Arming Sinhalese Civilians In Border Areas
By Rajan Hoole -November 8, 2014
Dr. Rajan Hoole
A ccording to Herman Gunaratne, an informal group around Ravi Jayewardene, which included an army volunteer, Colonel Wickremasekere, and a regular, Major Karunatilleke, then based at Anuradhapura, met in Colombo on 23rd December 1984. They saw the Kent and Dollar Farms disaster as a retreat of the Sinhalese. Blinded by their aims, they were unable to take into account what they had been building up within the other side through more than an year of aggressive posturing and forced evacuations. According to Gunaratne what they decided was not to establish large Sinhalese settlements for the present, but to stop the ‘retreat’ by arming and training the Sinhalese villagers in border areas.
This decision was taken out of a sense of frustration that their dream of grand Sinhalese settlements with Israeli help had come almost to naught. It was also taken within the mental constraint of continuing an aggressive approach to the Tamils. But a little thought would have shown that arming Sinhalese civilians was a futile exercise. The Kent and Dollar Farms massacre was a particular response to a grave provocation. It had broken to some extent the Tamil inhibition against killing Sinhalese civilians. It had the potential to become a wider tendency, but it could also have stopped there. There would have been understandable fears among Sinhalese border villages, but it was not so far a threat to them. Old Sinhalese villages that had interacted peacefully with Tamils for centuries were very different from the Sinhalese settled in Kent and Dollar Farms under the JOSSOP. After all, leading Sinhalese politicians Maithripala Senanayake and K.B. Ratnayake, who were from these villages, had their education respectively at St. John’s College and Hartley College, Jaffna.
