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INDICTMENT AGAINST SRI LANKA
Black July 1983:
the Charge is Genocide
On 15th Anniversary
Year 16: the Holocaust Continues
S Sathananthan & Sabiha Sumar, 28 July 1998
A moral weakness
The five days, from 25th to 29th July 1998, constitute
the 15th anniversary of the Holocaust of July 1983. Fifteen years ago
the Tamil people living outside the Northern and some parts of the
Eastern Provinces were targets of the pogrom, unprecedented in its scale
and brutality. The events of that fateful week have been burnt into
Tamil memory as Black July.
The anniversary brought forth numerous retrospective commentaries on the
Holocaust. Some writers accurately noted the evidence indicating how
senior members of the then United National Party (UNP) government had a
direct hand in meticulously organising the pogrom; and how the State
security forces colluded with the armed Sinhalese men who killed and
raped defenceless Tamil civilians and looted or destroyed their
property. Indeed they deplored the instances where the security forces
participated in the pogrom; and they underlined the refusal of the then
President JR Jayawardene to hold a judicial inquiry into the Holocaust,
which omission amounted to a cover-up and in effect confirmed the
complicity of the State. Some writers demanded that an official inquiry
should be held – however belatedly – to investigate the events and
identify the perpetrators of the tragedy.
Hardly any commentary dealt with the fact that the Tamil United
Liberation Front (TULF) did not aggressively demand an inquiry into the
Holocaust, whether in 1983 or at any time thereafter. In effect the TULF
collaborated with the UNP government in the cover-up. An objective of
TULF’s opportunistic collaboration was to ensure that the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is made the scapegoat so that the TULF
could retain the political leadership of the Ceylon Tamil people.
The writers who conceded that the violence was premeditated and was
orchestrated by the State nevertheless apportioned a share of the blame
to the LTTE. They viewed as a terrorist act the killing of 13 soldiers
by the LTTE in the ambush, in which an army vehicle was blasted by a
land mine, two days earlier in Tirunelvely on the 23rd of July 1983.
They held the LTTE’s deliberate attack responsible at the least for
intensifying Sinhalese hostility against Tamils and for providing the
Sinhalese ultra nationalists within the UNP government the opportunity
to launch the pogrom.
The more reactionary writers deceptively described the violence as ‘a
communal riot’. They disingenuously placed almost the entire blame for
it upon the LTTE by portraying the pogrom as an unfortunate but
involuntary response of some sections of the Sinhalese people to the
killing of the 13 Sinhalese soldiers by the Tamil LTTE. They
misleadingly projected the Holocaust as ‘an episodal defection from the
democratic norm’ and absolved the vast majority of the Sinhalese by
shifting the responsibility for the atrocities to the lumpen elements
within the Sinhalese community.
What is remarkable is the convergence of views among writers from
across, virtually, the entire political spectrum. They equated as
violence the killing of the Sinhalese soldiers in the course of battle
by their adversary, the LTTE, to the murder of defenceless Tamil
citizens by the armed minions of the duly constituted Sri Lankan
government, which is bound by the Constitution to protect all citizens.
The intention of the writers may have been to maintain so-called
‘neutrality’.
But the two cannot be compared and the result of ‘neutrality’ is the
crippling moral weakness. Almost all writers are incapable of making the
crucial political distinction between the violence of the aggressor and
the violence of the victim, that is, between the repression by the
aggressive Sri Lankan State and the resistance of the victimised Tamil
people.
Informal and formal State terror
In the Tamil view, the Sinhalese consensus that the
Holocaust was not repeated after 1983 is pure political fiction. The
violence never stopped.
Between 1983 and 1987, the pogroms continued albeit on a low key. Tamils
remember the repeated and brutal attacks they suffered whilst travelling
between Jaffna and Colombo. They were waylaid in trains. They died of
sniper fire in the coaches. Buses to and from Jaffna were frequently
intercepted and Tamil passengers were dragged away, and rarely seen
again. Indeed travel through Sinhalese-majority regions, particularly in
the north-central part of the country, became for Tamils a deadly game
of Russian roulette. Not one Sinhalese person was convicted for these
crimes.
The military systematically mowed down Tamil civilians by the hundreds
in the Tamil-majority Northern and Eastern Provinces under the pretext
of attacking the LTTE and other Tamil resistance groups. The slaughter
was characterised by Mr Narayan Swamy as ‘the dance of death’ (Tigers of
Lanka, 1994, p.170). In 1987, the State escalated the violence when it
unleashed Operation Liberation to conquer Jaffna, the cultural heartland
of Ceylon Tamils.
Ceylon Tamils view the military operations as extensions of the
Holocaust to the two Tamil-majority provinces. The Tamil people
correctly understood the violence as State terror, unleashed by the
Sinhalese-controlled State. In a refreshing departure from the beaten
path, Mr Izeth Husssain focused on State terrorism as the central
problem (Social Justice, no 135, 1998).
Furthermore, Tamils drew a clear difference between informal State
terror (pogroms) from formal State terror (military repression).
Informal State terror against Tamils is carried out by non-uniformed
minions of the State and it began with the pogrom of 1956. Formal State
terror is executed by the uniformed men and women of the armed forces,
which were first deployed to crush non-violent Tamil resistance in
Jaffna in 1961. The conquest of Jaffna in December 1995, the atrocities
and disappearances in the North-Eastern Province (NEP), the current
Operation Jayasikurui and the alleged existence of mass graves of Tamils
in Chemmani are manifestations of the continuing formal State terror
against the Ceylon Tamil people.
Apology for formal State terror
The claim that Black July has not been repeated since
serves to mask formal State terror. It lends credence to the military
fiction, disseminated by official propaganda, that the war is only
against the LTTE and not directed principally at the Tamil people.
Whether or not all those who make the claim are aware of its diabolical
implications is not the point. The effect of their argument is, however,
to legitimise formal State terror as ‘counter-insurgency’ military
operations.
Formal State terror is also legitimised by reinforcing the political
fiction, that Black July was not repeated, with the political myth that
the Peoples Alliance (PA) government seeks to devolve power in order to
reach a negotiated settlement to the Tamil Question. For instance, Dr
Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu asserted not only that ‘there has been no
repetition of the carnage’ but also that ‘the political agenda has been
moved far to accommodate devolution’ (Social Justice, no 135, 1998,
p.17).
Those who believe in that political myth should reflect on the following
provisions of the 1972 and 1978 Constitutions and the October 1997
Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) on Constitutional
Reform. They are sufficient to indicate the implacable opposition of the
PA government to the devolution of power.
(a) The delegation of principle legislative power was made discretionary
under the 1972 Constitution drafted by the United Front (UF) coalition
government, led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP): ‘The National
State Assembly may not abdicate, delegate or in any manner alienate its
legislative power nor may it set up any authority with any legislative
power other than the power to make subordinate laws’ (Art 45(1)).
(b) In the 1978 Constitution of the UNP government, the word ‘may’ is
replaced by ‘shall’ to make the devolution of power unconstitutional:
‘Parliament shall not abdicate or in any manner alienate its legislative
power, and shall not set up any authority with any legislative power’
(Art 76(1)). The use of the word ‘shall’ makes the provision mandatory
and, in the words of President JR Jayawardene, ‘all but closed the door
on federalism’ .
(c) October 1997 Report of the PSC on Constitutional Reform of the PA
coalition government, led by the SLFP, also seeks to make the devolution
of power unconstitutional: ‘Parliament shall not abdicate or in any
manner alienate its legislative power and shall not set up any authority
with any such legislative power’ (Art 92(1)).
The above provisions allow the establishment only of local government
institutions. The Provincial Councils (PCs), for example, set up under
the 13th Amendment without the repeal of Article 76(1) were dishonestly
palmed off as institutions for the devolution of power. In fact they are
glorified Municipal Councils entirely irrelevant to resolving the Tamil
Question. Given Article 92(1), the claim that power could be devolved
through the Regional Councils (RCs) proposed by the PA government is
similarly an unconscionable deception.
Toward genocide
Having abdicated the moral responsibility to distinguish
between the repression of the aggressor and the resistance of the
victim, the writers in general internalised government propaganda and
treated the war as a conflict essentially between two armed groups, the
Sri Lankan armed forces and the LTTE. The following observation by Dr
Jehan Perera typifies this ahistorical perspective: ‘as in the case of
the riots, the civilian population is more or less disengaged from the
direct fighting, but remain on the sidelines giving each side necessary
logistical support’ (Social Justice, no. 135, 1998, p.27). The above
view deliberately ignores the carpet-bombing and artillery shelling of
Tamil civilian areas in the north. The unprecedented Tamil refugee
population of about half million in the NEP is very unlikely to concur
with Dr Perera, that they are perched ‘on the sidelines’.
Moreover, the cultural myopia of most writers has blinded them to the
unfolding tragedy of genocide. For the PA government has created famine
conditions by severely curtailing the supply of food, agricultural
inputs and fuel. The restrictions imposed on the supplies of antibiotics
and essential drugs have placed the lives of Tamil children at great
risk. The government announced in early July 1998 that the meagre
supplies will be pruned further in August.
The deprivation of food and medicines to civilians by the PA government
qualifies as genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention, which
specifies that actions calculated to create conditions in which a part
or whole of a people could be destroyed constitute genocide. This point
has been cogently argued by the Law Foundation Professor at the
University of Houston and Co-Chair of the International Criminal Law
Interest Group, Professor Jordan J Paust (‘The human rights to food,
medicine and medical supplies, and freedom from arbitrary and inhuman
detention and controls in Sri Lanka’, Vanderbilt Journal of
Transnational Law, vol 31, no 3, 1998).
What is needed is not impotent breast-beating, however cathartic it may
be, over past atrocities. What is more important and urgent is to reveal
the past within the present. The need of the hour is to condemn the
continuing Holocaust, the draconian war against the Tamil people and to
expose the genocidal intent of the Sinhalese-controlled State.
Are those who grieve Black July capable of forcing the
Sinhalese-controlled State to stop unconditionally the genocidal war?
Are they ready to demand and struggle for the immediate withdrawal of
the Sinhalese armed forces from the NEP?
Or will they continue to effectively condone the genocide of Ceylon
Tamils on the spurious ground that the withdrawal of the armed forces
from the NEP will strengthen the LTTE? |
