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Sri Lanka The Riots of July 1983
In July 1983, the most savage communal riots in Sri Lanka's
history erupted. Conservative government estimates put the death
toll at 400-- mostly Tamils. At least 150,000 Tamil fled the
island. The riots began in retaliation for an ambush of an army
patrol in the north that left thirteen Sinhalese soldiers dead.
The army was reputed to have killed sixty Tamil civilians in
Jaffna, but most of the violence occurred in Colombo, where
Sinhalese mobs looked for Tamil shops to destroy. More than any
previous ethnic riot on the island, the 1983 riots were marked by
their highly organized mob violence. Sinhalese rioters in Colombo
used voter lists containing home addresses to make precise
attacks on the Tamil community. From Colombo, the anti-Tamil
violence fanned out to the entire island. The psychological
effects of this violence on Sri Lanka's complex and divided
society were still being assessed in the late 1980s.
Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the communal rioting, a selfevident truth was that the island's history, and the complexity
of its society, had a portentous message for the present:
Sinhalese and Tamil Sri Lankans were fated by history and
geography to coexist in close proximity. This coexistence could
be discordant or amicable, and examples of both could be drawn
from Sri Lanka's history. It was a message, however, whose
meaning was forgotten as the ethnic communities were drawn
increasingly into a vortex of rancor and violence that made the
restoration of harmony a persistently elusive goal for the Sri
Lankan government.
* * *
Informative general histories of Sri Lanka include K.M. de
Silva's A History of Sri Lanka, E.F.C. Ludowyk's A
Short History of Ceylon, Zeylanicus's Ceylon, S.
Arasaratnam's Ceylon, and Chandra Richard de Silva's
Sri Lanka: A History. Source books on medieval history are
Wilhelm Geiger's translations of the Pali chronicles, the
Mahavamsa and Culavamsa, and the comprehensive
The Early History of Ceylon by G.C. Mendis. Highly
informative for the study of modern political events and ethnic
disturbances are S.J. Tambiah's Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide,
and the Dismantling of Democracy, A. Jeyaratnam Wilson's
Politics in Sri Lanka, and Government and Politics in
South Asia by Craig Baxter, Yogendra K. Malik, Charles H.
Kennedy, and Robert C. Oberst. (For further information and
complete citations,
see Sri Lanka -
Bibliography.)
Data as of October 1988
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