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Sadly, it is only in the aftermath of September 11th that the cynosure of world attention is on how terrorism can affect rights, freedoms, democracy, civil society, rule of law and economic and social development. Attention the world over is on Camp X-Ray (Guantanamo Bay), the stifling of civil liberties, the harassment of Human Rights activists and organisations by state and non-state actors, and the introduction of draconian emergency regulations which undermine civil liberties and human rights. These however are elements that Sri Lanka has had to contend and grapple with in its post-independence history.
Furthermore, the conceptual linkage between Human Rights and Terrorism on the one hand, and Human Rights and Conflict Resolution and Transformation on the other, is an importance one to make. The UN Commission on Human Rights Resolution 2001/37 condemns all acts, methods and practices of terrorism:
…as acts aimed at the destruction of human rights, fundamental freedoms and democracy, threatening the territorial integrity and security of States, destabilising legitimately constituted Governments, undermining pluralistic civil society and the rule of law and having adverse consequences for the economic and social development of the State.
Post-independence politics and terrorism in Sri Lanka
British colonialism is often cited by many scholars to be the root cause of conflict. However, one should go beyond a monocausal explanation of the conflict, and address the dynamics of Tamil militancy within the contested and multi-faceted socio-political space of Sri Lanka after 1948.
As they did throughout their empire, the British ruled Ceylon by creating an English-speaking elite from amongst the Sinhalese and the Tamils. Their favouritism engendered an opposition which took racial and religious overtones. The majority of those who had been left out of the elite spoke Sinhalese and were Buddhists, and they began to promote a racist notion of Sinhalese superiority as an ‘Aryan race’. After independence it was this Sinhalese-speaking group that gained control of the new state of Sri Lanka, and began to exclude Tamils from higher education, jobs and land mainly by making Sinhala the only official language. Not surprisingly, Tamils resented this discrimination. As the anthropologist Stanley Tambiah has argued, the island's violence is a late-twentieth-century response to colonial and postcolonial policies that relied on a hardened and artificial notion of ethnic boundaries.
This paper argues that denial of Human Rights does not only occur through active repression, but can also come about through the inability of the state to realise the rights of its citizens, especially in the socio-economic domain. Such 'passive violations' also deepens social cleavages, as one can see in the case of Sri Lanka, and enhances the potential, over a period of time, for militant uprisings and violent conflict. Contested access, and the privileging of the few or the majority to political space often creates radical divisions and tensions in societies. Galtung explains this as 'structural violence', situations where injustice, repression, and exploitation are built into the fundamental structures of society, and where individuals or groups are marginalised due to differential access to social resources built into the social fabric of a country.
The beginnings of terrorism in Sri Lanka are inextricably entwined with the activities of the State. In the 30 years from the mid-1940s, successive governments took measures to reduce the number of Tamils in the professions and the public sector. These measures interacted in diverse and complex ways with a potent Sinhala Buddhist exclusivism which gradually became the animating ideology of the Sri Lankan state. Particularly amongst the arriviste, lower caste Sinhalese, the spread of anti-Tamil chauvinism was soon perceived as a promising means of increasing economic opportunity. As time passed, the electoral promise of pandering to this chauvinism tempted even the most cosmopolitan of Sinhalese politicians.
Arguably, the most adverse legislation for Tamils came from the language policy of S.W.R.D Bandaranaike’s government. The introduction of the 1956 ‘Sinhala Only’ Act, which replaced English with Sinhala as the language of official government business, clearly disadvantaged large numbers of Tamils. Its effect was compounded by widespread protests in Tamil areas in which school principals would not allow the teaching of Sinhala while school children refused to study the language.
The final straw for Tamils, however, was the introduction in the early 1970s of communal quotas for university entrance. This led to the exclusion of merit-worthy Tamil students and it was this that set the ethnic powder keg alight. With 'standardisation', it became clear that the Tamils had lost the education and employment opportunities which had conditioned their commitment to a unitary Ceylon in the first place. Large numbers of young Tamils came to the conclusion that their socio-economic aspirations could only be fulfilled within a separate Tamil state.
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Sanjana
Sanjana Hattotuwa is a Rotary World Peace Scholar presently pursuing a Masters in International Studies from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The views expressed here are his own. He can be contacted at hatt@wow.lk.
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Comments
Insightful! curtis star | Oct 8th, 2003
I would like to applaud Sanjana Hattotuwa on her insightful piece delving into the causes of terrorism in SriLanka.
She approaches the subject matter with sincerity and honesty and makes it evidently clear to us, the forces and influences that single handedly planted the seeds of rebellion and chaos in the form of the LTTE.
If only Sri Lankan politicians could be as honest with themselves then this war would have been over many years ago.
Well done Sanjana!
Curtis
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