Though Funny Boy is told through the eyes of a child, it still provides insight into the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, one of the longest-running civil wars. Yet it is worth taking a more objective, deeper look in order to fully contextualize the events of the novel.
The civil war began in 1983 and lasted until May 2009. It arose from the legacies of British imperialism (the Harvard International Review [HIR] says, “A post-colonial analysis reveals that both the Sinhalese and Tamils acted to recover what they believed they had lost during their respective golden eras, imperial rule for the Sinhalese and shortly after for the Tamils”) but, more succinctly, the conflicts between the Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic groups.
Sri Lanka is about 74% Sinhalese, who tend to be Buddhist, and 11% Tamil, who tend to be Hindu. Tamils were possibly invaders from India’s Chola Kingdom in the period between the 3rd century BCE and the 13th century CE, but it was during the British colonial era that tensions accelerated. The Tamil people were given favorable treatment and better opportunities, as Tamils also lived in other areas of colonial control across the world. The Sinhalese felt, as the HIR explains, “isolated and oppressed.”
After independence in 1948, however, the Sinhalese became ascendant. The HIR says “many Sinhalese worked their way into the upper echelons of government. These Sinhalese gained power and went on to gradually pass acts effectively disenfranchising their Tamil counterparts. One such act was the Sinhala Only Act, a 1956 bill that made Sinhala the only official language of Sri Lanka and created barriers for Tamil people trying to access government services or seeking public employment.” With further diminishing educational opportunities for Tamil students, the official changing of the country’s name from Ceylon to Sri Lanka, and the establishing of Buddhism as the primary religion, riots began occurring and a Tamil military insurgency formed.
Some Tamils called for a separate state, Tamil Eelam, though there was already an obvious geographical divide between the two groups. The Tamils were split over this idea, but the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rose to prominence, destroyed other Tamil groups, and established themselves as the official representatives of the people.
Fighting began in 1983 with a LTTE attack on the Sri Lankan army. The LTTE were inspired by Che Guevara and his guerilla targets. They used terrorist tactics, such as assassinating the prime minister of India and the Sri Lankan president, and using suicide bombers, child soldiers, and female-led suicide attacks. The HIR references the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which “determined that the Sinhalese-dominated government has also been implicated in war crimes such as the torture of war prisoners and citizen disappearances. In one notably brutal example, the government’s forces murdered five Tamil students in the port city of Trincomalee.” Many Tamils fled to other countries such as Canada and Australia.
In 2002, Norway helped broker a ceasefire agreement, but for the next several years, both sides repeatedly violated the terms. In 2008, Sri Lanka officially withdrew from the agreement and continued to endeavor to rout the LTTE. It formed a partnership with a pro-government part of the LTTE and, as the Council on Foreign Relations explains, “installed the leader of that party as chief minister of the newly created Eastern Provincial Council after May 2008 elections.” Fighting continued into 2009 with heavy casualties, but eventually the Sri Lankan government declared victory.
In terms of the future of the conflict, the CRE says that the LTTE is effectively crushed, but Robert Rotberg of Harvard’s Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution “cautions the outfit could carry on a guerilla war for years, depending on the survival of its leader, Prabhakaran. Unlike the 1990s, when the government’s claims that it had defeated the rebel force were quickly proved wrong, the army, a much stronger and less corrupt force, has managed to deal a hard blow to the Tigers. Moreover, Rotberg adds, the LTTE has run out of money because of the successful blocking of payments from the Tamil diaspora. But the larger problem of integrating the island’s minority Tamil population will remain even if the LTTE is defeated, say experts. It is essential that the government moves to give ‘a fair deal to the Tamils and integrate them more effectively in the fabric of the nation’ says Rotberg.”
