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The
scope and ruthlessness of the Sri Lankan government assault on the
independent Tamil areas made it evident that the campaign was not
simply aimed against the Tamil Tigers. Some 300,000 Tamils are still
being held in concentration camps.
An
AP dispatch reported May 26: “A military-sponsored tour for journalists
to a small corner of the camp revealed scenes of heartbreak and
misery among the 200,000 displaced crammed into the vast tent city
hastily constructed on scrub land. Tens of thousands more war-displaced
people are scattered in smaller camps near Vavuniya,
which used to be the army’s northern garrison on the edge of the
territory ruled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The United Nations says together the camps
house nearly 300,000 internally displaced people in wretched
conditions.”
The
dispatch continued: “The Sri Lankan military has refused to release the
internal refugees, saying they must be screened to weed out any
Tamil rebels who may be hiding among them. Access for international aid
agencies has been restricted for the same reason.
“Many
told reporters about relatives taken away for questioning who
so far have not returned. ‘They are calling most of the Tamils
LTTE [Tamil Tigers],’ said a man who identified himself as Seevalingam, a former worker at the hospital at Killinochchi, once the rebel capital. He feared the
displaced masses would be held here a long time.”
The
June 11 issue of The Economist, the leading journalistic voice
of British capital, hailed the destruction of the Tamil Tigers, but
expressed worry that the Sinhalese chauvinist triumphalism
of the Sri Lankan government leader would perpetuate the conflict: ‘The
president also harked back to ancient Sinhalese martial heroes. Marking
victory with plans to build stupas [Buddhist
monuments, often containing relics] all over the mainly Buddhist
country, and relishing songs, posters and newspaper articles hailing
him as a ‘king’, Mr Rajapaksa
seems to be cultivating the image of an elected monarch. In
particular, he likes to recall Dutugemunu, a
famous warrior-king of the second century BC, who defeated Elara, a Tamil usurper from India.”
The
alienation of the Tamils (about 20 percent of the 21 million total
population of the country) has a very long history. The British
colonial government did its part to inflame communal conflicts. With
the onset of Sri Lankan independence, bourgeois politicians basing
themselves on Sinhalese chauvinism began an assault on the Tamils.
The
first discriminatory legislation was adopted by the Sri Lankan
government in 1948. It stripped the Tamils imported as plantation
workers of citizenship, creating a mass of stateless persons. The
moves against the so-called estate Tamils reduced the Tamil population
from 33 percent to 20 percent and gave the Sinhala
parties a two-thirds majority in parliament. The
government subsequently tried to expel the estate Tamils from the
country.
The
Tamil population is in fact multilayered. One layer is
descended from Tamils who have lived in Sri Lanka since prehistoric times.
Another layer are the laborers imported by the
British plantation owners. Most Tamils are Hindus, as opposed to the
Sinhalese, who are Buddhists. But there are also many Muslims and
Christians. Basically, the religious divide is that the Sri Lankan
Tamils are not Buddhists. (The Sri Lankan Buddhist community became
isolated by the waning of Buddhism on the Indian subcontinent, and
so the Sri Lankan Buddhists developed a sort of siege mentality.)
The
next discriminatory legislation was the adoption of Sinhalese
as the sole official language in 1956. (Sinhalese is a language of
northern Indian origin, and therefore Indo-European; Tamil is a
southern Indian language, and not Indo-European.) Protests
organized by Tamil politicians were broken up by Sinhalese
chauvinist mobs. Then in 1958, hundreds of Tamils were killed by
Sinhalese mobs and 25,000 were forced to flee from Sinhalese
majority areas.
The
government adopted colonization schemes, trying to flood
Tamil-majority areas with Sinhalese settlers. In the 1970s, the
Sri Lankan government banned the importing of Tamil language
materials from India, using the deceitful
argument that this was a socialist policy designed to assure the
economic self-sufficiency of the country. The Sinhala-only
policy led to closing higher education and therefore civil service jobs
to Tamil youth.
By
1973, the established Tamil political leaders began calling for a
separate Tamil state. A bloc of Tamil parties was formed, the TULF, or
Tamil Liberation Front. In 1976, it campaigned for a separate Tamil
state. It won the election but was later banned.
In
1983, an armed struggle began for the establishment of a Tamil
homeland in the northeast of the island. From 1987 to 1990 India maintained a
“peace-keeping” force in the area of conflict, which attempted to
disarm and put down the Tamil resistance movement. But India was unable to end the civil
war, in which 80,000 people have been killed.
The
war against the Tamil people caused desperation, especially
among the Tamil youth, and promoted the rise of an armed
organization, the Tamil Tigers, that was often ruthless in its tactics.
The Sri Lankan government and the major capitalist powers cited the
armed struggle of the Tigers as an excuse for isolating them as a
“terrorist” organization. But they did nothing to address the
desperation of the Tamil people that created them.
All
defenders of democratic and human rights must condemn the Sri Lankan
government’s war of extermination and its chauvinist intoxication
against the Tamil independence movement. The fact that Sri Lanka is a third-world country
cannot be used as an argument against denouncing the actions of
its government. Humanity is one. The violation of the human rights
of any people lowers the level of civilization for everyone.
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