COLOMBO, 24 July 2003 — Most Sri Lankans will remember where they were this week 20 years ago when bloody ethnic riots changed the course of the country.

The capital Colombo burned as hundreds of minority Tamils were killed by the majority Sinhalese community in a carnage that launched an all-out war between the Sri Lankan military and the Tamil Tiger rebels.

The war claimed more than 64,000 lives and displaced more than one million people before a truce was signed last year between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the government.

The conflict, however, is unresolved and the LTTE has walked out of talks citing a lack of progress in rebuilding Sri Lanka’s Tamil-majority north and east.

The trouble began on July 23, 1983, when a ragtag group of Tamil militants ambushed an army patrol in the northern Jaffna Peninsula and killed 13 soldiers.

The next morning, Tamil lawyer C.V. Vivekananthan was hearing a case in a Colombo court when a judge told him to go home early.

“When I came out, all the houses were burning. They had the voters list in their hands — they were able to identify the families of Tamils,” he said in his office near the courts.

Majority Sinhalese mobs rampaged through the city in a week of rioting that destroyed businesses and homes, drove hundreds of Tamil youth to join militant groups fighting for a separate state and half a million more to seek political asylum abroad.

“For a week it was a free-for-all, it went on,” said Vivekananthan, who witnessed Tamils burned alive in their cars or tied to tires.

“You can’t forget that smell inside of you,” he said. The United National Party, which heads the ruling coalition and launched the peace bid last year, was in power in 1983 and was accused of complicity in the riots.

Ganesh remembers spending his 10th birthday in a Colombo school converted into a temporary refuge for Tamils whose homes had been looted and burned.

“The toilet facilities were bad, there was not much water and the army was in charge,” said Ganesh, who did not want his real name to be used. The scars from 20 years ago still haunt Sri Lankans, but those who saw the carnage just want to move on.

Vivekananthan, who moved with his family after the riots to the Tamil-majority Jaffna Peninsula until the fighting there forced them back to Colombo, sees no reason to look back.

“Why can’t they forget about it and instead bring about a solution?” he asks.

But some worry the past has already been forgotten, leaving little understanding of issues among young people who have only known their country at war.

“I am not quite sure how it all happened, other than the fact that it was an issue between the Sinhalese and Tamils,” said 19-year-old Anusha, quoted in a Sunday Leader newspaper article headlined “An Ignorant Generation”.

“It is better if we can keep away from recalling those unpleasant memories,” said Sonali, 16. For those who do remember, there is not only bitterness and anger, but also warmth toward the Sinhalese friends and neighbors who took risks to protect them. Vivekananthan’s wife and six children were taken in by neighbors whose children played with theirs, despite the financial toll of feeding seven extra mouths the family could ill-afford.

One Sinhalese woman recalls her parents sneaking food to a Tamil family hiding nearby; another remembers taking a classmate home to break the news she no longer had a home to return to. “Every Sinhalese helped out. All of our neighbors helped us,” said Ganesh. “There is no hatred. You realize it’s not most people who actually perpetrate it, it’s only a minority.”