Sri Lanka’s ‘Black July’ riots, 25 years later, and the rise of the Tamil Tigers

by Yoni Goldstein

(July 25, Toronto, Sri Lanka Guardian) Twenty-five years ago this week, as many as 1,000 Sri Lankan Tamils were killed in what came to be known as the “Black July” riots. Majority Sinhalese nationalists, including Buddhist monks, went door-to-door in Sri Lankan cities looking for Tamils (who are predominately Hindu). The Sinhalese mobs dragged their victims into the street and either beat them to death with clubs and pipes or placed gasoline-soaked tires around their necks and set them alight, then stood back and watched as they burned alive. Almost all those killed were innocent civilians, including many women and children. Few, if any, were Tamil Tiger terrorists, whose ambush killing of 13 government soldiers set off the carnage on July 23, 1983.

Thousands of Tamil homes and shops were also looted, then burned to the ground. More than half of the nearly 250,000 Tamils now in Canada — the largest expatriate Sri Lankan Tamil population in the world — came here as part of the exodus that followed these infamous pogroms.

The friction between Tamil and Sinhalese residents of the island once known as Ceylon goes back centuries. During British rule, Tamils held most of the senior indigenous positions in commerce, the professions and the bureaucracy. This is partly the result of their greater willingness than their Sinhalese countrymen to accept missionary education and British institutions, and partly because of British unwillingness to integrate Buddhists into the upper echelons of society and imperial government.

After independence in 1948, however, Sinhalese majority governments implemented a form of reverse discrimination known as the “policy of standardization,” which made Sinhalese the sole official language and brought most businesses under state control, then reserved most major government jobs and contracts for the Sinhalese.

The result was a marginalization of Sri Lanka’s 3.2 million Tamils and a rise in Tamil militancy, particularly after the bloody mayhem of July, 1983. Over time, the Tamil Tigers developed into a combined insurgent army and terrorist group based in the northern and eastern parts of the country, which the Tigers seek to transform into an independent Tamil homeland known as “Tamil Eelam.”

During the country’s on-and-off quarter-century-long civil war, nearly 70,000 people have died, many of them Tamils. Reports claim Sri Lankan security agents routinely resort to torture of Tamil prisoners. In other cases, suspected Tigers routinely have “disappeared” while awaiting trial.

Yet despite all this, most of the world has little sympathy for the Tamil cause. And the reason is simple: The Tamil Tigers are just as brutal — and in some cases, far more brutal — than the Sri Lankan government itself.

Over the years, the Tigers have executed dozens of suicide bombings and terrorist attacks. (A Tiger suicide bomber killed Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, for instance, while a Tiger assassin murdered Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.) The Tigers’ other crimes include blocking reconstruction aid to the tsunami-ravaged east coast, abducting Sinhalese civilians and forcibly recruiting child soldiers from Tamil families.

Sadly, the Tamils’ thuggish mindset has infected the Canadian Tamil community as well: Tiger front organizations have extorted millions of dollars from Tamil businesses in Toronto and other cities, often threatening harm to relatives back in Sri Lanka if business-owners fail to comply. Given all this, Stephen Harper’s government was entirely correct to put the Tigers — and its front organizations — on Canada’s list of outlawed terrorist organizations.

Too many Tamils — both here and in Sri Lanka — equate support for political independence with support for the Tigers’ brutal methods. As a result, the world has forgotten the many genuinely horrible injustices wrought upon the Tamils. This is the fate of any group that puts its faith in terrorism instead of politics.

Courtesy: National Post
- Sri Lanka Guardian