Sarath Chandrajeewa’s first impressions of Jaffna came from his father’s stories about the north where he was stationed as a police officer. His father spoke of the friendliness of Jaffna people, their…
I was in Jaffna in July 1983, staying with a few friends of mine at the boy’s hostel of the University of Jaffna. The hostel was situated right by the Kokkuvil train…
How to select keys for the door when you know the gatekeeper all too well, when chance and destiny carry the same code words, when love no longer depends on…
Today Sri Lanka faces its worst economic crisis since independence. In the coming months, people’s hardships will only worsen as more austerity is forced on them. The present crisis is a result…
The images are stark and compelling. The STF men are stoic and menacing. They stand unmoving, machine guns clasped tightly to their chests, their faces obscured by motorcycle helmets. The women are…
“Even today I believe he will return but if he doesn’t, let him remain missing. If you want to report that he disappeared on the 15th, you can do that. We would…
December 19, 2021. Jaffna town. 6 am. Three motorcycles parked one behind the other at an angle with headlights on. Two armed military personnel, clad in black, on each motorcycle. Women headed…
Drug abuse is a menace that many societies are attempting to come to grips with. There has been a global rise in the number of drug users while accessing the substances has…
A destructive civil war, social upheaval, market forces and plastic have all played a part in the gradual erosion of Jaffna’s rich legacy of arts and crafts. A major dyeing and weaving…
The sentiments are unanimous. Under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidency and government, Sri Lanka’s human rights defenders in the north are being threatened, harassed and intimidated on a scale never experienced before. Interviews…
“An alleged former combatant who was “rehabilitated”. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is the armed group that the Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa government claim they defeated in May 2009.…
We will not forget Mullivaikkal, the shot, the strafed, the scissored, and the cluster-bombed. We will not forget holes in roofs, holes in water tanks, holes in heads. We will not…
Ratnajeevan Hoole, 2020, London: Thesam Publications, i-xxvii, 327 pages. Professor Ratnajeevan H. Hoole’s book on Jaffna Heritage Histories is a fascinating critique of several strands of invented recent histories of Sri Lanka’s…
“And home isn’t here and home isn’t there” – Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour Every story of ethnic cleansing is heart breaking. Some of them have been almost forgotten, overlooked in…
In October 1990, some 75,000 Muslims in the Northern Province (about five percent of the province’s total) were forcibly expelled from their homeland by the LTTE. In some places the rebels gave…
