Spoils of Victory

Despite the end of civil war, Sinhala extremism continues to poison Sri Lanka

01 June 2013
Activists and monks affiliated with the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) have been a driving force for Sinhala supremacism in recent years.
LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
Activists and monks affiliated with the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) have been a driving force for Sinhala supremacism in recent years.
LAKRUWAN WANNIARACHCHI / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

DURING THE 1990S, the ethnic wars in the crumbling Balkans were often ascribed to what the media called “ancient hatreds”, a self-feeding cycle of fighting and vengeance with its roots deep in history: the Serbs were said to have detested the Croats since World War II and the Albanians since 1389. Deriding the theory, the journalist Stephen Schwartz joked that one might as well trace the animosity back 2,000 years, to a raid described by the Roman poet Ovid, in which the Sarmatians, notionally distant ancestors of today’s Slavs, brutally crushed the distant ancestors of today’s Albanians.  So tenuous were the extrapolations that the Balkan wars could even be seen as a natural sequel to the millennia-old battle of which Ovid wrote:

Swift, on horseback, the barbarians ride to the attack;

an enemy with horses as numerous as their flying arrows;

Samanth Subramaniam is a contributing editor at The Caravan and the India correspondent for The National. He is the author of This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War, and Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast.

Keywords: Sri Lanka LTTE nationalism Buddhism ethnic violence Sinhalese Sri Lankan Tamils Jathika Hela Urumaya
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