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“Is it not a simple act of arson? No, it is genocide”

Twenty four years ago today, two towers of learning in Jaffna disappeared. One was the Public Library in Jaffna that was set on fire by the Sri Lankan Police, the other one was Rev. Father David, who fell dead in the balcony of the Bishops House when he heard the news of Jaffna Library being set on fire.

A nation of people who have undergone suffering and indignity in the hands of Sinhala rulers during the past half a century, consider this incident as the symbolisation of Sinhala supremacist thinking and the desire to destroy anything Tamil. Commencing from 1958, the Tamil people have seen Sinhala chauvinism in its peak several times, resulting in loss of lives and property. In every instance, the calamity was attributed to rowdy elements, looters and hooligans. But the torching of this citadel of learning and Tamil civilization has been done by state police under the personal supervision of two senior cabinet ministers of that time.

Having relegated Tamil language to a secondary position by making Sinhala, the only official language and introduced the Higher Education Standardisation Act that cut to size the intake of Tamil students into the universities, the government took the next obvious step to limit the scope of learning of the Tamil children, by reducing to ashes 97,000 valuable volumes including ‘ola’ manuscripts. The so-called acts of good will in contributing a brick and a book for the re-structuring of the Library, has become meaningless in the wake of a military occupation of Tamil habitats, denial of basic human right of the Tamil people to resettle in their own lands and continued military excesses in the occupied areas.

01 June 2005

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