“I am not worried about the opinion of the Tamil people…now we cannot think of them, not about their lives or their opinion…the more you put pressure in the North, the happier the Sinhalese people will be here…Really, if I starve the Tamil people out, the Sinhala people will be happy,” J.R. Jayawardene informed the London Daily Telegraph in an interview on 11th July, 1983.
On 23rd July,1983, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) killed 13 Sri Lankan soldiers in an ambush in Jaffna, a city in the North of the country that was a stronghold of the LTTE’s. A day later, in response to these killings, Colombo erupted into what many remember as one of the bloodiest days in the nation’s history: an anti-Tamil pogrom led by primarily Sinhalese nationalistic bigots saw the government-supported extermination of close to 3,000 innocent Tamil civilians .
Dubbed Black July, these events may have been the primary catalyst for the civil war and genocide that would engulf the country for the next 26 years. A linguistic test was used to distinguish Tamils from Sinhalese: entire families were killed over the Tamil pronunciation of the word “baldhiya” (meaning ‘bucket’ in Sinhala). Tamil civilians who had no affiliation with the LTTE were hounded simply for being Tamil. Men, women, and children were burnt, raped, and beaten publicly by civilians and security forces alike.
Whilst it is important to know that there were many Sinhalese and Muslims who sheltered Tamil families during the massacre, it is easy for Sri Lanka to remember only that, to mythologise this fact. In valorising this heroism, there is an attempt to forget the persecuted.
Aran Mylvaganam is an ex-refugee and activist from the Tamil Refugee Council. He explains that pogroms continued from the ‘50s through the ‘70s, and were coupled with discriminatory state government legislations forcing thousands of people to flee Sri Lanka and seek refuge in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
“I’m not here just as an activist. I’m also a survivor, a witness to horrible violence. My own school was bombed by the Sri Lankan Air Force. You won’t find any mainstream articles about what happened to my school, but [the] Sri Lankan government murdered 21 children in cold blood, including my family members, my own brother, my cousins, and so many others in that village.”
Regarding the 2009 massacre of more than 40,000 Tamils at the hands of Sri Lankan forces that occurred in the coastal village of Mullivaikkal, Mylvaganam said: “we’re talking about 400,000 people cornered into a tiny area in Mullivaikkal, and one in three or one in four would have been murdered.”
“We remember that all these atrocities were carried out with the support of Western governments,” he stresses, “including the government in Australia back then: It was the Labor government. Just like we’ve seen with the support that the Australian government is [now] giving to Israel.”
Remembrance, then, takes on a most warped and complex form in Sri Lanka. Whilst the state government annually memorializes with pomp and praise the Sri Lankan soldiers who were killed in the civil war, in the North and East of the country, Tamil families — during remembrance periods and otherwise — are surveilled severely, with multiple reports emerging of police and military raids of remembrances held by Tamil citizens. Pots of kanji are overturned by police officers and orders are issued in Sinhala, a language that those grieving do not understand.
To deny the dignity of remembrance is to deny a people’s right to existence.
Just last week, a video circulated on social media platforms depicting family members of those who were forcibly disappeared being unceremoniously evicted from the police station for protesting the Office on Missing Persons’ process, insisting on an independent organisation to handle the inquiry. Mothers have been core protesters against this system — the video pictured them being dragged away by police officers, reproducing J.R. Jayawardene’s anti-Tamil rhetoric even after all these years.
Justice is something of a joke in Sri Lanka. The LTTE has been declared a terrorist organization for committing violence against and the forced displacement of not just the Muslim minorities living in the North and East of the country, but also Tamil families who were additionally coerced into giving up their children for the ‘cause’. The state government of Sri Lanka, on the other hand, those political actors who were responsible for the mass-killing and raping of women and children of the Tamil minority — amongst other war crimes — remain unaccused of their war crimes. Recently uncovered mass graves in Chemmani are irrefutable proof of genocide, yet the progress of seeking justice on behalf of the families remains slow.
There is virtually no effort made by the Sri Lankan state to remember or acknowledge the horrors that the Tamil people have endured. Few members of the public who belong to the majority Sinhalese are willing to learn of these atrocities. Members of the Tamil diaspora continue to seek justice in international courts , whilst many others engage in what Dr. Sharika Thiranagama calls the “ political deification of Prabhakaran ,” the late leader of the LTTE, revealing an animated glorification of his actions.
Mylvaganam says distrust of the governments runs deep: “when it comes to genocide against Tamils…it’s not just the Rajapakse brothers who were responsible; all political parties from the South were complicit in that genocide. As far as we’re concerned, the current government has blood on its hands when it comes to what happened in 2009.” He also emphasises that “there was very little awareness” in Australia about the genocide against Tamils.
There is a long road to recognising Tamil genocide in the global and Australian community. In a current political climate where minorities are continually vilified in Sri Lankan media for their calls for acknowledgement of the brutalizing racism they have endured, it is instrumental to remain aware of political biases and remember Sri Lanka’s checkered history in all its complexity. To stand with and listen to the voices of survivors and those displaced is to join calls for transformative justice and recognition. Reconciliation, whatever that may look like, will perhaps emerge only then.
Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS)
People for Equality and Relief in Lanka (PEARL)
International Truth and Justice Project Sri Lanka (ITJP)
Public opinion surveys: Sri Lanka Barometer
We acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land, the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. The University of Sydney – where we write, publish and distribute Honi Soit – is on the sovereign land of these people. As students and journalists, we recognise our complicity in the ongoing colonisation of Indigenous land. In recognition of our privilege, we vow to not only include, but to prioritise and centre the experiences of Indigenous people, and to be reflective when we fail to be a counterpoint to the racism that plagues the mainstream media.
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