J. R. Jayewardene
J. R. Jayewardene opened Sri Lanka's economy, rewrote its constitution to give himself the presidency, and presided over the week that started a twenty-six-year civil war. He was a lawyer from the Colombo elite and a minister at independence, and he is remembered internationally for a speech at the San Francisco conference in 1951 arguing against reparations from Japan, quoting the Buddha on hatred ceasing not by hatred. He won a landslide in 1977 and used it. The economy was opened - the first liberalisation in South Asia, ahead of India by a decade - and he replaced the Westminster system with an executive presidency he then moved into. The presidency he built was hard to remove him from. In 1982 he held a referendum to extend the sitting parliament by six years rather than hold the election due, won it under emergency regulations with the opposition press restricted, and so governed with a five-sixths majority nobody had voted for since 1977. The Tamil question had been worsening since a 1956 act made Sinhala the sole official language and since university admissions were weighted against Tamils in the 1970s. In July 1983, after the Tigers killed thirteen soldiers in an ambush, mobs attacked Tamils in Colombo and elsewhere for a week using electoral rolls to find their houses. Between four hundred and three thousand people were killed, the government did not intervene for days, and Jayewardene's own remarks afterwards expressed no sympathy. Black July is generally taken as the point at which a small insurgency became a war with a diaspora behind it. He signed an accord with India in 1987 that brought an Indian peacekeeping force which ended up fighting the Tigers, and was attacked with a grenade in his own parliament the same year.
- Lived: 1906 CE – 1996 CE
- Nationality: Sri Lankan
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
