• Sri Lanka:
• History

Sri Lanka - History

Sri Lanka appears to have been inhabited from as early as 125,000 BC. Balangoda Man was the ancestor of the present-day Veddhas, a racial minority now inhabiting remote forests. The Great Dynasty (Mahavamsa) of the Sinhalese was established in 543 BC by King Vijaya, who came with his followers (the Sinhala, or ‘Lion Race’) from Bengal and settled in the north. Traces of the vast irrigation system they established still exist. About 300 years later, a royal prince from India named Mahinda, son of Asoka, introduced Buddhism. Tamil settlements began in the 10th century AD, and gave rise to a Tamil kingdom in Jaffna. There was a long struggle between Sinhalese and Tamil kings for the control of the north of the island.

By the end of the 13th century, the Sinhalese were forced to migrate to the south. Malaria set in when the irrigation and drainage systems were destroyed by continuing warfare. The Sinhalese population split into two separate kingdoms at the end of the 15th century, the up-country kingdom of Kandy and the low-country kingdom of Kotte.

In the 16th century the Kotte Kingdom sought protection from new arrivals, the Portuguese; and in 1597 Dharmapala, last of the Kotte kings, bequeathed his throne to the King of Portugal. The Portuguese soon subdued the north and so acquired most of the coastal belt of the country, leaving the central region to the Kingdom of Kandy.

From the mid-1630s, the King of Kandy helped the Dutch to dispossess the Portuguese; by 1656 the whole island had become a Dutch possession except for the Kingdom of Kandy. Later the Dutch also seized Kandy’s coastal areas, cutting the Kandyans off from the outside world. British interests developed in the late 18th century when a British army invaded and forced the Dutch to accept its protection. In 1802 the Dutch colony became a British possession. The Kingdom of Kandy was invaded in 1815 and its monarchy was abolished. Thus the whole island came under British rule.

Plantations growing rubber, coconut and coffee were established in the 19th century. After the coffee plantations were destroyed by a fungus in the 1870s, planters successfully switched to tea. The country soon became the second largest producer (after India) of black tea. During this period, Indian Tamils were brought into the country as indentured labour for the tea estates.

Constitutional development of Ceylon (as the country was then called) began relatively early, with executive and legislative councils set up in 1833, and the first opening up of the colonial civil service to Ceylonese. Full self-government was achieved in 1946, under a new constitution, with a bicameral legislature (which became a single chamber in 1972), and Ceylon became fully independent and joined the Commonwealth in 1948.

The first prime minister of independent Ceylon was one of the leaders of the independence movement, D S Senanayake. He was the head of the United National Party (UNP, the former Ceylon National Congress supported by the Tamil Congress). After a split in the UNP in 1951, S W R D Bandaranaike formed the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP).

In 1956 the SLFP won a decisive electoral victory. The new government, nationalist and non-aligned, immediately began talks with the UK which ended in the return to Ceylon of the Katunayake airfield and the Trincomalee naval base.

In September 1959, Bandaranaike was assassinated. After elections the following year, his widow, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, led the SLFP to victory and became the first woman prime minister in the world. In March 1965, the UNP was voted back to power with Dudley Senanayake (son of Sri Lanka’s first prime minister) as prime minister until 1970, when the elections returned the SLFP.

Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s new government introduced a new constitution in 1972. Following the lead of India, Ceylon became a republic while remaining within the Commonwealth. Under the new constitution, the republic had a unicameral parliament, the National State Assembly, and a non-executive president. The first president was William Gopallawa, formerly governor-general, and Mrs Bandaranaike remained prime minister.

Throughout this period, Ceylon’s government developed programmes of welfare and nationalisation. These led to marked improvements in health and literacy, but the economy began to decline. In 1971, there was a serious internal crisis with an uprising of Sinhalese youth, led by the Marxist Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP), in protest about widespread unemployment. In 1972 the country’s name was changed to Sri Lanka. In 1977 the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) was formed as the Sinhalese and Tamil communities polarised, and the civil war had begun by the early 1980s (see the text under ‘Communal conflict’).

The government lost popularity and, at the general election in 1977, the UNP under J R Jayewardene won a sweeping victory. The UNP government encouraged the private sector, and (under a new constitution in 1978) opted for a presidential form of government with proportional representation and renamed the country the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. The first presidential election, held in 1982, was won by Jayewardene. In December 1982, the life of the 1977 Parliament was extended, by a national referendum, for six more years.

In 1988 Ranasinghe Premadasa was elected to the presidency and in 1993 was killed by an LTTE suicide bomber. In 1994 UNP presidential candidate and opposition leader Gamini Dissanayake was killed, with more than 50 others, by a suicide bomber. After President Premadasa’s assassination in 1993, D B Wijetunga took over as president and remained in office for about a year until the general election in August 1994.

Communal conflict: After independence, the Sinhalese became the dominant social and political force and the Tamils felt that they were being marginalised, especially after 1956 when Sinhala was made the official language. Several different Tamil parties formed and demanded that the Northern and Eastern provinces become part of a federal state or, when this was refused, an independent homeland.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) was formed in 1977 and from around 1980 began attacks on politicians, the police and the army in the north. This brought a Sinhalese backlash in the south: in July 1983 there were riots against Tamils in Colombo and the south-west of the country, and Tamils fled to the north and Tamil Nadu in India. The army deployed in the north, the conflict escalated, and the Tamil Tigers gained effective control of Jaffna and the northern peninsula.

The Indian government attempted to mediate and, in July 1987, President J R Jayewardene and Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi arranged a ceasefire, supervised by Indian troops. Under the Indo–Lanka Accord provincial councils were introduced as a solution to the conflict. The provincial councils for the Northern and Eastern provinces were to be temporarily merged into a single council.

Some Indian-supported Tamil groups accepted the arrangement, and elections for the new council proceeded. However, the Tamil Tigers refused to co-operate, and in 1988 Jayewardene asked the Indian government to withdraw its troops. The Tigers took control of the vacated areas and fighting continued with few breaks into the 21st century and by 2001 it was estimated that more than 60,000 people had died in the conflict.

After it came to power in the August 1994 general election, the People’s Alliance government engaged in peace talks with the LTTE, but after four rounds the Tigers unilaterally abrogated the ceasefire that had been in force and relaunched the war. Their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, appeared to remain committed to fighting for a separate state. In 1995, government forces recaptured the town of Jaffna, forcing the LTTE to withdraw into dense jungle, and the war continued.

From 1996 LTTE attacked substantial civilian and economic targets outside the operational area, and especially in Colombo. Ten days before the celebration to mark 50 years of independence, on 25 January 1998 a truck was exploded by LTTE suicide bombers as they drove it through the gates of the country’s most sacred Buddhist site, the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, killing 16 people. In mid-2001, the Tigers attacked the international airport near Colombo, destroying several civilian and military aeroplanes.

In February 2000 Norway agreed to provide a special envoy to act as intermediary in peace talks and he held several rounds of talks.

In March 2000, the LTTE began a new offensive on the Jaffna peninsula – held by government forces since 1995 – and the government declared a state of war for the first time and suspended all non-essential development projects. In April, the LTTE captured the strategic Elephant Pass base, denying government troops the only land route into the peninsula. By May, the Tigers had driven the government forces back to the suburbs of the city of Jaffna, proving themselves as a professional fighting force, deploying sophisticated weapons including heavy artillery captured at Elephant Pass.

Despite the declaration of a unilateral ceasefire from December 2000 to April 2001 by LTTE, and the continuing efforts of the Norwegian envoy, the warring parties could not agree to meet and deadlock continued until a UNP government was elected in December 2001. A ceasefire was agreed with the LTTE in February 2002, allowing Norwegian facilitators to organise peace talks between the government and the separatists. The first round of talks was held in Thailand in September 2002, when talks focused on reconstruction of the areas affected by the war and the return of displaced people, and dates for further talks were agreed.

As the peace talks proceeded, LTTE dropped its demand for a separate Tamil state and agreed to work towards a federal system and, for the first time, the government also agreed to share power with the LTTE. After the sixth round of talks, held in Japan in March 2003, progress slowed and LTTE failed to attend the international donor conferences focusing on Sri Lanka’s development priorities in Tokyo in June 2003. However, with aid donors exerting increasing pressure, a seventh round of talks was eventually scheduled for November 2003 to discuss proposals for a power-sharing administration in the north and east of the country.