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The roots of the conflict lie in a long history of state oppression of the Tamils in Sri Lanka, which eventually led some Tamil youth to take up arms against the government.When the British government granted formal independence to Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) in 1948, it handed power to politicians drawn mainly from the upper classes of the majority Sinhala ethnic group. These politicians used racism as a tool to divide the working class. They also used it as a weapon in their struggles with each other: different Sinhalese politicians would compete to show that they were the strongest defenders of the Sinhalese people. This resulted in the adoption of racist policies and the stirring up of antagonism against the Tamil minority.
One of the newly independent state's first acts was to deprive Tamil plantation workers of citizenship rights. These workers were descended from people brought to Sri Lanka from India by the British in the nineteenth century to work on coffee and tea plantations. Despite the fact that their families had lived in Sri Lanka for several generations, a million people were denied Sri Lankan citizenship, being defined as "Indians".
The citizenship law did not directly affect the main group of Tamils, whose ancestors had lived in the north and east of the island of Sri Lanka for thousands of years. But it was soon followed by new laws adversely affecting all Tamils. Sinhalese was declared the sole official language of Sri Lanka, a move which made speakers of the Tamil language second-class citizens. Knowledge of Sinhalese was made a prerequisite for employment in the public service, thereby excluding most Tamils from government jobs. Discrimination against Tamils was also applied in education.
For many years Tamils opposed these discriminatory laws by peaceful means, including demonstrations, sit-ins and participation in elections. But peaceful protests were met with violent repression, carried out by the police and army as well as racist Sinhalese mobs incited to violence by politicians and Buddhist monks. There was a series of pogroms against Tamils, culminating in the murder of an estimated 3000 people in the government-instigated riots of July 1983.
LTTE theoretician Anton Balasingham argued that: "The anti-Tamil riots that periodically erupted in the island should not be viewed as spontaneous outbursts of inter-communal violence between the two communities. All major racial conflagrations that erupted violently against the Tamil people were inspired and masterminded by the Sinhala regimes as a part of a genocidal program. Violent anti-Tamil riots exploded on the island in 1956, 1958, 1961,1974, 1977,1979, 1981 and in July 1983. In these racial holocausts thousands of Tamils, including women and children, were massacred in the most gruesome manner, billions of rupees worth of Tamil property was destroyed and hundreds of thousands made refugees. The state's armed forces colluded with the Sinhalese hooligans and vandals in their violent rampage of arson, rape and mass murder."
The growing repression led to the growth of Tamil nationalist sentiment. In 1977 the Tamil United Liberation Front won 17 seats in the Sri Lankan parliament on a platform of self-determination for Tamils.
LTTE forms
The repression of peaceful protest led many Tamil youth to turn to violent methods. The LTTE was formed in 1972 and carried out its first major armed action in 1978. After the 1983 pogrom, the LTTE gained increased support from the Tamil community and dramatically stepped up its war against the Sri Lankan army.
Government forces were unable to defeat the LTTE, despite brutal repression including numerous massacres of Tamil civilians. In 1987 India sent a "peacekeeping force" to Sri Lanka, with the ostensible aim of protecting the Tamils from the violence of the Sri Lankan army. However the Indian government did not want to see the creation of an independent Tamil state, and the Indian army soon began repressing the LTTE. The Indians tried to use some other Tamil armed groups as a counterweight to the LTTE, leading to conflict among the Tamil militants.
In 1988, Ranasinghe Premadasa was elected as president of Sri Lanka. He was no friend of Tamils, having been prime minister during the 1983 pogrom. Nevertheless, he opposed the continued presence of Indian troops, and started talks with the LTTE. He even secretly gave the LTTE some arms to fight the Indian troops. But he remained opposed to self-determination for the Tamils, and once the Indian army had withdrawn, fighting broke out once again between the Sri Lankan army and the LTTE.
There have been a number of attempts to reach a peaceful settlement to the war.
Chandrika Kumaratunga was elected prime minister in 1994 after campaigning on a peace platform. However, Kumaratunga was never serious about peace, but merely wanted time to rebuild the Sri Lankan army for a new war.
In February 2002 a ceasefire agreement was signed between the LTTE and the United National Party (UNP) government of Ranil Wickremesinghe. This was the longest-lasting attempt to bring peace. But once again the government not only failed to offer the Tamil people a just solution that could guarantee a lasting peace; it failed even to fully implement the provisions of the ceasefire agreement -- for example, those provisions requiring the Sri Lankan army to evacuate public buildings it had occcupied in Tamil areas, and to disarm pro-government paramilitary groups. These paramilitary groups continued to exist and to carry out, in collusion with the Sri Lankan army, acts of violence and intimidation against LTTE supporters.
The UNP government, which claimed to want peace but failed to deliver it, was replaced in 2004 by a more openly chauvinist government, a coalition of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SFLP) with the JVP (Peoples Liberation Front). Later the JVP left the ruling coalition, but an even more extreme Sinhalese chauvinist party, the Jatika Hela Urumaya, which is led by Buddhist monks, joined the government.
Following the election of the SLFP, violence escalated into full-scale war. LTTE-controlled areas have been subjected to aerial and artillery bombardment by the Sri Lankan armed forces, as well as blockades preventing food supplies and other necessities from entering these areas. Tamil civilians have been murdered by government troops and pro-government militias, and Tamil youth have been conscripted into these militias against their will.
There have been a series of massacres by the armed forces. For example, on June 17, 2006, in the fishing village of Pesalai, Sri Lankan navy troops threw grenades into a church where Tamil refugees were sheltering. On August 4, in the town of Muttur, 17 aid workers (most of them Tamils) employed by the French charity Action Contre le Faim (Action Against Hunger) were murdered in cold blood by the army. On August 14, in Mullaitivu, an orphanage was bombed by the Sri Lankan airforce, killing more than 50 children.
Fifteen-thousand people fled from the town of Vaharai in eastern Sri Lanka following heavy shelling by the Sri Lankan army on January 18, 2007. According to the Tamilnet website, the shelling was intensified in the evening despite an urgent message sent to the International Committee of the Red Cross from Vaharai hospital authorities saying that the area around the hospital, where many displaced people had sought refuge, was under attack.
In March 2007, Batticaloa district parliamantarian S. Jeyanandamoorthy claimed that 40,000 people had been displaced from the Paduvankarai area of eastern Sri Lanka in a period of 48 hours, due to heavy artillery and rocket fire from the Sri Lankan army.
Repression against Tamils has intensified, not only in the traditional Tamil areas of the north and east, but also in Sri Lanka's capital Colombo. Many Tamils have fled to Colombo, both to escape the fighting in the north and east and for economic reasons. But the renewed war has led to increased harassment of Tamils in Colombo. Police have carried out sweeps through Colombo’s suburbs, questioning Tamils about their reasons for being in the capital. Military checkpoints have been established at key junctions throughout the city.
On June 7, 2007, 500 Tamils were forcefully expelled from lodges in Colombo, and sent on buses to the north and east. A further 300 were detained in a police station awaiting transport.
Human rights and peace groups and Tamil and left parties held a demonstration to protest against the expulsions on June 8, 2007. The Supreme Court ordered a halt to the expulsions. Nevertheless, the expulsions provided yet another example of the government's racist attitude towards the Tamils.
Indian journalist Narayan Swamy commented that the expulsions carried out by the Sinhala-chauvinist state paradoxically prove the existence of, and the need for, a Tamil homeland: "For too long it has been claimed by Sri Lanka's ruling elite that there cannot be a concept of `Tamil homeland’ because more Tamils now live outside of the war zone that is the northeastern province, which was once overwhelmingly Tamil ... the Sri Lanka police's high-handed action seemed to prove that the `Tamil homeland’ does exist and it does constitute precisely that region the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) wants to secede."