Sri Lanka gained independence from Britain in 1948 as theDominion of Ceylon, although the British Royal Navy retained a base there until 1956. In 1972, the country became a republic, adopting the nameSri Lanka. Since this time, the country has experienced several armed conflicts– acivil war, two Marxist uprisings, and other terrorist incidents.
From 1985 to 1989, Sri Lanka responded to violent insurrection with equal violence against the Sinhalese majority as part of thecounterinsurgency measures against the uprising by theMarxistJanatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party.[9] In order to subdue support of the JVP uprising, several acts of cruelty committed by the state were recorded, including the torture and mass murder of school children.[10][11] This repression peaked amongst the Sinhalese population between 1989–90. Approximately 90,000 casualties occurred during between 1971 and 1990, most of whom wereSinhalese male youths.[12]
TheSri Lankan Civil War lasted from 1983 to 2009. In 1986, an American-Tamil social anthropologist atHarvard University stated that acts of terrorism had been committed by all sides during the war, but although all parties in the conflict had resorted to the use of these tactics, in terms of scale, duration, and sheer numbers of victims, the Sri Lankan state was particularly culpable.[13][14][15][16] This was echoed by the Secretary of theMovement for Development and Democratic Rights, anon-governmental organisation, which further claimed that the Sri Lankan state viewed killing as an essential political tool.[17] This had originally prompted the demand for a separate state for minority Tamils calledTamil Eelam in the north of the country,[14][18][19] an idea first articulated byS.J.V. Chelvanayagam in 1976.[20]
Assaults on Tamils for ethnic reasons have been alleged, and the experience of state terrorism by the people ofJaffna has been alleged to have been instrumental in persuading theUnited National Party to increase their hostilities there.[10][21]
Chandrika Kumaratunga was the President of Sri Lanka from 1994 to 2005. In an interview with the British television presenter and news criticDavid Frost, she stated that at the time that her husbandVijaya Kumaranatunga was assassinated, "Sri Lanka had akilling fields, there was a lot of terror perpetrated by the government itself, state terrorism."[22] This statement has been supported by a report released by theAsian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC), a non-governmental organization based inHong Kong and associated with theUnited Nations, which has also claimed that there was widespread terrorism committed by the state during this period.[23]
Following the collapse of peace talks in 2006, human rights agencies such as theAsian Center of Human Rights (ACHR), theUniversity Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR), and pro-LTTE political parties such as theTamil National Alliance claimed that the government of Sri Lanka had unleashed state terrorism as part of its counterinsurgency measures against the rebel LTTE movement.[24][25][26] The Sri Lankan government responded by claiming that these allegations by the LTTE were an attempt by the LTTE to justify their own acts of terrorism.[27]
The ACHR has also stated that following the collapse of the Geneva talks of February 2006, the government of Sri Lanka perpetrated a campaign of state terrorism by targeting alleged LTTE sympathizers and Tamil civilians.[28] A spokesman forHuman Rights Watch was of the opinion that "the Sri Lankan government has apparently given its security forces a green light to usedirty war tactics."[29] International intervention in Sri Lanka was requested by Tamil sources to protect civilians from state terrorism.[30][31]
The Sri Lankan government has been accused of the usagestate-sponsored paramilitaries to commit war crimes. Many of these groups were created at the height of the second JVP uprising. During the civil war, one of the major state-sponsored paramilitaries was theTamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal, led byKaruna Amman.
^Gananath Obeyesekere,Narratives of the self: Chevalier Peter Dillon's Fijian cannibal adventures, in Barbara Creed, Jeanette Hoorn,Body Taade: captivity, cannibalism and colonialism in the Pacific, Routledge, 2001, p. 100.ISBN0-415-93884-8. "The 'time of dread' was roughly 1985-89, when ethnic Sinhala youth took over vast areas of the country and practiced enormous atrocities; they were only eliminated by equally dreadful state terrorism."Gananath Obeyesekere
^abIshtiaq Ahmed,State, Nation, and Ethnicity in Contemporary South Asia, Continuum International Publishing Group, 1996, p. 55.ISBN1-85567-578-1.
^W. A. Wiswa Warnapala, L. Dias Hewagama,Recent Politics in Sri Lanka: The Presidential Election and the Referendum, Navrang (Original from the University of Michigan), 1983, p. 29. ASIN: B000II886W.
Alagappa, Muthiah (2003).Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features. Stanford University Press. p. 238.ISBN978-0-8047-4629-8.
Danieli, Yael; Brom, D; Sills, Joe (1989).The Trauma Of Terrorism: Sharing Knowledge and Shared Care. University of Hawaii Press.ISBN978-0-8248-1211-9.
Hattotuwa, Sanjana (2003). "From violence to peace: Terrorism and Human Rights in Sri Lanka".The Online Journal of Peace and Conflict Resolution.5 (1): 14. 1522-211X.
