Tisaranee Gunasekara – The Lanka Academic

“There are not two Germanies, a good one and a bad one, but only one whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt and ruin”.
Thomas Mann (Germany and the Germans)

July was our month of shame. The time when we, the Sinhalese, debased our history and our culture and descended to the level of sub humans, attacking and killing unarmed, defenceless human beings whose only crime was that they happened to be Tamil. The guilt belongs to us all – not only to those who acted, but also to those who, through silence and inaction, permitted such crimes to be committed in their name.

There are still those within Sinhala society who try to justify the unjustifiable by mentioning the attack on the 13 soldiers, which acted as the catalyst for the July/August violence. However it is not possible for the Sinhalese to blame the Tigers/Tamils for their descent into insanity anymore than it is possible for the Tamils to justify the Tigers’ civilisational crimes by pointing at Sinhala extremism in general and the Black July in particular. Klaus Mann using the Faust model wrote that every nation has two souls, good and evil. So it is with the Sinhalese and the Tamils. It is because various expressions of Sinhala extremism from 1956 through 1983 to the present times did (and do) have an appeal to a certain part of the Sinhala psyche that we as a nation repeated those acts, and still try to justify them. Similarly it is because the Tiger atrocities make an appeal to a certain part of the Tamil psyche that the LTTE became and continues to be predominant within the Tamil movement.

There is an old Hebrew saying: “let them kill you but never cross the line”. Both our nations, both our peoples crossed the line, not once but repeatedly and permitted others to do so in their name. Often we justified such action as necessary and occasionally applauded them as glorious. These Lion and Tiger mentalities, constantly reinforcing each other had created a Sri Lanka without Sri Lankans, and a nascent Eelam which enslaves Tamils. Extremism is not only destructive; it is also and primarily self-destructive.

The Boomerang Effect

When Velupillai Pirapaharan decided to ambush the ‘Four Four Bravo’ unit, it is unlikely that he thought this attack would bring him such rich dividends. If the Jayawardene government acted with even an iota of intelligence the subsequent tragedies would have been averted. It is still far from certain why President Jayawardene made the fateful decision to bring the bodies of the 13 soldiers to Colombo. It is known that in making this decision the President acted against the advice of several of his ministers including his own Prime Minister, who with his intimate knowledge of Colombo warned about a possibility of an outbreak of violence. Sirisena Cooray in his biography of Ranasinghe Premadasa recounts that in response to urgent warnings by Mr. Premadasa and himself (in his capacity as the Mayor of Colombo) Mr. Jayawardene agreed not to bring the bodies to Colombo; the next day at a wedding at the Shalika Hall he learned from a visibly upset Mrs. Jayawardene that the bodies are to be brought to Colombo after all. The rest is history.

Perhaps Mr. Jayawardene’s own verdict of his infamous march to Kandy against the Banaranaike Chelvanayagam Pact is applicable here as well lack of wisdom, lack of foresight, lack of courage. Perhaps Mr. Jayawardene succumbed to the sin of pride, of Hubris that the Greeks were so familiar with (the UNP at this time was on the top of the world, flushed with its own successes, perhaps also blinded by them). If so Nemesis was not long to follow. For President Jayawardene, Black July marked the beginning of the end. He followed that one monumental mistake with two more, the unjust proscription of the JVP and the amendment which drove the democratic Tamil leaders from parliament. From then on it was all the way downhill, for the regime, the President and the country.

An event can happen like a bolt from the blue. But often it is the result of a long period of gestation, which is rarely seen and understood as such. Just as the Dharmapala ideology enabled the Sinhala Only in 1956 and the first anti-Tamil riot, the Cyril Matthew propaganda enabled the Black July. For several years fears were being aroused among the Sinhalese, fears about exams and university admissions, about jobs and advancements (I remember being told after my O Levels that it was my duty as a Sinhalese to study medicine and become a doctor, as my patriotic contribution to the struggle to prevent Tamil predominance in the medical profession; incidentally this charge of disproportionate representation in the professions such as medicine, engineering and law was omnipresent in the anti-Semitic propaganda in Germany, prior to the assumption of power by the Nazis). That propaganda campaign (which was extremely popular with the bilingual Sinhala middle class) was part of the pre-history of the Black July. The political (both UNP and SLFP), social and religious elite sowed the seeds of which Black July was the bloody harvest.

The Welikade Massacres

The cold blooded and gruesome massacre of Tamil prisoners in the Welikada jail by a group of Sinhala prisoners with the collusion of the prison authorities, not just on one but two occasions, is one of the worst pages in this darkest chapter in the post-Independence history of Sri Lanka.

Martin Luther once warned that ‘Sir Mob’ does not make distinction between the guilty and the innocent. If one takes the 13 soldiers incident, those who were guilty of that attack eventually benefited while those who were innocent suffered death and destruction, thanks to the Black July. Among the victims of the Welikade massacre were confirmed practitioners of non-violence such as the well known Gandhian social activist Dr. Rajasundaram. As M Nithyanandan, a survivor of the massacre recalled many years later: “While they were breaking our gate to enter into the dormitory, Dr.Rajasuntharam went up to them and talked. At that time he was only wearing a waist cloth sarong and was without a shirt on his back. He talked to them and I was able to hear him asking them, “Aiye mallee oya uppita gahanda ennae?” (Why younger brother, you came to beat us?) Before he could complete his sentence, one fellow gave a blow on his head by a length of a thick iron rod. No sooner the fatal blow landed on his head, his skull broke and blood burst profusely from scalp as if though flowing out from a pipe. He fell down and that was it. Blood was seen to spurt several feet….” (Asian Tribune 26.7.2004). It is one of those ironies of life and history that those who die of violence are not necessarily those who practice violence.

The Welikada massacre (or rather massacres) was symptomatic of the mindless violence that engulfed the county in those dark July days. None of the victims of this civilisational crime were members of the LTTE, the perpetrators of the 13 soldier attack. In fact many of the victims, had they been alive, would have later either been killed by the Tigers or gone the route of Douglas Devananda. This is true even of the famous Kuttimani. In a recent interview to the Asian Tribune about the Welikade massacres (Douglas) “Devananda revealed that Thangathurai, Kuttimani and others told that it was Prabakaran who betrayed them and the police was able to wait in ambush for them at Manalkadu only on the information given by Prabakaran. Kuttimani was so furious and he was never prepared to forgive Prabakaran for his act of betrayal. He was telling everyone that he wanted to apply for bail and go to India or anywhere in the world and kill Prabakaran and return back to the jail. For him when he was at Welikade, killing of Prabakaran was the only goal before he died, as he was sentenced to death. Every minute he was thinking of taking revenge by killing Prabakaran. Whenever Captain Kotalawela – that time he was only a Captain—visited the Welikade prison to talk to the political prisoners, Kuttimani use to appeal to him to arrange some sort of a bail for him to leave the prison for a few days so that he could accomplish his mission of killing Prabakaran for betraying him and his fellow Tamil prisoners who were dedicated to noble goal of achieving Tamil Eelam through the TELO group” (Asian Tribune 30.7.2005 ). According to survivors (including Mr. Devananda, Mr. Kuttimani’s eyes were gouged out and his tongue was cut off by his murderers while he was still alive).

One of the ring leaders of the massacres were none other than Gonawala Sunil, who was jailed for raping a 16 year old girl and pardoned by President Jayawardene in accordance with a request by Ranil Wickremesinghe (Gonawala Sunil was a well known supporter of Mr. Wickremesinghe, who today is the Tigers’ Best Friend in the South). As another survivor of the massacres Gnanapiragasam Gnanasekeram recalled: “On the evening of 24 July 1983, we heard commotion in the front gate of our prison. We understood that a big crowd marched from the Kanette cemetery to attack the Tamil prisoners and we heard reports of gun fire and later after sometime it died down. We were told that the security personnel who stood guard outside the prison gate fired warning shots to chase the mob that came to attack us. On 25th, our cells were not open for the usual airing at 10 O’clock in the morning. The doors were kept under lock. Suddenly we heard commotions and sound of wailing and people in hundreds running up and down. I put my face to the cell bars and peeped. I identified one of the person leading the mob as Sepala Ekanayake, the air plane hijacker. I saw another who came with him having a bunch of keys. They had come in by opening the main door and the passage door. I saw another person who was not a prisoner, but later I learnt that he was a notorious underworld character Gonawala Sunil, who was actually leading the attack” (Asian Tribune 23.5.2004).

Twenty two years later, the tragedy continues. The Tigers, who became predominant thanks to the Black July, have imposed a reign of terror on the very people they are supposed to liberate. And the Sinhalese are preparing to enact on the religious front the same criminal madness they enacted on the ethnic front in 1956, 1973 and 1983. Once again a segment of the political, religious, social and intellectual elite and pinion makers are trying to create a fear psychosis in the country, using the conversion issue. One of the main lessons of Black July is that no country can be kept undivided only by the will of the majority and that to prevent the bifurcation/fragmentation of a country the freely given consent of the minorities is essential, a necessary precondition. While the Tigers are repeating vis-à-vis the Muslims the very same mistakes we made with the Tamils, we Sinhala Buddhists are enthusiastically planning to repeat with Sinhala Chrsitians our earlier mistakes with Tamils. Thus the Tigers are impeding the creation of Tamil Eelam while the Sinhalese are undermining the unity of Sri Lanka. Perhaps like in some Greek tragedy this is a divine punishment on two communities who refuse to learn, and who are all too willing to give full reign to the subhuman within their national souls….