Organisation and Pre-planning

1#

More than any other previous ethnic riot, the 1983 eruption showed organized mob violence at work. Gangs armed with weapons such as metal rods and knives and carrying gasoline (frequently confiscated from passing motor vehicles) and, most intriguing of all, because it indicates prior intent and planning, carrying voter lists and addresses of Tamil owners and occupants of houses, shops, and other property, descended in waves to drive out Tamils, loot and burn their property, and sometimes kill them in bestial fashion. These gangs frequently had access to transportation – they traveled in buses or were dropped off at successive locations by the Colombo coastline trains.

2#

As The Times (London) of 8 August 1983 put it: “This time [unlike in earlier riots] the Government detected plain signs of deliberate organization. The rioters, seeking out Tamil homes and burning them, had a particularly detailed knowledge of who lived where and who owned what.” India Today (New Delhi) of August 31 confirmed this report: “The mobs were armed with voters’ lists, and detailed addresses of every Tamil-owned shop, house, or factory, and their attacks were very precise.” Most of Wellawatte, the ward in Colombo where Tamils were concentrated, was burned; so were large portions, and entire lanes, in the wards of Dehiwala and Bambalapitiya.

3#

A third disconcerting feature of the 1983 riots was the complete breakdown of law and order, a breakdown that was caused as much by the active participation or passive encouragement of the ultimate guardians of law and order—the police and the army—as by inflamed criminal excesses of the civilian marauders. There were several instances of the authorities’ active or passive condoning of the destruction of life and property.

4#

The New York Times (Sunday, 7 August 1983) reported that “Sri Lankan Army troops pulled 20 civilians off a bus and executed them two weeks ago in retaliation for a Tamil guerilla attack that killed 13 soldiers, a government spokesman confirmed today.” This was up north in Jaffna.

Elsewhere, in Trincomalee, the beautiful, coveted harbor on the east coast, where Tamils and Sinhalese (the majority of the latter being considered by the Tamils as recent intruders) were poised in equal numbers, sailors from the Sri Lankan navy ran amok, themselves setting a bad example for the civilians to follow. The sailors, later assisted and accompanied by civilians, ran riot, killing and looting and setting houses and shops ablaze. Morawewa, a district of Tamil residential concentration, was reduced to ashes.

5#

Army personnel actively encouraged arson and looting of business establishments and homes in Colombo and absolutely no action was taken to apprehend or prevent the criminal elements involved in these activities. In many instances army personnel participated in the looting of shops.

6#

President Jayawardene said in a television interview yesterday that troops and police had sometimes encouraged the anti-Tamil violence. The President told a BBC interviewer: “I think there was a big anti-Tamil feeling among the forces, and they felt that shooting the Sinhalese who were rioting would have been anti-Sinhalese; and actually in some cases we saw them encouraging them.”

7#

One of the houses burnt in the Sinhalese violence belonged to the editor of “Virakesari” which is owned by Mr. Wenceslaus, father-in-law of Mr. Vijay Amirtharaj, Indian Tennis Star. But the ‘Virakesari’ building was left intact. This was not by sheer oversight—but a deliberate omission! Sri Lanka President Mr. Jayawardene was born in this building and the Sinhalese rioters were not prepared to commit the sacrilegious act of pulling it down!

Does this not clearly indicate to the world as to who masterminded the riots? In spite of this Mr. Jayawardene is making futile attempts to shift the burden and making a number of unconcerned persons scape-goated!

8#

But the Prime Minister’s words convey nothing like the scale of the violence which occurred on the 25th , the 26th, and over the rest of that week. Tamil shops, houses and business premises were systematically fired. In Colombo at least 500 cars—some with drivers and passengers inside—were burnt. Tamil-owned buses, running between Colombo and Jaffna were burnt. Tamil patients in hospitals were attacked and killed – some had their throats cut as they lay in their beds. Tamil doctors had their dispensaries and houses burnt and destroyed. In Welikade jail Tamil detainees were brutally and cold-bloodedly murdered, over two separate days. Thirty-five were killed on the 25th, another seventeen on the 27th in a ‘prison riot’, allegedly by Sinhalese prisons who somehow got out of their cells, somehow got weapons, and somehow could not be restrained by their (armed) prison guards. (In Jaffna jail, about the same time guards were able to shoot down and kill four Tamil prisoners allegedly attempting to escape.) Altogether, fifty-three Tamil prisoners died in Welikade, their bodies smashed and mutilated.

9#

Sri Lanka’s capital city for most of the last fortnight looked like it had been taken by a conquering army. Street after street lay empty to the gaze, although the dawn-to-dusk curfew had been lifted, and small, watchful groups of Sinhalese dotted the side-walks, providing flesh and blood counterpoints to the hundreds of burnt-out shops and factories and homes that lined the once bustling markets and roads. The arson was professional, charred shells fallen in on themselves, with blackened signboards announcing Tamil ownership hanging askew, here and there a liquor shop with hundreds of broken bottles littering the floor, or a jewellery mart with showcases battered in and the gold and the gems carefully removed before the torching. Fifty yards from the Indian High Commission, right next door to the police headquarters, stood a huge block, blackened and devastated. ‘The shops in this block had heavy grille doors,’ recalled an eye-witness, ‘so an army truck was used as a battering ram to break through them, and then the soldiers sprang in with Sinhala battle cries to claim the lion’s share of the loot.’

10#

As a result of the decision to bury the soldiers in Colombo many people, relatives and friends and villagers from the homes of the soldiers, collected at the cemetery. Many people who would have attended the funerals had they been held in the separate birth-places of the soldiers, had come to Colombo to attend the ceremony there instead. There may have been as many as 300 persons from each area and, in addition of course, many other people from Colombo were at the cemetery as well.

According to observers the crowd which collected (reported in one paper as consisting of 10,000 people) was restive. There was a delay in the arrival of the bodies, and, by the time of their arrival, feelings were running very high.

11#

Senior members of the government, members of opposition parties, lawyers, members of citizens’ groups, people affected by the violence, and international aid workers interviewed were all consistent in stating that, from the beginning of the disturbances, many people in the mobs in the streets possessed election lists containing the names and addresses of all those who lived in particular streets. The lists indicated the houses in occupation by Tamils and also whether the owner of a house was Tamil, Sinhalese or Muslim. The possessions and houses of Tamil people were then systematically attacked. If a Tamil family were living in a house rented from Sinhalese owners the house itself was not damaged but the furniture and property of the Tamils within it would be destroyed. In many streets all the Tamil-owned shops were destroyed but those owned by Muslims or Sinhalese were spared. The same thing happened with houses. …

12#

… the killers, the arsonists and the looters did not rise from the ranks of the most disadvantaged. It was Colombo that was burning on 23 July 1983. The fires spread to other towns and distant bazaars later. The social complexion of the marauding mobs was markedly urban – not only such marginal metropolitan groups as shanty dwellers, but strong-arm brigades and ‘rapid-deployment forces’ which recently emerged under political patronage and semi-educated youths tantalised by a new cult of violence and captivated by newly acquired life-styles.

13#

People identified as Tamils as a result of the questioning were told to get out of their cars, and their cars were set alight. If they were Sinhalese they were allowed to go, although often demands were made for petrol from the car, and the petrol was then used in the destruction of Tamil property. Early in the week the mobs were relatively orderly; later in the week many of the aggressors were reported to be drunk, having rifled liquor stores. This made the encounters even more terrifying for those stopped.

14#

One thing is quite clear: they did not start spontaneously. On the morning of 24 July, many people apparently went about their ordinary business in Colombo, with no forebodings and no expectations of anything untoward. And then, suddenly, the streets were full of goondas, Tamil houses and shops were on fire, Tamil possessions were being destroyed, and Tamils were being killed. Nor was this merely the observation of a few individuals: it is vouched for by the government itself. In a speech made in the immediate aftermath, on 29 July, Dr. Anandatissa de Alwis, the Minister of State for Information and Broadcasting, said this:-

“Look at some of the facts that you know yourself … There was a pattern about this, wherever the rioting took place. The similarity of the action of those who took part in it. How can there be a pattern if there was no leadership ? Pre-planning, instruction about what each group was to do. You saw for yourself, for example, that although riots took place, burnings of houses and shops took place in widely different parts of the city and its suburbs, there was a distinct method in every case. The rioters came along, took out the people from their homes, or the employees and proprietors from the shops, put them on the road, then carried some of the goods on to the road and set fire to them. Then they proceeded inside the workshop, or factory or house, to set fire to the rest. Now, if this happened in Borella and didn’t happen in Nugegoda, then there is no pattern. Then there is no unity of design. There was no instruction. But wherever it happened, it was exactly in the same way. This was the pattern. Of course there was looting, but there were - according to information now in the hands of the Government - definite instructions not to loot. This instruction was given apparently in order not to attract public disapproval and resistance to what they were doing, or the people doing it. Further, the looting that took place was an activity in which the locals took part. (As you know, the thugs and hooligans you find in every street junction were happy to do the looting once the job had been done).

So, to that degree, there was a pattern. Another thing that everybody noticed, or most people noticed if they were looking, was that the looters, or the people who came to burn and pillage, carried lists of names and addresses. They knew exactly where to go. They didn’t search. They looked at a piece of paper, looked at a number and there they were. Therefore, there was a pre-planning. We now understand from the information in the hands of the Government that these names and addresses were taken from the Register of Electors, from the Parliamentary Voters’ Lists, and were prepared very much in advance for an occasion such as this, the timing of which was left for various events which might or might not have happened, or might or might not have been engineered.”

Clearly, this was not a spontaneous upsurge of communal hatred among the Sinhala people - nor was it, as has been suggested in some quarters, a popular response to the killing of 13 soldiers in an ambush by Tamil Tigers on the previous day, which was not even reported in the newspapers until after the riots began. It was a series of deliberate acts, executed in accordance with a concerted plan, conceived and organised well in advance. But who were the planners and organisers, responsible for what they began, and for all its foreseeable consequences in killings, maimings, and loss of property, necessarily followed by a major setback for Sri Lanka’s economy?