Let’s Remove the Colonial Tropes in the Writings on Sri Lanka

Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake, whose preferred title is  “Decolonizing July 1983’s Fiction and History for a Post-Ethnic Sri Lanka: Tropes of Violence and Cold War at the end of the American Century”

 “Fair is foul and foul is fair”— William Shakespeare, Macbeth

 !@#$!!!! …. The Editor’s efforts to insert appealing cartoons and/or pictures of Macbeth were defeated by the digital world’s capitalist principles & demands for payment

Why are there no Booker Prize-winning novels about mundane multicultural families that inter-married for generations, shared religion/s, language/s and co-existed for centuries, while living in relative harmony in Ceylon/ Sri Lanka? Is the trope of dark natives engaged in endless chaotic violence an international literature prize-winning bestseller that masks white mischief, including sanitized, techno-scientific AI guided drone warfare? Susan William’s brilliant and brave book “White Malice” is subtitled, “The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa’.

Conversely, why are there so few prizes, literary or otherwise, for brilliant cross-over social science researchers and journalists like Phil Miller, author of the book “Keenie Meenie; The British Mercenaries who got away with war crimes” in Sri Lanka, Oman, Afghanistan, and other parts of the global post/colony, or perhaps we should say, the post-Covid-19 US dollar Eurobond debt-trapped Afro-Asian (neo)colony.

Located at the center of the Indian Ocean World, a tropical monsoon paradise isle, long deemed an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” and hence perpetually in the cross-hairs of great power rivalry, Taprobane, Sarendip, Ceylon, Sri Lanka, has so many stories to tell beside tired and trite stories of chaotic, cascading ethno-religious violence — a grand narrative that launched 41 years ago with the staging of ‘Black July’ 1983 as the Cold War turned hot in the Global South.

Instead of rose-tinted Raj Nostalgia favourites (the flip side of the dark natives’ violence and corruption stereotype), why not invite the brilliant and brave American journalist, Vincent Bevins to speak at Sri Lanka’s Indian Ocean-facing, Galle Literary festival?  Bevins is the author of the award winning; “The Jakarta Method”, about the US Central Intelligence Agencies (CIA), and Britain’s secret service MI-6 Cold War killing sprees across Asia, Africa and Latin America against communists, socialists and the Red left, that helps contextualize some of the violence evident in de-colonizing Ceylon/Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the Afro/Asian post/colony.

Phil Miller and Vincent Bevin’s brave books, both published in 2020, are based on recently de-classified documents, including the US State Department, Asia Foundation, the Foreign Office and British Archives. Most important and fascinating are interviews with people who lived through GLADIO-style Cold War violence against the Left and Trade Unions in the Global South – a subject to which we shall return. Miller’s and Bevin’s books, along with Yale University’s Eugen Ford’s “Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in South Asia” which details the use and weaponization of religion and religious networks of influence to stave off ‘God-less”  Communist movements in the Third World may help us lift the veil of long-cultivated and islanded ignorance among Colombo’s political, business and academic talking classes about the wider geopolitical Cold War dynamics that contextualize Sri Lanka’s post-colonial spasms of conflict among Leftists, ethno-nationalists and the State, as well as, the pogrom/riots of 1983 and the war that followed.

They help us connect the dots of apparently local and “internal’ ‘Leftist terrorists, ethnic”, religious and nationalist violence to the wider global Cold War strategy of fanning proxy wars to ensure continued colonial divide and rule policies, while weaponizing religious, linguistic and cultural differences in the Afro-Asian post/colony by the US-led war machine which maintains a surveillance network of more than 800 military bases around the world at this time to safeguard Euro-American and allied corporate financial, economic and security interests including in off-shore tax havens.

Ethnic Conflict as a South Asian Regional Proxy War

The wider global geopolitical arena of Cold War proxy war which took the form of a South Asian regional proxy war in Sri Lanka — with India’s intervention to weaponize linguistic tensions in the strategic island, becomes visible in Miller’s book that opens with the arrival of Britain’s K.M.S Mercenaries in 1983.

Miller describes how villagers in Batticaloa, on the Eastern Province, called the Keenie Meenie white mercenaries who flew STF helicopters, which also dropped grenades in cocktail glasses taken from the officer’s mess in Trincomalee Harbour on innocent civilians “Mossadu”. This was the local name for the white mercenaries, a la Israel’s Mossad that also trained the Sri Lankan Special Task Force (STF), accused of war crimes, in response to India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), operations which included setting up of Tamil militant groups in northeast Sri Lanka—in order to ward off any US military base in Trincomalee in a geostrategic theater called Sri Lanka.

A South Asian regional proxy war certainly unfolded between the Capitalist West backed and penetrated United National Party’s President J.R Jayawardena regime in Colombo after 1977 (when ‘Yankie Dickie’ as JR was called), came to power.

India the South Asian regional hegemon, allied then as now with then Communist Russia/ the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), was fearful of a US military base being set up in its back-yard at the much coveted Trincomallee deep sea harbour over which the British and French once fought a bloody battle in order to extend control over Indian Ocean trade routes. Hence, Indian intelligence agencies through the Research and Analysis wing (RAW), funded and trained Tamil militant groups including the Liberation Tigers (LTTE), in the northeast to deter the pro-US Colombo regime from any such adventure.

The South Asian regional Cold War proxy war in Sri Lanka took the form of a 30-year “Ethnic Conflict’, that was always already transnationally networked, funded and sustained by global-local networks and transnational interests. . It is remarkable that the worst ethnic and religious violence happened in the strategic with the supposedly liberal UNP governments in power enabling deep penetration of government investigations and institutions, including security, legal systems. The pogrom/ riots of 1983 and the so-called ISIS staged Easter Sunday bombing of 2019 designed to trigger a “Cascades” of violence. The first succeeded the second failed.

Jakata Method style lists of homes and business to be targeted were used in the Pogrom of 1983. Subsequent bouts of internal war attenuated close ties among Sinhala and Tamil speaking communities. Particularly, targeted and damaged in the third decade of armed conflict were long sustaining ties among Tamils and Muslim communities in the Eastern Province where Israel’s Mossad ran riot also to divide the LTTE”s Eastern Command from the North commoand. Mossad continues to this day to be present in Batticaloa where the mysterious was targeted in an own goal operation in the ISIS claimed 2019 attack and in the Surfing Zones of Arugam Bay and elsewhere along Sri Lanka’s strategic Indian Ocean coast line that was also hit by a Nuclear submarine triggered Tsunami Disaster. Hence, too the refrain “Someone Else’s War” and the UTHR book of the same.

Institutions like the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), similar to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe, were also set up to fight Communism, stem de-colonization, self-determination and Independence movements, and sustain Euro-American interests in the post/colony. SEATO was set up in 1954 by US President Eisenhower and headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand, to run proxy wars in South and Southeast Asia, including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma, even as Buddhism and Islam were weaponized.
Eisenhower would later warn the American people and incoming President J.F.
Kennedy who was assassinated in 1963 also for wanting to withdraw American troops from Vietnam, about the very same US military business industrial complex, being the greatest threat to Democracy in America. They were not growing roses and water lilies in the 800 military bases around the world.

“Freedom must be defended in every quarter. Each collective security
organization has its own character. SEATO, NATO, CENTRO, and other groups
have been designed to meet particular situations in various parts of the world for the threat of Communism is worldwide.” According to The CIA authorized Story of SEATO 1

In September of 1954, the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, the Philippines, Thailand and Pakistan formed the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, or SEATO, meeting in Manila. The purpose of the organization was to prevent communism from gaining ground in the region. So too the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), formerly known as the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO) and also known as the Baghdad Pact, was a military alliance of the Cold War. It was formed on 24 February 1955 by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

The alliance was dissolved on 16 March 1979. The organizations supported the weaponization of relgion/s and replicated GLADIO operations in Europe against Communists and leftists detailed by Swiss Historian Daniell Ganse.
Ethnic Conflict as a South Asian Regional Proxy War

Decolonizing Fiction: Beyond Culture Wars, identity politics, and other Distractions

Colombo’s many vibrant and colourful book shops are filled with novels, hi-stories, cultural, photographic and film studies and beautiful coffee table books, social and political science academic treaties, many on ethno-religious tropical violence. Others skirt the trope. As well, there are books about Buddhist, Hindu and tropical architecture and Orientalist exotica that sell well among English-speaking audiences. Increasingly, more and less superficial stories and films about cultural mixing and hybridity appear to be the flip side of the trope of perennial conflict — the anti-dote to depressing stories about dark natives and their interminable violence.

Endless fiction about perennial ‘ethnic conflict’ may jostles, post-war literary prize winning childhood inflected, semi-autobiographical diaspora novels, ethnographies and narratives that blur into travels stories to and from the beautiful, tragic, tear drop island which was bled and brain-drained of its talent, skills and youth, though various post-colonial episodes of violence, and exogenous economic shocks staged and delivered to “Make the Economy Scream” as President Nixon famously instructed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Cold War Chile, 1973 when the first popularly elected Socialist President of South America, Dr. Salvador Allende, was killed. Much like Sri Lanka’s first Socialist S.W.R.D Bandaranaike was assassinated in 1959 purportedly be a Buddhist Monk.

In honour of ‘Operation Colombo’, Santiago de Chile saw an operation of the same name that saw the disappearance of 39 intellectuals under the Washington-backed military dictator Augusto Pinochet who was later tried in a Spanish court for “Operation Colombo”. Was it to a mockery of history that a salacious film titled “Albaorda’ about an imaginary rape by Chilean Nobel poet Laureate, Pablo Neruda of a beautiful ‘Tamil servant girl’ when Neruda was Chile’s Consul General in Sri Lanka, was made and premiered in Tokyo, Japan in 2022– to character assassinate the leftist poet Laureate and friend of President Allende?

New investigations now show that Neruda too was assassinated (poisoned in hospital), during the CIA Cold War coup of 1973 against the popularly elected socialist government of his friend and confidant Allend. Thus too may history be twisted, warped and gamed, ironically by well-meaning, left-leaning, avant guard film directors like Asoka Handagama who clearly did not do his research right in his screenplay of Sri Lankan identity politics projected into Cold War geopolitics given foreign funding for such pulp fiction.

After all, shades of the CIA’s ‘Jakarta Method’ with lists of those to be targetted were chillingly replicated in Sri Lanka during the 1971 and 89 ‘Janatha Vimukthi Peramnua’ (JVP), insurgent uprisings and the 1983 pogrom/ riots that precipitated the ‘beggar’s wound’ of ‘ethnic conflict’ that ran for 30 years.

The JVP and LTTE conflicts with the de-colonizing State ensured the under and de-developing the strategic island. What emerged was an economic development model of and for colonial dependency on the Imperial West for markets and products, including the ‘economic reforms” inaugurated when “Yankie Dickie” nick-named President J.R. Jayawardena as he came to power with the riots of 1977 to Make the Economy Scream with ISIS-like terror which hit the country in 2019 and also laid the ground work for the current IMF USD-Eurobond Default and purported ‘bankruptcy” of Sri Lanka.

Orientalism and Raj Nostaligia: Beyond the frame of Violence

Raj Nostalgia for colonial rule is the flip side of the trope of exotic violence that has framed and islanded a significant part of English language literary production on Sri Lanka. Meanwhile, Cold War geopolitical currents and external actors that benefit from various exogenous economic shocks to “Make the economy scream” and bleed and brain-drain de-colonzing Sri Lanka, has remained beyond or outside the literary, historical and social science research and re-presentational frame, also given the hegemony of the modern nation-state. Thus the dark-skinned native in both victim and perpetrator, prisoner of his/ her own doom and chaotic violence in the islanded literature and history that may be also full of exotic spirtis, healing rituals, with nothing said about the systematic and deliberate weaponization of religion /s, spirituality and the occult by external intelligence agencies.

Indeed, large swaths of what we may term the Afro-Asian post/colony following Achille Membe have been represented in a hegemonic historical, anthropo logical and literary imaginary as prone to violence and disasters, natural and man-made– leading up to the current in vogue “Anthropocene climate catastrophe” literary narratives, exhibitions and artist shows about sinking islands, burning forests, heating seas, tsunamis and the like. Meanwhile Green and Blue debt bondage is designed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and colonial Club de Paris purveyours of Odious debt in the shape of Debt-for-Nature Swaps or Macro-Economy linked bonds to “Make the Economy Scream” again so the natives may have another Aragalaya protest show with placards in support of the IMF although Victoria Nurland is out of office in Washington.

Ethno-religious and gender-based, caste to lesser extent class violence as well as disaster stories had great purchase among those who seek to write and read, study and re-present the country in fiction, film, cultural studies and social science literature. Of course Culture Wars are fashionable around the world these days. They also serve to distract from Global power and wealth shifts east in the Asian 21^st century and the BRICS emerge as Empires rise and fall. Identity politics of all hues – race, ethnic, caste, gender, LGBTQ..xyz, hybrid diaspora, are also film and literary-prize favourites and tend to be valourized in the fiction, ethnographic, heritage and historical studies of the country written in the English language for transnational audiences. Of, course, from 330 million gods and goddesses, toddy tappers and slaves in palanquins, Ceylon/Sri Lanka had and has a fair share of exotica, colonial Orientalist and racialized Raj Nostagila fantasy, for historical and leisure literary consumption, notwithstanding.

Stories and films on cultural mixing and hybridity may be seen as the flip side of the trope of perennial ethnic conflict — an anti-dote to depressing stories about the interminable violence of dark natives. Hybridity stories are increasingly part of the repatoire of memory, history and colonial archive, curated in USAID and EU-funded Non-Governmental Organizations’ Cultural and literature Studies programs and seminar that continue to elide the very real structures and systems of what has been termed the  violent ‘American Century’, in particular, the Euro-American NATO war machine with 800 plus military bases around the world to conduct hybrid economic war operations and “Make the Economy Scream” in the Afro-Asian post/colony.

Culture wars not only enable gaming history, in an age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Fakes, and distract from hard geopolitical and violent economic realities of debt neo-colonialism, new Cold War proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine/Israel, and related systems and structures of militarization, and bonded indentured labour migration that sustain Euro-American G7 Eurobond-US dollar IMF debt colonialism to this day. &++

Is it not time to recognize the American Century of perpetual war draws as it draws to an Amagdon-eques end for what it truly was in the Asian 21^st Century?  The decades long Cold War (1946-1991), in Europe culminated with the breakup of the Soviet Union and Communist dream when Capitalism seemed to triumph with Francis Fukushima’s “End of History” narrative.

In the Global South the Cold War took the form of and continues in the shape of regional, hybrid, economic proxy wars against de-colonization and National Liberation movements largely socialist and leftist in the Afro-Asian post/colony, including South Asia- a history that remains to be written. That Cold War continues as a proxy war on China in Sri Lanka today as the native try liberate themselves from dependence on the “exorbitantly privileged US dollar” and colonial Club de Paris-Eurobond IMF Odious Debt trap mafia at this time that is crafting Macro-Economy Linked bonds to further debt bondage.

The secret, sanitized, organized and targeted violence of the Cold War honed Euro-American, US led military industrial complex’s intelligence networks and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) War Machine that protects its financial interests and assets strips otherwise wealthy countries around the world through exchange rate manipulations, manifests in various masks and forms:  Staged regime change operations riots, pogroms, assassinations, coups and Aragalaya protest chaos strategies in the Global South (and Hong Kong 2019), to ‘Make the Economy Scream’ have remained largely beyond the ethnographic and photographic frame. Simultaneously, internal, religious and cultural differences have been valourized and weaponized to divide and distract national liberation struggles and Communist Socialist and Left movements for independence and self-determination, by retreating European empires that had divided and ruled the Global South and continue to do so ensure their security and economic interests around the world– as the rising American empire moved in at the end of World War 2.

They were not growing roses and waterlilies in their 800 military bases around the world, Human Rights and Democracy conferences notwithstanding. Indeed, the nearest US military base to Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean is a tragic tale of dusky people who were banished from their island home –the Chagos Islands were the deadly CIA Blacksite is located at the giant Diego Garcia military base. Military bases are by nature highly environmentally polluting and carbon emission intense but somehow they never feature in the “Anthropocene Climate Catastrophe’ grand narrative and UN Conference Circuit that has replaced Covid-19 as the new ruse for Empire and Global Governance.

PART 2 — The Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk: Cold War GLADIO Ops. in the Global South

The Owl of Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, flies as dusk, as Hegal and Walter Benjamin who meditated long and hard on History as a ‘presentist’ pastime wrote.

“40 years after the staging of the July 1983 Pogrom that morphed into riots and then a Dirty War that ran for three decades in Sri Lanka, bleeding, brain-draining and de-developing the strategic marine and mineral rich island led by a largely colonized and incompetent political, business and intellectual elite establishment in Colombo in thrawl of the exorbitantly privileged US dollar Fetish, distance from those troubling and traumatic events give us perspective and the wisdom of hindsight–if we ask the right questions, read the right books and declassified documents.”

Phil Miller’s book, based on de-classified documents of the British Foreign Office which lifts the veil of silence and ignorance about British mercenaries, Israel’s Mossad, and other Western GLADIO style operations in Sri Lanka and other parts of the post/colony at the time of the 1983 pogrom and afterward, was  published by Zed Press, London 2020 the same year as Bevin’s Jakarata Method, and  should surely be up there on any post-colonial academic reading list for all those studying and writing about Sri Lanka in English. But few local or international academics and experts on the country seem to know of it and he has not been invited to the Raj Nostagia Galle Literary Festival

In his fascinating book The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anti-Communist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that shaped out world” American journalist Vincent Bevin maps how Cold War proxy wars unfolded across the Global South- from Indonesia to Brazil. Sri Lanka’s “ethnic conflict’ and certainly the JVP violence of 1971 just before the island’s full Independence and First Republican Constsitution and 1989 falls within the frame of Bevin’s analysis – they were part of a South Asian regional Cold War proxy war operation to hinder the Left and full de-colonization.

Phil Miller like Vincent Bevin’s goes outside the nation-state as framing device to explore the Cold War, proxy war violence and CIA backed regime change operation in Indonesia in 1965 against the Communist party, as Cold War escalated. This was also a time when religious and ethnic identities were being weaponized again anti-colonial Socialist and Communist national liberation and De-colonization movements sweeping the Global South? That history is revealed in another important book “Cold War Monks: Buddhism and America’s Secret Strategy in Southeast Asian” including Ceylon/ Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar that traces the weaponization of Theravadha Buddhism based on mining of de-classified Asia Foundation documents..

Islanded: What’s Beyond the Frame and Trope of Violence?

Phil Miller’s book tells the story of the British Keeni Meenie, x-SAS Special officers turned mercenaries operating in Sri Lanka in 1983 and onwards, along with the Israeli Secret Services Mossad operating in the Eastern Province and training the Special Tast Force (STF), through convulsions of violence and human rights abuse, when ancient and close ties between Hindu Tamil and Christian, and Muslim communities were weaponized and torn asunder — much as in modern Palestine.

Of course, it also helps to have Julian Assange releasing classified documents on the role of the US’ led NATO Deepstate, Special Operations Forces and related BlackWater mercenaries in staging violence in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the post/colony, and then gaming the narrative also with “Economic Gaslighting” for Disaster Capitalism in the global corporate media echo chamber- ABC, BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, France 24 etc. Today in Sri Lanka there is BlackStone and BlackWater to contend with

— living as we do in states of permanent emergency in a world of poly-crisis – from Covid-19 biowar Lockdowns, to Anthropocene climate catastrophes staged with Directed Energy Weapons and HAARP technologies, to the 2019 mysterious Islamic State (ISIS) terror attacks to “Make the Economy Scream”, not to mention hybrid economic and cyber war — US Dollar Eurobond neocolonial debt entrapment and purported bankruptcy.

Gladio to The Jakarta Method and

It also helps to read the work of Swiss academic and Cold War historian, Daniel Ganse on GLADIO operations or those who ‘stayed behind’- post world War 2-  to smash Communism and socialism in Europe, just like those who stayed behind to continue clandestine divide and rule and sabotage Real Independence in the Afro-Asian post-colony in collusion with sections of local political and business elites to understand the history of clandestine weaponization of identity politics to ensure colonialism by other means, including, development discourses and debt trap Aid.

‘The Jakarta Method’ brilliantly detail’s Washington’s Cold War GLADIO-style anti-Communist program for regime change, murder and neo-colonization across the de-colonizing Global South– from Indonesia,1965, to Brazil and other parts of South America, including Santiago de Chile where “Operation Colombo” was staged to disappear Leftist intellectuals.

Jakarta Method echoes some of the findings of Swiss Historian Daniel Ganser in “NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe”, that showed how the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and British secret service, in collaboration with the military alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and European military secret services, set up a network of clandestine anti-communist armies in Western Europe after World War II.

These secret soldiers were trained on remote islands in the Mediterranean and in unorthodox warfare centres in England and in the United States by the Green Berets and SAS Special Forces. Gladio means sword. The GLADIO network was armed with explosives, machine guns and high-tech communication equipment hidden in underground bunkers and secret arms caches in forests and mountain meadows, In some countries the secret army linked up with Right Wing terrorists who in a secret war engaged in political manipulation, harassment of left wing parties, massacres, coup d’etats and torture.

Like the Gladio “stay behind” armies of NATO used across Europe, it is increasingly clear that there were “Stay behind” operations, networks, agents and systems of the Empire to protect US_UK corporate and Euro-American economic and security interests and differ Real Independence from the British Raj in the Afro-Asian post/colony where ethno-religious conflicts were used and manipulated to maintain and sustain British and US economic and security interests. Hence the façade, it was called the Peagent of Independence that was maintained in Ceylon which became a British Dominion from February 4, 1948 until June 1972. US-UK secret and cyber interventions in the strategic island have since clearly waxed and waned according to Cold War priorities elsewhere in Asia and the Indian Ocean world theater of America’s perpetual wars of the American Century as described by Tom Engleheardt.

CONCLUSION

 The ethnic conflict/ Pogrom’ staged and declared 40 years ago in July 1983 — following the model of what has come to be termed the ‘Jakarta Method’, which scarred a generation appears to have ’islanded’ Ceylon/ Sri Lanka. Indeed, the country has been framed and trapped within what World Systems theorists like Samir Amin, Emmanuel Wallestine and Andre Gunder Frank termed a colonial dependency pattern of under-development and de-development, amid literary and academic re-presentations the orientalised and racialist Ethnic Other in the perpetually violent dark natives of the  post/colony.

India was then, as now, allied with Communist Russia/ United Soviet Republic and competing with formed imperial masters UK and the US (that had also built up Pakistan into a Garrison State after dividing India at Independence in order to rule the region) – to control geostrategic Sri Lanka, and head off a US-UK bid to build a military base– as happened in the Chagos Islands, southwest of Sri Lanka. SWRD Bandaranike paid for nationaliszing the geostrategic ports and airports of Sri lanka with his life in 1959  the early 60s. Who then staged and benefited from the violence, the assassination of the first Socialist Prime Minister back in 1959 who had just nationalized the strategic ports and airports of Ceylon?

Finally, is there tacit aversion or censorship among liberal post/colonial types who are part of a veritable research industry of and for violence, conflict, and identity politics within the country regarding the truth about geopolitical and external dynamics embedded and tangled in tragic events in the country? The well-funded Human Rights, peace and reconciliation NGO research industry in Sri Lanka, that endlessly rehashes in partnership with the UNHRC the ‘beggars wound” of so-called ethnic conflict that ended 15 years ago, prefers not to know and remains studiedly silent about Miller’s path-breaking book which was published by Zed Press, London, which exposed the some of the crimes of the UK-US Empire in the post/colony and blown open a new line of research for generations to come along with other scholars of Empire.

The Ford Foundation funded International Centre for Ethnic Studies, was set up just a year before the staging of the Jakarta Method style pogrom/ riots of 1983, when state affiliated Trade Union thugs had lists of minority-Tamil homes and businesses to be raised to the ground. Retrospectively, it is clear that ICES was set up to help craft a humanities and social science research agenda to construct ‘ethnicity’ and violence as a grand narrative and institutionalize a wholly un-scientific, colonial racial imaginary of cultural differences among Sinhala and Tamil-speaking people in the island which has ‘islanded’ the country and its development trajectory, keeping it dependent and abject for decades– a subject to which we shall return. History became biology in the EU and USAID well-funded NGO ethnicity and conflict research industry.

Sri Lanka’s thirty year armed conflict, which commenced 41 years ago in July 1983, has long been constructed as an ‘internal’ and ‘primordial’ conflict between two Racially, i.e. biologically different and distinct communities, the Sinhalas and Tamils, rather than between linguistically and culturally different but biologically and genetically similar communities. The naturalization of linguistic-cultural difference among people of South Asia is a wholly un-scientific narrative; One that was used to construct spurious racial hierarchies to divide and rule between Aryan and Dravidian language groups and insert them into a colonial and racist hierarchy.

***************************