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Ethnic groups in Sri Lanka have been at war since 1983. The war is dominantly ethnic in its construction but not genocidal in a strict sense of the definition of the term, in that the conflict or war is not directed toward the elimination of a population on ethnic or racial grounds. However, the passions of the war are fueled in an ideology of nationalism, given greater impetus through religious values that are one major basis for ethnic distinction. This ethnic distinction took on a destruction of genocidal quality not dissimilar from other conflicts of a genocidal character, in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, and increasingly in other parts of Africa.

The war in Sri Lanka has affected the lives of all communities in Sri Lanka. These include the major parties to the conflict, the dominant Sinhala-speaking largely Buddhist population (some two-thirds of the island's population) located mainly in the fertile central, western, and southern coastal zones of the island, and the Tamil-speaking, mainly Hindu, population (less than one-third of the total population) who live in the dry northern and eastern parts of the island. Both populations have significant minorities of Christians (mainly Catholic, but also Protestants). There is an important minority of Muslims who are mainly Tamilspeaking and these are found in communities throughout the island. They have been caught up in the fighting, sometimes the victims of violence from both Buddhist Sinhala and Hindu Tamils.

All of these populations have a history in the island stretching far back into precolonial times. Both Sinhala Buddhists and Hindu Tamils make claim to the island as their indigenous heritage and the often furious debate involving archaeological and other evidence is very much a part of the enduring crisis, legitimating the rival claims of the warring parties. However, the grounds for the war were largely established in recent colonial history starting with the arrival of the Portuguese in the early fifteenth century and ending with Dutch occupation, and from the late eighteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century, with the British. The political and economic changes that occurred in the island in these colonial periods and in the postcolonial aftermath created the structures within which the ethnic crisis and war of the early twenty-first century took form.

In the course of twenty years of open ethnic hostilities in Sri Lanka official statistics indicate that some sixty thousand individuals have lost their lives on both sides of the Sinhala/Tamil ethnic divide. Many of the deaths have been among Sri Lanka military and among combatants in various Tamil guerrilla groups, but especially the commanding Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Civilian populations and particularly Tamil Hindus (but also Tamil Christians and Muslims sometimes as a result of LTTE attacks) have suffered the greatest number of casualties and despair resulting from social, economic, and territorial dislocation and from the deprivations and rigors of confinement and restriction imposed by the ebb and flow of combat.

Sinhalese populations both directly and indirectly have also suffered. A serious spin-off from the intensification of ethnic hostilities and the changing fortunes and uncertainties of the war has been growing civilian unrest among the Sinhala population. A major insurrection organized in the late 1980s by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), also known as the Peoples Liberation Movement, and largely supported by unemployed rural and urban Sinhala youth, activated repressive military and paramilitary organizations of the Sri Lanka state. These, which had assumed much of their character because of the larger ethnic conflict, focused their acutely destructive capacities on the Sinhala civilian population (and not merely JVP supporters). Various clandestine operations by military and paramilitary forces resulted in an extremely high loss of life, which, as of the early 2000s, has received little in the way of open or serious investigation. Although tensions run high in the early twenty-first century, there are indications that the war is drawing to a close.

Ethnic Diversity

The ethnic/religious shape of the conflict and war has a long history of development. Undoubtedly, other forces of a nonethnic or religious character—often of a social class kind—also gave impetus to the struggle. Social-class issues have sustained the war even when ethnic and religious factors have declined in importance.

The hostility of mainly ethnic Sinhala majority toward the Tamil ethnic minority has its roots in colonial and postcolonial history. The ethnic categories and their political significance arose during the course of Western imperial intrusions into the island, known as Ceylon from the colonial era and until 1972, and especially under the British who subdued the entire island with their conquest of Kandy in 1815. Ethnic identity became a marker of cultural and social distinction in a colonial political order whose rigidity that was not typical of Ceylon's past. As various scholars have stressed, terms like "Sinhala" and "Tamil" used in ancient precolonial sources often described ruling lineages and structures of political allegiance that were often very fluid. The kings who defended largely Sinhala-speaking populations during the Western invasions (Portuguese, Dutch, and finally the British) were of Tamil lineage from South India. With colonial rule, ethnic distinctions served bureaucratic and governing interests and the social boundaries described ethnically became far less porous and situationally relative than before. Such ethnic boundaries informed the formation of constituencies of political interest and nationalist resistance leading to Independence in 1947 and the burgeoning of postcolonial nationalism.

Ethnically based political rhetoric of a powerfully nationalist kind further bolstered by appeals to common language and religious affiliation was integral in the formation of political communalism. Moreover, political parties in the postcolonial period expressed a variety of socioeconomic concerns and felt inequalities under cover of debates over ethnicity. The language issue was of supreme importance in the years following independence, when Sinhala (swabasha) became the main language of the state. The policy of Sinhala-only was promulgated by Prime Minister Solomon West Ridgeway Dias (SWRD) Bandaranaike in order to appeal to a largely Sinhalese-speaking peasantry and the lower middle class and working class in the central, western, and southern regions of the island. English, the language of colonialism, was generally seen as a means of exclusion, only available to educated elites and inhibiting the opportunities for employment and upward social mobility of hitherto depressed groups. Tamils were widely perceived as advantaged in the job market (especially in access to the professions and highly prized positions in government bureaucracies) because they were seen as better qualified in their English-speaking abilities (to some degree a legacy of missionary activity in the Tamil north). The postcolonial politics of language intensified ethnic division. Ethnically motivated restrictions on Tamil access to university places (especially in medicine) and to positions in the civil service were a major source of discontent among Tamils from the 1970s.

Anti-Tamil feeling was also apparent in a series of attempts to repatriate to India Tamils who had been brought as indentured laborers to work on the British and later largely Sinhala-owned tea estates in the highland areas of the island. These highly exploited estate workers attracted little help from the larger Tamil population on the island who, as with the dominant Sinhala population, saw themselves as indigenous to the island and distinct in certain cultural and linguistic ways from Tamils in India. A closer feeling of identity between tea-estate Tamils (who were also discriminated against in terms of caste) and the larger Tamil community in Sri Lanka is a late 1990s development and, perhaps, one positive outcome of the ethnic war.

Religious Factors

The misconception among Sinhalese that Sri Lanka was the last refuge of Buddhism was a further factor in the growth of ethnic hostility especially by Sinhala toward Tamils. British rule was regarded as instrumental in the reduction of the preeminence of the Buddhist religion. Sinhala nationalism from the late nineteenth century to the 2000s was largely motivated by a movement of Buddhist revitalization (linked to a reassertion of the value of Sinhala custom) against the effects of colonial domination. This was keenly supported by members of the urban merchant classes situated along the western and southern coasts. The various caste-based communities that formed around members of these classes were and continue to be forceful in the pursuit of Sinhala interests defined in opposition to Tamils. The engagement of religion (specifically Buddhism) to nationalist ethnic allegiance is a key factor in generating the passions of the conflict. It politicized the Buddha clergy, making them central to ethnically defined communal political and economic interest (a legacy of the revitalization movement that paradoxically made a doctrinally other worldly religion acutely this worldly). The assassination in 1959 of Prime Minister Bandaranaike, the chief architect of Sinhala ethnic nationalism, by a member of the Buddha clergy, is significant in this regard. In 1972 Bandaranaike's widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the then-elected prime minister, declared Buddhism to be the national religion.

Communalist rioting and killing of an ethnic kind was gathering force in Sri Lanka through to the early 1980s. Major attacks against ethnic Tamils occurred in 1947 soon after its independence, in 1956 and 1958, and there were incidents throughout the 1960s. The 1970s were full of ethnic tension and the capital, Colombo, as well as other urban centers became increasingly subject to curfews in order to dampen any ethnic disturbances. Ethnic tensions, especially in the south (a powerful region of Sinhala nationalism), precipitated a form of ethnic cleansing. Minority Tamil populations went to Tamil areas in the large urban centers such as Colombo. The participation of Sinhala in Tamil Hindu festival events—a feature of religious life in some centers in the south (and also in the Colombo areas)—declined and eventually stopped. The increasingly greater divisions of ethnicity that appeared in everyday social life heightened communal divisions.

All came to a head in August 1983 when a unit of Sinhalese soldiers was ambushed near the sacred Buddhist city of Anuradhapura. Anti-Tamil riots spread through major urban centers but were the most fierce in Colombo. There were attacks on middle-class Tamil residential areas but perhaps the strongest were in the abject shanty communities of the poor. Sinhalese attacked their Tamil neighbors, many of them refugees from the tea estates. Sinhalese thugs roamed the streets. Government authorities were slow to react and there were many stories of Sinhalese police standing by as atrocities were committed. Suggestions of government complicity were strong, as were rumors that President Jayawardena's conservative United National Party government had instigated the rioting as a type of pogrom. There is some evidence that gangs of thugs were bussed to Tamil zones (violence having a long history in political party rivalry). Indeed, prior to the rioting, serious threats urging Tamil independence had been directed at the then relatively small LTTE guerrilla movement and the Tamil population as a whole. The riots blazed for four days. Official estimates of Tamil deaths are in the vicinity of 300, although other estimates are far greater. There is only one recorded instance of a Sinhala death, a person fleeing rioters. Approximately 300,000 Tamils living in Sinhala-dominated areas fled their homes. The start of the ethnic war that has consumed Sri Lanka and in which Tamil civilians have been the greatest victims can be traced to these events of 1983.

Socioeconomic Factors

Violent nationalism of a genocidal kind can generally be shown to have its roots in socioeconomic crises. There was growing unemployment in Sri Lanka partly as a consequence of the liberalizing and opening up of a hitherto relatively closed economy. Sri Lanka was one of the first countries to apply structural adjustment policies recommended by the World Bank and the IMF. Liberalization of the economy was accompanied by a paring down of state-supported welfare services, the laying off of staff in state bureaucracies (a major employer), and the winding down of state industries and their privatization. These changes seemed to coincide with the increase in ethnic tensions that were further exacerbated by the Jayawardena government's intensification of a populist rhetoric promoting Sinhala Buddhist nationalism.

The Role of Nationalist Rhetoric

Much of the discussion regarding the violence toward Tamils by ethnic Sinhalese populations has rightly emphasized its similarity with ethnic nationalism elsewhere, especially in Europe. Scholars discovered parallels with Nazi Germany and blamed the invention of a tradition of postcolonial government-sponsored Sinhala history narratives (which drew on Western constructions of the colonial period). Powerful criticisms were made of those nationalist arguments that asserted a continuity of ancient historical experience into the present; for example, that contemporary violence was a modern manifestation of ancient enmity between Sinhala and Tamil or was the latest instance of a long cycle of revenge. The essentialism and primordialism of such arguments were attacked not only because they were empirically inaccurate but also because they displaced responsibility for the destruction and suffering away from the contemporary state and its ruling interests. The hatred that was unleashed was the result of the constructions and falsehoods of modernity. The inventions of ethnic nationalism on both sides (for the rhetoric of Tamil nationalists paralleled, if in distinct ways, those of the Sinhala) encouraged sentiments that gave emotional force to the destruction.

Perhaps the politics of ethnic hatred and exclusion and extermination in modern times carries a potent hierarchical force. But in Sri Lanka this potential gathered much energy through the mythologies of nationalist rhetoric as this found a degree of acceptance in everyday religious and ritual practices. In other words, a nationalist argument of hierarchy—that the Tamil others should exist in a generally subordinate relation to Sinhala—was more evident given the nature of the mythological sources of Sinhala nationalism. The ethnic violence during the rioting in 1983, as well as the violence of the ensuing war involving attacks on Tamil civilian populations, often took a marked hierarchical form. Incidents were recorded of victims being forced to submit their bodies after the manner of Tamil victims before Sinhala heroes of the past. Some of the fury of the destruction, the radical disordering, often dismemberment of victims and fragmentation of their possessions, carried the disordering passion of a ritual process restructuring of person and world. In many respects the direction of the ethnic war as it developed in terms of strategy and in the control and occupation of territory assumed symbolic values appropriate to the nationalist mythologies that gave it impetus. Leading politicians, including the president, and military commanders not only appealed to the ideas conveyed in ancient mythology but to a degree came to live and act them out.

The symbolic values born of nationalist discourse that have framed both ethnic conflict and war continue to have force into the 2000s. To some extent Sinhala often appear to be imprisoned in their dialectic even though there is an urgency among many sections of the population to break free. There is clear evidence that the urban and rural poor who have borne the greatest brunt of the tragedies of the war have grown tired of nationalist rhetoric. But it is still engaged by elites and this has complicated efforts by international groups (the Norwegians especially) to broker a settlement. Such an observation demands a stress on the social and economic lineaments underpinning the conflict, the almost total lack of trust that has developed between the warring parties notwithstanding.

There have been numerous shifts in elite formation, especially in relation to liberalization and contemporary globalization. To some extent this has driven an anxiety to achieve a settlement to the war, and was evident in the political tussle, given wide global media coverage, between the recently defeated prime minister and the elected president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, the daughter of Bandaranaike whose family is from the upper echelons of the still largely Kandyan-based ruling groups. The prime minister was closely associated with urban business and merchant groups with substantial local and international interests in peace. The general mood for peace was for a limited time encouraged by the U.S.–driven war on terrorism. This also produced a climate necessary for the highly successful guerrilla movement of the LTTE to come to the negotiating table. But this impetus to peace started to slow and became further hampered by the concern of powerful Sinhala elite groups to maintain a political and economic grip on the island, which the nationalist discourse they encouraged initially facilitated. It is the social dynamics of this elite (Sinhala and Tamil), many members of which have their roots in the colonial past and have spread their influence internationally (as a function of migration, some forced as a consequence of the war), that holds the much of the key to understanding the durability of the war and the persistence of suffering for all communities.

Conclusions

As the dominant population and in control of the machinery of power of the Sri Lanka government, much of the responsibility for reconciliation rests with Sinhala leaders. They, perhaps, have become weakened in responsibility with the growth in power of the LTTE. Overall, all sectors of Sri Lanka society have become subordinated to the logic of war in itself and this has driven other nationalist discourses among Tamil Hindus and the minority Muslim population alike. These paradigms in their own particular histories enlivened by the horrors of war, are making moves toward a peaceful solution.

The result of the conflict has had enormous polarizing effects on the society of Sri Lanka, creating a degree of division that was more imagined than real in the years leading to the war. The war has caused much death and suffering, which sometimes appeared to have genocidal ingredients. However, to label the events "genocidal" would be to indulge in a discourse that is part of the inflammatory rhetoric often used by members of the warring parties to justify the perpetration of violent acts.

SEE ALSO Death Squads; Ethnic Cleansing; Ethnic Groups; India, Modern; Nationalism; Refugees; Religion

Bruce Kapferer