1981 Anti-Tamil Organised Violence

1#

The Public Library in fact contained irreplaceable literary and historical documents, and this book burning by Sinhalese police has come to signify for many a living Tamil the apogean barbarity of Sinhalese vindictiveness that seeks physical as well as cultural obliteration.

2#

And then, on 31 May [1981], an unidentified gunman fired some shots at an [District Development Council] election meeting, and the tense atmosphere exploded into state-sponsored mayhem. With several highranking Sinhalese security officers and two cabinet ministers, Cyril Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake (both self-confessed Sinhala supremacists), present in the town, uniformed security men and plainclothes thugs carried out some well-organised acts of destruction. They burned to the ground certain chosen targets - including the Jaffna Public Library, with its 95,000 volumes and priceless manuscripts, a Hindu Temple, the office and machinery of the independent Tamil daily newspaper Eelanadu, the house of the MP of Jaffna, the headquarters of the TULF, and more than 100 shops and markets. Four people were killed outright. No mention of this appeared in the national newspapers, not even the burning of the Library, the symbol of the Tamils’ cultural identity.

3#

The government delayed bringing in emergency rule until 2 June [1981], by which time key targets had been destroyed. On 4 June, emergency rule was extended throughout the country, and lifted five days later. Meanwhile, the government had no intention of postponing elections, despite the fact that the signs were hardly auspicious. It was determined to win at least one seat in Tamil territory. On the morning of polling day, TULF leaders were arrested: they were later released, with no explanation given. After the elections, several of the ballot boxes were tampered with, and some were never produced for counting. But, in spite of this, TULF won all the seats in Tamil areas.

After the elections were over, there was no respite for the Tamil people. While Sinhalese MPs fulminated against opposition colleagues, and discussed in parliament how to best kill them, Tamil peasants were actually being murdered by organised gangs in the border areas of Batticaloa and Amparai. During July and August, Tamils in the East and South, including the hill country plantation workers, were terrorised and made homeless. Women were raped, and at least twenty-five people perished. The attacks, many by well-organised goon squads, were widely believed to be directed by members of the ruling UNP, among them close friends of the President.

4#

Throughout the rest of 1981, under the cover of a country-wide state of emergency, the army indulged in acts of violence in Jaffna District - assaulting schoolchildren, hitting out at people on the streets, burning houses and a bookshop. In November, under the pretext of ’hunting for terrorists’, soldiers entered an agricultural farm in Vavuniya where eleven families of plantation workers, victims of earlier hill country violence, had been settled by the Gandhiyam Society. This organisation, formed in 1976 for community and social service, had carried out most of its work among destitute Tamil refugees. Now Gandhiyam volunteer workers were assaulted by the military, and hung by their feet. A few days later, forty soldiers shot at close range a youth described in the newspapers as a ‘most wanted terrorist’ who was at the time on bail from police custody. By the beginning of 1982, it was clear that the army intended to stay in Jaffna. To quote an eye-witness writing in the January 1982 Tamil Times: ‘the Northern Province of Sri Lanka, and specially the Jaffna Peninsula, presents an appearance of a recently occupied territory, army personnel and vehicle movements being evident everywhere during day and night. Almost the entirety of the armed forces of the state has been deployed, with all the modern military hardware at its disposal’.

5#

In March, the security forces attacked the Gandhiyam settlement at Pannakulam in Trincomalee, and on 6 April they arrested and tortured the Gandhiyam secretary, Dr S. Rajasunderam, and president, S.A. David, accusing them of harbouring ‘terrorists’. Shortly after, two young men and two young women who were distributing leaflets at Vavuniya calling for the release of Dr Rajasunderam were arrested and possibly tortured. Gandhiyam offices in the North were also shut down. Since this was the sole charitable organisation working for the rehabilitation of plantation Tamil refugees, the social implications were grave.