Exorcising Reds And Eelamists
Rajan Hoole
Sri Lanka: A Haunted Nation - The Social Underpinnings Of Communal Violence - Part 2
The era that followed the July violence was one that was haunted by ghosts. Those who had harboured carefully conceived agendas against what they took to be an omni- present Tamil separatist enemy were suddenly seeing these plans being flung back at them. One such plan was conceived in the Ministry of Mahaveli and Lands (MML) under Gamini Dissanayake. In Chapter 5, we described some of the minister’s activities around Trincomalee. In the weeks preceding the July violence, some officials in the MML were active trying speedily to implement Mahaveli System M north of Trincomalee in the Yan Oya (River) basin. Like the subsequent System L in Manal Aru (Weli Oya) in the Mullaitivu District started the fol- lowing year, it was to be another Mahaveli project without Mahaveli water. Economically it was very tenuous. Yan Oya was a seasonal and unreliable dry zone river.
The plan as these officials saw it was intended to sunder the contiguity of the largely Tamil- speaking North-East by establishing large Sin- halese settlements in the Yan Oya basin and then System B in the Maduru Oya basin. The story is described in M.H. Gunaratne’s For a Sovereign State. The plan according to him had the ap- proval of Gamini Disssanayake who had prom- ised to brief the President. It is a sign of Gunaratne’s naivety that he credits a junior Mahaveli official, T.H. Karunatilleke, with seeing for the first time the political urgency of the Yan Oya plan. This was in spite of Panditharatne, chairman of the Mahaveli Board, having given him a hint that it was an old hat that was practically infeasible.
Dissanayake was evidently willing to give the zealous hounds straining at the leash a bit of rope and the resources of his Ministry while keeping his own options open. These were the same devious politicians behind the July ’83 vio- lence. It was another dreadful example of how easily the resources of the State, where Tamils had no power and the few Tamils remaining in government service were kept in the dark, could be turned against a minority. This was accom- plished secretively by a handful of zealots given the licence. Dissanayake claimed that he had told Jayewardene. Both he and his boss would have taken credit or distanced themselves depending on how things turned out. This scheme may also partly explain Gamini Dissanayake’s unfriendly interest in Tamil refugees from earlier commu- nal violence settled in the Trincomalee District, just on the eve of the July ’83 violence.Read More
