Government Response
For five full days the government did nothing. Finally, on 27 May, a state of emergency was declared. The Federal Party and Jathika Vimukthi Peramuna were both banned. Most of the country's senior Tamil politicians were Federal Party members and were later arrested. Within two days, the military had restored order in Colombo and eventually the rest of the country. Nearly 12,000 Tamil refugees had fled to camps near Colombo. The government secretly commissioned six European ships to resettle most of them in Jaffna in early June. The army was eventually withdrawn from civilian areas in the rest of the country, but remained present in Jaffna for a quarter century.
On 3 September 1958 the Tamil Language (Special Provisions) Act – which provided for the use of the Tamil language as a medium of instruction, as a medium of examination for admission to the Public Service, for use in state correspondence and for administrative purposes in the Northern and Eastern Provinces – was passed, substantially fulfilling the part of the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayagam Pact dealing with the language issue.
Read more about this topic: 1958 Riots In Ceylon
Famous quotes containing the words government and/or response:
“I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What I’m saying is that a lot of behavior that you are talking about is a direct response of people not having a future, or feeling that they don’t have a future.”
—William Julius Wilson (b. 1935)