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Sri Lanka The Tamil Insurgency
Political and economic conflict between the Sinhalese and
Tamil communities was a problem of growing urgency in the years
following independence. In the face of an expanding Sinhalese
ethnic nationalism, Tamil groups initially expressed their
grievances through legally constituted political channels,
participating in parliamentary debate through the Tamil Congress
and the Federal Party. In the early 1970s however, a number of
events worked to create a new sense of alienation, especially
among Tamil youths, and a new desire to seek redress through
extralegal means. In 1970 the Ministry of Education introduced
quotas for university admission that effectively reduced the
number of places available for Tamil students. As a result, a
contingent of young, educated Tamils was cut off from the
traditional path to advancement and set loose on an economy illprepared to accommodate them.
Tamil interests received another blow in 1971 when the
Constituent Assembly met to draft a new constitution. Federal
Party delegates to the assembly proposed that the new republic be
designed along federal lines to insure a large degree of autonomy
for Tamil areas. In addition, the Tamils hoped to remove the
special status that had been granted to the Sinhala language and
Buddhism. The Constituent Assembly not only rejected both of
these proposals, but even denied the minimal protection to
minorities that had been guaranteed under the Soulbury
Constitution of 1946. The Tamil delegates responded by walking
out of the assembly.
The neglect of Tamil interests in the Constituent Assembly
and the enactment of the new constitution in 1972 marked a
turning point in Tamil political participation. The older
generation of Tamil leaders had been discredited: their activity
in the political process had accomplished little, and the Marxist
JVP insurrection of 1971 had set a new model for political
activism
(see Sri Lanka - The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
, this ch.). Two new
groups emerged as an expression of the growing alienation and
frustration in the Tamil community. The first, the Tamil United
Front, was a coalition of Tamil interest groups and legal parties
united by an urgent call for Tamil autonomy. The group espoused
nonviolent means to achieve its goals--demonstrations, strikes,
and roadblocks--and yet it offered tacit support to other, more
confrontational tactics. The second of the new groups, the Tamil
New Tigers (TNT), abandoned the political process altogether and
geared itself for violence. The TNT was founded in 1972 by
Velupillai Prabhakaran, an eighteen-year-old school dropout who
was the son of a minor government official. Both the name and the
emblem of the new group included the tiger, the traditional
symbol of the ancient Tamil kingdoms and one that clearly opposed
the lion symbol of Sinhalese nationalism. Despite this obvious
ethnic affiliation, the TNT publicly espoused a Marxist ideology
and claimed to represent the oppressed of all ethnic groups.
In July 1975, the TNT gained wide public attention with the
assassination of the Tamil mayor of Jaffna, who had ordered the
police to open fire on a Tamil rights demonstration outside city
hall. Except for this act of violence, the activities of the TNT
in this period are largely undocumented, and little evidence
exists of widespread public support for its violent methods.
Moreover, the prospects for a political solution had improved by
1976; the general elections scheduled for 1977 offered hope that
the fiercely pro-Sinhalese Bandaranaike government could be
ousted and replaced by the more moderate United National Party.
At the local level, the Tamil United Liberation Front, a
political party, spawned by the Tamil United Front, launched a
major campaign for a separate state in Tamil-dominated Northern
and Eastern provinces.
The victory of the United National Party and the emergence of
the Tamil United Liberation Front as the leader of the
parliamentary opposition seemed to give substance to those
political hopes. With the enactment of a new constitution,
however, it became clear that no major party could turn its back
on Sinhalese nationalism. In the Constitution of 1978, as in the
previous one, Sinhala remained the sole official language,
Buddhism retained "the foremost place" under law, and federal
autonomy was denied the Tamil areas. The political
disillusionment that emerged in the early 1970s increased after
the 1977 elections and gained added impetus after the anti-Tamil
riots of 1981 and 1983. A progressive radicalization of the Tamil
population led to a growth in the size and level of activity of
militant groups, and the insurgency emerged as a growing threat
to the power of the government.
Data as of October 1988
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