Economy, Culture, and Civil War in Sri Lanka

1 Articulations of Economy and Ethnic Conflict in Sri Lanka

1 Articulations of Economy and Ethnic Con®ict in Sri Lanka Deborah Winslow and Michael D. Woost On July 24, 2001, a small but well armed group of guerillas—members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—mounted a daring assault on Sri Lanka’s only international airport and the adjoining military air base. The attack was intended to mark the anniversary of the infamous anti-Tamil violence of 1983 and also to retaliate against the Sri Lankan government for more recent events, including what the LTTE termed indiscriminate bombing of civilians in the north. Anniversary hostilities had been anticipated, so airport security was tight; hundreds of air force troops were present at the base. Nevertheless, despite these precautions, a mere 14 LTTE insurgents managed to wreak serious havoc. They ¤rst raided the base, where they demolished eight military planes and damaged another ten. They then moved on to the civilian airport and destroyed six commercial airliners, while airline employees and travelers cowered behind suitcases, furniture, and check-in counters. When the shooting stopped, 21 people were dead: 7 airport security workers and all 14 Tigers (123India.com 2001). In the aftermath of this attack, the government closed Katunayake International Airport for 36 hours. Lloyd’s of London imposed war zone insurance rates on both the airport and the ports,1 and for months afterwards, international carriers curtailed their Sri Lanka schedules and demanded ticket surcharges to pay the rising insurance costs of doing business there. Not surprisingly, both tourism and foreign investment plummeted. Thus the events of July 24, 2001, were not only a tragedy for those on both sides who lost their lives; they also were a blow to government economic plans for Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese-dominated south. Perhaps this was not yet the straw that broke the back of Sri Lanka’s southern economy—tourism resumed, the surcharges gradually were lifted, and travel to and from the country was approaching normal within a year. But the July 24 raid undeniably was a particularly dif¤cult twist in the already tortuous economic path traveled by the Sri Lankan government since 1983, when the war with the Tamil separatists began in earnest. In July 1983, the worst communal riots in Sri Lanka’s history—full-scale antiTamil attacks—took place in the capital, Colombo. The violence was so widespread and so destructive that it closed Colombo down for almost two weeks, even as it spread to other cities and towns throughout the country (Tambiah 1996: 94–95). Estimates of the total number of people killed during those awful days range wildly, from 350 to 4,000, but all agree that hundreds, even thousands, died and tens of thousands more were injured (Eller 1999: 95; Tiruchelvam 1999: 192). In addition, as many as 100,000 Tamils in Colombo alone, and another 175,000 elsewhere , were rendered homeless (Rotberg 1999: 7).2 Property damage totaled hundreds of millions of dollars; an estimated 18,000 homes and 5,000 shops were destroyed (Herring 2001: 40). The generally cited catalyst for the 1983 riots was a series of events in the northern Tamil city of Jaffna. First, there had been what was reported as a rampage by government, primarily Sinhalese, troops. In reprisal, Tamil separatists ambushed an army truck and killed 13 Sinhalese soldiers. The army then chose to bring the dead soldiers’ bodies south and put them on public display in a Colombo cemetery , a display that in the end was cancelled despite the agitated crowds gathered to greet them (Tambiah 1996: 95). The violence that followed seemed almost predetermined , an anti-Tamil pogrom, especially because the dead included 53 Tamil prisoners in a maximum security Colombo jail. There also were many reports of of¤cial involvement, the use of voter registration lists to locate Tamil households , apparent police acquiescence, and even provision of transport for the socalled mobs (Ross and Savada 1990: 205–206; Snodgrass 1999: 100–101; Somasundram 1999: xviii; see also Bremner, this volume). Since then, in both scholarly and popular analyses, it has become axiomatic that the events of the summer of 1983 “turned a con®ict between the state and radical Tamil youth into an ethnic war” (Herring 2001: 163). That tragic summer is seen as the watershed for an increasingly polarized society and the escalating losses of two decades of foregone income and investment as the government deployed its limited economic resources3 to ¤ght the war and to repair the destruction it wrought. We...