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Sri Lanka's Lost Generation

March 21, 2016
Source
Daily Times

S Mubashir Noor

Sri Lanka’s civil war ended seven years ago, but social fault-lines dividing the country have not yet closed. Ethnic Tamils worldwide still resent the Sinhalese-dominated state for alleged war crimes committed during the insurgency and for its piecemeal efforts at resettling internally displaced Tamils. What pains them more than material losses wrought by two decades of bloodshed is the war’s long and ominous shadow on today’s Tamil youth. Unmoored from mainstream society, these young men and women are Sri Lanka’s lost generation.

On March 8, 2016, Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) Youth chief Sivarraajh Chandran slammed Malaysia’s home ministry for mulling the import of former Sri Lankan soldiers as security guards, imploring Kuala Lumpur to rethink this “mad scheme.” Why? Because “it does not consider the sensitivities of Tamils all over the world. Tamils hate Sri Lankan soldiers who had massacred civilians in the long war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE),” Chandran explained. Last year, Sri Lankans voted President Maithripala Sirisena and his ‘rainbow coalition’ into office on pledges of uniting a fractured country and he clearly has his work cut out for him.

Sri Lanka’s civil war officially began in 1983, but its roots lay in events three and a half millennia earlier. Around 1500 BCE, Aryan invaders from the North swooped down on the Indian subcontinent and conquered its Dravidian denizens. The Buddhist Sinhalese claim ancestry from the Aryans while Hindu Tamils are the progeny of ancient Dravidians. Time, intermarriages and internal migration healed most ethno-religious rifts, but Sri Lanka’s continued to fester. Structural inequalities inflamed these grievances after the country’s independence from Great Britain in 1948.

Sinhalese nationalists begrudged their British masters for favouring the island’s Tamil minority because they staffed its lucrative tea export business. After Britain’s exit, these nationalists took advantage of superior numbers to upend the status quo in their favour. In 1972, Sinhalese politicians changed the country’s name from historical Ceylon to Sri Lanka and installed Buddhism as the state religion. This triggered a Tamil backlash that soon bloomed into armed conflict.

Young Tamils in Jaffna and other LTTE controlled areas were the most vulnerable actors in this war. They unwittingly sank into a giant whirlpool of hatred while both LTTE and Colombo used them as cannon fodder. Child soldiers, some barely in their teens, received cyanide pills from LTTE commanders in a macabre suicide-pact to live and die by the Eelam flag. Few of these thousands were willing participants and LTTE used a mixture of coercion and rewarded cooperation to pry one child from each Tamil family.