31 May night marked the 45th anniversary of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library in May 1981. If the Socialist Lead of Sri Lanka and South Asia (SLLA), the Revolutionary Left Faction of the Socialist Equality Party, was present at a commemoration event before the Jaffna Public Library on 31 May, and asked to address an audience of Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, the SLLA would have delivered the following speech.
Friends, comrades, brothers and sisters, Tamils, Sinhalese, Muslims, and all who cherish the meaning of human dignity, 45 years ago on 31 May, in the dead of night, flames consumed one of the greatest cultural treasures of South Asia. The Jaffna Public Library was home to over 97,000 volumes, to irreplaceable ola leaf manuscripts, to ancient chronicles and living memory, to the intellectual heritage of the Tamil people accumulated across centuries, was reduced to ashes. Not by accident. Not by nature. But by deliberate human hands: uniformed Police and organised thugs, dispatched from the South. Four Tamil men were dragged from their homes and killed. Homes, shops, offices, and the press of the Tamil newspaper Ealanadu were burned. Statues of Tamil cultural figures were demolished at road junctions.
This was not a spontaneous eruption. It was a political decision, made in Colombo, carried out in Jaffna, and covered up in silence by an entire political establishment and a compliant media. No official inquiry was ever held into the destruction of the Library. No one was prosecuted. No Minister faced justice. The fire that burned on the night of 31 May 1981 was lit by the ruling class of this island and it was fueled by decades of communalist poison that every major political party, had been injecting into the bloodstream of Sri Lankan society since Independence. We gather here today not only to grieve. We gather to understand.
What was destroyed that night?
The books that burned were irreplaceable, Yalpanam Vaipavama, the history of Jaffna, existed in only one copy, and it perished in the fire. But, the rulers of Sri Lanka were not primarily burning books. They were burning people's sense of themselves. They were burning the confidence, the continuity, and the cultural selfhood of the Tamil minority. They were sending a message, written in fire: You do not belong here. Your history does not count. Your culture is disposable. Your lives are contingent on our permission.
This was not a fringe ideology, but the State ideology, entrenched in the legal framework of the republic by the Sinhala Only Act of 1956, by the anti-Tamil university admissions schemes, by Buddhism’s enshrinement as the State religion. And, it was the language of a ruling class that used communal hatred as a tool of governance, a weapon to distract the Sinhalese poor and working class from the economic policies, the austerity, the open-market liberalisation, and the assault on wages and public services, that were devastating their own lives alongside the lives of Tamil workers.
The burning of the Jaffna Library was not the beginning. And it was not the end. It was a turning point, a signal flare fired two years before the July 1983 pogrom, in which organised Sinhala mobs, with voter registration lists in hand provided by State institutions, went from door to door, burning Tamil families alive in Colombo and across the island. Black July ignited a civil war that would consume nearly three decades, claim tens of thousands of lives, shatter entire community’s Tamil and Sinhalese.
Standing today here facing the once flame-engulfed walls of this magnificent monument, we should say loudly, never again. Never again must mean: never again a burned library. Never again a Black July. But never again cannot be a wish. It must be a programme. Seventeen years have passed since the guns fell silent in May 2009. What has changed? The war is over, the conditions that produced the war are not.
The military still occupies the North and the East. Tamil lands remain seized under military control. Tamil writers find their books blocked by Government censors under the cynical banner of national unity. And presiding over all of this today is the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna/National People’s Power Government of Anura Kumara Dissanayake , a Party that built its political career on enthusiastic support for the anti-Tamil war, that opposed every concession to Tamil democratic rights, and that now poses as a Government of national unity while allowing Sinhala chauvinist propaganda to circulate freely.
We must say this plainly: the militarisation of the North has not ended with the war. It has continued and deepened. Successive Governments from Percy Mahendra Mahinda Rajapaksa to Ranil Wickremesinghe to Kumara Dissanayake have maintained the military stranglehold on Tamil life because the military is the iron fist of a capitalist State that rules in the interests of the Sinhalese bourgeoisie and serves as the instrument of communal oppression. The glorification of the military, the victory parades, the war monuments, the cult of the soldier, is not incidental. It is how the ruling class educates the Sinhalese masses into accepting militarism as their national identity, while ensuring that no united struggle of Tamil and Sinhalese workers can challenge the social order.
The moral disorientation you see in the Sinhalese society today, the celebration of soldiers over teachers, the tolerance of racist social media, the passive acceptance of Tamil humiliation and even calls for the repeat of the historical violence, massacres and vandalism, is not the natural condition of the Sinhalese people. It is a manufactured condition. It has been manufactured, across decades, by a ruling class that needed Sinhalese workers to see Tamils as their enemy rather than their comrades. It is the deliberate product of a political culture built on militarism, chauvinism, fear, and lies, because a Sinhalese worker who hates Tamil workers is a worker who will never turn to face his actual oppressor. It is in this context that we should turn to the lessons of seven decades of betrayal
The tragedy of Sri Lanka is inseparable from the history of betrayal by the parties that once claimed to speak for the working class. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which emerged from the Trotskyist tradition, was once the largest workers’ Party in South Asia. It had, within its hands, the political means to unite Tamil and Sinhalese workers on the basis of socialist internationalism, to oppose communalism at its roots, and to fight for a Government of the working class that guaranteed equal rights for all national minorities. Instead, in 1964, the LSSP leadership capitulated to class collaboration, joined the bourgeois coalition of Sirima Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike, and sealed Tamil oppression into the very Constitution of the republic. Colvin Reginald de Silva, once a fighter for the Fourth International, presided as a Minister over the entrenchment of the Sinhala-only language policy. This was not a minor error. It was a world-historical betrayal. It opened the road to every pogrom, every war crime, every burned library that followed.
Capitalism cannot solve the national question in Sri Lanka. The ending of the war did not solve the Tamil national question, and the ruling class has been capitalising on this unresolved problem ever since. Throughout the 78 years of Independence, it has produced only communal war and economic devastation. The Tamil bourgeois Parties, the Tamil United Liberation Front, the Tamil National Alliance and its successors have failed Tamil workers and youth just as comprehensively, channeling legitimate grievances into Parliamentary deals with Colombo and appeals to foreign imperialist powers that have never served Tamil interests and never will. The LTTE separatist programme, whatever its origins in the just anger of Tamil youth, could not overcome the fundamental reality that a separate Tamil capitalist State would be a small, economically weak entity, dependent on the same imperialist powers that armed and sustained Colombo’s military, unable to guarantee the rights of Tamils who live within and outside the North and the East, and incapable of addressing the root of the class question.
The path forward is not separation. It is not a communal deal brokered between Tamil and Sinhalese elites. It is the unification of the Sri Lankan working class, Tamil, Sinhalese, and Muslim, in a common struggle against the capitalist system that has used communalism as its instrument of rule for seven decades.
What does never again demand of us?
When we say never again, we do not make a sentimental appeal. We make a political commitment.
Never again a Jaffna Library arson means: never again will we allow the ruling class to burn the cultural heritage of any people, because we understand that the hand that lit that fire was the hand of class rule, using racial hatred as its instrument. Never again a Black July means: never again will Sinhalese workers stand aside while their class brothers and sisters are massacred, because we understand that the pogrom was organised against Tamils to prevent the unity that would threaten the ruling class.
The Sinhalese workers and youth who are told today that their national glory consists in military parades are being robbed. They are being robbed of their class consciousness, of their solidarity with fellow workers, of their capacity to fight for their own emancipation. The same ruling class that burned the Jaffna Library has imposed poverty, casualised labor, and International Monetary Fund austerity on Sinhalese workers. The enemy of Tamil workers is the enemy of the Sinhalese workers. His name is not Tamil or Sinhalese. Its name is capital.
What are we fighting for?
We call upon Tamil and Sinhalese workers, youth, teachers, students, and intellectuals to build a united movement, not a movement of ethnic reconciliation brokered by elites who represent no one but themselves, but a movement of the working class, fighting for: The immediate end to military occupation of the North and the East, and the return of all seized Tamil lands to the rightful owners. Full linguistic, cultural, and democratic rights for Tamils and all national minorities, including the Muslim community which has faced its own waves of racist persecution. An end to the militarist culture that has been poisoned into the Sinhalese society, a culture that glorifies killing and suppresses solidarity. The prosecution of those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity, from Black July. And above all a socialist political programme that places the resources of this island its land, its labour, its productive capacity, under the democratic control of its working people, Sinhalese, Tamil, and Muslim alike, so that poverty, communal division, and ruling-class manipulation can be swept away at their roots.
The Jaffna Library held the memory of a civilisation. It held books that no one can recover. It also holds, for us, an indelible political lesson: that a ruling class willing to burn a library is a ruling class willing to burn everything, willing to burn villages, willing to massacre civilians, willing to destroy entire peoples, in defense of its power and profit. Honour the memory of what was destroyed on this night 45 years ago not by grief alone, but by commitment, the commitment to build the political movement that makes such destruction impossible, by ending the system that makes it necessary. A heritage was rendered ashes. But, the struggle lives on.
Never again through the unity of the working class of the North and the South.
The writer is an attorney
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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication