Increasing irrelevance of ‘1983’

Part 1

The recent explosion of hot air in the media about “1983” ran in all directions, with the usual claque beating their chest and wailing, as loud as they can, to take the moral high ground. Not surprisingly, the major thrust of opinions expressed arrived at the one-sided conclusion that the sole cause of it was the Sinhala south going on the rampage with a nudge-and-a-wink from the state.

Those pundits fixated on blaming the Sinhala south only brushed aside wilfully the hidden historical forces that led to “1983”.

In short, they were engaged in the usual game of creating the sound of a clap with one hand. The other northern hand that hit the southern hand to cause the sounds of “1983”was hidden behind the cadjan curtains of Jaffna. It hardly got any mention.

Any objective study will concede that a major event like “1983” could not have occurred without the push of the over-determining and complex forces driving events inevitably to July 23, 1983. Perhaps, one of the nearest comparisons would be the sans culottes (the French underclass) that stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789.

They did not spring out of nowhere on July 14. The meaning of July 14th cannot be understood by what happened on that day. One has to go back in time to understand the inter-play of forces that gave rise to July 14.

This memorable date was a physical, political and symbolic expression of their rage to get out of the multifarious historical factors that had pushed them into an oppressive and helpless corner. The storming of the Bastille was the mere breaking point of the preceding historical factors.

Factors

Similarly, to understand the meaning of July 23rd it is necessary to go back into the preceding days to find out how the mobs went berserk, targeting mainly the urban, middle-class Tamils.

Only then can the factors, particularly the additional factor of the northern provocative tactics and politics that led directly to “1983”, can be grasped comprehensively. As will be pointed out later, “1983” did not come only from the south. The factors that flowed from the north contributed in large measure to “1983”.

But the Tamil ideologues and propagandists seized the opportunities of the day and astutely exploited July 23 to pose as the victims of the Sinhala south which it was, in a sense, if you consider only the immediate reaction of the south to the killings of the 13 soldiers.

The exploding events gave credence to the myths of victimology which were exploited on a massive scale to internationalize Jaffna-centric politics. The billowing smoke that came out of burning cinders of “1983” screened the manipulated political forces that issued directly from the Tamil extremists of the north.

In the outpouring of sympathy from the violence of “1983” there was no room to imagine that it was a by-product of pre-planned Tamil tactics to gain political mileage from provoked southern violence.

This essay is not to exonerate the violence, but to explain the pre-planned northern tactics that drove the Sinhala mobs to attack what they saw as the Bastilles of the Tamil middle-class located in urban areas in 1983.

Expression of resistance

Certain sections of the Sinhala community viewed “1983” as an expression of southern resistance to the escalating violence and provocations of the north. It was a crude way of the south saying enough is enough.

When the misguided mobs attacked the Tamil-middle class - and this was a key factor in shaping the internationalization of the events that followed — the south was also challenging the northern myths of “discrimination” and separatism.

They viewed with disdain the well-entrenched Tamil-middle class enjoying all the privileges in the comfort zones of the south while accusing the Sinhalese of “discrimination” to advance the Tamil goal of separatism. It was a contradiction they could not accept.

There is, no doubt, that “1983” is the fiery moment where all the pent up feelings of both sides of the divide met and collided violently with disastrous consequences. Looking back, it is quite apparent that if a provocative act similar to that of the burial of the 13 soldiers killed in Jaffna did not occur on July 23 plenty of other incidents would have cropped up to spark off a conflagration of that magnitude.

The prevailing ethnic climate was sizzling hot and the political environment tinder dry that it needed only a firefly to ignite Sri Lanka in “1983”.

It was a time when the south was incensed by racist statements attributed to Mrs. Amirthalingam, wife of the leader of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) who had sworn to skin the Sinhalese alive and wear the skins as slippers. It was a time when the state-owned CTB bus drivers would bring home stories of Jaffna Tamil shops refusing to serve them even a glass of water.

It was a time when the southern psyche was assaulted and threatened by the escalating violence of the north. The northern violence and their cry of separatism were anathema to the southerners who had co-existed with all communities despite their differences that did not clash in colonial or feudal times.

It was a time when the Tamil activists were plotting and planning to provoke the lower-level Sinhala leadership to react violently against the Tamils. The provocative tactics of Jaffna-centric violence was seen later in the attacks on the Sri Maha Bodhi, the Temple of the Tooth, the massacre of Buddhist monks, children and mothers with babies later. But this is to jump ahead of July 23, 1983.

Since “1983” is regarded as the turning point, it is necessary to trace the northern tactics that provoked it. The evidence comes from the horse’s mouth, Prof. A. J. Wilson, son-in-law of the father of separatism, S. J. V.

Chelvanayakam.He rote: “There is however still another option available to the Tamil militants, namely that of slow strangulation of the political economy of the Sinhala-dominated island. This could take the form of effective international propaganda. There are militant Tamil expatriate groups in India, West Germany, Britain Canada and the United States and they had achieved a measure of success.

Their principal tactics are to expose discrimination by successive Sinhalese-dominated governments against the Tamils in Sri Lanka, bring to the world’s attention violations of the Tamils’ human rights, lobby governments and international lending agencies against providing economic aid to Sri Lanka, invite the attention of foreign investors and tourists to the political instability in the island and popularize the cause of Eelam.

Political murders, acts of sabotage, and the inflammatory and provocative speeches are the established forms, and these have been tried.

The Sinhalese masses and their lower-level ethnic leadership are needled by such acts and urge their rank and file to take retaliatory action. Nothing is more satisfying to the Tamil militants.” (pp. 300-301 - Sri Lanka and its Future: Sinhalese versus Tamils” - A. J. Wilson)

Climax

This blueprint of the Tamil extremists to provoke the Sinhala lower-level ethnic leadership was published by Prof. Wilson in 1982. The implementation of this blueprint reached its climax comprehensively in 1983.

His understanding, knowledge and closeness to the leading Tamil hierarchy of the time enabled him to grasp the inner workings of the Tamil extremists who were manipulating events to provoke the Sinhala masses to “retaliate” against the Tamils in 1883.

In this sense he forecast the coming events accurately. Please note, he is dead right when he wrote that the strategy was to “needle” the Sinhala masses and their lower-level ethnic leadership who would urge their rank and file to retaliate. And as forecast by Prof.

Wilson it was the provoked “lower-level Sinhala leadership” - mark you, not the top level Sinhala leadership — that retaliated against the provocative politics of the northern leadership.

Nowhere does he mention the Tamil leadership taking the Gandhian path to avoid violence. On the contrary, the Tamil leadership at all levels, was waiting for the Sinhala mobs to attack the Tamils for them to reap the political benefits that would flow from Sinhala mob violence.

The inhuman tactics to provoke the Sinhalese to kill the Tamils was subsequently cranked up by the Tamil propaganda machines to demonise the Sinhala south.

The bloody-minded Tamil leaders (who never failed to pose as Gandhians) had no compunction in adopting tactics of primitive human sacrifices for them to thrive in extremist communal politics.

The Tamil leadership, as stated by Prof. Wilson, literally hovered around gleefully, like vultures, waiting to live off Tamil corpses. And yet it was the Sinhalese who were made to pay for it with a whole new theoretical industry building up to blame only the Sinhalese.

It could be argued, on the basis of Prof. Wilson’s incontrovertible evidence, that the responsibility of the Sinhala leadership at the highest level and at the lower-level is diminished because the primary responsibility was that of the northern leadership that deliberately pursued a political strategy of provoking the south to retaliate against their own Tamil people.

This tactical game of pursuing any means to achieve their political ends - including the means of provoking the Sinhalese to kill their own Tamil people — could come only from a leadership that was totally immune to any moral or humane values.

History

If the Sinhala leadership was accused of complicity on July 23, 1983 then the Jaffna Tamil leadership stands accused of not only complicity but initiating, encouraging, directing and financing Jaffna-centric violence that led to “1983”. Of course, this kind of heartless and oppressive behaviour is not alien to the Tamil culture.

It goes back to feudal times when the Vellahla elite reduced the Tamil low-castes to subhuman slaves. And it was this oppressive and cruel culture that was passed on from the upper-caste Vellahlas to low-caste Prabhakaran who continues to perpetuate the subhuman culture of Vellahla cruelty under his one-man fascist regime to this day.

The violent and cruel discrimination enforced by the Vellahla elite under the sanctions of the Hindutva ideology makes Jaffna the darkest chapter in Sri Lankan history. Under the worst of times, neither the Sinhala community nor “the Sinhala governments”, as they say, had oppressed and suppressed the Tamils, or any other minority, the way the casteist Vellahala elite, or the Pol Potist regime of Prabhakaran had stamped on the Tamils.

When the entire leadership of the Jaffna Tamils was decimated by Prabhakaran, the Tamils became the leading exterminators of the Tamils. S. Chandrahasan, son of S.J. V. Chelvanayakam, said that the Tamil Tigers have killed more Tamils than all others put together.

V. Anandasangaree, the TULF President, who confirmed Chandrahasan’s verdict on the Tamil Tigers, added that he had the right to go to Jaffna and protest when Mrs. Sirimavo Bandaranaike opened the Jaffna University but he can’t step into Jaffna now under Prabhakaran’s regime. Statistics confirm that the majority of Tamils prefer to live with the Sinhalese than under the Pol Potist regime of Prabhakaran.

Yet the ideologically fixated propagandists/apologists on both sides of the divide blame the Sinhalese. The liquidation of Tamils by the Tamils, starting from Chelvanayakam who led the innocent Tamil youth like Pied Piper to the music of elusive Eelam, are glorified while the blame for that too, ironically, is heaped on the Sinhalese.

Criminal record

The collective violence, discrimination (even Karuna broke away from the Tamil Tigers accusing the northern leadership of discriminating against the Eastern Tamils) and oppression of the Tamils by the Tamils, denying them their basic human rights, stands as an unparalleled criminal record in Sri Lankan history.

Dr. Noel Nadesan, the Editor of Uthayam, the Australian community paper for Tamils summed it when he stated: “Tigers are the enemy of Tamils, not the Sinhalese,” (Sri Lanka Guardian - July 24th, 2008). The unmitigated of the violence of the Tamils against the Tamils indicts the Tamil leadership from feudal and colonial to modern times.

Though the Sinhalese are to be blamed, if at all, for not giving into the fictional, divisive and provocative politics of the north they should be held responsible essentially for falling into the trap laid by the Jaffna jingoists.

How fair is it to blame the Sinhalese when, as stated by Prof. Wilson, the Tamil leaders were deliberately inviting the Sinhala mobs to attack the Tamils so that they could thrive on the misery and the blood of the Tamil people? Strange as it may seem, some leading Tamil expatriates in Melbourne (where I live) were disappointed that the Sinhalese had not killed more Tamils in “1983”.

They saw the political and propaganda advantages of Tamils being killed by the Sinhala mobs and, as stated by Wilson, they were hoping to capitalize on the deaths of their own kith and kin.

None of the intellectual donkeys in academia and NGOs who carried the propaganda load for the Machiavellian Tamil leadership ever explored or mentioned the direct role and the responsibility of Jaffna-centric tactics and violence that led to “1983”.

Either they were totally ignorant of the evidentiary tactics mentioned above (and there is more in Wilson’s account) or they deliberately decided to ignore the beastly role played by the Tamil leadership in their seminars, publications, doctoral theses and recent eulogies of “1983”.

Besides, it would have been embarrassing for them to apportion blame to the Tamil leadership because any such argument would cut to shreds the prevailing mythology of blaming the Sinhala community only.

Secondly, any such acknowledgement of the Tamil leadership contributing to the suffering of the Tamils would undermine the claim of the Tamils to greater share of power based on Sinhala “discrimination” and anti-Tamil violence.

The Sri Lankan crisis has been exacerbated and prolonged partly because a lucrative industry grew up, with funding from foreign sources, to blame only the Sinhala-Buddhists.

Exonerating the Jaffna-centric leadership that had consistently pursued mono-ethnic extremism, rejecting multi-cultural co-existence in a pluralistic democracy, was a cleverly crafted tactic of the pro-separatist lobby because that was the only way of maintaining the mythology of victimization.

Distributing the blame to both parties would diffuse the impact of victimology. The political objective of putting the blame solely on the Sinhala polity was to push for greater compensation in the form of grabbing political power.

Ignoring the interplay of the dynamic dialectics that led to “1983” has been a fatal flaw that had muddled the thinking of the pundits and obstructed the path to durable co-existence and peace.

These political pundits, who were wearing their hearts on their sleeve when they revisited the graveyards dug by the Jaffna-based political ghouls, are no better than the Negombo women who were on hire for anyone to mourn for their dead.

The sound of the one-hand claps of the Tamil lobby echoing in the passage of time is not taking anyone anywhere either to understand the past or to address the issues flowing from it.

By ignoring the overwhelming northern forces that preceded “1983” the partisan theorists have deliberately chosen to take sides with the sole aim of giving another injection to the dying forces of mono-ethnic extremism of the north.

It is the politically motivated partisan analyses of blinkered academics and ideologues that have distorted the perspectives on “1983”.

The evolution of events makes it clear that the stage was set for “1983” in the 1976 Vadukoddai Resolution which encapsulated the politics of hate and urged the Tamil youth to take up arms against the Sinhalese.

The anti-Sinhala political culture of Jaffna-centric politics, which had gathered momentum from the dying days of the British Raj, found its final expression in the Vadukoddai Resolution of 1976.

The machinations to provoke the Sinhala masses to attack the Tamils were an integral part of the violent ideology embedded in the Vadukoddai Resolution.

The overall strategy in the war against Sinhalese included provoking the Sinhalese to attack the Tamils.

These tactical manoeuvres did deliver the pre-planned result of (1) earning the wrath of Tamils against the Sinhalese, driving them into the hands of the Tamil militants and (2) winning the sympathy of the international community. Nevertheless, the unfolding events establish that the call to arms in the Vadukoddai Resolution reached its climax in “1983”.

After the declaration of war by the political class/caste in the Vadukoddai Resolution it was inevitable that Jaffna-centric extremism and violence were doomed to collide with the south. The political jump from “1976” to “1983” was short but sharp.

By 1976 the Illankai Thamil Arasu Kachchi, (the Tamil State Party) had come to the end of its extremist tether. It had become a victim of its own extreme racism.

Having launched the Tamil State Party in December 1948 (disguised though as federalism) it had incrementally driven their northern electorate to the extreme of separatism - the furthest point to which it could go. Having reached that end-point there was no turning back for them.

They were forced to deliver their promise. The Tamil youth were biting their heels to deliver the political meat they promised. In a desperate bid to retain their power they rejected not only multi-cultural co-existence but also parliamentary path to achieve political goals and, most of all Gandhian politics which adorned them only as the Emperor’s clothes.

They did not want to acknowledge that they had painted themselves into the corner of Eelam which they could not deliver. Nor could they get out of it after demonizing the Sinhalese as their inveterate enemy.

Pressured by the youth who were insisting on instant results they had no escape route except to embrace the violence endorsed in the Vadukoddai Resolution. There was no way of pacifying the youth with promises of negotiations or compromising for deals less than Eelam.

Prof. Wilson confirms the violent politics of the northern leadership. Non-violent politics would not fit into the violent programme of the Tamils adumbrated by Prof. Wilson.

By 1976 they had reached a point where they could not go back to find non-violent options because they had thrived in electoral politics by demonizing the Sinhala-Buddhists as the enemy of the Tamils who must be eliminated/defeated to attain their political goals.

In any case, the north had abandoned all hope of tolerant, multi-cultural co-existence when they endorsed violence to achieve their separatist state, as stated in the Vadukoddai Resolution.

From their point of view the decision to wage a war against the south was realistic because an established state would never give into separatist demands without a violent struggle. In fact, separatism and violence and are inseparable. Vaddukoddai Resolution is a clear expression of their plight. This also explains why no other community declared war on the Sinhalese.

In short, the peninsular political leaders having laid the ideological base for Jaffna jingoism, having distributed wooden pistols at Gandhian satyagrahs, having recruited and encouraged the Tamil youth to take up arms against the Sinhala south, having financed and directed their mono-ethnic extremism, having rejected pluralism and multi-cultural co-existence, having manufactured a fictional history and a concocted geography to match were rearing to unleash violence against the Sinhala south to achieve their elusive Eelam.

They were bent on dividing the nation on ethnic lines and one political objective for provoking ethnic violence was to get the Tamils out of the south into the north in order to claim that the division was a physical reality.

The sadistic politics of the “Gandhians” of Jaffna made “1983” an inevitability. Their declared methodology was to get the Tamils killed by the Sinhalese. Nothing gave them greater satisfaction, says Prof. Wilson.

His evidence leads to the conclusion that in “1983” the Sinhalese were more sinned against than sinning. Ever since “1983” the provoked Sinhalese have been forced to pay dearly for falling into the trap laid by the Tamils