All Our Black Julys

“1983 was but part of a series of other events. In 1961 Tamil government servants formed a secret racist outfit called Pulip Padai “Army of Tigers”, in 1973 India sent 20,000 detonators for 20,000 explosions and at least from 1982 the Indians started training various Tamil groups for cross border terrorism. To put these in context, we have also to address the many other Black Julys. And these include those of 1958, 1971, 1977, 1978, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1987-1990 and 1992 (the mass expulsion of Muslims and Sinhalese from Jaffna).”
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by Dr. Susantha Goonatilake

(July 26, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) It was 4 a.m. that Monday morning in July 1983 when the telephone call from Ramachandran my old classmate at Royal woke me up. As only those who have grown up together from childhood can be so friendlily rude to each other, I snapped why he was waking me up so early. His answer yanked me out of sleepiness. He said that he was leaving that morning to his adopted home Canada (which of course I knew already) but that some problem was brewing. The "problem" as he related was that a few hours earlier, there had been attacks on Tamil shops in Borella and he wanted me to drive him to the airport. He said that the attacks were a reaction to soldiers killed in Jaffna. On the way to the airport with him that morning, there were no incidents. But on my way back, the signs were ominous as I saw people gathering on street corners.

Dropping Rama at the airport, I was at my office around 10 or 11 a.m. in the upper storeys of the People's Bank Head Office. From my window, I could soon see a band of thugs; it was then actually a small band, snaking through from Borella attacking people and shops. One unspeakable incident that I saw from the People's Bank was a set of thugs near the Regal Cinema setting upon and assaulting a schoolboy pulled down from a bus. A female colleague watching the scene said although repulsive “Tamils deserved it" for the killings "they" were doing in the North. Disgusted, I moved away. I went to my phone and telephoned the police, but to no avail.

My worried schoolboy son rang up saying that my wife had rushed to her University at Kelaniya to help her Tamil colleagues there but she had not returned. I went home, got into my private car and went with my son towards Kelaniya. The crowds on the roads had swelled and the vehicle transport was grinding to a halt as milling crowds of thugs were challenging every car and pulling out Tamils. I tried to protest, but was hit and nearly yanked out of the car. We turned back. My wife eventually did reach home walking all the way from Kelaniya with her Tamil friends who had washed away their pottus. Those walking silently with the crowds could escape questioning but not those in vehicles.

Within hours, further hell did break loose. We had some experience in the 1978 riots as well as in the 1977 post-election violence. We were then living in a small flat and in 1978 during the riots, we had mobilized; my wife in fact helping form the Citizens Committee for National Harmony with Fr. Tissa Balasuriya and she as joint secretaries. (A few years later for reasons we do not have to go into now, she resigned). In 1978, the trauma was limited as we went into different Colombo-based refugee centres and helped. One small but telling event stands out in my memory, namely the use of our two bathrooms by so-called lower caste Tamils who had been refused such facilities in the refugee centres by their higher castes. My role was to transport these kira growers from refugee camp to our house and back again.

But this time in 1983, the days that followed were different as a government refused to function. It later reminded me of how the Indian government refused to function in the 1984 Delhi anti-Sikh riots.

In our immediate neighbourhood behind Police Park we organised a small committee of both middle-class and nearby slum dwellers to keep the local peace. Elsewhere very many Sinhalese helped, others remained silent (as they would remain silent a few years later in the period 1987 to 1990). We helped organise other groups that would ferry people to safety. A group of young monks banded together at a Borella Temple and got involved in saving lives. (Out of that experience they launched a magazine Vinivida, which later was to expose the later atrocities with one monk having to pay the price by being blown up in a tyre at Kegalle in 1989). Our house had three Tamil families of nearly 20 residing for six months (they have not visited us since, a deep insight into human nature). My brother at Ratmalana hid people in his ceiling. In the midst of help by many Sinhalese, there were some notable absentees; nowhere to be seen was one who is now so shrilly screaming from diplomatic immunity to the newspapers.

The expatriate community joined in the action. Ashamed of what was happening, I took the French academic Eric Meyer to film some of the incidents. When the government banned the JVP and the NSSP falsely accusing them of responsibility for the riots, we hid the NSSP Politburo member physicist Dr. Shantha de Alwis and his Swiss wife directly in front of JR’s house in the residence of a French employee of the French embassy. (Alwis later left the country, never to return).

We heard of a poignant incident of a middle-class Tamil man, continually banging his head on the railing of the residence of President JR Jayewardene till he bled. It was clearly a case of a citizen who having voted for JR, was feeling so completely let down. We heard the story of the trainload of thugs from the Veyangoda direction which came to Wellawatte and attacked from the seaside. At a refugee centre, we came across a disoriented man who kept muttering that his name was Tamil but his language was Hela, in fact he said he had published a poem to that effect. (A few months later my wife got him invited to be a speaker at the annual Munidasa Kumaratunge event where he recited his poem “Mage nama Demala, Mage basa Hela”. We lost track of him since then.)

Finally on Wednesday, that great statesman JR Jayewardene - and indeed this country has been blessed with many such great statesmen - broke his self imposed silence and came on TV and radio. There was a curfew now and the Tamil families in our house crowded around the TV and radio. Unbelievably there was not much call for action or of remorse but the man said sadistically that the Sinhalese had to be appeased. Who were these appease-demanding Sinhalese, he did not name. The Tamils in our house who had voted for him paled and went silent.

Our statesman Jayewardene had just a few years earlier famously said that, with his newly acquired powers, he could do anything except turn a man into a woman. And even before 1983, he had indeed begun those fantastic wonders. (He and his successor, were to continue these wonders in the much greater bloodletting of 1987 - 1990). On being elected in 1977, he had let loose unprecedented attacks on opposition supporters destroying their houses and property as truckloads of UNP thugs roamed the country. Soon he got letters of undated resignation from his willing sheep, falsely misnamed as UNP MPs. In 1978, his goons were involved in the attack on Tamils. In 1980, he sacked overnight 100,000 striking workers. In1982, he crowned himself king by a rigged referendum. It was with all these kingly powers that he was now addressing the nation in 1983.

Two days later on the Friday with the population - both Tamils and Sinhalese – on edge the new horror broke. The hysterical story came out that the LTTE was marching down towards Colombo. Panicked "respectable" Sinhalese rushed home from office. Sinhalese thugs rushed for further attacks on Tamils. (Among those attackers, later we found were Colombo slum dwellers from both Tamil and Muslim communities who were seen carting away stolen goods.) Instead of temporarily putting a ring of government troops around the predominantly Tamil areas for protection, Jayawardena eventually decided otherwise. He was to ship them away to Jaffna.

A couple of months later, we followed them by car along the A9 to Jaffna - actually to the Jaffna University. Even after Sinhalese students and academics had all been chased away from the Jaffna University in the late 1970s, I had given a lecture there to a large audience. We now went around meeting Tamil students asking them to return to Colombo. I even volunteered to put them up at three houses of relatives to give them confidence. But the wounds were still very raw. (My friend Ramachandran returns now and has completed a multi storey apartment block in Wellawatte as has many other Tamil expatriates.)

1983 was but part of a series of other events. In 1961 Tamil government servants formed a secret racist outfit called Pulip Padai “Army of Tigers”, in 1973 India sent 20,000 detonators for 20,000 explosions and at least from 1982 the Indians started training various Tamil groups for cross border terrorism. To put these in context, we have also to address the many other Black Julys. And these include those of 1958, 1971, 1977, 1978, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1987-1990 and 1992 (the mass expulsion of Muslims and Sinhalese from Jaffna).

To this list, we must add the anti-Sikh 1984 Delhi riots where the parallels with 1983 were so uncanny that a friend wondered whether both events could have been triggered by Indian secret services. In Delhi, it partly was. To these questions we must return - at another time.
- Sri Lanka Guardian