"Our organisation, as well as our people do not want war. We want peace and we want to resolve our problems through peaceful means. We are deeply committed to the peace process. It is because of our sincere commitment to peace that we are firmly and rigidly observing ceasefire. It is our organisation that took the initiative of declaring the cessation of hostilities unilaterally and observing peace for the last two years tolerating the provocative actions of the state's armed forces. . "

- Hon. Velupillai Pirapaharan, the national leader of Tamil Eelam, in his Heroes' Day Message, 2003.

Colonial Rule

The effects of Portuguese and Dutch colonial rule on the island's pre-capitalist economic formation are minimal when com­pared to the profound effects of British colonial domination. The most significant event of British colonial rule was the imposition of an exploitative plantation economy.

It was in 1815, with the conquest of the Kandyian kingdom by the British, the painful history of the Tamil plantation workers begins. It was during that time the British colonialists decided to introduce the plantation economy in the island. Coffee plantations were set up in the early 1820s, a crop which flourished in high alti­tudes. Speculators and entrepreneurs from England rushed to the newly conquered mountain areas and expropriated vast tracts of land, by deceit, from the Kandyian peasantry. The Kandyian peas­ants refused to abandon their traditional subsistence holdings to become wage earners on these new capitalist estates. The pressure exerted by the colonial state to draw the labour power from the indigenous Sinhalese peasantry did not work. The British colonial masters were thus compelled to draw on their limitless reserves of labour from India. A massive army of cheap labourers were con­scripted from southern India who, partly by their own poverty and partly by coercion, moved into this Promised Land to be con­demned to an appalling form of slave labour. A notorious system of labour contract was established which allowed hundreds of thou­sands of Tamil labourers to migrate to the plantation estates. Between the 1840s and 1850s a million people were imported. The original workers were recruited from Tamil Nadu districts of Tinneveli, Madurai and Tanjore and were from the poor, oppressed castes. This army of recruited workers were forced to walk hun­dreds of miles from their villages to Rameswaram and again from Mannar through impenetrable jungles to the central hill-lands of Ceylon. Thousands of this immiserated mass perished on their long hazardous journey, a journey chartered with disease, death and despair. Those who survived the journey were weak and exhausted and thousands of them died in the nightmarish, unhealthy condi­tions of the early plantations.

The coffee plantation economy collapsed in the 1870s when a leaf disease ravaged the plantations. But the economic system sur­vived intact with the introduction of a successor crop tea. Tea was introduced in the 1880s on a wide scale. The tea plantation econo­my expanded with British entrepreneurial investment, export mar­kets and consolidated companies transforming the structure of pro­duction and effectively changing the economic foundation of the old feudal society creating a basis for the development of the capi­talist economic system. Though the plantation economy effectively changed the process of production, the Tamil labourers - men, women and children - were permanently condemned to slave under the white masters and the indigenous capitalists. The Britishplanters who brought the Indian Tamil labourers into Sri Lanka deliberately segregated them inside the plantations in what is known as the `line rooms'. Such a notorious policy of segregation 4 ondemned the Tamils permanently to these miserable ghettos, isolated them from the rest of the population and prevented them from having their own land, building their own houses and leading a free social existence. British colonial rule built up the Tamil plantation community within the heartland of the Kandyian Sinhalese andmanipulated the Tamil-Sinhala antagonism to divide and rule. Itrduced to conditions of slavery by colonialism, the Tamil plantation workers toiled in utter misery. Their sweat and blood sustained the worst form of exploitative economy that fed the English masters with the surplus value and enriched the Sinhala land owning classes.

The impact of British colonial domination on the indigenous Tamil people of the northern and eastern provinces had far reach­hip- effects. On the political level, British colonial rule imposed a unified administration with centralised institutions, establishing a singular state structure. This forceful annexation and amalgamation of two separate kingdoms, of two nations of people, disregarding their past historical existence, their socio-cultural distinctions and their ethnic differences are the root causes of the Tamil-Sinhala racial antagonism.

Ihe Tamil social formation was constituted by a unique socio­economic organisation, in which feudal elements and caste systems weir lightly interwoven to form the foundation of this complex society. The notorious system of caste stratification bestows, by right of birth, privilege and status to the high caste Tamils. The mostl exploited and oppressed people are from the so-called depressed castes who eke out a meagre existence under this system of sauvery. Privileged by caste and provided with better education­al facilities by foreign missionaries, a section of the high caste Tamils adopted the English educational system. A new class of I nalish educated professional and white-collar workers emerged and became a part of the bureaucratic structure of the civil service. The English colonial masters encouraged the Tamils and provided them with an adequate share in the state administration under a notorious strategy of divide and rule, that later sparked the fires of sinhala chauvinism.

The Tamil dominance in the state administrative structure, as well as in the plantation economic sector, the privileges enjoyed by the English educated elites and the spread of Christianity are fac­tors that propelled the emergence of Sinhala nationalism. In the early stages, nationalist tendencies took the form of Buddhist revival, which gradually assumed a powerful political dominance. Under the slogan of Buddhist religious renaissance, a national chauvinistic ideology emerged with strong sediments of Tamil antagonism. The Buddhist religious leadership attacked both the Tamils and European colonialists and spoke of the greatness of the Sinhalese Aryan race.

Anagarika Dharmapala, a Buddhist thinker, wrote in his popu­lar work, 'History of an Ancient Civilization', 'ethnologically, the Sinhalese are a unique race, inasmuch as they can boast that they have no slave blood in them, and were never conquered by either the pagan Tamils or European vandals who for three centuries dev­astated the land, destroyed ancient temples and nearly annihilated the historic race. This bright, beautiful island was made into a par­adise by the Aryan Sinhalese before its destruction was brought about the barbaric vandals....'

The Sinhala national chauvinism that emerged from the Buddhist religious resurgence viewed the Tamil dominance in the state apparatus and in the plantation economy as a threat to 'nation­al development'. Such anti-Tamil antagonism articulated on the ideological level began to take concrete forms of social, political and economic oppression soon after the island's independence in 1948 when the state power was transferred to the Sinhala ruling elites.





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