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Sri Lanka The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
The leftist Sinhalese Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna drew
worldwide attention when it launched an insurrection against the
Bandaranaike government in April 1971. Although the insurgents
were young, poorly armed, and inadequately trained, they
succeeded in seizing and holding major areas in Southern and
Central provinces before they were defeated by the security
forces. Their attempt to seize power created a major crisis for
the government and forced a fundamental reassessment of the
nation's security needs.
The movement was started in the late 1960s by Rohana
Wijeweera, the son of a businessman from the seaport of Tangalla,
Hambantota District. An excellent student, Wijeweera had been
forced to give up his studies for financial reasons. Through
friends of his father, a member of the Ceylon Communist Party,
Wijeweera successfully applied for a scholarship in the Soviet
Union, and in 1960 at the age of seventeen, he went to Moscow to
study medicine at Patrice Lumumba University. While in Moscow, he
studied Marxist ideology but, because of his openly expressed
sympathies for Maoist revolutionary theory, he was denied a visa
to return to the Soviet Union after a brief trip home in 1964.
Over the next several years, he participated in the pro-Beijing
branch of the Ceylon Communist Party, but he was increasingly at
odds with party leaders and impatient with its lack of
revolutionary purpose. His success in working with youth groups
and his popularity as a public speaker led him to organize his
own movement in 1967. Initially identified simply as the New
Left, this group drew on students and unemployed youths from
rural areas, most of them in the sixteen-to-twenty-five-age-
group. Many of these new recruits were members of lower castes
(Karava and Durava) who felt that their economic interests had
been neglected by the nation's leftist coalitions. The standard
program of indoctrination, the so-called Five Lectures, included
discussions of Indian imperialism, the growing economic crisis,
the failure of the island's communist and socialist parties, and
the need for a sudden, violent seizure of power.
Between 1967 and 1970, the group expanded rapidly, gaining
control of the student socialist movement at a number of major
university campuses and winning recruits and sympathizers within
the armed forces. Some of these latter supporters actually
provided sketches of police stations, airports, and military
facilities that were important to the initial success of the
revolt. In order to draw the newer members more tightly into the
organization and to prepare them for a coming confrontation,
Wijeweera opened "education camps" in several remote areas along
the south and southwestern coasts. These camps provided training
in Marxism-Leninism and in basic military skills.
While developing secret cells and regional commands,
Wijeweera's group also began to take a more public role during
the elections of 1970. His cadres campaigned openly for the
United Front of Sirimavo R. D. Bandaranaike, but at the same time
they distributed posters and pamphlets promising violent
rebellion if Bandaranaike did not address the interests of the
proletariat. In a manifesto issued during this period, the group
used the name Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna for the first time.
Because of the subversive tone of these publications, the United
National Party government had Wijeweera detained during the
elections, but the victorious Bandaranaike ordered his release in
July 1970. In the politically tolerant atmosphere of the next few
months, as the new government attempted to win over a wide
variety of unorthodox leftist groups, the JVP intensified both
the public campaign and the private preparations for a revolt.
Although their group was relatively small, the members hoped to
immobilize the government by selective kidnapping and sudden,
simultaneous strikes against the security forces throughout the
island. Some of the necessary weapons had been bought with funds
supplied by the members. For the most part, however, they relied
on raids against police stations and army camps to secure
weapons, and they manufactured their own bombs.
The discovery of several JVP bomb factories gave the
government its first evidence that the group's public threats
were to be taken seriously. In March 1971, after an accidental
explosion in one of these factories, the police found fifty-eight
bombs in a hut in Nelundeniya, Kegalla District. Shortly
afterward, Wijeweera was arrested and sent to Jaffna Prison,
where he remained throughout the revolt. In response to his
arrest and the growing pressure of police investigations, other
JVP leaders decided to act immediately, and they agreed to begin
the uprising at 11:00 P.M. on April 5.
The planning for the countrywide insurrection was hasty and
poorly coordinated; some of the district leaders were not
informed until the morning of the uprising. After one premature
attack, security forces throughout the island were put on alert
and a number of JVP leaders went into hiding without bothering to
inform their subordinates of the changed circumstances. In spite
of this confusion, rebel groups armed with shotguns, bombs, and
Molotov cocktails launched simultaneous attacks against seventy-
four police stations around the island and cut power to major
urban areas. The attacks were most successful in the south. By
April 10, the rebels had taken control of Matara District and the
city of Ambalangoda in Galle District and came close to capturing
the remaining areas of Southern Province.
The new government was ill prepared for the crisis that
confronted it. Although there had been some warning that an
attack was imminent, Bandaranaike was caught off guard by the
scale of the uprising and was forced to call on India to provide
basic security functions. Indian frigates patrolled the coast and
Indian troops guarded Bandaranaike International Airport at
Katunayaka while Indian Air Force helicopters assisted the
counteroffensive. Sri Lanka's all-volunteer army had no combat
experience since World War II and no training in
counterinsurgency warfare. Although the police were able to
defend some areas unassisted, in many places the government
deployed personnel from all three services in a ground force
capacity. Royal Ceylon Air Force helicopters delivered relief
supplies to beleaguered police stations while combined service
patrols drove the insurgents out of urban areas and into the
countryside.
After two weeks of fighting, the government regained control
of all but a few remote areas. In both human and political terms,
the cost of the victory was high: an estimated 10,000 insurgents-
-many of them in their teens--died in the conflict, and the army
was widely perceived to have used excessive force. In order to
win over an alienated population and to prevent a prolonged
conflict, Bandaranaike offered amnesties in May and June 1971,
and only the top leaders were actually imprisoned. Wijeweera, who
was already in detention at the time of the uprising, was given a
twenty-year sentence and the JVP was proscribed.
Under the six years of emergency rule that followed the
uprising, the JVP remained dormant. After the victory of the
United National Party in the 1977 elections, however, the new
government attempted to broaden its mandate with a period of
political tolerance. Wijeweera was freed, the ban was lifted, and
the JVP entered the arena of legal political competition. As a
candidate in the 1982 presidential elections, Wijeweera finished
fourth, with more than 250,000 votes (as compared with
Jayewardene's 3.2 million). During this period, and especially as
the Tamil conflict to the north became more intense, there was a
marked shift in the ideology and goals of the JVP. Initially
Marxist in orientation, and claiming to represent the oppressed
of both the Tamil and Sinhalese communities, the group emerged
increasingly as a Sinhalese nationalist organization opposing any
compromise with the Tamil insurgency. This new orientation became
explicit in the anti-Tamil riots of July 1983. Because of its
role in inciting violence, the JVP was once again banned and its
leadership went underground.
The group's activities intensified in the second half of 1987
in the wake of the Indo-Sri Lankan Accord. The prospect of Tamil
autonomy in the north together with the presence of Indian troops
stirred up a wave of Sinhalese nationalism and a sudden growth of
antigovernment violence. During 1987 a new group emerged that was
an offshoot of the JVP--the Patriotic Liberation Organization
(Deshapreni Janatha Viyaparaya--DJV). The DJV claimed
responsibility for the August 1987 assassination attempts against
the president and prime minister. In addition, the group launched
a campaign of intimidation against the ruling party, killing more
than seventy members of Parliament between July and November.
Along with the group's renewed violence came a renewed fear
of infiltration of the armed forces. Following the successful
raid of the Pallekelle army camp in May 1987, the government
conducted an investigation that resulted in the discharge of
thirty-seven soldiers suspected of having links with the JVP. In
order to prevent a repetition of the 1971 uprising, the
government considered lifting the ban on the JVP in early 1988
and permitting the group to participate again in the political
arena. With Wijeweera still underground, however, the JVP had no
clear leadership at the time, and it was uncertain whether it had
the cohesion to mount any coordinated offensive, either military
or political, against the government.
Data as of October 1988
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