Confronting the Complexity of Loss

violence including the assassinations of Tamil police officers and Member of Parliament
M. Canagaratnam in 1980 set the stage for what would later be known as ‘Black July’—
an event that fundamentally changed the nature of the conflict.
The July 1983 ethnic pogrom is often described as the starting point of the ethnic war in
Sri Lanka. 42 On 23 July 1983, the LTTE conducted an ambush, which resulted in the
death of thirteen Sri Lanka Army soldiers. The next day, riots broke out in the capital city
and quickly spread to many parts of the country. S. J. Tambiah in his seminal work Sri
Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy 43 describes the event and
the loss to human life and property. According to his account, the 1983 eruption showed
‘organised mob violence at work’. He pointed to news reports of ‘mobs being armed with
voters’ lists, and detailed addresses of every Tamil-owned shop, house, or factory’. 44 He
observes that though the official death toll was 350, the figure could have been as high as
2,000. 45 He also refers to the incredible damage caused to property and the estimated
100,000 Tamils who were left homeless in Colombo alone. 46 The majority of victims
were Tamil, although there were reports that persons of Indian origin were also targeted.
The state’s failure to prevent violence has been well documented, both by Tambiah and
others, including K.M. de Silva. Tambiah described the involvement of the state as a
‘disconcerting feature of the 1983 riots’, 47 where the breakdown of law and order was
‘caused as much by the active participation or passive encouragement of the ultimate
guardians of law and order—the police and the army—as by inflamed criminal excesses
of the civilian marauders’. 48 K.M. de Silva makes a similar observation:
What distinguished the riots of July 1983 from previous disturbances was the role
of the security forces. The breakdown in law enforcement in the early days of the
riots had no precedent in the past; it took the government nearly a week to reestablish
its authority and quell the violence. The security forces were either
generally indifferent to or ignored their peacekeeping role, repeatedly refusing to
intervene when their intervention could have saved lives and property. The
machinery of law and order had almost totally collapsed. 49
Several types of incidents involving violence and loss of life and property took place
during the next three decades, all of which may be considered components of the ethnic
war.
First, civilian massacres by security forces took place during the war. An early example
of this type of violence was the incident in August 1983 when army personnel pulled
42 See Ketheshwaran Loganathan. Sri Lanka: Lost opportunities: past attempts at resolving ethnic conflict
(1996).
43 Tambiah, op. cit. at 21.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid. at 22.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid. at 24.
48 Ibid.
49 K.M. de Silva, Regional Powers and Small State Security: India and Sri Lanka, 1977-1990 (1995), at 71.
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