Black July and reply to Dr.Rajasingham Narendran

| by Sebastian Rasalingam

( March 17, 2013, Toronto, Sri Lanka Guardian) Please permit me to add a few words in reply to Dr. Rajasingham Narendran (RN), (http://www.srilankaguardian.org/2013/03/whose-wrong-reply.html) a gentlemen that I hold in great esteem. The inter-communal violence escalated from their early beginnings in the riots of 1939, through 1958 (when the Tamil protests about Language laws were purely non-violent), to acts of increasing violence from both sides, and finally the 1983 horror and the Eelam wars.

In 1983 the LTTE was already much more than a hit-and-run organization. It acutely felt the need for money collection. Nadesen, a senior police officer, was their organizational man in Colombo. I knew for a fact that they were collecting money in the Colombo area since many months before Black July.

Dr. RN mentions the case of the 1977 riots, and how he met the dejected Senior Superintendent of Police Mr. Shanmugam in Kandy. In 1983 there was a Tamil IGP and five or six Tamil DIGs. The turn-of-mind of the UNP leadership was such that it is very possible that the police high-ups may have been ordered from above to not to intervene in 1983. There were also many other higher-rank police officers below them who would have been conveyed the message. However, if that were so, I feel that it is morally reprehensible that not one uniformed officer, be they Tamil or Sinhalese, has come forward to confirm this, even though many such officers left the country in retirement or as refugees, and would have been able to speak out. Just recently, a retired Polce officer has given his version of the burning of the Jaffna Libraray, and attempts to absolve the minister Gamini Dissanayake. I am sure there are others officers who have much to say, about July 1983.

Dr. Narendran suggests that in 1983 the LTTE was still a hit-and-run organization. In reality, it had already pulled off several bank heists, assassinated political figures since the time of Duraiappah, engaged in ejecting most of the Sinhalese who lived in Jaffna, and carried out lamp-post lynching of `low-caste' Tamils who were the early informants who tipped of the LTTE activities to the police in Jaffna. I believe that some ten or twenty thousand Sinhalese ejected from Jaffna were already in Colombo in very dire circumstances, totally ignored by the state.

Two older Sinhalese displaced from Jaffna and married to Tamil women lived as temporary dwellers in the impoverished Malay street area that I lived, and they came to our church during that time. The only thing they wanted was to carry on with their lives, but there was no doubt that there were many younger people seething with anger ready to be pawns of any violent Sinhalese group. The situation in the North was also a heated tinder box, with the TULF leaders saying that they are `ready for state terror', and constantly throwing a gauntlet, sure of the power of their `boys'.

In 1983 the LTTE was already much more than a hit-and-run organization. It acutely felt the need for money collection. Nadesen, a senior police officer, was their organizational man in Colombo. I knew for a fact that they were collecting money in the Colombo area since many months before Black July. That kind of activity needs organization, lists of Tamil households, and young activists. The young LTTE had all that. It planned the ambush of the 13 soldiers, and it expected a `spontaneous' backlash in Colombo.

There seems to be evidence that Sinhala extremists also were gearing up for mayhem and waiting for the whirlwind, with their own lists of Tamils marked for vengeance. That is why I believe that there were several sinister forces wrestling to use the violent events as they unfolded, to fit their respective purposes wherein the Colombo Tamils were the victims of all the forces. Of course, some personal grudges, as well as hooligan-traders trying to displace entrenched merchants etc., may also have been executed in those troubled moments. It is painful for many people, especially those who suffered life and limb, to revisit those events. Furthermore, the human mind replaces facts with invented constructions more palatable to our innate beliefs. Nevertheless, I find it difficult to believe that none of the senior Police officers, i.e., trained responsible individuals, did not even keep some diaries or records. They would be doing a great service to history, as well as to the efforts towards reconciliation by speaking out what ever they remember, in what ever form they remember, even if it be distorted by the lens of hindsight and pain.

I believe that reconciliation is a necessity. We have to look forward, and not backwards, just as Vietnam and Cambodia have done, in ignoring the horrendous pain inflicted on them by USA, and now wrok with USA. Tamil Nadu and India have also been myopic in their policies, and their race-rousing politics is not directed to reconciliation and peace. In the end, India itself will fall apart. Meanwhile the prudent future policy for the residents of Lanka, be they Tamils or Sinhalese, is to learn to live with each other, even as the European nations who have warred since Christendom now work together, and even as the ever-warring Celts, Goths, Visigoths, Scots, Normans, Anglos, Catholics and Protestants all live together in a `United Kingdom', though not as yet in Ireland.