamil professionals are said to have left the country
since the violence began last month. One leading Tamil entrepreneur estimates
that 90% of his fellow-industrialists are now contemplating emigration. If
they go, Sir Lanka will lose more than their capital assets, many of which went
up in smoke last month. It will lose commercial instincts and management
skills. The only gainers from this devastation will be a handful of Sinhalese
bourgeois who will probably lay claim to businesses which have hitherto been
run by Tamils.
Who is to blame?
President Jayawardene’s government, instead of
condemning the Sinhalese mobs and the ‘security’ forces for systematic acts of
arson, looting and murder, has had the audacity to blame it all on the Tamil
minority. In a radio broadcast on 28 July, the President said that “…the
time has come to accede to the clamour and natural request of the Sinhala
people”. It appears that the desire of the Sinhala people is not merely
that the country cannot be divided, but also to see to it that the Tamil
minority is stripped of its already dwindling civic rights, for, since the
President’s broadcast, not only has legislation been enacted making it illegal
to call for a separate Tamil state, but also, to repeat, the government has
started a process of wholesale confiscation of businesses formerly owned by
Tamils. Under the above legislation, a number of parties, including the main
opposition (Tamil) party, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), with its 17
members in parliament, has been outlawed. Breaches of the ban, including
membership of offending parties, are, under the legislation, to be met with
penalties ranging from loss of civic rights to confiscation of property, life
imprisonment, or the death penalty. Those infringing this legislation are to
be forbidden to hold public office, to practise their professions or to join
any movements or organisations. By taking this step on 30 July by way of
placating the Sinhalese mobs, still rioting, burning, looting and murdering at
the expense of the Tamil minority, the government of Sri Lanka has given its
endorsement to the blood bath.
The government has also blamed the riots on foreign
conspirators, whose object, it says, was to destroy the economy and overthrow
the government. In substantiation of this assertion we have only to
government’s word, to wit, further assertions. No credible proof has been
given. We must therefore seek the real reasons behind these riots elsewhere.
Sinhalese and Tamils have lived side by side for
centuries without resorting to communal violence, which is a relatively new
phenomenon. In medieval times, the separation of the two communities, in human
terms, was rarely as rigid as tradition suggests and more than one Sinhalese
King was in fact a Tamil. During nearly four centuries of foreign rule
(Portuguese from 1594-1638; Dutch from 1638-1796; British from 1796-1948), Sri Lanka witnessed hardly any communal tension between the Sinhalese majority and the
Tamil minority. Although the 1930’s gave rise to religious and linguistic
revivalism on the past of the Ceylonese people, this revivalism was only an
integral part of the growth of nationalism directed against Christian
missionary teaching and as an expression of revolt by the people literate in
Sinhala, but not in English, against the privileges of the English-speaking
élite. British governments’ reliance on English as the language of
administration had fostered the dominance of a small class of English-speaking
civil servants and professionals. In this, by a historical accident, the
Tamils had a preponderance disproportionate to their numbers because the Tamil
areas in the north were less developed in agriculture and industry, forcing
young men to seek careers in the public service or the professions in the
south, and also because the prominence of missionary activity in Jaffna had
created a sound educational base in English. But in the last decades of
British rule, the emphasis was gradually switched to vernacular education.
Popular schooling created mass literacy in vernacular languages and the
consequent demand that the administration should be conducted in the
vernacular. The Swabasha or ‘our own language’ movement became a
central part of the nationalist movement. So it can be seen that the Swabasha
movement was directed against the English-speaking elite and, in the final
analysis, against British colonial rule over the people of Ceylon. In no way was it a movement directed against the Tamils who, side by side with
their Sinhalese compatriots, took part in the movement for Ceylonese
independence.
So what and who has brought matters to such a pass
that the TULF has, as a part of its programme, adopted the demand for a
separate Tamil state? Leaving aside for a moment the legitimacy or otherwise
of this demand, and the correctness or incorrectness of TULF’s tactics, it has
to be admitted that the main responsibility for this sad and messy state of
affairs lies with the Singhalese bourgeois politicians and the successive
Ceylonese governments who, being unable to fulfil their promises to the people
for a better life and in order to cover their betrayal, have sought to divert
the anger of the Sinhalese masses against the Tamil minority. Bourgeois
electioneering, with its attendant demagogy, appeals to communalism and the
exploitation of religious, linguistic and cultural diversity, has seen to it
that Sinhalese chauvinism is roused and unleashed on the Tamil minority, and
that the Sinhalese masses blame their misery and wretchedness on the Tamils
rather than the local exploiters – both Sinhalese and Tamil – and their
imperialist masters.
Discrimination
Successive Ceylonese governments have been guilty
of committing acts of blatant discrimination against the Tamils. One of the
first acts of the newly-independent government was to make most of the
so-called Indian Tamils (numbering just over a million) effectively stateless
persons under the Citizenship Act of 1949. The net result of the above measures
was that out of a million plantation workers, who were every bit Ceylonese,
though of Tamil origin, only 140,000 obtained citizenship. In revising the
electoral registers for the central Ceylon districts for 1950, Tamil names were
simply left out, leaving the onus on anyone who wanted his name reinstated to
prove his citizenship under the new rules. After this disenfranchisement,
eight Tamil members of parliament from the plantation areas were duly replaced
by Sinhalese.
In the 1956, the Bandarnaike government pushed
through the Official Language Act, declaring that “the Sinhala language
shall be the one official language of Ceylon”. This was followed by the
1972 Republican Constitution which made ‘Sinhala only’ the basis of
administration, ignoring completely the needs and wishes of the Tamil minority
and in complete violation of the promises made to the Tamils at the time of
independence. Public servants were discriminated against on language grounds;
not only were incentive bonuses offered for passing Sinhala examinations, but
also periodic promotions were withheld from those who would not take them: in
some cases notices of compulsory retirement on language grounds were served on
those Tamil officials who had failed to learn Sinhala.
Also in 1972, the government instituted, in the
field of education, the system of ‘standardisation’ under which marks obtained
by candidates for university are weighted by giving advantage to certain
linguistic groups and/or certain districts, the purpose again being to
discriminate against the minority in the field of employment, particularly in
the administrative service, the professions and the armed forces.
It is these discriminatory policies and acts of the
successive Ceylonese governments which have inspired and created the
Tamil-bating Sinhalese chauvinism by seeking to persuade everyone that the real
problems of Ceylon lay in the Tamil minority and that once this minority had
been dealt with everything would be rosy in the Ceylonese garden. No wonder,
then, that this government-whipped-up anti-Tamil hysteria should have found, in
the absence of a strong revolutionary working-class movement, a ready response
among the poor, downtrodden, ignorant Sinhalese masses and created the communal
violence periodically, beginning with 1956, through 1958 and 1979 to 1983, in
which Tamils were the victims of organised and systematic violence and
butchery. It is also these discriminatory practices, in the absence too of a
strong working-class revolutionary leadership among the Tamils, which have
produced Tamil separatism. Mr Walter Swarz of The Guardian has justly
remarked that “the degree of self-conscious nationalism on the part of the
Tamils is relatively new”. It is anti-Tamil hysteria and Tamil-basing
Sinhalese chauvinism which has not merely strengthened bourgeois Tamil
nationalism, but even produced the urge for a separate state, for until 1975,
secession was never a serious demand. The subsequent riots of 1979 and 1983
have merely served to strengthen this Tamil urge for separation. President
Jayawardene’s government, instead of looking into Tamil grievances and removing
their causes, has in typical fashion sought to safeguard the unity of Ceylon by outlawing the advocacy of secession. On the one hand this government is against
the division of Ceylon, on the other hand, by instigating pogroms against the
Tamil minority, not only does it produce a desire on the part of the Tamils for
separation, but also, through pogroms, forces tens of thousands of Tamils in
the south of the country to flee to the Jaffna area in the north, which is
already a Tamil stronghold, thus effecting a de facto partition of the country.
Separation no solution
Various solutions to this problem have been put
forward, but the most absurd are those that call for a division of the country
and the creation of a separate Tamil-speaking state in the north. That this
demand should be put forward by the bourgeois leadership of TULF and the
so-called Tamil Tigers and their bourgeois supporters elsewhere is understandable.
That people who call themselves socialists, and even swear by Marxism-Leninism,
should support such a demand in the case of Ceylon is nothing short of a
betrayal of socialism and a mockery of it. And this is precisely what is being
done by some of them. Although the Labour Herald of 19 August publishes
an interview, without a single word of its own against it, with a certain Dr
Amugum, a leading member of the Tamil community in Britain, in which the Doctor
advocates partition, and though the Socialist Action (a
weekly paper of the Trotskyite Socialist League, formerly
the International Marxist Group – IMG) of 18 August uses
expressions like “self-determination” in this context, the sole
‘honour’ of supporting a separate Tamil-speaking state belongs to the
Trotskyite Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP).
The WRP, never in any doubt of its
r-r-revolutionary credentials (what a bliss ignorance can be), in its paper News
Line of Saturday 30 July, open its leading article with the following paragraph:
“The WRP and the daily ‘News Line’ condemn the
racist pogrom against the Tamil nation launched by the reactionary
government of President Junius Jayawardene in Sri Lanka. We call for the immediate
establishment of a Tamil Eelam state in the north and east of the
island in accordance with the wishes of the Tamil people” [our emphasis
throughout].
First and foremost, the luminaries of the WRP
assume precisely that which has to be proved, namely, whether the Tamils of Sri
Lanka constitute a nation or not. What then is a nation?
“A nation is a historically evolved, stable
community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make up
manifested in a community of culture”. In order not to unduly offend our
WRP friends, we deliberately omit the name of the author of this definition.
Applying the above scientific criteria, it is clear
that the Tamils of Sri Lanka do not constitute now, and have never constituted
in the past, a nation, for they, along with the Sinhalese, are a historically
evolved stable community of people (which has nothing whatever to do with the
racial features or origins of such a community), sharing a common territory,
possessing an internal economic bond which welds the various parts of a nation
into a single whole, and having a special spiritual complexion and a national
culture, which is Ceylonese. Although some Tamils may not be able to write
Sinhala, most of them understand it and almost all of them would learn it in no
time were it not for discrimination and violence practised against them from
1948 onwards.
If one looks at the map of Sri Lanka, one finds Tamils living all over the country, albeit there are special pockets
of the country with a greater concentration of Tamils. These pockets of Tamil
concentration are Jaffna, Batticaloa, Trincomalee, Puttalam, the tea-growing
Kandyian uplands and certain districts of Colombo. Of all these pockets, only Jaffna can be described as solidly Tamil, though even Jaffna had 20,402 Sinhalese in it,
according to the 1971 figures, compared with a Tamil population of 673,043.
Batticaloa has a 2-1 majority of Tamils, but is separated from Jaffna by Trincomalee, whose population is nearly equally divided. These places are in
turn physically separated from the tea-growing Kandyan uplands, and the latter
are further still removed from the said districts of Colombo. The problem is
further complicated by the fact that of the 3 million Tamils, just over a half
are the so-called Ceylon Tamils, concentrated in the Jaffna area and In Colombo.
The rest are the so-called Indian Tamils who were brought as indentured
labourers by the British in the 19th and 20th centuries to work on the tea
plantations, and who are concentrated in the Kandy uplands. How is the
promised Trotskyist land, Tamil Eelam, to be carved out? Will it be by having
more than one Tamil state, or will it be by a mass movement and uprooting of
whole populations from one area to another along communal lines as witnessed
during the partition of India? One has merely to ask these questions to realise
the grotesquely reactionary nature of the ‘solution’ offered by the ‘Marxists’
of the WRP. In the WRP scheme of things, Ulster, not to mention large tracts
of South Africa, would become a nation!!
In any case, this Tamil Eelam, in the unlikely
event of it coming into existence, could not survive economically, for the
areas in the north and east are insufficient to support 3 million Tamils. And
if they are not to support all the Tamils, but only those living in the north
and east, this statelet would be no solution to the problems of Tamils living
elsewhere in Sri Lanka. Furthermore, this Tamil Eelam would be bereft of the
Sri Lankan exports which really matter: tea, rubber, gems and coconuts, being
merely left to live on the export of rice, chillies, onions and fish – on the
supposition that there would be any of these commodities left over for export
after feeding 3 million people. Thus it can be seen that the Tamils, not being
a nation, are not entitled to the right of self-determination; nor would it be
in their interests to exercise such a right even if they possessed it.
Solution
In our view, the best solution to the problem is
that the government of Sri Lanka be pressed to accede to the following
legitimate demands of the Tamil community:
1.
The Citizenship Act of 1948 be revised so as to confer citizenship on
all those Tamils who were rendered stateless under this and related enactments.
2.
All those Tamils disenfranchised under the Election Amendment Act of
1949 should be re-enfranchised;
3.
Discrimination in education and employment should be ended;
4.
Tamil should be made a language of administration side by side with
Sinhala, at least in those areas where the Tamils are heavily concentrated, and
facilities for teaching it in schools should be freely available in all areas
of the country; and all public pronouncements and regulations should be
published in both languages.
Only in this way would it be possible to safeguard
the position of the majority while, at the same time, meeting reasonably the
fears of the minority. This, and this alone, constitutes the democratic
solution to the problem. This is the only way forward for the reconciliation
of the two embittered communities.
Of course, the above demands will not be easily
granted by the Ceylonese bourgeois government which in the past ahs done much
to inspire Sinhalese chauvinism and instigate violence against the Tamils in
order to divert the attention of the masses from the economic problems facing
them, and to cover betrayals by successive government of the promises made to
the people during elections.
For the above demands to be realised, it is
essential for the working-class leadership – among the Sinhalese and the Tamils
– to pick up the gauntlet, work together and build a powerful movement of the
Ceylonese working class which leads the entire people in their struggle for a
better future. This may sound like pie in the sky, but there is no other and
easier way round it, for the Tamil ‘problem’ is an inextricable part of the
general struggle of the Ceylonese masses for the overthrow of the Ceylonese
exploiters and their imperialist masters. The latter are using the Tamil
question for dividing and weakening the mass movement in Sri Lanka with the object of prolonging their decrepit and senile rule. The working class
and the masses of Sri Lanka must counter and render nugatory this filthy game
by building a united and powerful revolutionary movement, which doubtless would
sweep away the scourge of local and foreign exploiters.
The road is a difficult one, but the prize at the
end is worth fighting for.