KAMALIKA PIERIS

2nd revision 20.9.21

On the night of 31 May 1981, while Jaffna slept, this library was set on fire.There was a run up to this. The Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) decided to contest the District Development Council (DDC) elections to be held on June 4, 1981.

On May 31, 1981, the TULF held a massive election rally near the Nachchimaar Amman Temple in Jaffna.  Two unidentified gunmen shot at the police and fled the scene, killing three Sinhala  policemen. The two hundred police personnel present rioted and burnt boutiques, shops, houses, cars and ‘commercial establishments’. These attacks were the worst that the people of Jaffna had experienced so far, reported the media.

That night police and paramilitaries began a pogrom that lasted for three days, said Wikipedia. The head office of TULF party was destroyed. The Jaffna MP V. Yogeswaran‘s residence was also destroyed. Four people were pulled from their homes and killed at random. Many business establishments, a Hindu temple  and the office of the Eelanaadu, a local newspaper, were also destroyed. Statues of Tamil cultural and religious figures were destroyed or defaced, said Wikipedia

On the night of June 1, 1981, the Jaffna public Library was burned. The burning of the library lasted the entire night. Yogendra Duraiswamy, then GA, Jaffna, requested the Navy base in Karainagar and the Municipality for bowsers of water to extinguish the fire. He found that the Municipal Office was closed and the water tower locked. The city was virtually deserted. Although the Navy’s browser arrived at the scene, its capacity was inadequate to douse the roaring fire. No one had dared to come out that night. None of the TULF politicians were present.

It is only after it was burned down that Jaffna Public Library rose to world attention. This otherwise obscure library suddenly became a great library. The world was told of the magnificent collection it once held and how Jaffna was grieving about the burning.

There was genuine grief as well. That night one of our distinguished teachers at St Patrick’s College, and a well-respected linguist, Rev. Dr. H. S. David died of a heart attack on being informed of the terrible tragedy, reported Santiapillai. Fr. T.M.F. Long who worked so tirelessly and contributed so much to establish the Jaffna Library reacted with intense grief and suffered a heart attack and died a broken man in Australia, he added.

One would expect that the chief  librarian of the Jaffna public library, who would have been safely asleep while the library was burning, would have been interviewed  later  and asked what valuable resources the library had held. But he does not appear once in the story. He has not been interviewed. We do not even know his name.

The library burned down but the national newspapers did not report the incident. In Tamil Nadu, newspapers did not report the burning for several days. The Hindu noted on 6 June 1981 that a public library with its entire collection of books has been burnt”, and on 13 June it quoted Amirthalingam saying that the library had held 95,000 volumes, some of which were rare and centuries old”  

The UNP government of J.R.Jayewardene did not hold an inquiry to establish responsibility either.   To date, no one has been indicted for the crime.  Since there was no inquiry, there was much speculation as to ‘who done it.’

The following assortment have been charged, each separately, with burning the Jaffna public library:  Cyril Mathew, Gamini Dissanayake, Police, Army, LTTE,   UNP government.

The library was burned by police and thugs brought into Jaffna mostly from Kurunegala, by Ministers Cyril Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake to help to rig the Jaffna DDC elections and to commit such violence as deemed necessary, said Devanesan Nesiah, among others.

U.B. Wijekoon squashed this.  He said he was the only Government minister in Jaffna on that day and others like Minister Gamini Dissanayake whose names have been mentioned in connection with the Jaffna library burning, arrived only after the incident took place. Wijekoon had seen the library burning

The burning was not pre-planned said U.B. Wijekoon, then District Minister for Jaffna. To the best of my knowledge, It was a spontaneous act, carried out by policemen stationed there on election duty”, Wijekoon said.

There were about 500-600 policemen who had come on duty to Jaffna. In the unrest leading to the DDC elections, three policemen on duty at an election rally of the TULF had been shot dead. That same night several boutiques in Jaffna town were set on fire, and the following day the library was set on fire.

Tassie Seneviratne, Former Senior Superintendent of Police,   supports this. A police sergeant who was attached to the Jaffna Police Station told me, some years later, that he poured petrol from a barrel and ignited the fire with a match stick, said Tassie. This police sergeant had regretted this ha years later and had confessed to Tassie as well as another DIG.   Tassie had not asked who else had been involved.

Police officer K.Krisnadasan  writing in 2015, says it was the army, not the police. He was on duty that day in Jaffna. ‘About 7.00 – 7.30 pm from the station premises we noticed heavy smoke emerging from the Jaffna Public Library building and we knew that the library building had been set on fire. DIG instructed me to take a Police party and rush to the library immediately.’

I then promptly rushed with a police party comprising of 2 Sub Inspectors and about 10 Constables on foot as the library building is only about 250 yards from the Police Station. As we approached within a few yards from the library building, I noticed about 20 Army personnel in uniform inside the building. They were pulling down the books from the shelves and throwing them into the fire.

On seeing the police party one officer came out followed by a few other army personnel pointing their AK47 rifles towards us and shouted in a rough tone in Sinhala and ordered us to get back to the Police Station. The police party then received instructions from the DIG to return. After we came back to the Police Station, we saw the whole building going up in flames.

 After my return to the Police Station, I made an entry in the Register/Investigation Book regarding what I had seen. DIG/NR too made an entry in the Officers’ Visiting Book.  The DIG tried his best to contact the Army top brass who were in Jaffna, to inform of the situation, but to no avail. It was not advisable for the police to take any further action. What I have reported is what I saw. I only visited the scene after the fire has started to engulf the building, concluded Krisnadasan.

This means that the army, instead of setting fire to the library and leaving the place, as any sensible arsonist would have done, stayed on happily to make a bonfire of the books and confront anybody who came. The fire would have been visible miles away. When the police appeared the army came and stood before them boldly and chased them away.  We often see scenes like this in films.

The culprit, others said, is not any of the above, but the government of Sri Lanka .That is why the government did not appoint a commission of inquiry. In 2001, a Daily News  editorial said  that the burning of the library was done by goonsquads let loose by the government  Minister Champika Ranawaka  said when visiting Jaffna on 2010, said it was the work of ‘goondas’.

President Rajapaksa is quoted as having said “The UNP is responsible for large scale riots and massacres against the Tamils in 1983, vote rigging at the DC elections and the burning of the Jaffna library”.  The embassy of USA said in a statement issued on 12.3.2016 that the library was set ablaze by Sri Lankan state security forces and state sponsored mobs in 1981. In 2016, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe apologized in Parliament for the burning of the Jaffna library during UNP government of 1981.

The Government should appoint a commission to go into the truth about burning of the Jaffna Public Library, by appointing a high level judicial panel even at this late stage, said Krisnadasan, writing from Australia in 2015. The truth will never be discovered unless the various stories are independently examined. It is not too late to revisit the scene independently and objectively, and establish the facts, taking into account the versions of all concerned,

The burning of the Jaffna public library was excellent propaganda for the Tamil Separatist Movement. They made full use of it. The burnt out shell of the library is preserved for tourists and visitors to see. It is next to the new Jaffna Public Library.

Rebecca Knuth, Professor of Library and Information Science at the University of Hawaii featured the Jaffna Public library in her book Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction” (2006). She attended the IFLA annual conference 2006 at Seoul, and made a presentation on the subject. Here are three of her utterances, taken from the abstract of her speech.

• The collection became well known internationally and was popular with Sinhalese and Tamil intellectuals, as well as the general public.”
• It became the major repository for all known literary source materials of the Tamil people”
• Indeed, one could think of the Jaffna Library as a national library even though a Tamil nation had not yet come into being.”

The burning of the Jaffna library is mentioned in fiction too. Here is Nayomi Munaweera’s description in her book Islandof a thousand mirrors” 

Sinhala policemen and paramilitaries storm the old Tami Library (sic) rip books from shelves, set fire to [them]. The conflagration shoots high into the sky… for weeks afterwards, torn blackened pages fly over the lagoons and marshes, the onion and chillie fields. They lodge in branches of palmyrah trees, float into houses, entangle in barbed wire fences and in the limbs of   gods soaring over the kovils,”

Sritharan Someetharan, made a documentary of the burning,  called Burning Memories, Born just 19 days prior to the burning of the library, Someetharan was deeply impacted by the event from an early age, said the interviewer .” Though the documentary was released in 2007, it was not screened in Sri Lanka until 2011. It has been shown in film festivals in India, England, France, Canada, and America and elsewhere. He has also made a film on Taraki” Sivaram, a pro-Tamil Sri Lankan journalist.  (Continued)