SL: 1983 STATE TERRORISM!..................By..... Izeth Hussain

1983 – State Terrorism ............by Izeth Hussain...../courtesy island.lk
In 1958, ten years after Independence, Sri Lankans of my generation were shocked by the anti-Tamil riots. We had complacently assumed that that was the sort of thing that was endemic in India but could never take place in Sri Lanka. Thereafter we came to a proper appreciation of what those riots were really about. They were an episode in the inevitable assertion of the dominant position of the island’s Sinhala Buddhist majority. We then assumed, again with complacency, that once that dominant position had been asserted and ethnic imbalances resulting from colonialism had been corrected, we would reach a new equilibrium and the dominant Sinhala Buddhist majority, or the Sinhalese majority, would give fair and equal treatment to the minorities. That kind of equilibrium has been reached in a great many multi-ethnic countries. Why not, after all, in Sri Lanka as well?

It became apparent under the 1970 Government that the ethnic imbalances of the colonial period had been corrected, and that it would be absurd to suppose that any of the minorities were still in a privileged position. Sri Lanka was clearly established – at least in the eyes of the minorities - as the Sihadipa, the land of the Sinhalese, and the Dhammadipa, the land where the Dhamma reigned supreme, with the Sinhalese Buddhists as the chosen people carrying a sacred trust to preserve Theravada Buddhism in all its pristine purity. But the ethnic minorities, as well as the Christian Sinhalese, saw themselves as being reduced to the position of second class citizens. Clearly the paradigm of a new equilibrium, of an ethnic majority asserting its dominant position and thereafter giving fair and equal treatment to the minorities, was not working.

Many of us, certainly including myself, supposed that what had gone wrong was that the drive to assert the legitimate position of the Sinhala Buddhists had acquired a momentum of its own and gone too far, resulting in a new disequilibrium replacing the old colonial one, instead of a new equilibrium. We supposed further that it was only a matter of time before the Sinhala Buddhist chauvinist trend would be reversed. Most Sri Lankans saw that as about to happen when the 1977 UNP Government assumed office. What followed totally contradicted our expectations. Within weeks there were anti-Tamil riots – there had been none since 1958; army operations in Jaffna in the latter half of 1979 seriously alienated the Tamils; in 1981 the DDC elections were rigged and the Jaffna Library was burned, outraging the entire civilized world; and anti-Tamil racism rose to its genocidal apogee in 1983.

25 years after the 1958 riots it came to be broadly accepted that the ethnic problem could not be solved through a Western liberal democratic model, with the dominant ethnic majority giving the minorities reasonably fair and equal treatment. It became part of our conventional wisdom that a solution would be possible only through a broad measure of devolution, perhaps under a system comparable to the one prevailing in India. Now, 25 years after 1983, the consensus about a possible solution through devolution is fast disappearing. It has come to be widely recognized that the LTTE wants nothing less than a de facto Eelam, for instance through a loose confederal arrangement, an expectation on which no sane government in Colombo can be expected to deliver. On the Sinhalese side the prospects for working out an internationally acceptable devolution package seemed very favorable indeed during the 1994 to 2000 period. The CBK Government proposed a devolution package going beyond what was given under the Indian Constitution. That was acceptable to the UNP opposition, and it certainly would have been acceptable to the Sinhalese people. But suddenly, after further developments, the UNP cut and ran. The ugly truth therefore is that the LTTE does not want a solution through devolution, while the Sinhalese side has never ever offered a credible devolution package.

If no solution is possible through the Westminster model, nor through devolution, what options are left? War, protracted war, with guerilla warfare following on the end of the conventional war as suggested by the Army Commander, is the only one available at the moment. The Western powers who have been badgering us about negotiations can now stop doing so, and go away ruefully shaking their heads while recollecting choice bits of wisdom from their chintanaya. For instance they could invoke that great engraving of Goya – who never swallowed the optimism of the Enlightenment ideology – showing two men clubbing each other to death while both were sinking to their deaths in a bog.

Once the relevant segments of the international community recognize that it is futile to expect a negotiated solution in the foreseeable future, several outcomes could become possible. India as the regional great power could come to feel free to impose a solution. Prabhakaran may die, and a political solution could become a realistic prospect. And so on. I will not here engage in a futurological exercise to make guesses about other possible outcomes, except that I must declare that it seems to me certain that the configuration of the final solution that will emerge will be shaped by the gun and nothing else. What seems certain at the present juncture, however, is that a protracted war could spell dangers for Sri Lanka and therefore we should try to work out ways of getting out of this imbroglio, instead of emulating those two men in the Goya engraving. For this purpose we need new approaches to the ethnic problem, new ways of understanding it which could enable us to get a better grip on it, what is called a new paradigm. What can we learn for this purpose from the 1983 riots?

In the recent spate of articles on the subject one leitmotif kept on recurring, one grand narrative was implicit. It was that those so-called riots were in reality a pogrom, a meticulously organized affair behind which were very powerful political personages, a pogrom carried out by chosen thugs with very little popular participation, while in fact the majority of the Sinhalese people refused to participate in the pogrom, and many of them went out of the way to help Tamils sometimes at considerable risk to themselves. It was a perception that prevailed among all our ethnic groups in the immediate aftermath of the 1983 riots, and it has persisted for twenty five years and held sway to this day. It could be a simplification, but there is an essential truth to it.

Abroad too the true nature of what had occurred was quickly recognized. Gnana Moonesinghe in an article in the Island of July 27 quoted the following from Paul Sieghart, Chairman of the British International Commission of Jurists: "Clearly this was not a spontaneous upsurge of hatred among the Sinhalese people. It was a series of deliberate acts, executed in accordance with a concerted plan, conceived and organized well in advance."

The so-called riots of 1983 were clearly a case of State terrorism, but there has been a curious resistance to acknowledging them as such, even though the incriminating facts are hardly ever disputed. As far as I am aware I was the first Sri Lankan to argue the case about the 1983 State terrorism, as a speaker at a meeting of the YMCA Forum sometime around 1993. I followed that up with an article in the Lanka Guardian. I wrote another article on the subject in 1998, which was published in the Daily News together with a commendatory editorial. A surprising development took place some years later. At a meeting held by the Liberal Party, chaired by Rajiva Wijesinha, the question of holding an inquiry on State involvement in the 1983 riots came up. All the minority members present were unanimously in favour of such an inquiry, while all the Sinhalese – with the notable exception of Wijesinha – were adamantly opposed to it. Those Sinhalese included some notable left-wing and Marxist intellectuals.

That adamant opposition was all the more surprising as the case for holding an inquiry into possible state involvement should have been self-evident. The basic case I used to argue was as follows: There were no ethnic riots at all for the nineteen year period between 1958 and 1977, clearly signifying that the Sinhalese people had nothing like an impulse to have a go at the Tamils. The so-called ethnic riots of 1977 were very clearly a pogrom, with no popular participation at all unlike the 1958 riots. That pogrom was really the first salvo in the State terrorism that raged until 1983. There was no popular participation either in the army operations in Jaffna in the latter half of 1979, or in the abortion of the 1981 DDC elections and the burning of the Jaffna Public Library. As for 1983, there was the very widespread perception about the involvement of the State. The refusal to countenance even an inquiry suggests that there is something deeply wrong with at least a segment of our Left movement. I will not here explore the possible reasons, except to say that our Left has also indulged in identity politics just like our two major parties. Suffice it to emphasize here that at the people’s level there has been a widespread perception of State involvement in the 1983 riots, and at elite levels a refusal to face up to that fact.



However quite suddenly, and also quite surprisingly as there had been no clamour for it from the NGOs or any other segment of the public, President Kumaratunga instituted the Presidential Truth Commission on Ethnic Violence (1981 – 1984) in July 2001 under the Chairmanship of former Chief Justice S. Sharvananda. It was something that she should have done in 1994. By 2001 we had got accustomed to the idea that the perpetrators of horrors against the Sri Lankan people from 1977 to 1994 would never be brought to book. Retrospectively it seems that what is now called the culture of impunity had already been instituted under the 1994 Government. So, the institution of the Truth Commission seemed a welcome new departure.

But the indications were clear enough that it was not meant to be taken too seriously, and that it was really meant to serve a cosmetic purpose. The time frame of 1981 to 1984 was absurd as the State terrorism clearly began in 1977. However, the Commissioners ignored that time frame and went into the antecedents leading up to 1981. They were required to submit their Report in January 2002 – that is, in no more than just six months. The Report was in fact submitted in September 2002. It noted that the South African Truth Commission had a staff of 750 to assist it, the media gave it wide coverage, and there was something like national participation in what was seen as a process of reconciliation by establishing the truth. There was hardly any of that here. The Report emphasized the need to set up new Commissions to continue the work of establishing the truth as part of a continuing process of reconciliation and nation-building. There has been none of that, and all that has happened is that President Kumaratunga issued a perfunctory apology over 1983. Clearly at the level of the State also there has been a resistance to establishing the full truth about what happened in 1983.

However, the Commission did bring out details that point directly and unambiguously to State involvement at the highest level in the 1983 pogrom. The Report quoted President Jayawardena as having told the Daily Telegraph of London (12th July, 1983), "But on terrorist issues, these we are going to deal with ourselves without any quarter being given." The Report states that "significantly" that and other statements made to that newspaper were given coverage on SLBC radio. It continues that "another act of significance" took place on July 18 – days before the pogrom began on July 23 – when regulations enabling the police to dispose of dead bodies without judicial inquiry, already applicable in the Northern Province, were extended to the rest of the island even though there were no disturbed conditions outside the North to warrant it. At that point the Report again quotes from the Daily Telegraph interview, "No need for any debate, arguments or counterarguments. Firm action will be taken shortly to uproot terrorism." The Report further states that the killing of the thirteen soldiers on July 23 was followed by the reprisal killings by the armed forces of 51Tamils in the North, on which there was a total media blackout. It was argued before the Commission that had the reprisal killings been publicized the conflagration that followed would very likely have been avoided.

I will not go into further details to show up the State’s culpability over 1983 as it seems so obvious. Instead I will make some necessary clarifications. It might seem that by focusing on terrorism at the level of the State I am loosing sight of the obvious fact that ethnic problems such as the one we have in Sri Lanka have behind them both racism at the level of the State and racism at the level of the people. Certainly the Sinhalese people cannot be devoid of racism, no more than most other ethnic groups which can be expected to produce their quota of racists. That racism can rise to a high level of intensity as I believe it did in 1958, and be at low intensity as I believe it was in 1977. The explanation for the difference is that in 1958 the Tamils were still seen as posing a serious threat to the legitimate dominant position of the Sinhalese majority, whereas there was no such threat perception in 1977. It is significant that apparently there was widespread popular participation in the 1983 riots only on Black Friday, following on President Jayawardena’s criminally incendiary broadcast. The explanation, I believe, was the threat perception set off by the story that the Tigers had come into Colombo.

The important point, however, is that even high intensity racism among the people does not necessarily result in violence against a minority. When rioting goes on unchecked for days, and has an obviously and meticulously organized character, we can be certain that the State allows it or backs it, or as seems practically certain in the case of 1983 the State is at the bottom of it all. Kumari Jayawardena wrote in connection with possible reasons for the 1983 riots, "In this context it is therefore not the urban poor and ‘lumpen’ sections of the city population who cause the riots; they are merely the temporary ‘beneficiaries’ of unrest. They use the rare opportunity to come out on to the streets, to break all the norms of bourgeois society in respect of law and order, to rule the roost for a day or two, vent their anger against the ‘haves’ and help themselves to the property of others. This phenomenon occurs with increasing frequency in South Asia, where there are glaring contrasts between rich and poor. The deprived sections, given a license to plunder by the racist propagandists, make full use of such occasions to attack whichever minority group has been targeted as the enemy – whether it be Muslims or Sikhs, as in India or Tamils or Muslims, as in Sri Lanka." – from Ethnicity and Sinhala Consciousness, included in July ’83 and After (ICES).

I will now conclude with some brief observations on what we might learn from the 1983 riots for the purpose of reaching out to new paradigms that could enable a better grip on our ethnic problem. There was certainly some degree of discontinuity between the State and the power elites backing it which were responsible for what amounted to genocidal State terrorism on the one hand, and on the other the Sinhalese people as a whole who showed no enthusiasm for it, except perhaps for a few brief hours in limited areas on Black Friday. It was the repetition of a pattern established decades ago at the time of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact – showing a degree of discontinuity between the State and power elites on one side and the Sinhalese people on the other.

Both SWRD and Dudley Senanayake were democratic leaders at a time when our political culture was unambiguously and vigorously democratic, and both were leaders of mass-based political parties which had all the means to test the opinion of the Sinhalese masses. It is reasonable to think therefore that both leaders believed that their proposed pacts with Chelvanayagam would have the backing of the mass of the Sinhalese people. The opposition was from segments in the State, and the power elite – members of which backed the SWRD assassination. The nation-wide tsunami of grief that followed showed that the mooted pact with Chelvanayagam had not diminished his mass appeal in any way.

All that happened between 1977 and 1983 to further wreck our ethnic relations also showed a degree of discontinuity between the State/ power elite and the Sinhalese people. Particularly significant is what happened between 1994 and 2000 when President Kumaratunga offered devolution packages, one of which at least went beyond the devolution available under the Indian Constitution and even got the support of the UNP opposition. There were no howls of outrage and mass protests from the Sinhalese people. Her efforts were finally sabotaged at the power elite level by the same UNP opposition. It is worth mentioning also that the two parties known for their extremism on the ethnic problem, the JVP and the JHU, today have negligible support among the Sinhalese people.

The paradigm briefly sketched out above needs to be refined and developed, which cannot be done in this article. In terms of this paradigm the ethnic problem could have been solved decades ago if there had been pressure on successive governments from the people’s level, specifically through a dynamic civil society. Alas, there has been nothing of the sort in Sri Lanka. What of the present situation? There is no alternative to continuing with the war, and the peace that will follow – perhaps with new constitutional arrangements – will depend on the military outcome. We have to bear two propositions in mind. 1) Power flows through the barrel of a gun. 2) So do Constitutions.

Underlying our ethnic problem is a disastrous failure in nation-building. The process of nation-building in multi-ethnic societies requires above all that minorities are made to feel that they are given fair and equal treatment, even though the majority ethnic group may have a dominant position. Alternatively there will be no sense of the unity that makes a nation in a worthwhile sense. We must remember that there is an ongoing process of erosion of state sovereignty on a global scale, and lack of unity in Sri Lanka could make it vulnerable to the outside world, perhaps even to satellisation. To evade that kind of fate what is required in terms of our paradigm is a change in the mind-set of the Sinhalese State/power elite, and that may never come about without adequate pressure from the people.

Concluded


courtesy www island.lk