Veeragathy Thanabalasingham
by Veeragathy Thanabalasingham, Jaffna Post, July 2025
The fact that there is still no political solution to the ethnic problem is even more shameful than the worst ethnic violence.
Forty two years have passed since the July 1983 anti-Tamil pogrom that marked a watershed in inter-ethnic relations in Sri Lanka. Beyond the horrors of more than a week of unprecedented ethnic violence, the deaths and destruction of property, the trauma and psychological impact on the Tamil people is immeasurable.
The killing of 13 Sri Lankan soldiers in a Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) guerrilla attack in Tirunelveli in the Jaffna peninsula on the night of Friday 22 July, 1983 was exploited by the Sinhala communal forces within the then Jayawardena government to unleash the pre-planned violence against Tamils throughout the country.
The late eminent editor Mervyn de Silva coined that disastrous month as ‘Black July’, which established that nothing would ever be the same again in Sri Lankan politics. There were a few journalists who wrote that everything was black in Sri Lanka after that July. Former diplomats and political analysts described July 1983 a period of agony of Sri Lanka.
Government’s mood
A week before Black July, President J. R. Jayewardene’s comments in an interview with ‘The Telegraph’ clearly revealed his government’s attitude towards the Tamil people.
“Now I am not worried about the opinion of the Jaffna people. We can’t think about them now, or their lives, or their opinion of us. The more pressure we apply on the north, the happier the Sinhala people will be”, Jayawardena stated.
His comments, unbecoming of a country’s President, exposed that the Black July pogrom was not merely fuelled by the anger of the Sinhalese over the killing of soldiers in Jaffna, but were the result of a long-drawn plan by the communal forces encouraged by the state machinery.
Although the sufferings, deaths and destruction of property experienced by the Tamil people in the civil war were inexplicably greater than those sufferings in Black July, it was that July that led to the proliferation of armed struggle movements among the Tamils and precipitated the civil war. Therefore July 1983 made an indelible negative mark on Sri Lanka’s political history that will never fade away.
None of the leaders of the government came forward to utter a single word of sympathy to the Tamil people who suffered untold suffering in that Black July across the country and took shelter in thousands in refugee camps.
In a televised address to the nation on Thursday, July 28, four days after the start of the violence, President Jayewardene justified the pogrom against the Tamils as a natural reaction of the Sinhalese people against the Tamil politicians’ demand for the partition of the country.
Not only did the government not take immediate action to control the violence, but the soldiers and police acted in concert with the violent mobs. They too were involved in several incidents of violence. Government politicians, even many ministers, had been at the forefront of violence against Tamils in their respective areas.
When asked during an interview with BBC, why didn’t the army use guns to disperse violent mobs, President Jayewardene replied, “I think there was a lot of anti-Tamil sentiment among the soldiers. The soldiers may have felt that shooting a Sinhalese involved in the riots would be an act against the Sinhalese community. At some places, we also witnessed soldiers encouraging the rioters.”
Neither Jayewardene nor Ranasinghe Premadasa, the then Prime Minister and later President, or any of the politicians who held important positions in the United National Party (UNP) government, expressed regret to the Tamil people for Black July.
Chandrika apologized
Later, only President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga publicly apologized on behalf of the Sri Lankan government. Addressing an event to mark the 21st anniversary of Black July, she said, “Every citizen of this country must collectively take responsibility for those atrocities against the Tamils and apologize to the victims. I take the responsibility of apologizing on behalf of the Government of Sri Lanka and all the citizens of Sri Lanka.”
Indian intervention
Black July led to India’s direct intervention inevitably in the Sri Lankan ethnic issue. The then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, sent her External Affairs Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao to Colombo. On the day of Rao’s arrival (29 July 1983), communal forces again launched vicious attacks on the Tamils, spreading the rumour that the LTTE had arrived in the capital.
A large number of deaths were reported that day. There was no doubt that communal forces unleashed violence again when the Indian Minister was in Colombo to allegedly express the Sinhalese opposition to India’s intervention on behalf of the Tamils.
Addressing a meeting of the UNP controlled Plantation Workers’ Union (with a majority of upcountry Tamils as members) after Black July, Gamini Dissanayake, a powerful minister in the Jayewardene government, angrily declared that Tamils would be killed within 24 hours if India invaded Sri Lanka.
Illusion of war
In the post-Black July period, all the governments in power claimed to be trying to find a political solution to the ethnic problem on the one hand, but on the other, they were bent on a military solution.
Gerry Adams, an Irish republican politician and former leader of the Sinn Féin movement, once commented on the peace process to resolve the Northern Ireland crisis, that peace process was war by other means. We have seen from experience that Sri Lanka’s peace initiatives were similar.
Sinhala political leaders basically had an illusion of ‘war’ in their thinking regarding the Tamil issue. It is worth remembering two examples.
In the weeks after the UNP’s landslide victory in the July 1977 parliamentary elections and Jayewardene became Prime Minister, violence against Tamils erupted in many parts of the country, including Colombo. Then the late Appapillai Amirthalingam, Secretary General of the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), was the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament.
Prime Minister Jayewardene, in his address to Parliament during one of those days of violence, said to Amirthalingam: “If you want peace, we are also for peace. If you want war, we are also for war.”
More than two decades earlier, on June 5, 1956, Ilankai Thamizharasu Katchi (ITAK) led by S. J. V. Chelvanayagam, staged a satyagraha campaign at Galle Face Green in Colombo to protest against the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike government’s move to make Sinhala the only official language. At the instigation of the government, the violent mobs brutally attacked the satyagraha as the police stood watch.
Bandaranaike addressed Amirthalingam, one of those wounded in the attack, as he entered parliament with his head bandaged, calling him the “Honourable Wounds of War.”
It is clear that the Sinhala leaders viewed the struggle for the legitimate rights of the Tamil people with a belligerent attitude long before the Tamil youth took up arms. In the end, no one could stop the war, and the rest is the recent Sri Lankan history.
Military action
All the Presidents of Sri Lanka had not only talked about a political solution for international consumption, but also contributed to the efforts to find a military solution. Whether it was India’s or the international community’s involvement, it was evident that instead of finding a political solution to the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka, the methods of action tended towards a military solution and ultimately ensured the escalation of the conflict into a full-blown war.
The dramatic changes in the international political situation gave President Mahinda Rajapaksa the opportunity to defeat the LTTE militarily in the Vanni and end the civil war. Claiming to be the only president who provided firm political leadership for the victory of the government forces in the war against Tamil Tigers, Rajapaksa exploited the war victory to campaign among the Sinhala people to reap the maximum political advantage.
The Rajapaksas, who pursued a majoritarian political agenda with a militaristic approach, were eventually overthrown by an unprecedented popular uprising against their misrule, corruption, abuse of power and family-dominated politics three years back.
Their downfall actually marked the failure of majoritarian mobilisation. But their belief that they can come back to power through the same communal path that brought destruction to the country, can be seen through their speeches and actions, especially that of the so-called political heir of the Rajapaksa family, MP Namal Rajapaksa.
A key lesson from Sri Lanka’s worst economic and political crisis in history is that majoritarian mobilisation should no longer be allowed to distract attention from the core issues facing the people of the country irrespective of race, religion, caste and creed to cover up mis-governance.
Political forces, especially Sinhala nationalist forces, who were rejected by the people of the country in last year’s national elections, are waiting for opportunities to use communalist sentiments for a political comeback.
Communal campaign
The recent discovery of human skeletons in mass graves in Chemmani, Jaffna, has once again put the spotlight on Sri Lanka’s wartime human rights violations and war crimes, both domestically and internationally.
Sinhala nationalist politicians in southern Sri Lanka have started waging a communal campaign over the graves and are warning of the risk of ethnic riots. Former ministers Sarath Weerasekera, Wimal Weerawansa and Udaya Gammanpila are at the forefront of such vicious campaign.
No action by the government
President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the NPP government leaders, who have vowed never to allow racism and religious extremism to take root again, are taking no action against these communal politicians who are recklessly warning of ethnic violence.
Opposition to the 13th Amendment
The same communalists had previously spoken in and out of Parliament that if the 13th Amendment to the Constitution is fully implemented, Sri Lanka will experience the worst ethnic violence ever seen and that there is a limit to the patience of the Sinhala Buddhist people.
Against such a background, there is no guarantee that a ‘Black July’ will not happen again. It seems that the Southern Sinhala polity has learned no lessons from the Black July or the civil war and the more than four decades of political, economic crisis that followed.
Situation of Tamil people
This is the sixteenth year since the end of the civil war that we commemorate Black July. What is the situation in Sri Lanka at the moment? In the four decades, more than 1.5 million Tamils have migrated abroad, especially to Western Europe and North America, to live as modern Jews. Sri Lankan Tamils have become a significant segment of the influential Asian diaspora communities in the West.
Many of the Sri Lankan Tamils in the diaspora are economically strong enough to be requested by government leaders to come and invest in Sri Lanka and help develop the motherland. The organisations among them are also engaged in political activities that invariably draw the attention of the international community, especially the West, to the humanitarian problems faced by the Tamils in Sri Lanka and the efforts to find a political solution to the ethnic problem.
Continued sufferings
Thousands of families in the north and east are still suffering the consequences of war. Even after the end of the war, the successive governments were interested in strengthening militarisation in the Tamil areas. It is also visible in the intensification of state-sponsored planned settlements with the help of religious forces aimed at changing the demography of Tamil speaking traditional regions.
Land grabbing in the name of archaeology, forest conservation and national security needs is the most urgent problem facing the Tamil people in the North and East today.
After Black July, the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord of July 1987 led to the formation of Provincial Councils, following direct intervention by India. The 13th Amendment to the Constitution has not been fully implemented even after 38 years in existence.
All governments ensured that the provisions of the Peace Accord were not implemented to the benefit of the Tamil people who have been discriminated against by all governments since Independence.
Even India has not been able to exert pressure on Sri Lankan governments to fully implement the 13th Amendment. In the period following the Peace Accord, various efforts were made towards a political solution even without showing interest in implementing already existing arrangement for devolution of power.
They include the parliamentary select committee headed by Mangala Munasinghe in 1991 during the Premadasa regime, the proposals for the new constitution submitted to Parliament in 2000 during the regime of Ms. Kumaratunga, the proposals of the All-Party Representative Committee headed by Prof. Tissa Vitharana in 2006 during the Mahinda Rajapaksa Presidency, and the process of drafting the new constitution during the Maithripala Sirisena – Ranil Wickremesinghe government.
Former Tamil National Alliance (TNA) leader Late Rajavarothayam Sampanthan repeatedly explained these initiatives in his talks with governments and in his addresses to Parliament.
After Ranil Wickremesinghe took over as President in July 2022, he held a few rounds of talks in the name of All Party Conference claiming to resolve the ethnic issue ahead of Sri Lanka’s 75th Independence Day. He announced at a Thai Pongal ceremony in Jaffna that his government would take steps to fully implement the 13th Amendment within two years.
13 A without police powers
However, he refrained from talking about the 13th Amendment following the protests in the South. During a meeting with the leaders of the Tamil parties, Wickremesinghe proposed the implementation of the 13th Amendment, without police powers. Tamil parties expectedly rejected it. How to restart efforts to solve the ethnic imbroglio remains a problem.
The Southern polity does not feel the need to find a sustainable political solution to the ethnic problem that led to Black July and the civil war. Today, the anti- devolution of power stance has become so strong that there are demands for the repeal of an amendment that has been in the Constitution for more than three and a half decades.
NPP Government
The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) led NPP government, which came to power last year with the overwhelming support of the people, is also not ready to think and act differently on the national question, from the positions of the traditional political parties that have been rejected by the people.
The leaders of the NPP who claim to have changed many of their old policies to suit the contemporary domestic and international conditions, are not prepared to change their position on the ethnic question alone.
The main constituent party of the ruling NPP, JVP has a bitter history of resisting all attempts to find a political solution to the ethnic problem. ‘Indian expansionism’ was one of the fundamental policies of the JVP. But today, after coming to power, its leader Dissanayake’s government maintains close ties with India. However, they are not ready to heed India’s incessant request to at least implement the 13th Amendment.
Dissanayake, who was in the Opposition when the controversy over the 13th Amendment broke out during the Ranil Wickremasinghe Presidency said, “Even the Provincial Councils were obtained through the Tamil people’s struggle. If the Tamil people think that the 13th Amendment is a solution to their problem, we have no problem with that.” But after coming to power, he did not talk about the 13th Amendment. It seems the President and his government does not want to antagonize the Sinhala nationalist constituency by venturing into any initiative towards solving the national problem.
The NPP government, which says the provincial councils system will remain in place until a new constitution is brought in, is unlikely to be able to hold early provincial council elections, which have not been held for eight years.
One of the reasons for this was the significant drop in the votes of the NPP in the recent local elections. The government is not coming forward to adopt a positive attitude towards the problems of the Tamil people, who have voted in unprecedented numbers for the ruling party in the Northern and Eastern Provinces in the 2024 parliamentary elections.
If the government which came to power promising the people to bring about a change in the system and a new political culture, does not come forward to get rid of the previous wrong tendencies regarding the national question, which is the main issue of Sri Lanka, and adopt a healthy policy of respecting the legitimate political aspirations of the minority communities, then the change in the system and the new political culture can only be empty slogans.
It is a shame for Sri Lanka that even after 42 years since Black July, a political solution to the ethnic problem is slipping away. In fact, it’s a bigger shame than Black July.