33 Years Ago Today; Sri Lanka’s Black July: Borella, 24th Evening

July 24, 2016

Most people hate to see themselves as murderers. This influences the manner in which they perceive public and private tragedies, and memory often rejects the unpleasant and sanitises the true nature of the event. So it happened with Tamils in the way they sanitised and rationalised instances of Tamil violence against Sinhalese and Muslims. Several of these have been described in our reports over the years. The Sri Lankan State with its ideology is an institution, which most Sinhalese actively or passively empathised with. The fact that there was no investigation into the violence of July 1983, made it easy for Sinhalese in general to opt for versions that distanced their government and hence themselves from the holocaust. Likewise the Tamils, with the subsequent communal attacks by their militant groups.

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