The People With the Most to Lose in a U.S.-China Cold War
When Ranasinghe Premadasa took over as Sri Lanka’s president in 1989, his government was facing down two armed rebellions. In the north, the Tamil Tigers were fighting to establish an independent state. In the south, a leftist group called the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) was claiming that leaders in Colombo had no legitimacy and calling for a national revolution. Even before Premadasa’s inauguration, the state had waged war on both fronts.
The fight against the Tamil Tigers would go on for two more decades, taking thousands of lives and gaining international notoriety. The battle with the JVP would last for only a short period, and is remembered by few outside Sri Lanka. Yet it was among the deadliest conflicts at the time. “People just disappeared,” says Nira Wickramasinghe, a historian of modern Sri Lanka at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. “Anyone with any kind of leftist association was under threat.”
The JVP was waging an armed insurrection, and the Sri Lankan government decided to put an end to it. Their tactics were horrifying: Students, put the number of lives lost at 40,000 to 60,000, but no careful accounting has ever been done. U.K. government archives indicate that Western governments knew Sri Lanka and its proxies were systematically killing innocent civilians. And according to the top British diplomat in Colombo at the time, Sri Lankan officials were confident that the West would support them, prioritizing the fight against communism over human rights.
