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Sinhalese mob stopping cars to look for Tamils, 25 July, 1983 |
massacre – long-term consequences”, I dealt with this blot on Sri Lanka which set
the stage for the division of Sri Lanka. This is still on the web
(www.tamilcanadian.com/pageview.php?ID=4260&SID=145)
(www.org/taraki/articles/2006/07-28_Consequences.php?uid=1866)
(www.tamilnation.org/form/brian/060723blackjuly.htm)
This year I will simply offer the Tamil people an Apology for what was done to them
in 1983, and even more so, for the increasing violations of their basic human rights
in the quarter of a century that has followed.
I did not slit Tamil throats or pull out the intravenous drips and throw out Tamil
patients from hospital, But there is a collective guilt, a collective shame,, when
members of one’s ethnic group behave like savages. The only ‘crime’ that the victims
had committed was to be born Tamil. For the first time in my life, I felt ashamed to
call myself a Sinhalese. An entire ethnic group was shamed by the behaviour of
Sinhala goons led by their masters in Dictator J.R.Jayawardene’s government, and
hoodlums in yellow robes who were desecrating the Buddha, one of the greatest
teachers of Peace the world has ever known. (My mother was a devout Buddhist and
her father a teacher of Buddhism and the author of books on Buddhism).
Some 3,000 Tamil civilians died that week and their homes and property burnt. Many
more would have died had it not been for courageous Sinhalese, ordinary decent
Sinhalese, who risked life, limb and property to hide Tamils and save them from
certain death. Thank God for some decent Sinhalese. I have no doubt that some of
them tendered an apology to the devastated and petrified Tamils, but the best
apology was the shelter they provided at considerable risk to themselves.
The news
I was already in Australia when the massacre occurred. All I could do was to watch
the horror on television. I watched with disbelief and disgust, that a country which
calls itself “Buddhist”, had scores of absolute barbarians, both inside and outside
Government.
I had a call from London. It was from one of the finest Sri Lankans, a Sinhalese, I
have ever met – Rt Rev Lakshman Wickremasinghe, the Bishop of Kurunegala, The
ailing Bishop was in London but said he was returning home at once to be with his
(and my) people, the Tamil people. He did; I wish I had the courage to do the same.
I have regretted it ever since.
He visited the numerous refugee camps all over the island to comfort the devastated
people, as Christ would probably have done. He visited a refugee camp in
Akkarayan, Jaffna, with Dr Luther Jeyasingham and a close friend of mine, the
irreplaceable Kandiah Kandasamy of the Movement for Interracial Justice and
Equality (MIRJE). After talking with the refugees he was discovered crying in a 2
room. When asked, he replied that from his conversations he had found that his
family had been closely linked with the violence. (The Bishop was the uncle of Ranil
Wickremasinghe, a Minister in Jayawardene’s government at that time and a later
Prime Minister, and a kinsman of J.R.Jayawardene, the President). The Bishop died
on 23 October 1983, a broken man. He never recovered from that trauma.
Sri Lanka has produced two saints – Bishop Lakshman Wickremasinghe (a Sinhalese
in the South) and Bishop Bastiampillai Deogupillai (a Tamil in the North).
When Bishop Lakshman called me from London, I said that we, the Sinhalsese had to
apologise to the Tamils. He said he would and he did. I apologised to my Tamil wife.
The apology
In his final Pastoral Letter “A cry from the Heart” (15 November 1983) before his
untimely death, this is what he wrote,
“We must be ashamed as Sinhalese because what took place was a moral crime. We
are ashamed as Sinhalese for the moral crime other Sinhalese committed. We must
not only acknowledge the shame. We must also make our apology to those Tamils…”
In a more private way, I tendered my apology. When the full horror of what
happened in that week of shame, dawned on me, I sat up one night and wrote a long
letter. In the morning I gave it to my wife – “This is an apology from a Sinhalese to a
Tamil”. I left for work. When I returned she said, “I have read it. What do you want
me to do with it?” I said, “If the apology is accepted, you can throw it away”. She
said she would keep it. It was this which was later expanded, and published, with a
Foreword from that doyen of Australian Tamils, Sri Lanka’s most brilliant
mathematician, Professor C.J. Eliezer who was the Dean of the Faculty of Science in
Colombo where my wife and I were students in the 1950s. In the expanded version
Sri Lanka. The July 1983 massacre. Unanswered questions, I held President
Jayawardene and his murderous Ministers responsible for a carefully planned and
executed massacre of Tamils and the total destruction of their economic base, which
had nothing to do with the ambush of 13 Sinhalese soldiers in the North.
I believed then, and even more so now, that unless the Sinhalese apologise to the
Tamils for the outrageous violation of their basic human rights over the past 50
years, there will be no peace, and certainly no peace with friendship, between the
ethnic groups in Sri Lanka – divided or undivided.
It has to be a genuine apology – not the bogus apology of my cousin, the former
President, Chandrika Kumaratunga, or using her political name, Chandrika
Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.. At a meeting to mark the 21st Anniversary of the 1983
pogrom, she declared,
“Every citizen in this country should collectively accept the blame and make an
apology to the tens of thousands who suffered. I would like to assign to myself that
task on behalf of the State of Sri Lanka, the government, and on behalf of all of us,
all citizens of Sri Lanka to extend that apology.”
As I said in my earlier publication, that is not an apology, it is political clap-trap.
“Every citizen” (that includes the Tamils – unless, of course, she considers Tamils to
be non-citizens ) is not to blame for the 1983 pogrom. J.R.Jayawardene and his anti-3
Tamil Ministers were to blame.
“Every citizen” is not to blame for the wholesale massacre of Tamils that occurred in
Jaffna in 1995. She, Chandrika Kumaratunga, President, Minister of Defence and
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, is to blame. Had she the courage and
integrity, she would have apologised to the Tamil people in the North for what she
did to them.
The blame for the massacres of Tamils does not rest on “every citizen” but on two
elite families – of S.W.R.D Bandaranaike (his wife and daughter), and of
J.R.Jayawardene and his cronies. To this can now be added another, more
murderous than both of the others, President Rajapakse’s and their supporters
among the ranks of the so-called Marxists, and the ‘crazed gentlemen’ clad in yellow
robes.
Tracking down the criminals
Nazi war criminals have been hunted down and punished (irrespective of their age),
50 years after their crimes. There is no reason that those responsible for the Sri
Lankan crime in July 1983, should not be hunted down and brought to justice.
Many of those who were responsible, J.R.Jayawardene and his hoodlum Minister Cyril
Matthew, and his colleagues, and their thugs, are either dead or not traceable.
Others with blood-drenched hands are very much alive and readily accessible. One is
Elle Gunawanse Thero.
This yellow-robed hoodlum played a crucial role in the events of July 1983.. He wasthe monk who whipped up the emotions of the crowd that had collected in the
Kanatte cemetery to bury the soldiers, and later fanned out to set fire to Colombo in
general, Tamil homes and businesses in particular.
He then led a mob down Cotta road, Borella, armed with a list of innocent Tamils
(obtained from the electoral office) who were to be wiped out. He was later seen at
the Cinnamon Gardens police station, with a pistol visibly tucked in his yellow robe,
demanding curfew passes. He was the man in the passenger seat of a lorry (I had
the photograph), with hoodlums armed with petrol and kerosene, directing them to
the Tamil homes to be burnt.
Where is he now? Exactly where he was then – opposite the BMICH on Buller’s road
(now Bauddaloka mawatte). That was crown property where he, like many other
monks, had illegally squatted, building a small structure. With strong ties with
Gamini Dissanayake, Minister for the Mahaveli, this small structure was replaced by
an impressive one, with State funds and acknowledged his benefactor, calling it
“Mahaveli Maha Seya”. It was from here that the detailed pogrom of the Tamils was
meticulously planned and executed.
And now? On 15 January 2003, this virulently racist monk, launched the
“Organisation to Protect the Motherland” (OPM), to oppose the talks between Ranil
Wickremasinghe, then the Prime Minister, and the LTTE, for a federal settlement. He
claimed that the North and East which had been merged under Emergency
Regulations in 1987, should be de-merged as the ‘Emergency’ had lapsed with the
peace accord signed by Wickremasinghe and the LTTE.4
On 1 October 2003, Elle Gunawanse launched the National Patriotic Movement,
accusing Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe of trying to divide the country.
What stops his arrest and trial? Nothing, other than the lack of will of the political
establishment to do so. There he is in all his glory, right in the middle of Colombo,
with his heavily blood-soaked yellow robes and none will dare touch him.
There are others with a case to answer. There is one, in particular, a Minister in
Jayawardene’s government, who has much to explain. Let us call him “Minister X”
There were 72 Tamil political detainees in the Welikada prison in Colombo, held
there without charge or trial. On 25 July 1983. 35 of them were massacred by
Sinhalese prisoners in the jail. President Jayawardene, in a rare act of responsibility,
wanted the rest of the Tamil detainees to be immediately sent to Jaffna prison.
However, Minister Lalith Athulathmudali and ‘Minister X’, opposed this saying that
the Sinhalese would become further infuriated over such a decision. It was obvious
that Athulathmudali and ‘Minister X ‘ did not want the prisoners taken away to
safety. Surprise! Surprise! A day later (27 July) there was a second prison massacre,
and another 18 slaughtered. Of the original 72 Tamil detainees, only 19 were left.
The Sinhalese would now not be ‘infuriated’, since the job was ¾ done.
Who was Minister “X”? Find it out for yourself. There’s a bit of home-work for you.
Action
In January 2008, I was invited to New Zealand to address a special prayer session in
the Elim Church, Auckland. Rev Prince Devanathan, a soft-spoken Tamil priest
conducting the service said, “We have been praying and praying for Peace for more
than 20 years. But the more we pray, the further we get distanced from Peace. That
is the reality”. He then came out with the finest words I have heard for years –
“Prayer without action is dead”
I’d say the same about an apology. An apology without action is dead. It is this
‘action’ that I have been trying to deliver in the past two and a half decades.
The same holds for protests. To protest, to hold a vigil, to remember the July 1983
massacre is fine. But protests without action is dead.
I urge you to act. To free the Tamil people to live with dignity, and safety in their
area of historical habitation – the North and East. I urge you to act; to act to save
the Tamil people from the Genocide, started in July 1983, and now progressing at an
alarming rate. Like the Welikada prison massacre, it is ¾ done. Act now. Tomorrow
may be too late for the Tamils in the North and East of the ‘Democratic Socialist
Republic of Sri Lanka’, as it likes to call itself.
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