Since December 2005 there has been an escalating armed conflict between the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The Sri Lankan armed forces have carried out a series of brutal massacres of Tamils, such as the August 14 bombing of an orphanage by the air force.

More than 50 children died. On August 4, 17 aid workers, mainly Tamils, were murdered by the SLA.

In June, Sri Lankan Navy troops threw grenades into a church where Tamil refugees were sheltering.

A ceasefire signed in February 2002 had ended nearly 20 years of war, but further negotiations failed to lead to a lasting peace.

Violence continued on a smaller scale, mainly due to the SLA’s support for paramilitary groups that murdered LTTE members and supporters. In December 2005, large-scale fighting broke out again.

The roots of the conflict lie in a long history of state oppression of the Tamils, which eventually led some Tamil youth to take up arms against the government.

When Sri Lanka gained its independence from Britain in 1948, one of the new government’s first acts was to remove Tamil plantation workers’ citizenship rights.

These workers were descended from people brought to Sri Lanka from India by the British in the 19th century to work on coffee and tea plantations.

Despite the fact that their families had lived in Sri Lanka for several generations, a million people were denied Sri Lankan citizenship and defined as “Indians”.

The citizenship law did not directly affect the main group of Tamils, whose ancestors had lived in the north and east of the island of Sri Lanka for thousands of years.

But it was soon followed by new laws adversely affecting all Tamils.

Sinhalese was declared the country’s sole official language, making speakers of the Tamil language second-class citizens.

Knowledge of Sinhalese was made a prerequisite for employment in the public service, excluding most Tamils from government jobs.

Discrimination against Tamils was also applied in education.

Government repression

For many years Tamils opposed this discrimination by peaceful means, including demonstrations, sit-ins and participation in elections.

But peaceful protests were met with violent repression, carried out by the police and army, as well as racist Sinhalese mobs incited by politicians and Buddhist monks.

There was a series of pogroms against Tamils, culminating in the murder of an estimated 3000 people in July 1983 during government-instigated riots.

The growing repression led to increased Tamil nationalist sentiment. In 1977, the Tamil United Liberation Front won 17 seats in Sri Lanka’s parliament on a platform of Tamil self-determination.

Repression of peaceful protests led many Tamil youth to turn to violent methods. The LTTE was formed in 1972 and carried out its first major armed action in 1978.

After the 1983 pogrom, the LTTE gained increased support from the Tamil community and dramatically stepped up its war against the SLA.

Government forces were unable to defeat the LTTE, despite brutal repression, including numerous massacres of Tamil civilians.

In 1987, the Indian government sent a “peace-keeping force” to Sri Lanka, ostensibly to protect Tamils from the SLA. However, the Indian government did not want to see the creation of an independent Tamil state, and the Indian army soon began repressing the LTTE.

In 1988, Ranasinghe Premadasa was elected Sri Lanka’s president. He was no friend of Tamils, having been prime minister during the 1983 pogrom.

Nevertheless, he opposed the continued presence of Indian troops, and started talks with the LTTE.

He even secretly gave the LTTE some arms to fight the Indian troops.

But he remained opposed to Tamil self-determination, and once the Indian army withdrew fighting broke out once again between the SLA and the LTTE.

Failed 'peace’ deals

There have been a number of attempts to reach a peaceful settlement to the war. Chandrika Kumaratunga was elected prime minister in 1994 after campaigning on a peace platform. However, she was never serious about peace and merely wanted time to rebuild the SLA for a new war.

The 2002 ceasefire with the United National Party government of Ranil Wickremesinghe was the longest-lasting attempt to bring peace. But once again the government failed to offer the Tamil people a just solution that could guarantee a lasting peace, and even failed to fully implement the ceasefire agreement.

The UNP government, which claimed to want peace but failed to deliver, was replaced in 2004 by a more openly chauvinist government, a coalition of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party with the People’s Liberation Front (JVP).

The United States and other imperialist powers have supported the Sri Lankan state against the Tamil struggle, supplying weapons and military training to the SLA. Israel has supplied Kfir jets to the Sri Lankan air force.

The US has banned the LTTE as a “terrorist organisation”, while ignoring the state terrorism carried out by the Sri Lankan armed forces. The European Union recently followed suit.

The bias of the “international community” also takes more subtle forms. An example is the Sri Lankan Monitoring Mission, which was established to supervise the 2002 ceasefire. The SLMM, headed by a Norwegian general, failed to enforce certain key provisions of the ceasefire agreement — for example, those requiring the SLA to vacate public buildings it has occupied in Tamil areas and to disarm paramilitary groups allied to the army.

The Norwegian mediators also did not take seriously the LTTE’s call for refugees to be allowed to return to their homes in the large areas of land occupied by the SLA (so-called “high security zones”). As a result, the LTTE eventually suspended participation in the talks.

But while essentially supporting the Sri Lankan government, the imperialist powers have at times tried to pressure it into granting small concessions to the Tamils. This annoys the most extreme Sinhala chauvinists, who sometimes claim that foreign powers are supporting the LTTE.

The left’s failures

During the 1950s, the Sri Lankan left appeared fairly strong. Both the Communist Party and the Trotskyist Lanka Sama Samaja Party (Ceylon Equal Society Party — LSSP) had a number of members of parliament.

However, these parties proved willing to sell out their principles in order to join coalition governments with the capitalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party. For example, dropping their insistence on equality for the Tamil language. Furthermore, the left parties largely neglected the rural poor.

The left parties’ shortcomings contributed to the rise of the JVP in Sinhala areas and of the LTTE in Tamil areas. The JVP was formed in the 1960s as a radical movement of Sinhalese rural youth. It led revolts against the government in 1971 and 1989 and was repressed by the SLA with extreme brutality on both occasions.

However, the JVP now reassures US officials that it has “renounced armed struggle”. The group still sometimes claims to be Marxist, but Sinhala chauvinism has become the main feature of its ideology in recent years.

While claiming to support equal rights for all ethnic groups, it denies the Tamil people’s right to self-determination and calls for war against the LTTE — which, in practice, given the racist character of the Sri Lankan army, means war against the Tamil people.

Tamil Tigers

The LTTE has fought courageously and persistently against the Sri Lankan and Indian armies in an effort to win self-determination for Tamils. It has been willing to seek a peaceful solution when it appeared that the Sri Lankan government might be willing to agree.

The LTTE has strong support from the Tamils living in the north and east of the island of Sri Lanka. This is indicated by election results (20 members of the pro-LTTE Tamil National Alliance were elected to Sri Lanka's parliament in 2004) and by the big attendance at LTTE-organised rallies for self-determination held throughout the north and east during 2005.

But self-determination has not yet been attained. This is not solely due to the military power of the Sri Lankan state and the backing it receives from the imperialist powers, important though that is. It is also due to the political limitations of the LTTE itself.

The LTTE has tended to see the struggle as a predominantly military one. This has led to disregarding the need to win support among the Sinhalese workers, peasants and students of southern Sri Lanka for Tamils’ right to self-determination, as well winning the support of the Tamil-speaking Muslims of eastern Sri Lanka.

The anti-war movement played a key role in forcing the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. The absence of a mass anti-war movement in southern Sri Lanka is a key obstacle to the success of the Tamil struggle.

The LTTE has been willing to negotiate with Sinhalese political leaders whenever the latter showed any signs of wanting to reach a peaceful solution. But the LTTE has not sought to get its message directly to the Sinhalese masses, bypassing the politicians whose promises of peace have been deceptive.

The lack of a strong anti-war movement in southern Sri Lanka reflects the weakness and political limitations of the Sri Lankan left, but some actions by LTTE have also helped to alienate the Sinhalese masses.

The LTTE has sometimes responded to the atrocities of the SLA by carrying out atrocities of its own, including massacres of Sinhalese civilians. At various times it has carried out bombings in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.

Errors by the LTTE also helped alienate the Tamil-speaking Muslims of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. The government’s discrimination against the Tamil language should have provided a basis for a united struggle by all Tamil-speaking people, including Muslims, against this injustice and for a united homeland for all Tamil people in Sri Lanka’s north and east.

Some Muslim youth joined the LTTE in its early years. But the government, with the aid of some Muslim politicians, was able to instigate clashes between Tamils and Muslims. This led the LTTE to become suspicious of Muslims, to such an extent that it expelled them en masse from the Jaffna region in the north. While the LTTE has since made efforts to rebuild relations with the Muslims, suspicions have not been overcome.

The LTTE's militaristic way of thinking has also led to the repression of dissent among the Tamils themselves.

These faults of the LTTE should not, however, negate progressives’ support for Tamils’ right to self-determination, and, in particular, for the removal of the occupying SLA from Tamil areas. The government’s denial of the right of Tamils to self-determination remains the main obstacle to peace.

This need not lead to total separation of predominantly Tamil areas from the Sri Lankan state. The LTTE has stated its willingness to consider a federal structure. But the crucial point is that the unity of Sri Lanka must be voluntary, not imposed by the SLA through violent repression.

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