This is the second of a two-part series. Click here to read part one
By Darini Rajasingham Senanayake*
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka | 24 July 2025 (IDN) — There are remarkable patterns of history, organised violence, and Disinformation between events leading to the pogrom and forced population displacements in Sri Lanka in 1983, and British occupied Palestine 35 years earlier as the Nakba unfolded amid Cold War escalating in Europe between the Allies and Soviet Union or Axis Powers.
Both Ceylon and Palestine were British occupied in 1948, and both got faux Independence that year as the British officially left but stayed behind — Gladio Style to stage Shocks, including assassinations such as SWRD Bandaranaike in 1959 with the CIA as happened to Patrice Lumumba in the Congo and Chile’s Socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973.
While the Crown Colony of Ceylon morphed into a British Dominion with pageantry and pomp for its bemused natives on 14 February 1948, the violent birth of the state of Israel followed exactly three months later on 14 May, amid the Nakba in Palestine, with thousands killed and millions forcibly displaced.
As the British mandate expired and its military withdrew in May 1948, Zionist militias, many trained by British occupation forces, divided and partitioned a culturally mixed Palestine to consolidate the Jewish State of Israel and expiate Europe’s guilt for its Nazi Gas Chambers and the extermination of six million Jews at the end of World War 2. The violent partition of British India into West and East Pakistan had happened a year earlier in 1947.
By then, the racialisation of cultural differences to weaponised ethno-religious identity politics and buttress British claims to racial superiority and government, to divide and rule the post/colony were in place, also to protect the economic and security interests of the retreating Raj. As the Cold War between the Western Allies against God-less Communists and the Axis powers escalated across the decolonising Global South, Gladio-style operations were staged in countries in Asia, Africa and South America, as much as in Europe against Communists and Socialists.
With the wisdom of hindsight and new research based on declassified documents, it is clear that both Palestine and Sri Lanka, geostrategic countries at the crossroads of global trade routes, were subjected by the same forces and neocolonial secret agencies, including British MI-6 and Zionist Mossad networks. Similar Catastrophes and Shock Doctrines — pogroms, staged riots, assassinations, regime change and forced displacement of populations to divide mixed cultural geographies and histories, un-mix populations and construct partitions and divided histories unfolded — of course in collusion with local political elites and their networks. Much of this was accomplished with funds from the International Development Aid gravy train. Sri Lanka still suffers from being a Donor Darling now trapped in IMF’s Spider and the Chabad—Lubovitch’ Spider Web’.
Ethnic Conflict as Cold War Proxy War: Clandestine Networks and Agents
New research based on declassified documents available in the British Archives and US National Security Archive has revealed that Sri Lanka’s so-called ‘internal ethnic conflict’, triggered 43 years ago in July 1983, was part of a much broader geopolitical jigsaw puzzle of Cold War regional Proxy Wars across the decolonising Global South. These included both Palestine and Sri Lanka. Of course, July 1983 had elements of the Jakarta Method (1965) adapted to Sri Lanka.
The ethnic conflict research and Human Rights research industry, which was part of Cold War Area Studies in the American Academy, served, often inadvertently, to promote racialised narratives and islanded colonial and Orientalist histories reeking with Raj Nostalgia, about dark natives engaged in perpetual ethno-religious violence in the post/colony. These narratives of “internal” conflict concealed the external geopolitical forces, actors and networks involved in Weaponising identity politics, and providing weapons and training to local groups, to promote internal ethno-religious violence. This, too, is how we were Gaslighted into believing, contrary to our everyday lived multicultural histories, social reality, and mixed cultural geography, in the story of permanent ethno-religious violence in the post/colony and the concomitant superiority of British rule with its mask of liberal democracy and human rights.
Sri Lanka’s 30-year armed conflict waxed and waned between cycles and bouts of international peacebuilding as part of a regional Cold War Proxy War waged between India, then close to the Soviet Socialist Bloc led by Russia, and the Western allies, seeking military bases in the geostrategically important island nation, then as now.
In a nutshell, India set up, trained, armed and funded the Liberation Tigers of Tamil (LTTE), and other Tamil militant groups in the north, after the pro-American J.R. Jayawardena regime came to power in 1977. India then allied with the Soviet Socialist Bloc, feared, then as now, the prospect of foreign US and UK military bases in her backyard. The Mahaweli Development Project had already begun in the Eastern Province near the Trincomalee deep-sea port.
India was not successful in staving off foreign bases in Sri Lanka. The staging of the July 1983 Pogrom and riots enabled British and Israeli “advisors” to set up long-desired bases in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. This was under the guise of the British Keenie Meeni mercenaries and Israel’s Mossad providing security to the J.R. Jayawardena regime and to fight the LTTE. bases were set up purportedly to fight the LTTE in 1984, under Yankie Dickie’s son Ravi Jayawardena. Much of this history is contained in books by Herman Gunaratne / Malinge Guneratne, who worked with the Mahaweli Authority resettlement program in Trincomalee and corroborated by Victor Ostovsky in his book “By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer.[i]
A cover-up investigation of Ostovsky’s book, conducted by former Justice Wadugodapitiya, is demonstrably flawed and contrary to known facts, including those revealed in a book on Ravi Jayawardena.
Mahaweli Development: Colonialism by Other Means?
Israeli operatives had already started work in Sri Lanka in 1977 in the Agriculture Sector and Mahaweli Development scheme, which saw population transfers setting the stage for massacres in the area and spread its tentacles along with the British MI6. July 1983 was triggered by clandestine external actors with deep historical knowledge of the country’s cultural diversity and experience in weaponising ethno-religious identity politics in collusion with local political elites and their cronies.
Tamil civilians in Batticaloa used to call the British KMS officers “Mossadu” as Phil Miller details in his book ‘Keenie Meenie: the British Mercenaries who got away with War Crimes’. The 1983 riots had elements of the Jakarta method. Lists of Tamil homes and businesses to be attacked had been compiled, and some Trade Unions in the Colombo Port and Senior Government Ministers were implicated in the violence.
Skilled in unleashing violence and reigning it in, the unmaking of ties among the Tamils and Muslims of the Eastern province was the handiwork of Mossad operating with and training the Special Task Forces in the Eastern Province.
Subsequently, as Indian Peace Keeping Forces moved in and took over the Northeast, the British KMS mercenaries and Mossad’s operations and bases to train the STF moved to Southern Sri Lanka, where Dirty War double game operations unfolded with a resurgent anti-Indian JVP in tow. It is now clear that the 1989 period of Dirty Wars with the JVP and STF both penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies with established history in Sri Lanka, ensured prolonging their sojourn in Sri Lanka with terror, tortour house and militias and disappearances, including Batalanda, etc., as the Cold War in Europe reached its apocalyptic end in early 1990. Subsequently, President Premadasa ordered the Mossad out, and he was killed.
Remarkably, it is alleged that Sir Ivor Jennings, the first Vice Chancellor of the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, had earlier suggested that Ceylon may be an appropriate terra nullius for the Zionist settler colony. Ceylon, like Palestine, was portrayed as more or less empty of people and hence suitable for European Jewish occupation and settlement – then as now, given the Chabad houses. After all, the colonised dark natives hardly counted, and were eminently disposable in the Colonial administrator’s Orientalist imagination. The British government, however, chose Palestine, closer home and more geostrategic, given proximity to British Oil’s Persian (Iranian) Oil fields and the ‘Holy Land or Jerusalem. Mercifully, Ceylon and its hapless natives were spared, but Britain, in retreat, was intent on ensuring its economic and security interests everywhere.
At this time, British and Israeli secret services continue to work together, notes Carlos Cruz Mosquesa. Research of investigative journalists from Declassified UK has uncovered that the British government, which claims to be working with Israeli leaders toward a cease-fire, has supported them with a staggering five hundred military intelligence flights over Gaza during the twenty-one months of violence.[ii] That is aside from direct arms supplies to the Israeli Defence Forces, who are accused of war crimes. The attempts to halt the genocidal violence unleashed on Palestinians coincide with Western nations’ efforts to protect and support Israel and those responsible for war crimes. While the United States’ unconditional military support remains the most important for Israel, much of the Western World is also complicit.
Given the history of divide and rule, decolonising countries often had tensions between majority and minority communities which could be and were negotiated and accommodated over time. The conflicts that escalated into wars were due to external geopolitical actors weaponising ethno-religious identity politics to secure their neocolonial interests, as happened in Sri Lanka, also through the deep infiltration and penetration of local and national institutions, law and order and investigative institutions under the guise of foreign Development Aid, Training and capacity building programs. The impunity of Zionist Chabad houses operating in all parts of Sri Lanka to service Israeli Defence Forces despite local protests is indicative that this continues to this day.
With the wisdom of hindsight, it is now clear, 42 years after our July 1983 Nakba, that the Western veneer of liberal democracy and human rights had us fooled along with the well-funded ethnic conflict research and Raj Nostalgia history industry. This despite expanding NATO military bases around the World, now totalling 750 plus in more than 80 countries to promote Human Rights and Neoliberal Democracy, while supporting clandestine Dirty War operations in the Global South against leftist decolonisation, national Independence and liberation movements. This was much like Gladio Operations in
Europe against communists, all of which served to advance the economic and security interests of the Euro-American empire- then as now.
*Dr Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake is a social and medical anthropologist with expertise in international development and political-economic analysis. She was a member of the International Steering Group of the North-South Institute project: “Southern Perspectives on Reform of the International Aid Architecture. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: Map indicating locations of Palestine and Sri Lanka. CC BY-SA 4.0
[i] For a Sovereign State and God’s Secret Agent
[ii] https://www.defenddemocracy.press/these-global-south-countries-barred-arms-transfers-to-israel/
