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Sri Lanka The Armed Forces after Independence
The advent of independence and dominion status in 1948
brought with it a series of changes in the designation and legal
basis for the armed forces. In 1949 the legislature passed a bill
authorizing the creation of the Royal Ceylon Army, Royal Ceylon
Navy, and Royal Ceylon Air Force. The army was formed in October
of that year, and the navy and air force were established in 1950
and 1951, respectively. These developments brought substantial
changes at the highest levels of command, establishing an
independent military force in the hands of an indigenous
government for the first time in more than 100 years. At the
level of individual units, however, the military order
established by the British remained largely unchanged; the
officers who took over as the force commanders had received their
training under the British and, in many cases, in military
academies in Britain. The basic structure of the colonial forces
was retained, as were the symbolic trappings--the flags, banners,
and regimental ceremonies (the Duke of Gloucester continued to
serve as the honorary colonel of the Light Infantry until 1972).
In the early years following independence, military affairs
received a relatively low priority; external security was
guaranteed by a mutual security arrangement with Britain, while
the function of internal security was usually left to the police.
In this period, the armed forces served a largely ceremonial
function, providing honor guards for state visits and
occasionally helping to maintain public order. From 1949 to 1955,
military expenses took up between 1 and 4 percent of the national
budget (as compared with 20 percent for India and 35 to 40
percent for Pakistan in the same period), and the regular forces
comprised only about 3,000 officers and enlisted personnel. (This
represented a significant drop from the wartime high of 12,000,
some of whom had been transferred into the reserve forces).
Even without sophisticated weaponry and training, this token
military force was able to conduct the immigration-control and
antismuggling operations that formed the bulk of its security
missions in the 1950s and 1960s. Growing ethnic tensions after
1956 spawned a number of public disturbances in which the army
was called to aid the civil powers, but these were largely local
and small-scale events that offered no opportunity for
traditional military operations. When the leftist Janatha
Vimukthi Peramuna made its bid for power in April 1971, it
confronted an army totally without combat experience and lacking
the training necessary to deal with a large-scale insurgency
(see Sri Lanka - The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
, this ch.).
In the wake of the 1971 insurrection, the government began to
cope with some of the more glaring deficiencies of the armed
forces. It immediately initiated a campaign to increase the size
of each of the three services. In addition, the troops were
reorganized to reflect the new concern with internal subversion;
in 1972 the army was divided into area commands, and individual
battalions were reinforced with larger rifle companies and
additional support companies. Training in this period tended to
focus on counterinsurgency and jungle warfare. At the same time,
because of the army's greater operational commitments, collective
training was suspended entirely for a year, and then resumed only
at the platoon level.
Despite these reforms, the armed forces were once again
unprepared for the outbreak of ethnic and political violence that
shook the nation in 1983
(see Sri Lanka - The United National Party Returns to Power
, ch. 1). This time, the military leadership was faced
with a more complex set of problems, for the conflict threw into
question not only the force's readiness, but also its reliability
as a defender of public order. In responding to the anti-Tamil
rioting that broke out in July 1983, the army was widely accused
of failing to restrain the Sinhalese mobs and of actively
participating in acts of intimidation, arson, and murder against
the civilian population. A 1983 report issued by the
International Commission of Jurists documents instances of army
soldiers "going on the rampage," burning Tamil homes, and
indiscriminately killing civilians in retaliation for Tamil
militant attacks on army patrols.
Such reports played a major role in exacerbating the ethnic
conflict and in fostering support for the Tamil Tigers among the
Tamil civilian population. The perception of the armed forces as
the ethnic army of Sinhalese nationalism stemmed from a number of
sources. First, beginning in the early 1960s, the government
adopted a military recruitment program that deliberately favored
Sinhalese candidates
(see Sri Lanka - Structure and Administration of the Armed Forces
, this ch.). A force that had originally contained a
disproportionately high number of minorities (especially Tamils
and Burghers) came to be more than 95 percent Sinhalese by the
early 1980s. Furthermore, the role of political and military
leaders during the 1983 rioting suggested that the anti-Tamil
violence of the security forces was receiving sympathy, if not
outright support, at high levels. For several days after the
rioting began, President Jayewardene refrained from any public
condemnation of the violence. When he did finally speak out, it
was to denounce the Tamil insurgents and the forces of
separatism. Military leaders were similarly slow to call to
account those soldiers responsible for atrocities.
In the face of a growing Tamil insurgency, the armed forces
remained seriously understrength. The army's fighting force
nominally consisted of five regiments, each consisting of one
regular and two volunteer battalions. In fact, only one of these
regiments had the full complement of volunteers, and these
recruits were poorly trained and equipped. The regular forces
themselves were below nominal staffing levels, and navy and air
force personnel were frequently deployed to fill up the infantry
ranks. Understaffing similarly plagued the signal, armored, and
engineering units and hampered their support missions.
New and unaccustomed functions also impeded the Sri Lankan
troop performance response. With the sudden growth of the Tamil
separatist movement in the early 1980s, the role of the armed
forces evolved from civil patrol to antiterrorism and eventually
to counterinsurgency. The army and the Special Task Force of the
police played the central role in these operations, launching
attacks against suspected Tamil insurgent bases and rounding up
Tamil men for questioning. The navy assisted with coastal patrols
to interdict arms shipments from south India, and the air force
was involved in transport and supply. Despite the creation of the
Joint Operations Command in 1985, the coordination of antiinsurgent operations continued to be poor. During this period,
the government failed to provide an effective strategy for
isolating the insurgents and securing the Tamil civilian
population.
By 1986 the insurgent movement had gained enough support to
seize control of the entire Jaffna Peninsula. For more than a
year, the armed forces in the area were confined to short
ventures in the immediate vicinity of their base camps. Finally,
spurred on by the threatened formation of a Tamil "Eelam
Secretariat," the government launched an assault to regain the
peninsula
(see Sri Lanka - The Tamil Insurgency
, this ch.). The offensive was
preceded by a two-month fuel embargo to limit the mobility of the
insurgents. Then, in May 1987, the armed forces began "Operation
Liberation," a coordinated land, sea, and air attack involving
3,000 troops, the largest single force ever deployed by the Sri
Lankan government. While air force helicopter gunships and
fighter-bombers targeted known rebel strongholds, the army, under
cover of artillery shelling, moved out of its camps in armored
vehicles and expanded its area of operations. The task force
gradually eliminated major Tamil bases along the northern coast
with the assistance of gunfire from Sri Lankan naval vessels, and
by the first week of June, succeeded in driving most of the
insurgents into the city of Jaffna.
Because an assault on Jaffna itself would involve large-scale
urban fighting that would cause numerous civilian casualties, the
Indian government interposed its objections to the forthcoming
offensive. Faced with a threat of Indian armed intervention on
behalf of the insurgents, the Sri Lankan government declared a
successful end to the operation. The Indo-Sri Lankan Accord that
followed provided for Indian troops to supervise the disarming of
the insurgents in the north, and the Sri Lankan armed forces
accordingly took up positions in the southern and eastern parts
of the island. When Tamils resumed armed assaults in September
1987, the security forces returned to the antiterrorist
activities that had been their primary function before 1985.
Data as of October 1988
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