Sri Lank: Defeat sows seeds of future conflict PDF Print E-mail
Sunday, 19 July 2009 04:30

For the NZ media, Sri Lanka’s brutal 30-year conflict is often depicted as a simple contest: ‘Sinhalese Buddhists versus Tamil Hindus’. 

New Zealanders are left with the impression that Sri Lanka is yet another place in the third world, where people are backward and tribalistic, and prone to slaughter each other over trivial matters like ethnicity and religion. In truth, as is the case with many conflicts around the world, the causes are far more complex.
Today, Sinhalese and Tamil communities are known for aggressively asserting their separateness from each other, each with its own history, language and religion. In Sri Lanka, out of a population of over twenty million people, less than one hundred inter-faith marriages have been recorded every year over the last few decades. Yet in the past, Sri Lankan society was more divided along caste distinctions than ethnic or religious lines. Traditionally, Sri Lanka’s social and political system has been dominated by land owning castes. Among the Sinhalese, this caste was called the Govigama; the elites among the Govis were the Radhalas, the aristocrats. Among the Tamils in Sri Lanka’s Northern and Eastern provinces, land has been owned for centuries by the elite Vellala caste, and just as the Govigamas in the South had members of lower castes bound to their agricultural estates, the Vellalas were supported by a system of Tamil castes beneath them, who worked their lands.
Members of the Sinhalese and Tamil elite mixed with each other freely and when it came to marriage, caste compatibility was the paramount concern; a Sinhalese aristocrat would sooner marry into a Tamil family of equal caste status, than a Sinhalese family of a lower caste and vice versa.
Sinhalese and Tamil elites continued to enjoy their positions of power and privilege under British rule and traditional caste hierarchies were reaffirmed in colonial systems of administration, where the highest positions were reserved for Govigama and Vellala members. Many of Sri Lanka’s politically astute families became highly anglicised, embracing Christianity and sending their children to English speaking private schools.
Upon independence from Britain in 1948, Sri Lanka’s elites needed for the first time to garner popular support. They embraced ethnic nationalism. Cultural revivalism had developed already as a vibrant form of resistance against the British imperial regime. After independence, the same ruling elites that enjoyed power through the period of British rule, quickly adopted Sinhalese and Tamil nationalism; Christians converted to Buddhism and Hinduism, and politicians shed western suits for traditional garb.
The first government of Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) was a coalition of two deeply nationalist parties, one Sinhalese and the other Tamil. Immediately after independence, the first discriminatory law against Tamils was passed with the enactment of the ‘Ceylon Citizenship Act’ – with the support of the Tamil party. Over a million Tamils of Indian origin were stripped of citizenship, to appease the demands of Sinhalese chauvinists. It also was aimed at further consolidating the power traditional Sinhalese and Tamil elites as the ‘Indian Tamils’ who had been brought by the British as indentured labourers to work on tea plantations, were prone to revolutionary Marxist ideas, (which was in fact the case).
Thus, when Tamils were victimised for first time Sri Lanka, it was not the Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalists who stood up for them; instead, their support came from SriThus, when Tamils were victimised for first time in Sri Lanka, it was not the Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalists who stood up for them; instead, their support came from Sri Lankan Marxists, both Sinhalese and Tamil. Lankan Marxists, both Sinhalese and Tamil.
In 1956, the ‘Sri Lanka Freedom Party’ swept to power. Its leader was Solomon Bandaranaike, an Oxford Educated Sinhalese Anglican, who had converted to Buddhism upon his entry into politics. Under this government, Sri Lankan Tamils were openly discriminated against. The 1956, ‘Sinhala Only Act’ attacked the position of Tamil elites in Sri Lanka’s government and administration, making Sinhalese the sole official language. Sinhalese nationalism became increasingly chauvinistic and in 1958, the first anti-Tamil riots occurred. In the North, and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were gradually gaining popular support among Sri Lankan Tamils. In 1983, the Tigers launched their first major attack against the Sri Lankan state, ambushing a convoy of soldiers in the Tamil city of Jaffna. Thirteen Sinhalese soldiers were killed and retaliatory riots against Tamil civilians erupted throughout the Sinhalese regions. Thousands of Tamils fled Sri Lanka and many sought refuge in the traditional Tamil regions of the North and East. These refugees provided the Tigers with recruits and the diaspora around the world became a source of funds for secessionist movement. A full-scale war between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil militant group soon became a reality.
In battle, the Tamil Tigers became one of the most successful guerrilla groups in history. They routed government forces from most of Sri Lanka’s northeast and established a de-facto Tamil state (called Tamil Eelam), with its own navy, air force, banks, hospitals, schools, even currency. The Tamil Tigers were the first group since World War 2 to use suicide bombing in 1987. In the past, the Government has been unable to defeat the Tamil rebels for several reasons.
Firstly, the Tamil Tigers have enjoyed for the most part, the support of the Sri Lankan Tamil people, who have in the decades after independence been brutalised by Government forces and Government sponsored thugs. In the past the Tigers have been able to blend into the Tamil civilian population.
Secondly, the Tamil Diaspora provided the Tigers with funds to administer their state.
The tide turned for Tigers with the events of 9-11 as country after country began to declare the Tamil Tigers a terrorist organisation. Organisations collecting funds for the Tigers were frozen.
The Government seized the upper hand, and borrowed heavily overseas to rearm. In 2007, a fragile peace was broken. Over a billion US dollars was pumped into Sri Lanka’s defence budget and the Government began a brutal campaign of indiscriminate shelling in rebel controlled areas. To ensure that Tamil Tigers did not use the civilian population as a cover, as they had in the past, the Government began rounding up civilians and sending them to displacement camps, located in Government administered “safe zones”.  International media and aid organisations were almost entirely excluded from access to either the camps or the war zone. As the army pressed forward, the Tamil Tigers tried desperately to organise a cease fire but the Government pressed on amid mounting civilian casualties until, on May 18, the Tamil Tiger Leader Vellipullai Prahbakaran  was killed.
So, the de facto Tamil state suffered complete military defeat. Yet thousands of Tamil civilians are still living in camps, as the Government is refusing to release them until any Tamil Tigers hiding among them have been detained. According to Tamil Net, a pro rebel website, these refugee camps are effectively government administered “torture and rape camps”. Recently three Sinhalese doctors working in one of the camps spoke to the media over their concern for civilians in the “safe zones”, who according to them, was still suffering from indiscriminate government shelling. These doctors have since been detained by the Government.
The Tamil Tigers may have been defeated as a conventional military force, but the divisions between Sinhalese and Tamils, which elitist politicians have manipulated in order to secure their power over the people, still remain. Sri Lanka is a case study as to how ethnic consciousness, throughout history, has been used as a tool of those in power, to prevent the working class from realising its unity. Too long have the people of Sri Lanka been excluded from meaningful political control which has thus far rested in the hands of a few powerful families. Only when Sri Lankan workers realise the extent to which they have been exploited and mislead by the ideology of the powerful, will the people of Sri Lanka know the meaning of peace.

Gayaal I