1983 July bloodbath: 4 decades later, Sri Lanka’s ethnic ties still in turmoil

An ambush by Tamil Tiger militants on July 23, 1983, killed 13 Sinhalese soldiers in Jaffna, igniting a quarter century of bloodbath that almost broke Sri Lanka and so badly ruptured its ethnic balance that the wounds are festering even 40 years later.

The Sri Lankan state may have crushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) after a long and bruising conflict but the island’s majority Sinhalese and minority Tamil communities mostly still live in two different worlds though the war ended way back in 2009.

None of this could have been anticipated by anyone in 1983 when a nascent LTTE decided to pull off something big to shake up a state that the militants felt was increasingly throttling the Tamil community.

Prabhakaran’s arrival

Just before midnight of July 23-24, some 20 rebels, including its then largely obscure leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, ambushed an army truck and a jeep in the heart of Jaffna, wiping out an entire unit of 13 Sinhalese soldiers.

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It was the deadliest casualty suffered by the army until then at the hands of the Tamil militants. The killings triggered a gory retaliation by government-sponsored Sinhalese mobs that targeted innocent Tamils who had nothing to do with the LTTE.

The anti-Tamil violence erupted almost simultaneously in Jaffna, where an army rampage left 54 Tamils dead, and in the national capital Colombo where hundreds – some say thousands – were butchered over 10 days.

The government admitted to 350 killings although Tamil accounts put it between 1,000 and 3,000. Sinhalese prisoners in two Colombo jails killed 35 Tamil prisoners on July 25 and 18 two days later. More than 18,000 houses and shops in Colombo were torched.

An estimated 100,000 Tamils took shelter in refugee camps, fleeing with just the clothes they were in. Of this, 75,000 became homeless in Colombo. The government shipped hundreds of Tamils to the island’s Tamil-majority north.

New Delhi chips in

Sri Lanka was never the same again. As Tamils escaped in thousands to neighbouring India and even the distant West, New Delhi began to covertly arm and train the Tamil militants.

The LTTE, which in 1983 had no more than 40 members and around 25 weapons, ballooned rapidly as hundreds of angry young Tamils flocked to it as well as other groups to wage a war that bled Sri Lanka.

The LTTE quickly wiped out almost all its rivals on the Tamil side, both militants and moderates, and took on the Indian military when it intervened in 1987. Within years, it controlled a third of all Sri Lankan land territory and two-thirds of its winding coast.

The group’s brutal and uncompromising war led to a situation when a Norway-led international peace process brought together the LTTE and Colombo. But the 2002 truce didn’t last. War erupted again in 2006 and this time led to the LTTE’s decimation three years later, ending a quarter century of gore.

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Although the war has ended and Sri Lanka has suffered its own economic turmoil, Colombo appears to be in no mood to concede even self-governance to Tamils despite the demands articulated by moderates who have no desire to break up from the island nation.

What PM Modi told Ranil Wickremesinghe 

Before Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe ended on Friday an overnight visit to New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to tell him gently to ensure a “life of respect and dignity” for the Tamil community, which dominates the northern province, which has a sizeable presence in the eastern wing and lives in substantial numbers in Colombo and the tea-growing hills.

Tamil politicians and community leaders say the problem is the firmly entrenched majoritarian mindset in Sri Lanka where any demand like the one articulated by Modi is seen with suspicion, with Sinhalese hardliners seeing “separatist tendencies” among Tamils even when none exist.

When Sri Lanka was enveloped by unprecedented shortages last year after being hit by a crunching economic crisis, a section of Sinhalese openly called it a karmic response to decades of oppression of Tamils. But once the economic mess began to mend, much of the sympathy for the Tamils evaporated.

When President Wickremesinghe named 28-year-old Jeevan Thondaman, a Tamil, the minister of water supply in January this year, a Sinhalese politician had the audacity to say that it was a bad choice because he might be biased against the Sinhalese in water schemes.

It is another matter that Thondaman belongs to the “Indian Tamil” community which had no links whatsoever with the Tamil Tigers. Sri Lankan mainstream media rarely report about happenings in Tamil areas in the northeast.

Most Sinhalese who now go to the north as tourists avoid local Tamil hotels and instead stay and have food on premises run by Sinhalese soldiers.

Very few Sinhalese appreciate that the worst victims of the LTTE’s long war for separation were the Tamils themselves. By the time the war ended in 2009, tens of thousands of Tamils had been killed or maimed in a war they never asked for at the first place. There is no trace of thousands.

Tamils seek election

The Tamils want elections at the earliest to pick provincial councils in Sri Lanka’s northern and eastern provinces so that they have an administration they can call their own. Many Sinhalese politicians are averse to the idea of Tamils having their own governance, branding it a challenge to Sri Lanka’s unitary system.

This is the germ that gave birth to a Tamil separatist campaign four decades back.

Even after all that Sri Lanka has endured, an “us” and “them” syndrome keeps the country politically and ethnically divided. When Tamils suffered during the war, most Sinhalese looked the other way; when the Sinhalese took to the streets last year following widespread shortages, Tamils kept away.

No wonder, many Tamils dub Sri Lanka a fractured island.