‘We Created The LTTE’

• Presentation Before Lessons Learned And Reconciliation Comm.

By K. Godage

I have written extensively on the CFA, in fact I called it a “sell out” in an article published a few days after it was signed. The people of this country should be eternally grateful to President Rajapaksa for having withstood all manner of pressures and threats and wiped out Prabhakaran and the LTTE; had that government, which entered into the CFA not been removed and had the PTOMS not been declared ultra-vires, this country would not only have been divided after a few years but even our hill country may have been annexed by Eelam, which may have later voted to become a part of Tamil Nadu! So we do owe a great debt of gratitude to the President for had he caved in to the enormous Western pressure that they brought to bear on him we would have been finished.
I wish today to share with you my thoughts not on the CFA but on the cause of the conflict – the principle issue of bad relations between our two main communities. I should perhaps introduce myself for what I have to say would then be in context as it were. I was born and bred in Wellawatte where my parents owned some six houses, of them four were tenanted by Tamil families, so my association with Tamil people of our land dates back to my childhood, so much so that the little Tamil I now speak goes back to my childhood. It has indeed been a painful past for the Tamil people of our land; It has been a 100 years since Ponnambalam Ramanathan and his brother Arunachalam sought parity of status for the two communities, claiming absurdly and ludicrously that the two communities were the founders of the island country and that the two communities should be treated as equals;  their position was taken over by G.G. Ponnambalam and later by S.J.V. Chelvanayagam.
Even before British times the Tamils of Lanka have sought to maintain their separate identity, religion and culture. This communal issue surfaced in the first decade of the 20th century and has been with us ever since. This issue manifested itself in many forms, first in the form of employment in the British administration; the Christian missionaries had establish English language schools extensively in the peninsula; this served a dual purpose, it helped them to find  manpower to run the administration, it also helped the British policy of divide and rule. The large numbers of Tamils at every level of the Public Service served to create envy and jealousy among the Sinhalese. It must also be stated here that the Tamils of Lanka were not a monolith, the Vellala elites such as Ponnambalam Ramanathan were totally opposed for instance to the granting of Universal Suffrage to the Tamil people as they were of the view that low caste Tamils would be empowered.
Ramanathan wrote to the Colonial Secretary protesting the decision. There was also an instance where some schools of non Vellalas were set on fire. As stated earlier though they were a minority; they sought parity of status with the Sinhala majority claiming that the Tamils were together with the Sinhalese, the “founding peoples of the country.” This is what inspired G.G. Ponnambalam’s 50-50 demand. There is no denying the fact that these Tamil leaders made a significant contribution to the misery of their own people. But for a short period during the D.S. Senanayake government they never sought to cooperate with the government. These Tamil leaders never sought to work with the Sinhalese and forge a Ceylonese identity, this attitude resulted in an ever widening gap between the two communities.
We should of course flag the fact that Prime Ministers Bandaranaike and Dudley Senanayake did seek to settle this issue but were thwarted by so called Buddhist monks who were racists, such as Talpawila Seelawansa, Baddegama Wimalawansa and Mapitigama Buddharakkita who knew not, and practised not fundamental Buddhist values such as Karuna or Meththa leave alone tolerance and unconditional love for our fellow beings as preached by the Buddha, they and the likes of F.R. Jayasuriya and K.M.P. Rajaratne were absolute racists and our political leaders capitulated to them.  If only we had settled this issue either on the basis of the Banda-Chelva pact or the Dudley-Chelva pact our country would indeed have been a much respected, developed country today.
1956 was indeed a watershed year for the Tamil citizens of our country, for the ‘Sinhala Only Act’ virtually shut out our Tamil citizens from government employment, on which they almost wholly depended. It was only in 1978, 22 years afterwards that Tamil was also made an official language but even now a Tamil  citizen even in most parts of Colombo cannot transact business in Tamil at a post office leave alone  make a statement in Tamil at a police station in Colombo city leave alone elsewhere in the country. They were persistently discriminated against especially in the field of employment and education (the standardization system affected Tamil youth, this was considered to be unfair, discriminatory and the result of the dominance of the majority Sinhalese). It was these youth who joined the insurgency movement.
Yes our Tamil citizens have undergone and are undergoing immense hardship, we need to reach out to them. It is because we have not, that the Vaddukoddai Resolution came about 20 years after 1956 and the insurrection followed.
The 1972 Republican Constitution failed to address the genuine grievances of the minority communities and the same error was repeated in the 1978 Constitution. Constitutions that form the basic law of the country should serve the interests of the nation and not the political ideologies of the party that happens to command the requisite majority at that point of time. The United Front government under the leadership of Sirimavo Bandaranaike put the process on the right track when they met at the  Nawa Rangahala to form the Constituent Assembly with the unanimous consent of all political parties then represented in the 1970 Parliament. It then got derailed as the temptation to serve the immediate political interests of the ruling coalition eclipsed the long term interests of the Nation State of Sri Lanka. The so called elitists who framed the 1978 Constitution were not bothered with the constitutional niceties such as a Constituent Assembly, for they with a five sixths majority were only deterred by their inability to indulge in gender engineering making a man a woman and vice versa.
We created the LTTE by our intransigence. We not only discriminated against them but criminal elements indulged in the killing of innocent Tamils in 1958, 1961, 1966, 1971, 1977, burnt the Jaffna Library in 1982 and finally there was the pogrom in 1983. It was indeed quite natural that the world sympathized with them and turned against us after that.
I wish here to state that the government of President J.R. Jayewardene contributed to the misery of the Tamil people in the north by sending in the army to crush the insurrection – We cannot forget the burning of the Jaffna Library — an unbelievable crime committed in a country which claims to be Buddhist and hence places the highest importance on the development of the mind. There were many other acts of violence committed on the civilians in the north. These mindless criminals by their actions only helped the LTTE to mobilize their people to the extent that they were prepared to sacrifice their lives for the cause. The cruelty visited  on the ordinary Tamil citizens of the north by the IPKF is documented in a book titled Satanic Force put out by the LTTE.
To my mind infrastructure development alone will not suffice though it is no doubt important. I have been one who has advocated the diverting of the Mahaweli to the north, for the Tamil people take to agriculture like fish taking to water. The north could be the producer of most of our agricultural needs. They had also the best Cooperatives in the country. Let us encourage entrepreneurship among them and build a new foundation, let us ensure that all our children learn both Sinhala and Tamil along with English of course.
In almost all countries of Western Europe people are taught and speak more than one language. I sincerely believe that all the people in this country are from the same gene bank and we are only separated by language.  So most of all let us reach out to our Tamil brethren in every possible way, empower them and make them feel that this country is as much theirs as it is ours and that they are entitled to dignity, security and to decide on their own destiny to the furthest extent compatible with the security of the country and have a say also in the destiny of our country itself.  Justice must be done and must also be seen to be done. That is a responsibility that rests with the government and us the people in the south. Even if a new constitution is crafted I do hope that there would be a devolution of power, without the subjects of Law and Order and Land.  We could even take a page out of the Indian book and establish a Panchayat Raj as an experiment and empower the people in the North.