Island on the Run
MHE petition just presented to the Queen on I behalf of the 800,000 stateless Tamils of Ceylon outlines a now familiar pattern of grievances. The Bulletin of the International Commission of Jurists put forward the same points in 1961, and they have remained un- answered. These are, essentially, that the Sin- halese majority in Ceylon, by the suppression of the Tamil language and the withdrawal of the rights of citizenship, are practising a form of dubiously legalised genocide. Yet the Tamil minority amounts to around 30 per cent of the island's population, made up of the Tamils of Ceylon who have been in the island for many centuries and who live mainly in the north and the east, and the Indian Tamils who were imported to work on the plantations under British rule and who are now scattered through- out the and. It is, this second group for whom no provision whatsoever is made for the preserva- tion of their identity and who are now by govern- ment legislation increasingly finding themselves jobless as well as stateless.
The desire to establish a strong national gov- ernment is a natural one and the inefficiencies and time-wasting that would result from establishing three official languages (English, Sinhalese and Tamil) are obvious. Such difficulties are not con- fined to Ceylon. It is the manner of the Ceylon Government's behaviour rather than its ultimate aim which is most in question, the brutality with which this aim is being pursued, and the disregard of outside, and even some internal, Sinhalese opinion, that give the policy its resemblance to some form of apartheid. And one should not underestimate the racial and religious feelings which lie beneath it. The next logical step after the petition to the Queen is an appeal to the United Nations where the Ceylon Government ought not to escape that kind of censure normally reserved for other, more familiar powers.
'Briar Rose 1963.'
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