It is not uncommon for people to blame our former colonial rulers for our present problems. It is claimed that the British adopted a divide et impera policy that was designed to set the Tamils and Sinhalese at loggerheads. They are reported to have favoured the Tamils in education, public service employment and in a variety of other ways. Scholars have shown that these claims are not borne out by the actual evidence, though some parts of the country (in both Sinhala and Tamil majority areas) did suffer from under-development particularly in education. In point of fact, at the time the British handed over power to us in 1948, we were largely a united nation. There was widespread economic activity by Sinhala entrepeneurs who set up businesses in the Tamil majority areas, and similarly Tamil entrepreneurs did business in Sinhala majority areas. It was the same with professionals, teachers, doctors and other para-medical personnel. In leading schools like Ananda in Colombo and Skandavarodaya and other leading schools in Jaffna, Sinhala and Tamil teachers taught Sinhala to Tamil students as did Tamil reachers teach Tamil to Sinhala students. All that has come to naught sixty years after independence.

This trend towards national integration was halted when politicians decided that party politics was more important that communal harmony. At the conclusion of the first General Election in 1947, the anti-UNP opposition could muster 34 members in a Parliament of 95 elected members, in contrast to 46 elected on the UNP ticket. There was then a possibility that government dominated by the Left may be formed as an alternative to one dominated by the UNP. But the Left grouping included seven elected representatives of the plantation workers. The UNP government decided that the most effective way of neutralizing this threat of an alternate Left government at a future election was to disenfranchise the plantation workers. At that time, this did not polarize Sinhala and Tamil opinion, even though it led to the birth of the Federal Party. Tamils like G G Ponnambalam and his section of the Tamil Congress, voted against the first 1948 Citizenship Bill but supported the second Bill, by when Ponnambalam and his group had accepted portfolios in the UNP government. In fact, the 52 MPs who voted for the Bill included 8 Tamils or Muslims from the North and East; while of the 32 who voted against, only S J V Chelvanayakam, C Vanniasingam and S Sivapalan were from the North and East. But there was clearly a racist element in these Bills (as clearly evidenced in the UNP’s campaign in the Kandyan areas at the next General Election in 1952).

Dr N M Perera’s speech during the debate on the Citizenship Bills is appropriate even today: "I thought that racialism of this type ended with Chamberlain and Hitler…. I did not believe it possible that any person claiming to be a statesman would ask us to accede to a Bill of this nature. We cannot proceed as if we are God’s chosen people, quite apart from the rest of the world; that we alone have the right to be citizens of this country." Even S W R D Bandaranaike, then Leader of the House and who voted with his government had this to say when winding up the debate on the Citizenship Bills: "From my point of view – I say from my personal point of view- these provisions go further than I would have liked personally. Though I support them in the interests of statesmanship and wisdom and in the interests of peace, I would have preferred the problem to be approached from another angle."

The Citizenship Bills sowed the seeds of ethnic conflict in our country, a conflict which was to erupt with the passage of the Sinhala Only legislation. The left sponsored Hartal of 1952 had been a turning point in the history of politics in our country. It created a mass movement that was to lead to the 1956 debacle for the UNP. S W R D Bandaranaike, who had crossed over to the opposition two years earlier, initially kept aloof from the Hartal. But he saw the opportunity created by this mass awakening, and formed a no-contest pact with the Left parties; while at the same time wooing the nationalists to enter into a coalition with the SLFP. The Sinhala Only cry followed. But Bandaranaike, the quintessential liberal, knew he was playing a dangerous game. He sought to right the wrong he had done by attempting to legislate for the use of the Tamil language. In 1957, just before he signed a Pact with Chelvanayakam, he stated: Our biggest victory will be when we win over the Tamils to call off the satyagraha movement and not suppress it by force of arms. To solve the vast problems facing the country, the government needed the confidence of all sections of the country." But the forces of ethnic chauvinism that he had unleashed would have none of it. And the UNP led by J R Jayewardene stoked the flames of communal hatred for purely party political gains. Just like in the Citizenship Bills, parochialism had triumphed over the long-term interests of the country.

We have today gone much further than what was envisaged in the Bandaranike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1957. Had we seized the opportunity then and had wisdom and sanity prevailed, the ethnic conflict would probably have been resolved before it came to assume sinister proportions. Another opportunity arose when Dudley Senanayake signed a Pact with Chelvanayakam. This time the boot was on the other foot and it was the SLFP, shamelessly supported by the Left parties, which mounted a racist campaign to whip up communal disharmony. Like the B-C Pact of 1957, the D-C Pact of 1965 also contained provisions for the use of the Tamil language and for the devolving of power to the regions. Both opportunities to resolve the national question were lost purely for want of a political will by the leadership to put country before party. As Dr N M Perera once said, ‘racial prejudice does not come from the bottom. It always comes from the top.’ If the leaders of our two major national parties had the statesmanship to eschew parochialism and together explain to the people, the need for a political solution that would have made all our people feel equal and proud citizens of our country, then tens of thousands of innocent lives would have been saved in this ethnic conflict. But it is still not too late for our leaders to show some wisdom and sanity and prevent further loss of lives.

Extremist Sinhala nationalism and Tamil nationalism have come to dominate both Sinhala and Tamil opinion because the political leadership of both communities were unable to resist these forces on the lunatic fringe of ethno-nationalism. Attempts by the political parties and the political leadership to appease these forces are slowly but surely leading to the destruction of our country. We need more discerning men and women who will see through propaganda and have the courage to expose the many charlatans who seek to destroy the peace, unity and justice for which our country so desperately yearns. We need a political leadership, both in the government and the opposition, committed to principled politics that reach out to all our people assuring them, by word as well as in practice, of democracy, justice and equality. It also means not promoting one set of armed militants to replace another.

Rajan Hoole is one of the co-founders of the University Teachers for Human Rights. The UTHR has, for over twenty years, been outspoken critics of human rights violations by both state and non-state actors in our ethnic conflict. In an article contributed to the Oxford University Press’ new Journal of Human Rights Practice, Rajan Hoole outlines the need that inspired him and others to form the UTHR: "The rapid intensification of the conflict in Sri Lanka during the mid-1980s followed the July 1983 communal violence. Agents of the state perpetrated human rights violations, including attempts at demographic transformation through massacres and the displacement of minority Tamils. The accompanying rise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam through the brutal elimination of rivals brought another dimension to the conflict. Conventional human rights work, which dealt exclusively with the State, distorted the problem. The new totalitarian cult of the hero within a disillusioned Tamil society portended internal terror, recruitment of women and children, debasement of its own civilians in peace and war, and a barbarous approach to civilians from other communities.

Amidst the devastation of 1987, a group of academics from the University of Jaffna, drawing on wider discussion within the community, wrote the Broken Palmyra in a bid to tell the whole truth and challenge the fatal trend. Through this experience, the University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna) [UTHR(J)] was born. Its reports have endeavoured to expose and challenge all perpetrators of abuses irrespective of affiliation. Its members also engaged with the university community and those outside against violence, whether out of narrow ideologies or sheer anger. The risk was knowingly taken and Dr Rajani Thiranagama, a leading member, paid with her life.