Anti-Tamil Pogrom Sets Capital Ablaze

Sets off ‘Black July’ across the island

History, they often say, is not necessarily only what happened; but also what you could and choose to remember. If this is any yardstick for historicity, as well as the importance of remembering right, there’s one red-letter day it would be better not to forget until all its lessons have been learned well so that its root causes are identified and any eventuality never repeated.

Tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities came to a head when militia of a separatist movement – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – ambushed an army patrol and killed 13 Sinhalese soldiers on 23 July 1983. Reprisals for this singular act of violence (often, one such is the flashpoint of a protracted conflict) set Sri Lanka on fire…

Not limited to Colombo but mainly in city centres where the two communities had lived side by side – and at least initially carried out programmatically by state sponsored, endorsed or ignored mobs – retaliation against the largest minority community was targeted, traumatic to behold or hear reports about, and tremendously inimical to the state of the nation in general.

For days – while the government led by President J. R. Jayewardene remained stumm and civil society stunned into silence – scores of citizens systematically as well as sporadically sought out their fellows of a sister ethnicity, to rape, loot and even murder them.

Such was the magnitude and vicious intensity of the bloodletting that the NGO International Committee of Jurists (ICJ) described the pogrom as ‘genocide’ in a December 1983 report.

With the complicity of state actors being contested (for instance, the army stood by in the early days of rioting – although law enforcement later opened fire on looters, prompting another backlash of violence in the city), the military eventually brought the situation under control though a horrific toll had been taken.

An estimated 250 to 300 dead, according to state figures; up to 3,000 people including upcountry Tamils killed; 18,000 establishments destroyed islandwide; and hundreds of thousands of Tamils fleeing the country to safety in the West, leaving in their wake damages to the tune of US$ 300 million and the scars of a lost generation of 150,000 homeless (around 5,000 homes and 8,000 shops were destroyed) – one that would later wage war on the state.

And the worst was yet to come…

The fallout from ‘Black July’ would billow like a mushroom cloud over the nation for the next 26 years – and more; a people torn apart for life by the events of an apocalyptic day.

The fallout from ‘Black July’ would billow like a mushroom cloud over the nation for the next 26 years – and more; a people torn apart for life by the events of an apocalyptic day