Sri Lanka: National Conflict and the Tamil Liberation Struggle

by Satchi Ponnambalam

Sri The National Question and the Tamil Liberation Struggle is the first book by a Sri Lankan on a conflict that has now escalated into wide-ranging violence and become the dominant issue facing the country. Its author, Satchi Ponnambalam, has written a scholarly but committed history of relations between the island's two distinct nations - Sinhalese and Tamils - which goes back over 2,000 years. He concentrates on the post independence period, and provides a detailed record of the discriminatory measures successive governments have taken against the Tamil population. This hostility on the part of a section of the Sinhalese has arisen, he argues, not because of any inevitable antagonism. Rather, its roots lie in the determination of the Sinhalese ruling class to divert the struggle common to both the Sinhalese and Tamil oppressed classes, a struggle inherent in the nature of Sri Lanka's neo-colonial, capitalist economy (an economy which benefits only the ruling class itself). These upper-class Sinhalese politicians, the author argues, are manipulating a myth of Sinhalese Aryan supremacy - at the cost of abandoning true Buddhism - so as to keep power in their own hands.
Ponnambalam outlines the Tamil people's struggle over the past quarter of a century for equality, justice and dignity. With the failure of these demands, Tamil organizations are now fighting for national freedom from internal colonialism and oppression, and demanding a separate state of Tamil Eelam in the northern and eastern parts of the island. To contain this separatist ground-swell, the Government has subjected the Tamils to a state of emergency since 1979, unleashed the armed forces, imposed press censorship, and used its Prevention of Terrorism Act almost indiscriminately against its opponents.
This book provides a real understanding of Sri Lankan politics and social conflict. As the author makes clear, the refusal of the ruling class, supported by its ethnic middle class and caste allies, to recognize the just rights and national equality of the Tamil people, threatans the country's tenuous retention of the democratic process and civil liberties, as well as its social peace. Neither the class question nor the national question is now capable of solution by the present ruling class. It is this line of analysis that makes this book throw light more generally on the national question in the Third World, a question which is one of its most intractable and unrecognized political problems.

Satchi Ponnambalam is a Sri Lankan lawyer who was educated at the Universities of Ceylon and London, Now a judge, he is the author of Dependent Capitalism in The Sri Lankan Economy, 1948-80 (Zed Press, 1981) which was published simultaneously in Sri Lanka, India, and the United Kingdom.

273 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1983