Some mistook the dark clouds along the horizon to be a frieze of incoming heavy monsoonal rain cloud that late Monday morning in July in Colombo. But it was something far more ominous. It was clouds of black smoke from the fires of July 1983.
The Galle Road from Bambalapitiya southwards was one long straight avenue of fire – flames flickering redly as shops and homes burned on the roadside with black smoke billowing upwards to form a dark archway over a road empty of vehicles but thronged with people fleeing the rioting. It was the same in many other cities of our Thrice Blessed Isle, from Badulla to Kandy to Galle to Ratnapura to Negombo and many smaller towns where the Tamil community had its roots amid larger populations of the other communities.
There are many generations living today for whom the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983 is still a real-life memory. Today, such violence and mayhem would immediately go on record with mobile phone cameras in almost every hand. Today the cruelty of race hatred and blood lust would have been captured audio-visually in a manner that no one could have denied or suppressed the evidence.
But if the much smaller scale, recent incidents of race pogroms such as in Digana and Aluthgama have been vividly recorded for the world to see, the visual record of the islandwide anti-Tamil rioting that exploded in that final week of July 1983 are a few photographs, mainly black and white. They are, today, all that is available - scant evidence of the mass destruction of life and property, massive displacement of people.
But the war that followed, that devastated entire regions of the country, that robbed whole generations of a ‘normal’ peaceful life, and the whole country of a more rational progress towards economic and social development; these are the scars that the Sri Lankan nation, as a whole must bear as evidence of the mass violence that began in 1983.
If the Tamil people bear the worst scars, all the other communities were soon to be mired in the bloodiness that engulfed the country as a result of July 1983, and, they also bear scars.
This island society had not experienced such a scale of social and economic devastation in centuries, perhaps never before on that scale. Thousands were killed in the race violence, hundreds of thousands lost livelihoods and homes, and a few million comprising all communities were immediately economically hit due to the crippled economy.
For example, the country’s biggest industrial zone at the time, the Ratmalana industrial zone just south of Colombo, saw much of its factories burnt down by organised gangs who had lists of Tamil-owned companies they sought to destroy. The wholesale destruction of Tamil-owned ventures also resulted in the loss of employment for scores of thousands of, mainly non-Tamil factory employees.
There were the race hatred propagandists then just as much as they flourish today. Whether clad in the white ‘national dress’ of politicians or the saffron of clerics, the loudest speakers had only loudspeakers in those pre-internet decades to promote inter-community hostilities.
Today, 36 years after the July 1983 pogrom, the physical scars of that violence are less noticeable, but the social scars remain still dominant in national life. The nation continues to experience bouts of racial violence, if on a smaller scale, and the seemingly permanent cacophony of race hate propaganda that blares forth from social media platforms, TV, press and radio platforms, as well as on political stages.
Political leaderships still posture in support of ‘inter-ethnic justice’ but strut more vigorously on platforms of ethnic exclusivism and supremacism. ‘National’ pride is more often presumed to be the pride of a single ethnic community rather than of a multi-ethnic social whole. Minorities are expected to conform to majoritarian culture and even so, are still not easily accepted as full equals.
Just last week, as the national legislature debated constitutional reform for the umpteenth time, political interest was low, the benches of the House empty and the voices supporting positive structural reform restricted to that of ethnic minority parliamentarians. The consensus-based report on a new Constitution by the parliamentary steering committee is now orphaned with the political parties whose representatives formulated and endorsed the proposals no longer willing to own it and actively take it forward toward implementation.
The propaganda of politicians has excelled in celebrating the ending of the devastating internal war, but how many reflect on and work toward resolving the inter-ethnic conflict that sparked off the war and which remains as a canker in our body politic? Failure to address the inter-ethnic division between Sinhalese and Tamil has resulted in the tragic expansion of inter-ethnic hostility to involve the Muslims as well. Some manipulators today are attempting to mobilise one ethnic minority against another perhaps in the crude belief that this would allow the majority community to remain dominant.
The lesson of July 1983 is that violence can never bring lasting solutions to social conflict. The ‘crisis of civilisation’ that then President J. R. Jayewardene saw in the July 1983 pogrom remains so today with the country still wracked by inter-ethnic tension and bouts of violence.
The loss that our peoples have experienced and continue to experience because of ethnic conflict can only be redeemed by the revival of civilisation – of civilised negotiation, thoughtful compromise and heroic civilian statesmanship that will bring institutional reform and a new culture of serendipity.