Background to Sri Lanka's communal violence

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IN SO FAR as national peace is in any way possible in a capitalist society based on exploitation, profit-making and strife, it is attainable only under a consistently and thoroughly democratic republican system of government which guarantees full equality of all nations and languages, which provides the people with schools where instruction is given in all the native languages, and the constitution of which contains a fundamental law that prohibits any privileges whatsoever to any one nation and any encroachment whatsoever upon the rights of a nationa minority. This particularly calls for wide regional autonomy and fully democratic local government, with the boundaries of the self-governing and autonomous regions determined by the local inhabitants themselves on the basis of their economic and social conditions, national Lenin, Resolution of the 1913 conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Central Committee)

THE communal violence in Sri Lanka has already led to the slaughter of hundreds of Tamils, the uprooting of at least 50,000 of them, and the beginning of a mass

movement by Tamils towards the North, where their community is the majority.

Large numbers of factories in the. 'development zone' around Colombo have been gutted, and so have many Tamil-owned enterprises in Colombo itself. The communal eruption also threatens Sri Lanka with an economic catastrophe.

The 'strong President' Junius Jayawardene has given official encouragement to the Sinhalese pogromists by blaming their Tamil victims and banning from political life and exercise of their civil rights all those advocating a separate Tamil state in the North and Bast. This means banning the Tamil United Liberation Front, the official Parliamentary opposition.

In an attempt to blame it all on the left, Jayawardene has also banned three left wing parties - the JVP, the NSSP, and the Communist Party. All three of them are Sinhalese parties with a chauvinist past.

The wave of anti-Tamil pogroms sweeping across the island was sparked when Tamil separatist guerillas killed 13 Sinhalese soldiers. But it has been long brewing. You could even say it has been brewing since Ceylon gained its independence from Britain in 1948.

Ceylon is a case study in the problem of coexistence by different but overlapping and intermeshed communities or nationalities in one territory. It is now giving the world bloody testimony that the approach to such questions advocated by Lenin in the quotation above is the only proper one for socialists and democrats.

The Buddhist Sinhalese, who make up three-quarters of the island's 14 million people, came from North India to Ceylon about 13,000 years ago. The Hindu Tamils divide into two groups.Those who form the majority in the northern and eastern provinces came to Ceylon from southern India about the same time as the Sinhalese. For centuries they had a separate kingdom in the north of the island. In the 1971 census there were 1,416,000 of them.

There were 1,105,000 other Tamils — who live as plantation workers, mainly in the Central Highlands, and were brought in by the British in the mid 19th make-up of the population, etc.

Jayawardene the 19th century - were disenfranchised, deprived of civil rights, and declared stateless.

Sinhalese chauvinism was to destroy even the limited secular and non-communal character left to the Ceylonese state atter thiş savage act.

It began as a ferment among the Sinhalese rural intelligentsia — village schoolmasters and Buddhist religious leaders. They wanted their religion and culture to have first place in the state, and to define Ceylonese nationality in terms of their own communal identity - language, religion, culture, history excluding all the Tamils.

They were alienated from all the existing political parties. The Ceylonese historian De Silva puts it like this: 'The Left was just as unsympathetic as the UNP leadership to the religious, linguistic, and cultural aspirations of the Buddhist activists... It was to (their) deep sense of grievance, (their) social and economic discontent, and (their) resentment at being neglected that the SFLP turned...

Solomon Bandaranaike split off from the UNP in 1951 and formed the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. Exclusively Sinhalese, it became the prime vehicle for Sinhalese chauvinism. In parallel the Tamil Federal Party broke from the Ceylon Indian Congress, asserting that the Tamils were a nation.

The SLFP won the 1956 general election and immediately brought in a bill to make Sinhala the only state language. After tremendous riots, full implementation of the bill was delayed until January 1961.

The Tamil Federal Party had also done well in the election. Its 1956 convention spelled out its programme: autonomy for the northern and eastern provinces under a federal constitution, parity for the Sinhala and Tamil languages, and civil rights for the Tamil plantation workers.

In 1957 Bandaranaike negotiated a compromise with the TfP. Tamil was to be one of the languages for administration in the north and east; Sinhalese settlement there was to be restricted; and there was to be a devolution of power to regional councils, as a concession to federalism. • When this was made public, in July 1957, there was such an uproar of Sinhalese protests and demonstrations - monks kiled themselves on Bandaranaike's lawn - that Bandaranaike abrogated it.

De Silva writes: 'Although the - Buddhist movement was generally hostile to Marxist ideology, it had no strong opposition to the adoption of a socialist profile. Since plantation enterprises, nascent industry and the island's trade were dominated by foreign capitalists, and the minorities (including the Christian) were disproportionately influential within the indigenous capitalist class, Buddhist pressure groups viewed socialism as a means of redressing the balance in favour of the majority group.

Every extension of state control over trade and industry could be justified on the grounds that it helped to curtail the influence of foreigners and the minorities. The Sinhalese Buddhist section of the capitalist class was not averse to socialism so long as its own economic interests were not affected.

The result was that the SLFP has been able to reconcile a commitment to socialism with an advancing of the interests of a section of the indigenous capitalist class — namely its Sinhalese Buddhist section' The SLFP dominated populist 'lower-orders' politics, with this mixture of communal chauvinism, cross-class 'socialism' , and "anti-imperialism' The rise of the SLFP affected the working class Left. The main working class party in Ceylon was a Trotskyist party, the LSSP, which also led a powerful trade union federation. They had led general strikes in 1947 and 1953, and had representation in Parliament.

The other working class party was the Communist Party. coalition, in October 1964, agreed with the Indian government on compulsory 'repatriation' of 525,000 Indians together with their 'natural increase' over a 15 year period: The agreement included a promise to give another 300,000 Tamils citizenship - by 1983. The measure was specifically directed against the working class Tamils.

The coalition fell in December 1964, and a UNP/Tamil Federal Party coalition took its place: When this government began to talk of 'ethnic reconciliation', the SLFP, the ISSP and the CP responded by whipping up a mass racist agitation against the Tamils and their' government.

•The opposition unleashed a sustained barrage of racist propaganda in which the SUPP, as the unabashed advocate of Sinhalese Buddhist domination of the Sri Lankan polity, was joined by the CP and the LSSP. The left wing leadership demonstrated all the ardour of recent converts in espousing a cause which they had once spurned"

The UNP/TFP government provoked riots when it legislated on the basis of the 1957 Bandaranaike/TFP agreement, in favour of 'reasonable use' of Tamil. An attempt to bring in another plank of the 1957 agreement -district councils 'under the control and direction of the central government' - had to be abandoned, so strong was Sinhalese opposition.

In 1970 a 'united front' of the SLFP (led since 1959 by Solomon Bandaranaike's widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike), the LSSP, and the CP, came to power. It was a 'left government' poisoned by communalism.

It nationalised the plantations in 1975 and, in a series of statecapitalist measures, put the state effectively in control of trade and industry. Thoroughly anti working class, it also cut the food subsidies and savagely repressed the 1971 JVP rising of Sinhalese youth disillusioned with the three ruling parties.

With a new constitution, in 1972, Buddhism in effect became the state religion, despite Hindu Tamil protests; Sinhalese was enshrined anew as the state language: Ceylon became Sri Lanka.

The renegade Trotskyists of the LSSP might claim that with measures like the nationalisations they had carried out much of their programme. But it was at the cost of disrupting the working class movement, and allying with a chauvinist petty-bourgeois populist party: Nothing stable could be gained in this short-sighted way.

Inevitably the government's communalism fuelled Tamil separatism. The TFP agitated for a separate state. 'A Tamil youth movement grew up, parallelling the JVP.

In 1974 the united front negotiated a deal to grant citizenship to some hundreds of thousands of the plantation-worker Tamils. But the point had already been reached at which such concessions would be too little, too late. In 1977 the most serious clashes for two decades occurred in Jaffna, the Tamil capital.

Also in 1977, the UNP made a spectacular comeback. It initiated a real 'counter-revolution' and a capitalist success story on the basis of repression of the working class.

A strong presidential system was introduced, modelled on France and the US. Economically, the government took Singapore and Hong Kong as its models, turning away from economic nationalism and making tax concessions and grants to attract foreign capital. Results: an average 6% growth rate in the worst year of world slump, and a drop in unemployment from about one quarter of the workforce to 15%.

Some concessions were made to the Tamils in a new constitution in 1978. A limited status was granted to the Tamil language. The stateless ' 'Indian' Tamils have been given civil rights, and one of their leaders has joined the government. But too late: the Tamil United Liberation front, representing the indigenous' Tamils, has remained adamantly distinct, demanding a Tamil State ('Eelam').

Serious guerilla activity led last May to the fourth state of emergency since 1977. The Tamil North has been effectively under military rule: troops have had the right to shoot to kill and then bury the dead without judicial interference, if they get the permission of the Defence Secretary.

It was against this background that the Tamil guerilla killing of 13 soldiers sparked mass pogroms.