TAMILS IN SRI LANKA:

SINHALA CHAUVINISM AND EELAM

A.E. Rajanayagam

A.E. Rajanayagam spoke to the Assembly about the struggle of the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, the historical background to the situation and the narrowing of alternatives leading to the call for an independent state. Raja was a CCA Youth Asia Intern in the Philippines where he worked on human rights documentation. Now he is with the Research Center for Human Rights in South Asia, an organization based in Madras, India which monitors human rights abuses in Sri Lanka.

I appreciate the opportunity to witness before you, about the ongoing struggle of my people who are being strangled in the clutches of Sinhala chauvinism. Our very existence is being threatened by the brutal oppression and genocidal policies of the Sri Lankan State which has repeatedly abandoned all attempts to create n unitary state encompassing the two nations that constitute Sri l,i4itka. Instead, since independence in 1948 the Sri Lankan state has rapidly established itself to be a Sinhala Buddhist State, perpetrating the most vile and brutal forms of oppression against the Tamil Far from catering to the needs of all the peoples of Sri Lanka, the Sinhala Buddhist state has renounced its responsibility to the Tamil people, and repeatedly demonstrated not only its inability, but its actual unwillingness to make a unitary existence possible within Sri Lanka and has gradually come to exercise a relationship oil imperialistic domination over the Tamil people.

We, the Tamils, have suffered the indignity of fundamental assaults on our culture. We have seen our people made stateless and voteless. Our people have been driven out of employment, are being deprived of education and good opportunities. We are being killed, looted, raped, arrested, detained and tortured. Our traditional hinterlands were taken away by state-aided colonizations and our people were driven out as refugees.

From such experience over the last four decades has been born

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our determination to end this oppression and to demand control over our own destiny and the will to assert our right to self-determination.

Historical And Geographical Background

Sri Lanka is situated at the southern extremely of the Indian subcontinent separated from it at its narrowest point by only 22 miles of sea called the Palk Strait. It is a medium sized island charmingly and strategically situated in the Indian Ocean. It became a trading port in the age of early European maritime adventure and a strategic naval base in the age of Imperialism. The island has an area of 25,332 square miles, almost the size of Ireland or Tasmania.

Sri Lanka is a country of heterogenous culture. It is composed of two separate and distinct ethno-linguistic nations namely Sinhala and Tamil and four great religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam). According to the 1981 census, the population is 14.8 million, in which Sinhalese comprise 73.98% and Tamil speaking people, 25.28%. (Sri Lanka Tamils, Indian Tamils and Muslim Tamils).

At the time of the Portuguese conquest in 1505, Sri Lanka was divided into three separate kingdoms: two Sinhalese Kingdoms in the south and the Tamil kingdom in the north and cast. The Portuguese and the Dutch who came after them, governed the Tamil nation as a separate kingdom without violating their territorial integrity. The British in 1833, however, introduced a unified state structure, amalgamating the Sinhala and Tamil nations for administrative convenience, and so laid the foundation for the present national conflict.

Independence And The Attack On The Tamil Nation

An essential requirement for unity where two or more nations live together in a single state is the accommodation of national diversity. Sinhalese chauvinism in Sri Lanka, has chosen the path of conquest and subjugation in nation building. With popular Sinhala support whipped up on the basis of false and racist notions such as the fear of the "Inevitable shrinkage" and inexorable extinction of Sinhalese as well as the supposed pcril facing Buddhism, the Sinhalese ruling class has set about a well calculated genocidal plan aimed at the gradual and systematic destruction of the Tamil nation.

Every aspect of our existence has been targetted for attack.

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Earlier in 1946, the Sinhalese and Tamil political elite had arrived at it constitutional settlement for independence with the Sinhalese political leadership promising just and fair government, and power-sharing on the basis of partnership to reap the benefits of freedom and self-government. Both the Sinhalese and Tamil leadership, in perfect amity and unity, adopted the independence constitution as representing "the solemn balance of rights" between the Sinhalese and Tamil peoples. After independence, the Sinhalese bourgeois political leadership, via the arithmetic of the ballot, denied citizenship and franchise to one half of the Tamil people — the million Tamil plantation workers of Indian origin, who, were brought from South India to work in the tea and rubber plantations at the turn of the British colonial rule. This step was politically motivated and aimed at mitigating the agitational outcry of Tamils in the Parliament.

The Sinhala Only Act was enacted in 1956 by the government which deprived the language rights of Tamils and became an impediment for government employment of Tamils.

In 1970, the Sinhala government promoted a notorious piece of legislation requiring Tamil students to score more marks than Sinhala students to gain entrance to university, which was called standardization.

A republican constitution that was promulgated in 1972 eliminated even the minimal rights enshrined in the previous constitution.

NI 1979, the Prevention of Terrorism Act was passed in the Parliament, which is similar to the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act in South Africa. It abrogated all legal and constitutional safeguards with regard to arrest, detention, protection against discrimination and retrospective criminality.

The power given to the military and police in June 1983 to dispose of bodies without postmortem or inquest, paved the way for indiscriminate shooting and killings of civilians by the racist Sri Lanka armed forces. The policy of aggressive state-financed Sinhalese colonization and resettlement of our traditional homelands sought to end the Tamils exclusive occupation of our homelands in the north and the east. The Sinhala government also totally isolated our homelands from all economic development programmes and projects undertaken with massive foreign aid from Western donor countries. As a result while the rest of Sri Lanka prospered, my homeland has been impoverished and made dependent on the Sinhalese master nation.

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Peoples' Response And Subjugation

In about a quarter century the Tamil people and their bourgeois nationalist leaders attempted peaceful political dialogues, non violent agitation and behind the scenes negotiations and they entered into open or secret pacts with their Sinhalese counterparts to win recognition for Tamil as an official language or as an alternative, regional autonomy. They even collaborated to win tangible concessions to soften the rough edges of their deprived status.

But, each time, pacts were broken, laws and regulations were not implemented and they could not win a single concession. Even peaceful agitation of our people was met with brutal force by the government. In the periodic massacres, thousands of innocent have been brutally sacrificed at the altar of racial hatred. Violent anti-Tamil riots exploded in 1956, 1958, 1961, 1977, 1979, 1981 and July 1983. On every occasion the state and the armed forces colluded with thugs and vandals in their sadistic orgy of arson, looting, rape and mass murder. In the July 1983 holocaust, according to unofficial estimates about 2,000 Tamils including women and children were murdered and millions of dollars worth of properties were burnt to the ground. The thirst for Tamil blood met no barriers. Even within a top security prison, 53 defenceless Tamil political detainees were cold-bloodedly murdered.

About 200,000 people became refugees, and sheltered in the refugee camps. . Among them 4-0,000 people have come to India and are still living in camps in Tamil Nadu State. The government of India have offered its good offices in view of the serious situation in Sri Lanka caused bv the acts of genocide and breaches of human rights during the July violence. The Indian Government sought to assist a political solution under which the legitimate aspirations of the Tamils to live in peace and security, and manage their own affairs would be recognised. But after nine months of the round table conference, no solution has come out. Instead of solving the problems, the Sri Lanka government has unleashed military oppression on innocent Tamil people. It has used the time to import arms from South Africa and invited the "Mossad", the international terrorist agency from Zionist Israel to train the military and police.

A new national security ministry was formed and American President Reagan has given huge amounts of aid for the ministry to buy arms and to train the military to suppress the liberation movements. Arms have been imported from South Africa and were

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transported to Jaffna, the northern city of the Tamil homeland. In life eastern province, all the Sinhalese youths in colonised areas were given training as paramilitary forces by SAS mercenaries. Many Tamil youths between the ages of 15 and 35 were arrested and detained in the military camps situated in the south. The techniques of international terrorists, the "Mossad", are used to torture the Tamil youths. Many youths were killed by torture and their bodies were thrown into the sea. Indiscriminate killings of innocent Tamil people by the armed forces is a frequent occurrence in the northern province.

The Armed Struggle For National Liberation

The continued failure of the Tamil parliamentarians to win the rights of our people, the treatment that was meted to them by the Sinhalese government which showed the total Ineffectiveness of non-violent forms of struggle and their failure to bring about either an equality of states or federal form of government further intensified the demand of our people for separation. It is only natural in these circumstances that the struggle for our rights developed into a national liberation struggle and a struggle for statehood.

Today there are six groups committed to armed struggle to our people from Sinhala chauvinism and all kinds of exploitation and oppression. The groups are in different stages of development in terms of revolutionary maturity, strength and support. Three groups have formed a united front for the liberation of Eelam and moves are being made to unite all six groups to fight for our liberation.

Today our people find themselves displaced and dislocated. Their family life has been disrupted and their day to day existence is I fallen, with immense misery. There is agony in both life and death. Our land is littered with the burnt corpses of our beloved people. US imperialism and Zionism, which historically have proven to excel in acts of barbarism against the peace loving people all over NI$, world are directly engaged in assisting the neo-fascist Sri Lanka state in unleashing state terrorism and acts of genocide against our people.

The Sinhala chauvinists who took to oppressing our people to protect themselves from progressive Sinhala masses have today, successfully wed their Interests with the interests of the American imperialists. In their overall attachment to the position of power and

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despotism they are playing more openly the role of surrogates to American imperialism in the Indian Ocean and have subsequently turned the island into a hot bed of tension, and a target of nuclear war. The class to whom the British handed over the power has succumbed to slavery.

Our commitment to defeat these forces is also a struggle to liberate the mass of Sinhalese people who are in the clutches of chauvinist-imperialist collusion. We will unite with all classes of people toward liberation. We still have a lot of trust in our friends among the Sinhalese people.

The freedom of our people will be totally achieved by the permanent victory over the material and spiritual wants of our people by initiating advanced forms of social production, distribution, assuring and providing equal opportunity and freedom to the individuals to develop themselves through elimination of all forms of exploitation.

The forces that are not prepared to accept fellow human beings as equals but are inclined to continue adopting all methods to impose their own will on others would be treated as enemies of the freedom of our people.