Sri Lanka: the choice of two terrors

Abstract

While a stalemate in the predominantly Tamil North and East of Sri Lanka continues despite Indian intervention on the government's behalf, in the Sinhala South death squads associated with the pseudo People's Liberation Front, the JVP, have been ruthlessly eliminating its opponents. The United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), having created and nurtured popular racism for over thirty years in order to get into power (through a ready-made Sinhalese majority of 70 per cent of the population), * would now like to draw back from the brink of another crippling civil war, this time in the South. But they are unable to do so because the JVP has taken up the Sinhala cause and pushed it to the point of social fascism through assassination and murder. Popular racism based on Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism promoted in the schools and expressed in song, textbook and media served to fuel the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1958, 1977, 1981 and 1983, in which thousands were killed at the hands of street mobs. Some of the most violently anti- Tamil propaganda (deriving inspiration from mythical Sinhalese history) has emanated from the present government. Colonisation of Tamil areas by Sinhalese was justified on the pretext of protecting ancient Buddhist shrines. And it is an open secret that ministers hired their own hit squads in the 1983 pogrom. When, in a bid to end the unwinnable war with the Tamils, the UNP signed the Indo-Lanka Accord in 1987, allowing Indian troops to operate on Sri Lankan soil, it alienated the very Sinhala nationalists it had itself fostered. And it was the JVP which capitalised on the resentment over India's interference in Sri Lanka's internal affairs. Accusing the UNP government (and other supporters of the Accord) of treachery, it enlarged and deepened popular racism into fanatical patriotism. But what has given the JVP terror tactics a hold over the population has been the steady erosion of democratic freedoms, on the one hand, and the self-abasement of the Left, on the other. Both the SLFP and UNP governments have postponed elections to stay in power, but the UNP went further and got itself re-elected en bloc on a phoney referendum to postpone elections. Local elections were never held under the SLFP and whatever elections took place under the UNP have either been rigged and/or carried out under conditions of massive intimidation. In the process, the political literacy that the country once boasted has been lost to the people and, with it, their will to resist. At the same time the collaborationist politics of the Left in the SLFP government of 1970-77 have not only served to decimate its own chances at the polls (it obtained not a single seat in the election of 1977) but also to leave the working-class movement defenceless. So that it was a simple matter for the UNP government to crush the general strike of 1980, imprison its leaders and throw 80, 000 workers permanently out of work. And it has been left to the JVP to pretend to take up the socialist mantle of the Left even as it devotes itself to the racist cause of the Right, and so win the support of the Sinhala-Buddhist people. In the final analysis the choice before the country is that of two terrors: that of the state or that of the JVP. Below we publish an analysis of the situation as at October 1988, put out by the underground Campaign for Social Democracy in the run up to the presidential elections.