ABSTRACT
Sri Lanka had been a British colony, attaining independence in 1948. That gave the floor to an increasing orientation towards policies of an aggressive State nationalism based on a fundamentalist Buddhist-Sinhala identity. Sri Lanka was, and continues to be, a plural society, which could roughly be described as consisting of the mainly Hindu Tamils who could trace their roots in India within a few generations, and those who claimed a much longer Sri Lankan ancestry, Sinhala speakers who are mainly Buddhist, Muslim inhabitants, and Burghers who were of mixed European and Asian ancestry. Areas of primarily Tamil settlement are to the east and north of the island and in the central regions. At first, State policies were confined to ensuring that the Sinhalese were able to enter educational and governmental institutions with greater ease, and organising the resettlement of Sinhalese in primarily Tamil areas, but these reforms began to take on a more aggressive tone. In response to increasing discrimination by the State and harassment by armed forces, Tamil resentment grew and by the early 1970s led to the constitution of, at first, pockets of armed militancy. In July 1983, there were island wide antiTamil pogroms backed by the armed forces of the State in which thousands of Tamils were killed and tens of thousands displaced. Many more Tamil youth joined in the armed struggle movements, which also recruited forcibly, with heavy punishments for perceived disloyalty. While the ethnic cleansing of Sri Lanka continued, a hostile anti-Tamil Muslim stance was engineered by the State, and fissures within Tamil militant movements were also exploited. These intensified when the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) occupied the Tamil areas in the north and east under an Indo-Sri Lankan Accord of July 1987, and attempted to influence Tamil militancy according to its own objectives, primarily against the strongest of the militant movements, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Thus, by the late 1980s, a large part of the Tamil population had experienced forcible displacement, either as a result of State resettlement policies, or as a result of direct attacks on their houses, shops and villages. Refugee camps within Sri Lanka were liable to be searched and suspects were conducted away. Younger Tamils especially were subjected to brutal measures through arrest, detention and torture for indefinite periods, during which many simply disappeared. Many of the Tamil youth had joined militant movements, but became disillusioned with them, while others escaped possible ensnarement in fighting through forced recruitment or extortion. More recently, as reserves of adult men and women
have become scarcer, an increasing number of children are forced to perform service in the LTTE. Although peace initiatives have been made, the conflict recommenced in a similar vein in 1994 and continues today (Hensman, 1993, pp 8-14; Daniel and Thangaraj, 1995, pp 231-40; Hoole, 1993; McDowell, 1996, pp 70-113; Steen, 1993, pp 25-96).
