Dear Orion,

I as a Sinhalese feel that this island of ours is for you and I to live in, wherever we please. Apparently
you don’t feel the same way. Therein lies the problem.

How can someone colonise their own country?
The Tamils can’t do it.
The Muslims can’t do it.
The Malays can’t do it.
The Sinhalese can’t do it.
Nor can any other group who are citizens of Lanka, can do it.

Your perception or the Kandyan/Sinhala perception, as you describe at the beginning of the article, of the British colonialist vs the Kandyan/Sinhala people aptly portrays how the Tamils I mentioned above perceive the Tamil-Sinhala Nations war. That is, the Colonialist push from D.S. Senanayake, the Sinhala Only unconstitutional offensive by SWRD, the”Constitutional” push of Srimavo, The JR Pogroms, Chandrika’s war against the Tamils and the British Colonialist-like criminal offensive of the Rajapaksa administration from 2008 to 2009 and the continuing colonialism of the Tamils. Will the Tamils wait till 2227 to gain their independence from the Sinhalese Colonialist (Like when we say British Colonialist, not all British were colonialists.) only time will tell.

World War II helped the British and other colonial empires grant independence reluctantly. What will help the Tamils, as they perceive it, to get their independence from the Sinhala colonialists? Only time will tell.

Thank you for a grand sweep of the role of violence in Sri Lanka’s politics. I think we need a documentary similar to that done in Indonesia called the Act of Killing; a horrifyingly brilliant piece of work. Here’s an interview with the Director, Joshua Oppenheimer replete with clips that you may find interesting – http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/19/the_act_of_killing_new_film

Here’s the trailer: http://youtu.be/tQhIRBxbchU

There’s one sentence in your article that I find problematic though: “Many analysts portray ethnicity as the central theme of the armed conflict[7] that ended in 2009, though ethnicity and culture were used as labels, economics remained the root cause of this conflict.”.

The counter argument is that the left in their inability to understand the ethnic dimensions of the conflict, and resorting solely to an economic analysis, were incapable of forming effective mutually reinforcing political alliances. Similar critiques have been made with relation to the indigenous people in Latin America and the left. In any case if economics was the root cause of the conflict back then I would argue that it plays a subordinate role to ethnicity now. Being disenfranchised due to ethnicity in your own land is far more of a flash point for conflict than economics I would say.

Regards

GTBP

A good article but I would like to present another perspective for your analysis.

“In the 1830s, under the Wastelands Ordinance, the British expropriated the common land of the
peasantry reducing them to extreme poverty”

In fact the British Land Grab and the forests vested about 85% of Lanka’s land in the Crown.

The impact of these land ordinances were uneven, because they were largely limited to the former Kandyan Kingdom (Mendis 1951:166).

The Kandyan Kingdom, in the 17th Century, extended to Elephant Pass in the North (Dutch National
Archive: “During the 17th century the Company was engaged in a war of attrition with the king of Kandy, who had close ties with Ceylon’s Buddhist population. There was a narrow tongue of land at Elephant Pass a fort was built to guard the border with the king’s territory” http://www.atlasofmutualheritage.nl/detail.aspx?page=dpost&lang=en&id=682#tab2)

The British enacted the Crown Land Enforcement Ordinance in 1840 to claim the unoccupied and
uncultivated land in the Kandyan kingdom (Farmer 1957:90- 91).

As a result of this ordinance, 90% of the land in the Kandyan highlands was designated as
land belonging to the British Crown (Herath et al, 1995:77).

The Waste Land Ordinance Act of 1897 (and the Crown Land Encroachment Ordinance in 1840), annexed more lands as crown lands where villagers could no longer claim them according to the new British imposed rules (Roberts 1979:233, Obeysekara 1967: 98-100).

The majority of the Sinhalese villages effectively lost the structural prerequisite of land tenure systems
(Obeysekara 1967:101).

These ordinances also created a large number of landless peasants in the former Kandyan kingdom,
which had held land through customary means but without legal proof. Furthermore, the ‘Land Settlement Ordinance of 1889’ allowed the colonial authorities to sell crown lands at will.

Many villagers in the Kandyan area were deprived of their high lands formally used for chena cultivation or
grazing the cattle (Mendis 1951:85).

These changes to the Kandyan land and service tenure systems disintegrated the old Sinhalese systems
(Codrington 1938:63).

According to the 1946 census on population in the agricultural sector of the island, 40% of the agricultural peasant families found in the former Kandyan Kingdom were landless while there were 26% landless agricultural families recorded in the wet zone (Herath 1995: 79).

You have correctly observed that “The Kandyans were starved into submission. Their land was confiscated. Their dependents were debarred from the fruits of their ancestral wealth. Being forced to live in the jungles and mountains, they had lost their means of livelihood”

You also observe that “Despite the tremendous pressure the colonial state was exerting, the dispossessed peasantry refused to abandon their traditional subsistence holdings and become wage-slaves”

Continuing you observe that “Under a notorious contract labour system, hundreds of thousands of Malaiyaha workers, at the time called ‘Tamil coolies’ were brought in from South India”

In 1881 there were 345,000 indigenous Lanka Tamils (approx) and 345,000 Malaiyaha workers (foreign Indian
Tamils). A near 100% of these Indian Citizens of Tamil ethnicity lived and worked in the Lands previously owned and farmed by the Kandyan Sinhalese.

For purposes of comparison it must be noted that the indigenous Tamil population in 1881 was 345,000
(actually slightly lower) and the act of bringing in Alien Tamil population and settling them in Kandyan lands was equivalent to moving the TOTAL indigenous Tamil population to the Kandyan Kingdom by dispossessing the real owners of their lands and depriving them of their livelihoods.

Given the facts above, don’t you think the “Exclusive Historical Tamil Homeland” concept (which History does not even support) has been the cause of more violence and bloodshed in Sri Lanka than anything else that you have identified?