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…
In different parts of Sri Lanka, families of the disappeared came together to hold events to commemorate the UN Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on August 30. In Digana (Central province), families held…
It has been 37 years since the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983, a riot that set the country ablaze and sparked a 30-year long and bloody war. But even after nearly four…
In July 1995 the St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Navaly, Jaffna, was filled with displaced Tamils seeking refuge and safety from the war. People in Navaly, including members of the…
Although the war ended a decade ago, the ethno-political and social fractures from violent conflict endure. On no other day are they more apparent than on May 18. Often, what we see,…
Although the war ended a decade ago, the ethno-political and social fractures from conflict endure. On no other day are they more apparent than on May 18. Often, what we see, read…
Meera Srinivasan, the Hindu correspondent in Sri Lanka, at the first press conference with Presidential candidate Gotabaya Rajapaksa asked him what happened to the LTTE cadres and others who surrendered to the…
Prof Sarath Chandrajeewa, the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Visual and Performing Arts, has been removed from his post by the President of Sri Lanka. No explanation has been offered. In a…
I am praying in a pew at Saint Mary’s Cathedral. The building has suffered burning, cyclones, the Eelam war’s bombs. Four hundred years ago Portuguese built the first church here, which…
Editor’s Note: Dear friends, I want to congratulate the Law and Human Rights Centre for organising this course. It is difficult but very important to do this in Jaffna, a place that…
