40 years since ‘Black July’, little space in Sri Lanka to remember the dead

sri lanka anti tamil pogrom anniversary black july

When a handful of individuals convened near the Borella Cemetery in Colombo on July 23, to mark the 40th anniversary of Sri Lanka’s anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983, a few angry young men disrupted the proceedings despite heavy police presence.

Members of an extremist Sinhala nationalist outfit — known for its visceral hate for the island’s ethnic minorities — the men barged into the gathering with familiar aggression and hurled abuse at the participants at the peaceful remembrance, branding them as “Tiger” (to connote the LTTE) and “terrorist”. It was an exact replay of the scenes witnessed at the same venue on May 18, at a rare Colombo commemoration of the end of the civil war. On both occasions, the huge contingent of riot police asked the activists, not disruptors, to disperse immediately.

For families of Tamil victims killed in the many cycles of violence in Sri Lanka, remembering the dead has not been easy. Forgetting those traumatic times is even harder.

Cheryl Arnold recalls the events that unfolded over the last week of July 1983 like they happened yesterday. She was 13 and studying at a famous girls’ school in Colombo, with children from different ethnic backgrounds. “Until that time, I was not conscious of my ethnic identity. We were all in the same class, we were friends. But that week changed everything for our family.”

The tension was palpable and everyone around was talking about it. “I couldn’t follow everything at the time, but I understood that the Tamils were in danger.” And very soon, the danger came close to her home located at the heart of Colombo, when the family saw a mob set fire to the house on top of their lane, where an elderly couple lived. “My brothers tried to douse the fire there and had apparently been noticed by the mob... days later, the mob came to our home and threatened us. One of them put a knife to my brother’s neck,” she said, of her older sibling’s narrow escape.

Ms. Arnold comes from a mixed ethnic family, her mother is Sinhalese and her father is Tamil. “My mother somehow spoke to them... while my father and I stayed at a neighbour’s home.” As violence began escalating on July 24, some friends drove her, along with her parents, to an uncle’s home. “It must have been barely two hours since we left, we heard that our house was ablaze.” Her three brothers each had their own “equally traumatic escape story” before the family converged at a church days later. It had turned into a refugee shelter for many like them who were “fortunate to be alive”.

Her parents subsequently left the country and sought asylum abroad. Deeply affected by the violence and loss of their home built with his hard-earned life savings, her father took ill. It was when Ms. Arnold tried to visit her ailing father that the reality of being Tamil in Sri Lanka hit her hard. In her case, even being half a Tamil was enough to face high risk and discrimination from fellow citizens and foreigners. “The embassy treated me like some sort of suspect... as someone who was trying to migrate to never return. They rejected my visa…by the time I reapplied and got it, it was too late,” she said, fighting tears. Her father had passed on. The family was scattered across countries and could never live together as they did before.