A great political victory
A great political victory
In this way, the district councils that the coalition had obtained from the Sinhala government as the basis for the decentralization plan as a solution to the Tamil problem had become dysfunctional and dead due to lack of power. In this situation, when the government announced that it would hold internal panchayat elections in the north on May 18, 1983, the coalition and opportunistic political parties came forward to enter the election fray.
The LTTE asked the public to boycott the elections in protest the state terrorism that was rampant in the north. The LTTE shot dead three of the organizers and supporters of the United National Party, who were acting as puppets of the government in the north, when they tried to enter the elections despite the LTTE’s warnings.
Following this incident that took place on the same day, all the Tamil candidates standing on behalf of the UNP withdrew from the elections, and many Tamils resigned from the UNP. The people of the Northern Province, who heeded the LTTE’s intense political campaign, completely boycotted the local panchayat elections. This boycott was a great political victory for the LTTE. The coalition that contested the elections by rejecting the LTTE’s request sought unbearable humiliation. With the defeat it faced in the elections, the coalition became a dead end. With this, the rising sun of the coalition set permanently from the political arena of Tamileelam.
Events of July 1983
July 1983 was a turbulent period in the history of the Tamils. If there was one incident that triggered a chain of events, had a huge political impact, and set the course of the history of the struggle in motion, it was the attack carried out by the LTTE in Tirunelveli on July 23. In this attack, which shocked Sinhala chauvinism, 13 soldiers were killed. Prabhakaran, who planned and participated in this attack, shot and killed seven soldiers with his own hand. This was the first incident in which many Sinhalese soldiers were killed in Tamileelam.
The attack was like a slap in the face of the Jayewardene government, which had been repeatedly shouting that it was going to destroy ‘terrorism’.
The attack made the Tamil people realize that the revolutionary armed struggle led by the LTTE was taking a powerful form and developing rapidly.
When the shock waves of this incident spread to South Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese government planned to turn it into an ethnic uprising against the Tamils and destroy the economic dominance of the Tamils in Colombo. The ethnic earthquake that erupted in South Sri Lanka from July 24, at the instigation of the government, caused unprecedented bloodshed. The barbaric violence of the Sinhala jungle shocked the entire world.
(Translation by Tamilpriya)
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