master_kuro

I read your comment because I thought it would provide another perspective on the situation, which is always a good thing. However, the link you shared as well as your rhetoric only made me more sympathetic towards the Tamil minority.

Here's my understanding on the conflict.

1. The Sinhalese majority were given mandate by the British.

2. They used this mandate to apply incredibly discriminatory practices towards the Tamils.

3. Constant rabble-rousing by Sinhalese politicians intermittently led to race riots, in which Sinhalese mobs carried out pogroms and murders against Tamils.

4. Due to almost laughably blatant policies targeting Tamils, such as an affirmative action policy designed to reduce the number of Tamil students at universities, a group of Tamil students formed a league to protest the matter. These students would become the forerunners of the tamil militant groups.

5. Further barbarism from the Sinhalese majority, such as the destruction of culturally important Tamil heritage (for instance, the destruction of an important library), seeding racial tensions.

6. A rebel group carries out an ambush against the Sri Lankan army, seemingly as retaliation for the assassination of one of their commanders. The result of this was a week of rioting where innocent Tamil civilians were murdered, raped and tortured by Sinhalese mobs. This event is known as Black July. To readers: do not view the wikipedia page for this event if you're sensitive. The first image depicts a Tamil man being stripped and beaten before being murdered by grinning Sinhalese youths.

7. War starts, and the rest is history.

I don't blame the "other side" for being extremely nasty ethnonationalists. In fact, I'm very surprised they didn't become violent militants earlier by how badly they were treated. Whilst I can't condone the ethnic cleansing they carried out, I can on a human level understand why they'd carry out such crimes when they'd been so viciously treated by their victims in the past. The sexual violence that seemingly became routine for Tamils is some of the most sickening that I've ever read. I had to take a break and go for a walk after reading some of the accounts.

My job requires me to have some level of awareness to the subtleties of conflict. Having studied the aspects of international relations that pertain to war, I've learned how complex a lot of these internal struggles can be. As such, I try to be fair in my assessments of ethnic conflicts. It's usually not straightforward to charactise one side as villainous and one side as victorious. Having pored over accounts from government affiliated sources, the only consistent perspective that Sri Lankan commentators seem to provide in their support for the killing of civilians is their strong belief that Sri Lanka must be a Buddhist nation and that Buddhism has a special place in the state constitution. That's literally the only thing that they have to support themselves without circular reasoning (and is ironically a key feature of fascist polity). Otherwise, it's "We treated the Tamils like subhumans, actively discriminated them into poverty and kept murdering them and rioting in their areas. Now they're fighting back, so we're justified in committing genocide". How on Earth do you justify that without having a revisionist stance, or claiming that the clearly documented discrimination against Tamils didn't happen?

What happened to the Sri Lankan Tamils is a travesty beyond reckoning. The fact that it has been forgotten and that the Sri Lankan government that stirred this conflict is still at large is a miscarriage of justice so severe that it calls into question any legitimacy of international law and human rights.

This is absolutely insane. It's almost cartoonishly monstrous.

Why isn't this better known? The way the Tamils were treated is so pure a representation of evil that I can barely get through the Wikipedia page. This was the work of Buddhists, too! I've been taught that Buddhists were peaceful and non-violent by creed, but clearly not if the only Buddhist majority nation is capable of such abomination.

This book changed my life. I was an awful mathematics student in high school, but having a very lukewarm interest in an artistic career I decided to take maths as an advanced subject so that I might pursue architecture or something. I ended up getting a U in my maths exams, which in the British grade system stands for “Unmarked”. I did so poorly that my paper wasn’t even worthy of a mark!

Around the same time, I was wandering around the I saw a book cover with the weirdest, most beautiful looking graphics I’d ever seen. I still remember thinking “What the hell is that supposed to be?” as I picked it up. The copy I held had a colored picture segment as the middle pages with crisper, more mindblowing images. I borrowed the book and started reading it, trying to figure out how those images were drawn.

Long story short, I ended up becoming quite competent at mathematics. Fractals (albeit statistical ones) actually ended up being an important topic in my doctoral research. I sometimes wonder what my life might have been like if I hadn’t seen those weird images - I’d certainly have become a very mediocre architect at best.