Anti-government protesters march to the office of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on July 9, demanding the resignation of the government. ⓒAFP PHOTO In late July, the Tamils, a minority ethnic group in Sri Lanka, remembered and commemorated the ‘Tamil Genocide’ that took place 39 years ago without fail this year. Remembrance events were held not only in the mainstream Tamil regions such as northern and eastern Sri Lanka, but also in countries with large numbers of Tamils such as the UK and Canada. The massacre 39 years ago is called ‘Black July’. From the night of July 24, 1983, for about a week, the riots and genocide against Tamils took place centered on Colombo, the largest city in Sri Lanka. The day before, the Tamil militant group ‘Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)’ killed 13 government troops, but the results were disastrous. The death toll is estimated at 400 to 3,000, but no one knows an approximation. It was a massacre that took place in a society where institutional and everyday racism had melted since the 1950s. This event changed Sri Lanka forever. It has become the ‘fashion line’ of the civil war in which Tamil armed groups are engaged in armed struggle. On May 18, 2009, all state agencies were mobilized, leading to another ‘Tamil Massacre’, and the civil war ended. In Sri Lanka, despite decades of severe state violence, no one has been brought to justice. This political legacy still haunts the chaotic streets of Sri Lanka due to the state’s bankruptcy. At the time of Black July 1983, Sri Lanka was governed by the National Unity Party (UNP). Ranil Wickremasinghe, who became the new president by a parliamentary vote on July 20, was then the UNP education minister. Twenty-six years later, in 2009, at the end of the civil war, when the genocide was so horrific that it was called the ‘killing field of Sri Lanka’, the president of Sri Lanka was Mahinda Rajapaksa of the Liberal Party (SLFP). Mahinda’s brother and defense minister and then-genocide leader Gotabaya Rajapaksa is the same president who recently fled to Singapore after being chased by anti-government protesters. Sri Lanka’s two traditional mainstream political parties, the SLFP and the UNP, may be competing in the mainstream Sinhalese politics, but when it comes to ethnic Tamil issues and their policies, they are both perpetrators of state violence and ‘joint culprits’ of the Tamil genocide. The two main political camps seem to have become co-captains on an old and obsolete ship after repeating the fusion of Sri Lankan politics over the past few years. Ranil, the last prime minister of the Rajapaksa regime to flee to Singapore on July 14, became acting president after Rajapaksa left. The remaining two years of Rajapaksa’s term of office are completed. Ranil, who has served as prime minister only six times, has no support in Parliament. The UNP did not win even a single seat in the 2020 general election as lawmakers withdrew after protesting Ranil’s incompetent leadership and close-range politics with Rajapaksa. Only Ranil himself managed to maintain one seat in the national proportion. In the end, the vote that supported him in the parliamentary vote to elect the president this time came from the Sri Lanka People’s Liberation Party (SLPP), which was formed by the political forces of the Rajapaksa family as part of the SLFP. Former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (right) and current President Ranil (left) fled to Singapore. ⓒAP Photo Protesters were forcibly dispersed as soon as he became president. In April 2019, an ‘Easter terror’ occurred in Sri Lanka. In November of that year, Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected president with a counter-terrorism flag. In the following year’s general election, his SLPP won a landslide victory, giving the Rajapaksa family government administrative and parliamentary powers. The mainstream Sinhalese masses who voted for him only two or three years ago are now joining the protests calling for Rajapaksa’s resignation. The new president, Ranil, has emerged as the biggest beneficiary of this turbulent period. As soon as Ranil became president, he mobilized the army to forcibly disperse the protesters. In the early morning of July 22, 50 people were injured in the process of suppressing violence by the military and police at the protest camp. The ‘Aragalaya Movement’ (meaning ‘struggle’ in Sinhala), which has been calling for the resignation of Rajapaksa, has also called for the resignation of Rajapaksa as well as Ranil. At a press conference on July 19, the day before his presidential election, he announced that “Ranil is not a legitimate presidential candidate.” Ranil’s hardline response to the protesters is in retaliation against the fact that some of the protesters who were occupying the presidential residence and the presidential palace set fire and attacked the prime minister’s house earlier this month. Ranil denounced the protesters as ‘Nazis’. Regarding his hardline response, only Mano Ganeshan (Tamil People’s League) was the only politician who said, “Ranil should have had a conversation with Aragalaya before sending in the military.” Ganeshan is a politician who has been actively pursuing the issue of enforced disappearances in Sri Lanka since the civil war and is a minority figure in Tamil politics. Since July 25, the Ranil government has issued a departure ban on six key leaders of the Aragalaya movement and has been detained one by one. The will to suppress the Aragalaya movement is clear. Prominent social activist and Catholic priest Jiwanta Fairis, youth activist Lahiru Wierasekara, student activist Wasanta Mudali, and student and labor activists such as teacher union member Joseph Stalin were subject to travel restrictions. Aragalaya Movement 2.0 is experiencing a period of division and chaos due to Ranil’s hard-line response that exceeds the expected level. Some of the civil society and journalists who participated in the demand for Rajapaksa’s resignation are also pouring out language that seems to criticize the ‘absence of law-abiding spirit’ towards the radical protesters rather than pointing out Ranil’s hard-line response. At first, they were generally in the position of ‘giving Ranil time to solve the urgent oil problem’. Clear Limits of the Aragalaya Movement The limitations of the Aragalaya Movement are also clear. Perhaps it was due to the lack of coordinated leadership, but almost everything was absent except the demand for resignation. There were moments when the physical clashes and conflicts within the movement were helpless and uncontrollable, and some activists who were involved in the movement in the early days left the camp. And above all, it seems that the agenda has failed, including the issue of the minority Tamil community. Sri Lanka’s problem isn’t just about the tourism industry’s recession triggered by the coronavirus and the terrorist attacks two years ago. It is not only Sri Lanka that the tourism industry is in a difficult situation in the aftermath of the corona virus. State violence without a history of punishment, politics that have been ‘indulged’ in the war economy even while condoning genocide, and ‘conflict populism’ politics that have been driven by the division of race and religion… . The problem is politics. Take, for example, defense spending and the war economy. According to the World Bank data on Sri Lanka’s defense budget, from 2005, Sri Lanka’s defense budget began to surge. In 2005, Mahinda Rajapaksa was elected president, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former US citizen, returned to Korea and assumed the role of defense minister, increasing the use of force in the Tamil region. The following year, in 2006, the four-year ceasefire was abolished, and the war ended with the Tamil Genocide in 2009. The fact that the defense budget does not decrease even after the war is over, but rather shows an increasing trend is very suggestive. At a time when popular support for the Rajapaksa regime was at its peak, the northern Tamil region suffered a disastrous economy due to militarization and internal colonization. On the other hand, the military took control of the administration of the northern part and effectively assumed the ‘military government’, and seized all real estate. The reason the Tamil community is not actively participating in the Aragalaya movement is that the current economic crisis has been a problem for them for decades. They want ‘bread’ as well as ‘justice’. The latter agenda was absent from the Aragalaya movement in Colombo. In mid-July, the British-based Tamil diaspora group, Tamil Solidarity, released an appeal to the Aragalaya movement, which has led the president’s resignation. Here, it sharply pointed out the problems that Sri Lanka needs to solve fundamentally. The Tamil Solidarity began writing, saying that even the Aragalaya movement is ‘Singhala Buddhist nationalism is dominant’. “Justice for the missing must be realized through the immediate release of all political prisoners and new and appropriate investigations into the issue of missing persons. The military’s participation in civilian issues must be stopped immediately. The military must withdraw from the civilian area. All occupied land must be returned to the original owner, and the land sovereignty of tea planters must be realized. Religious and non-religious rights must be respected and no form of Islamophobia is allowed. In addition, heinous laws such as the Anti-Terrorism Act (PTA) should be repealed. Finally, we must hold an election to form a ‘revolutionary constitutional assembly’ through a mass movement.” The ‘revolutionary parliament’ referred to by the Tamil Solidarity has a common denominator with the ‘People’s Council’ initiated by the Aragalaya movement. On July 24, the International Truth & Justice Project, an international human rights organization headquartered in South Africa, demanded the immediate arrest of former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a suspect in war crimes, from the Singapore Ministry of Justice. Since then, international human rights groups and some politicians have added their voices. Will the civil society of Sri Lanka, which led to the resignation of the president, be able to join this solidarity movement? It seems to be the first test bench of Aragalaya 2.0.
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The president fled, but no one was punished
