Portrait

In 1983:
The musical Annie is performed for the last time after 2,377 shows at the Uris Theatre on Broadway, New York City.

High ranking Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia.

Björn Borg retires from tennis after winning 5 consecutive Wimbledon championships.

Six men walk underwater across the Sydney Harbor - 82.9 km in 48 hours.

Vanessa Lynn Williams becomes the first African-American to be crowned Miss America, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Pope John Paul II visits the man that tried to assassinate him, Mehmet Ali Ağca, in prison to forgive him.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill creating a federal holiday on the third Monday of every January to honor American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Michael Jackson’s world famous music video for “Thriller” is broadcast for the first time. It will become the most often repeated and famous music video of all time and increase his own popularity and the record sales of the album “Thriller”.

McDonald’s introduces the McNugget.

The Black July, a communal riot occurs in Sri Lanka. These anti Sri Lankan Tamil riots leaves over 1,000 Tamils massacred and millions of dollars worth of their property destroyed. This pogrom is the beginning of a deadly Sri Lankan civil war in Sri Lanka.

25 years ago, the lives of normal Sri Lankans turned upside down. 13 soldiers were killed in Jaffna, and in revenge, normal Sinhalese men united to create furious, violent mobs that destroyed, burned and killed. Houses went up in flames, people ran from their homes in fear, shops were looted, property destroyed, lives taken. The Sri Lankan people were always a hot, passionate people. But July 1983 will always serve as a reminder as to just how hot and just how passionate.

Every one of us knows at least one person affected by the riots of July 1983. They are poor people, who were forced to flee their homes, leave behind their humble belongings and never return. But they are also people that aren’t usually recognized as victims of these riots; they are people sitting in high ranking positions in big, corporate offices in Colombo today, who also suffered; who watched their homes burn to the ground, and returned to its charred, blackened remains to find that everything that had survived the mobs had been stolen by their neighbours. They are not only nameless, faceless people living in poverty in refugee camps; they are aunts, grandmothers, bosses, the family of a friend; people that you and I both know. And while there are the victims that we all know are victims, there are many victims that no one sees as victims; they hide behind a clever veneer of success and happiness.

25 years down the line, it has never happened again, and yet, violence still exists. And because it does not exist in such a grandiose, history-making scale, we tend to forget sometimes that it does, and that it is still very much real. A problem possibly bigger than even the war itself, corruption, looms over us and threatens to destroy everything.

While we must seek hope in the fact that it has never happened again, we must remind ourselves that even though it may not be making the headlines in international news, the people of Sri Lanka continue to live with a terrible reality. They are the brave, bold people that are witness every day to incredible injustice and suffering. And while our past is one that is painful to remember, our present is still miserable for many too.

May Black July never happen again. And as much as it may be difficult to remember, if we are to forget, then we are at the risk of it happening all over again.

I just returned from Arugam Bay, and although I went there for entirely selfish purposes, I could not help but be reminded of the stark contrast between their lives there and our lives here and how easy it is sometimes to forget that such a difference exists. Especially for us.

Travelling with those that may never have travelled to that part of Sri Lanka before, I was made aware of how ignorant people can become of what lies just outside their door. Do people not know, or do they choose to ignore? Living in Colombo, it is very easy to become like frogs in a well. But I was shocked at how shocked they were by the people in Pottuvil. Sure they stared at us. Sure they stole from us. They tried to cause trouble and ripped us off at any given opportunity. They behaved as though they didn’t want us there. But is their behaviour really so difficult to understand? Wouldn’t you stare if you lived in a situation where electricity was a fickle luxury that could disappear at any moment, and a bunch of people turned up in a tourist coach, wore bikinis and danced to weird music for two days straight? Wouldn’t you be angry and bitter if you had a hard life, and some people turned up in your village, and had a party?

Arugam Bay is not Hikkaduwa. It is still very much a village. And it is for this very reason that it is so great for us; because it is so pristine and untouched, and not commercialized like Hikkaduwa. But for many it is just a place called home.
It is this ignorance that I fear will be the downfall of Sri Lanka. This refusal of the educated and the elite to understand the lifestyle of the average Sri Lankan. To see that this life we live in Colombo is very, very different from the life of other Sri Lankans, and that we make up only a tiny minority.

Sometimes I am very, very afraid of how little we know, and how much we can so easily forget.