The twentieth anniversary of the July 1983 riots falling next week is a good occasion for all Lankans to reflect on how this country shot itself in the foot two decades ago inflicting untold suffering on all its people, some more than others, with a few hundred criminals unleashing a communal pogrom on the Tamils. It was these events that created conditions for the LTTE’s separatist war that has brought Sri Lanka to the brink of disaster, killing at least 65,000 on both sides of the lines and robbing the people of the country of the fruits of its true economic potential.

What the LTTE will do to commemorate the July 23 anniversary remains to be seen. It has previously marked this day which gave it the opportunity to bring the Sri Lankan State to its knees and it is unlikely that it will allow the day to pass without a gesture. Although much propaganda has been done to damn them, the Sinhala people as a whole cannot be blamed for July 1983. Certainly criminals among them, bent on loot and carnage, emerged like termites out of the woodwork to profit from conditions created by certain elements who still remain this day to be publicly identified. Although names have been mentioned and accusations made, no iron-clad case has yet been made against the perpetrators of a historic crime against this nation.

President J. R. Jayewardene who won the most decisive mandate any leader of this country had been favoured with in 1977 proved to be an abject failure when he could not contain the rioting and prevent them assuming the proportions they eventually did. As President of the Republic, Commander-in-Chief of its armed forces and Minister of Defence, it was his duty and obligation to ensure law and order when anarchy was unleashed on the streets. Certainly Velupillai Prabhakaran and his LTTE, then a shadow of its present self, as well as the other terrorist groups euphemistically called "militants," had created conditions in the north for the police particularly and also the military to take an unkind view of Tamils in general. The lamp-post lynching of policemen will be particularly remembered; the landmines came later.

It has been speculated that Jayewardene, re-elected for his second term less than six months before the riots, had doubts on whether the forces and the police would obey his orders and therefore did not issue them soon enough. However, all that must remain matters of conjecture. The fact is that the Sri Lankan State proved woefully incapable of protecting those of its citizen brutally set upon by thugs and criminals and allowed what might have been reined if nipped in the bud to blow up to unimaginable proportions. In the event, the nation’s international image was blackened, some of its most talented professionals emigrated because of what they suffered or feared and tens of thousands of others took advantage of what happened to find themselves greener economic pastures in the west by claiming asylum in Western Europe and North America. Thus was created the Diaspora that was to later provide significant funding for the LTTE to wage its terrorist war on the Sri Lankan State.

There are many Tamils who still speak warmly of the kindness, hospitality and protection they received from their Sinhala friends and neighbours in that time of travail. There are also many stories of unspeakable brutality and bitterness that when Jayewardene belatedly appeared on national television after the riots, he offered not a word of sympathy or apology to the victims. Hopefully at this time when a serious effort is being made with unprecedented international backing to finally push the past behind us and regain Sri Lanka, that the genuine unhappiness about the impossible terms that the LTTE is hell-bent on extracting will not be exploited by any element in our polity to provoke the kind of backlash we saw twenty years ago. That danger is ever present and it is the duty of all our leaders to subordinate their own political interests and ambitions to the bigger picture and ensure that never again will this country allow the shame of 1983 to disgrace it worldwide.

1977 like 1956 was a lost opportunity. When J. R. Jayewardene and his UNP were swept into office with a massive five sixths majority, he like Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike who had routed the UNP 21 years earlier could have made rather than broken this country. Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only and not very talented team saw much of what had been gained in the past dissipated with half-baked socialist policies. It may have been then Ceylon’s misfortune that the SLFP-led Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) did not need the support of the left parties (with whom it fought the election on a no-contest pact) to form a government. The left had good people who might have helped give this country a better government than Bandaranaike was able to offer. But we can never know what might have been.

Jayewardene had talented people like Ranasinghe Premadasa who succeeded him, Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake - all of whom were to fall to LTTE assassins. There were others too like Ronnie de Mel who helped implement the president’s vision of a liberalized economy. The timing could not have been better given the global condition in the context of the dismantling of the Soviet Union and China’s movement towards market pragmatism. But 1983 destroyed all that and Sri Lanka today is struggling to remain an undivided country and rebuild what has been lost in two decades of civil war. If our leaders can rise above selfish ambitions for power and office and place the national interest above all else, and the people subscribe to a just and durable solution of the national question, then the present generation can look hopefully to the future.