Black July: Relation Of Events At Kanatte And The Tiger Friday
Rajan Hoole
Sri Lanka’s Black July – Part 33
We have argued in our account based on testimony cited that the outbreak of violence at Borella had no direct rela- tion to the clamour to hand over the bodies to the next of kin at Kanatte. The crowd was made up of conflicting elements that had different motivations. While the relatives did want the bodies of the soldiers, and gained much sup- port there were others, who wanted to turn the occasion into an anti-government demonstra- tion. Still others, such as Gunawanse, wanted to harness the anger of the crowd and turn it against the Tamils. Gunawanse played on the alleged mutilated condition of the bodies to in- cite the crowd, demanding that the bodies be shown – ‘even a little dismembered finger’. Was this protege of Minister Dissanayake acting en- tirely on his own? Ratnatunga confirms that the dominant sentiment at the cemetery was anti- government. Referring to the situation in the cemetery late in the evening, Ratnatunga says “Anti-government epithets were liberally strewn and were becoming the order of the night” (p.13). Given Gunawanse’s reputation, it is clear that he was starting to play on the grief and anxiety of the mourners, intending to move it in an anti- Tamil direction.
Gunawanse did not succeed at Kanatte itself. It was later that an anti-Tamil flavour began to creep in, when on the roads of Borella, accord- ing to Ratnatunga, ‘the crowd began voicing vitu- perative slogans aimed at the Government, the Tamils and the terrorists’. Ratnatunga points to different motivations in the crowd, a section of which moved to Borella and others to the President’s house along Kynsey Road. It was now a differ- ent phenomenon from what it was at Kanatte. While Ratnatunga absolves the Government of all responsibility for the violence, our account highlights the role of mobs supported by the government on the night of 24th July, whose role it was to attack Tamils and Tamil establishments. Gunawanse’s task appears to have been to fo- ment violence at the cemetery itself.
