This is the second article reflecting on a critical point in Sri Lankan history by Ishan P. You can read his first article here: “1983: Two Thousand Years of Tension – The Grizzly”
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The army, now angered, blazed through Jaffna in the most literal sense, setting Thamizh businesses on fire. The blaze through Jaffna was not reported by any newspaper with the same urgency of the LTTE attacks; the only newspaper companies that would write what really happened, for example the Saturday Review based in Jaffna, had been censored by the Sri Lankan government itself months back. The violence thus remained unknown to the Sinhala public.
A little farther south, a mob had swelled into 10,000 people attacking Thamizh stores in Borella, a suburb of the capital Columbo. They had heard of the LTTE attack and went on a hunt, ransacking and razing homes of Thamizhs. The police intervened and dispersed the crowd via means of tear gas, and the mob ran off in other directions. The tear gas hadn’t dampened their zeal, however. Swarms gathered with each fleeing section of the mob, with gang members and Buddhist monks alike joining the rampage in multiple directions.
My father’s aunt (for simplicity’s sake, Aunt D) was among the people who experienced the mob. She was already warned growing up in the 1970s of the dangers of going out into big crowds. There was already a risk of harassment—possibly sexual but mostly verbal—when a young Thamizh girl went out alone into crowded Sinhala areas. Furthermore, my grandfather, who had lived in Sri Lanka his whole life, read and spoke only in Sinhalese for fear of violence, which he witnessed on a man reading a Thamizh newspaper on a bus. Two thugs took him out of the bus at the next stop and beat him near death.
It was things such as this which made the LTTE popular. Back then, they weren’t anything resembling a terrorist organisation, they were a political movement who opposed the ‘Sinhala Only Act’ of 1956 and wanted at the least for Thamizhs to have rights. But the growing violence of certain groups and the army created just enough desperation for more radical and extreme members to gain influence in the party, and they began pulling supporters off the streets using guilt among other things to get them to ‘help’. Young men and many young women came to the newly radicalised group. It was these people that began fighting against the Sri Lankan Army.
When the Sinhala mob came, Aunt D was right in the middle. She had just turned seventeen a mere five days ago. The mob in Borella on the 25th of July came to her family’s house, where some relatives had come to stay. Friends in the Sufi Fellowship neighborhood group they belonged to warned them, the morning of the riots. One friend came with a van, parked around the corner but before any of them could leave, the mob reached their home. The mob was enraged, unquelled by her father’s attempts at reasoning, and throwing stones. The family had to hide in a small bathroom holding the door against the mob. The mob then decided to burn the house and them with it. They thankfully snuck to the back of the house to a room with a door only to the outside, and were not burnt. They were able to wave to their Sinhala neighbour, who after some debate allowed them to hide in their house.
They then headed into Colombo 7, a district protected by the police, who were not associated with the riots to the same degree as the army (who did most of the early stuff), and avoided by the mobs because there were several embassies in that district. They were met with tears by her aunt, who “thought [they] were burnt alive”. The “food was rationed” and they were told to “stay away from windows” because “there [were] people looking”. Their identification and their property records were burnt by the rioters (something which happened to quite a few others) at the behest of the government to ‘reclaim’ land from Thamizhs. They stayed at multiple friends’ houses (some Sinhala). Their friends in the police, part of the government (who were expediting passport application), and the Sufi Fellowship helped them relocate to Philadelphia via London. They left with very little of anything and escaped with passports with “terrible photos” that were express-developed.
This mob systematically targeted Thamizh flats and houses, not even having to search for which houses were Thamizh. Sinhala residents were left untouched as the mob looted and razed their Thamizh neighbours. This knowledge of who lived where was not something the rioters gained magically; it was through voter registration lists. How does one get voter registration lists, you might ask? In 1983, there was not much of a hacking culture, and the thought had not occurred to the zealous mob. There were multiple instances of government ministers convening the mob, and there are witnesses who saw government officials empowering them with the voter lists.
President Jayawardene gave no words of sympathy or comfort to the suffering Thamizh population, calling them ‘northern terrorists’ and stating the need for ‘a new form of terrorism’ to counter it. The government had even issued decrees stating that dead bodies need not be reported, sanctioning Thamizh deaths and exacerbating mob mentality.
Many Sinhalese helped Thamizhs hide. Aunt D told me reassuring stories of Sinhala civilians who shielded Thamizhs from the mob (one group making a human wall around some) and of Sinhala employees who sheltered their Thamizh coworkers.
But the mob and army who blackened July of 1983 created a lasting effect, impacting many people who Aunt D knew. Many suffered mental health problems and illnesses afterwards. But the impact wasn’t just on Thamizhs, Sri Lanka was affected, chiefly Colombo. The Thamizh population owned maybe 80% of the retail trade and about 60% of the wholesale trade. Almost all of that trade had disappeared, leaving shortage and inflation for everyone left. This began a downhill economic slide of Sri Lanka’s economy that worsened with the following Sri Lankan Civil War (1983 – 2009) between the army and the LTTE. There have been plenty of following problems in Sri Lanka leading Aunt D to remark, ‘Every time I think of going back to Sri Lanka, something blows up’ referring to for example the 1996 bombing of the Central Bank and most recently the Easter bombings of 2019—when Muslim radicals bombed multiple churches and hotels, killing a minimum of 269.
Black July has not been forgotten and never should be forgotten. It kicked off the war and kicked out 500,000-800,000 Thamizhs whose families had lived there for decades or even centuries. It killed 3,000 Thamizhs, of whom many were burnt alive or killed in hospice, and approximately 670 women faced sexual assault. It destroyed 18,000 Thamizh homes, 5,000 Thamizh businesses, and damaged property worth $300,000,000 (I shudder to think of the statistics of the following war). The government launched no investigations into the causes (I wonder why?).
Sri Lanka has improved though in recent years– except for debt–and some of my family has even moved back to Sri Lanka.
