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Black July is the common name used to refer to the anti-Tamil pogrom〔(Community, Gender and Violence, edited by Partha Chatterjee, Pradeep Jeganathan )〕 and riots in Sri Lanka during July 1983. The riots began as a "response" to a deadly ambush on 23 July 1983 by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a Tamil militant group, that killed 13 Sri Lanka Army soldiers. Beginning in the capital Colombo on the night of 24 July 1983, anti-Tamil pogroms spread to other parts of the country. Over seven days, mobs of mainly Sinhalese attacked Tamil targets, burning, looting and killing. Estimates of the death toll range between 400 and 3,000.〔〔 8,000 homes and 5,000 shops were destroyed.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://pact.lk/24-july-1983/ )〕 150,000 people were made homeless. The economic cost of the riots was $300 million. A wave of Sri Lankan Tamils fled to other countries in the ensuing years and many thousands of Tamils youths joined militant groups.〔〔 Black July is generally seen as the start of full-scale Sri Lankan Civil War between the Tamil militants and the government of Sri Lanka.〔 July has become a time of remembrance for the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora community around the world. ==Background== (詳細はcolonial period many Sri Lankan Tamils, particularly those from the Jaffna peninsula, took advantage of educational facilities established by missionaries and the British policy of divide and rule which placed minorities in positions of power in colonies, and soon dominated the civil service and other professions. When Sri Lanka became independent in 1948, a majority of government jobs were held by Tamils, who were a minority of the country's population. The elected leaders saw this as the result of a British stratagem to control the majority Sinhalese, and deemed it a situation that needed correction. In 1956 the Official Language Act (commonly known as the Sinhala Only Act) was introduced. Hitherto English – spoken by only 5% of the population – had been the sole official language, with the use of Sinhala (spoken by 75%) and Tamil (spoken by 25%) being severely restricted. Protests against the Sinhala Only policy by Tamils and by the leftist parties were met with mob violence that eventually snowballed into the riots of 1958. The implementation of the Sinhala Only Act deprived the Tamil populations in the north and east of the country of their right to fully integrate into government institutions and was the foremost injustice brought upon the ethnic minority group. In 1958, the Tamil political leadership acquiesced to a formula of Sinhala as the official language, but with the "reasonable use of Tamil". Only the leftist parties opposed this, holding out for parity of status between the two languages. However, after the Tamil people gave an overwhelming mandate to the Tamil nationalist Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (Federal Party), which had agreed to a subordinate status for the Tamil language, the leftist parties eventually abandoned parity of status. Throughout the 1960s, protests and state repression against these protests created further animosity. In 1972, the policy of standardisation that affected Tamils' entry into universities strained the already tenuous political relationship between the elites of the Tamil and Sinhalese communities. The quota entitlement in political representation became another cause for contention between Sinhala and Tamil people. There was also a series of ethnic riots in 1977 following the United National Party (UNP) coming to power. In 1981, the renowned public library in Jaffna was burnt down by a violent mob. The Jaffna Library was well known at the time as a nexus of Tamil activity with various Tamil groups vying for control. Until 1983, there were similar incidents of low level violence between the government and the mushrooming Tamil militant groups with a significant number of murders, disappearances and cases of torture attributed to both sides. On 23 July 1983, at around 11.30 pm, the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the Tamil Tigers or the LTTE) ambushed the Four Four Bravo military patrol in Thirunelveli near Jaffna in northern Sri Lanka. A road-side bomb was detonated beneath the jeep that was leading the convoy, injuring at least two soldiers on board. As soldiers travelling in a truck which was following the jeep dismounted to help their colleagues, they were ambushed by a group of Tamil Tiger fighters, who fired at them with automatic weapons and hurled grenades at them. In the ensuing clashes, one officer and twelve soldiers were killed immediately, while two more were fatally wounded, bringing the total death toll to fifteen along with a number of rebels. Kittu, a regional commander of the LTTE later admitted to planning and carrying out the ambush. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Black July」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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