Origins of the Sri Lankan civil war
Tamils were overrepresented in the civil service jobs due to the advantage of English language educational resources being allegedly disproportionately allocated to them.
[5] Since Jaffna soil was economically unproductive unlike the south, Tamils there invested more heavily in education to secure government jobs.
[6] Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism sparked by the grievances of the majority against the domination of a Westernized elite would lead to ethnic polarization.
[10] A primary contributor to the development of political awareness amongst Tamils during the European colonial rule was the advent of Protestant missionaries on a large scale from 1814.
[11][12] Great Britain, which had come to control the whole of the island in 1815, instituted a legislative council in 1833 with three Europeans and one each for Sinhalese, Sri Lankan Tamils and Burghers.
The issue of power sharing was used by the nationalists of both communities to create an escalating inter-ethnic rivalry which has continually gained momentum ever since.
However, the British Governor William Manning actively encouraged the concept of "communal representation" and created the Colombo seat which alternated between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.
The decision was strongly opposed by the Tamil political leadership, who realized that they would be reduced to a minority in parliament, according to the proportion of the population they make up.
[16] The Second World War served as an interregnum where the adroit politics of D. S. Senanayake successfully balancing the polarising tendencies of the Sinhalese as well as Tamil nationalists.
S. J. V. Chelvanayakam, the leader of this new party, contested the citizenship act before the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, and then in the Privy council in England, on grounds of discrimination towards minorities, but he did not prevail in overturning it.
[18] In response to the parliamentary act that made Sinhala the sole official language in 1956, Federal MPs staged a non violent sit in (satyagraha) protest, but it was broken up by a nationalist mob.
The FP was cast as scapegoats and were briefly banned after the 1958 riots in which many were killed and thousands of Tamils forced to flee their homes.
Another point of conflict between the communities was state sponsored colonization schemes that had the effect of changing the demographic balance in the Eastern province in favor of majority Sinhalese that the Tamil nationalists considered to be their traditional homeland.
But these policies severely curtailed the middle class Tamil youth, who found it more difficult during the 1970s and 1980s to enter a university or secure employment.
[25] The most important contributor to the strength of the militant groups was the Black July pogrom which was perceived have been an organized event in which over 1000 Sri Lankan Tamil civilians were killed prompting many youth to prefer the armed path of resistance.
[25] There is a sizable population of Tamils in the Central Province, plantation laborers brought down from India by the British colonial authorities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The main reason for the imbalance was that several multi-member constituencies elected a Tamil member of Parliament in a majority Sinhalese electorate.
The Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) government led by Solomon Bandaranaike was sworn into office on a platform that of helping the growing population of unemployed youth who were disenfranchised by the Sinhala Official Language policy.
A majority of civil servants under colonial rule were Tamil whose positions benefited from free English-medium missionary schools in the north and east of the island.
However, the majority of the Sri Lankan populace lived outside urban areas and did not belong to the social elite, and therefore did not enjoy the benefits of English-medium education.
The issue was compounded further by the fact that in the Jaffna district, where a largely Tamil speaking populace resided, students had access to English-medium education through missionary schools.
This created a situation where a large proportion of university students enrolled in professional courses such as medicine and engineering were English speaking Tamils.
In the 1960s, the government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike proceeded to nationalize most missionary schools in the country, secularizing them and changing the language of instruction from English to Sinhala only.
Unable to speak Sinhalese, it became increasingly difficult for Tamil youth to gain access to civil service jobs or attend universities, and unemployment rose.
[36][37] The pogrom was premeditated,[38][39][40][41][note 1] and was finally triggered by a deadly ambush on a Sri Lankan Army patrol by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on 23 July 1983, which killed 13 soldiers.
[43] Although initially orchestrated by members of the ruling UNP, the pogrom soon escalated into mass violence with significant public participation.
[45] The NGO International Commission of Jurists described the violence of the pogrom as having "amounted to acts of genocide" in a report published in December 1983.
