After seeing a couple of posts saying “Ask your grandparents or parents about Black July” I just had a thought. Not to go ask them, I’ve already done that before. But I wondered, just like you can ask an older person, “Where were you during black July” I asked myself, “where would I be during Black July?”
In summary, Black July refers to the Anti-Tamil riots of 1983, which saw people taking to the streets to hunt down any Tamil person they could find, to kill them and destroy their property. With a mostly undocumented death toll, numbering in the 3000s. It was a brutal display of racism and the deep evil that rose from it.
Full articles on it can be found on the Colombo gazette, Groundviews and many other publications as well (Reading multiple views is recommended).
While all this carnage was going on, I’d like to think I would have ushered Tamil people into my home and protected them. But I’d probably be scared too, so I wondered if I’d be brave enough for that. “I definitely wouldn’t be one of the perpetrators,” I thought. But then again, the perpetrators wouldn’t have imagined themselves there either. They weren’t all street thugs and violent sociopaths. They were the Kade uncles, the next-door neighbours, even boys still in their school uniforms. Just normal people turned savage for some reason. When such atrocity has been done by ordinary people, You have to ask yourselves, how? Why?
My mother was an 18-year old A level student in July 1983 when she told a group of Tamil boys “I’ll keep this step here, so when they burn your house you jump to mine, and if they burn my house use it to jump back to yours.” They never did burn either of their houses, but those boys along with a group of others were kept safe by a young girl that didn’t think twice about risking her house and possibly life, to keep a bunch of strangers safe. I often wonder what kind of savages you’d have to be, to just look at a person and go “You’re part of this group,(Race) I don’t like your group, I’m going to kill you and burn anything of yours I feel like”
But I have to remind myself that people don’t just become savage overnight.They don’t just hate a race of people overnight. It’s taught subtly. It’s observed in oppression. “Sinhala first” It’s reinforced by supremacy “Most prominent place.” All of these acts like fuel to a fire. A fire which begins as a little spark “These Muslims only men, so annoying” A spark that gets some fuel added to it “ She’s like this because she belongs to this group” and suddenly the spark becomes a flame, the flame starts a fire, a fire which most of us don’t acknowledge until it’s just too late. That is what I believe Black July was, a slowly built fire, fueled by years of questionable policies, communal unrest, manipulated information, which finally culminated in the inferno which was the 83 riots, which devastated so many innocent lives. The effects of which are still felt today. But we don’t have this sort of inferno. Or so we think.
June 2014 — Anti Muslims riots in Aluthgama, Beruwala, Kalutara killed 4 people, injured around 80, and 100s were made homeless following the riots. Clear anti-Muslim slogans were observed in these riots, and the same racist sentiments were seen in the violence which was perpetrated.
Feb 2018 — Riots in Digana. After a ridiculous story about sterilization pills, shops were burned with people in them, and a series of attacks and riots broke out all around the area with heavy racial, Anti Muslim connotations. The victims, just innocent people that didn’t ask to be caught up in this.
Violations of religious freedom are nothing new to Sri Lanka, nor is discrimination and rioting based on ethnicity. The reason why these things aren’t given as much prominence as they should is another conclusion I leave to you, but there’s one thing we really need to focus on right now.
We won’t need to risk our life or property to stop this, but perhaps our reputation. In our workplaces or friend circles, when people gloss over the atrocities that happened before and trivialize it, you might need to risk your reputation to state the facts clearly there.
And for that, we need to know the facts, so perhaps we may also need to give of our time. We may need to spend time learning history, a little bit about politics, subtle events which led to some of our countries great tragedies. Difficult in a culture where it’s so acceptable for young people to say “I’m not interested much in this political stuff” when we are the ones who should be most interested, as it will affect us the longest. So we might have to sacrifice some time, to learn, so that those immediately around us may learn as well, and then collectively, perhaps we could address the policies that lead to this sort of tyranny, and stop those fires before they burn out of control. So maybe right now, what we must do is to use our vote wisely, and in an informed manner, so that we won’t have to deal with the dire consequences of not doing so.
