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Sri Lanka has a history of conflict, but the recent attacks appear ...
Sri Lanka has long been subject to extremist violence. Easter Sunday’s coordinated bomb blasts, which killed almost 300 and injured hundreds more, are the latest in a long history of ethno-religious tragedies. While no one has yet claimed responsibility for the attacks, 24 people have been arrested. Three police were killed in their capture. The Sri Lankan government has blamed the attacks on the National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ), a radical Islamist group known for vandalising Buddhist statues. These attacks are different from previous ethno-religious violence in Sri Lanka. By fomenting generalised religious hatred, they appear to have more in common with Al-Qaeda, which has sought specific political change. Read more: Who are Sri Lanka's Christians? For many, the bomb blasts immediately recalled Sri Lanka’s ethnic civil war. The war was fought between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) and the Sri Lanka government from 1983 until 2009. In its final weeks, around 40,000 mostly Tamil civilians were killed, bringing the war’s total toll to more than 100,000 from a population of around 20 million. The Tamil Tigers were completely destroyed in 2009. Many Tigers, including their leader, were summarily executed. There remains much bitterness among Tamils towards the ethnic majority Sinhalese, but there is no appetite for renewing a war that ended so disastrously. A history of unrest Ethnic tensions in Sri Lanka were high prior to independence in 1948, and stoked by the 1956 election of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party under Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike. Bandaranaike proclaimed himself “defender of the besieged Sinhalese culture”, and oversaw the introduction of the Sinhala Only Act. The act privileged the country’s majority Sinhalese population and their religion of Buddhism over the minority Hindu and Muslim Tamils. The fallout from this legislation forced Bandaranaike to backtrack, but he was assassinated in 1959 by an extremist Buddhist monk for doing so. Inter-ethnic tensions continued with outbursts of mob violence. In 1962, there was an attempted military coup, and in 1964, around 600,000 third and fourth generation “Indian” Tamils were forcibly removed to India. In 1972, and again in 1987, the predominantly Sinhalese Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party (JVP) launched insurrections that were bloodily suppressed. Clashes between Sinhalese and Tamils in 1983 led to an attack on a Sri Lankan army convoy. This sparked the “Bl...
The Post-LTTE Turn: Sri Lanka- Pakistan Ties In A New Era - OpEd
The LTTE era was one of the darkest chapters in Sri Lanka's modern history. But from those painful years has emerged a stronger focus on preparedness and partnership.
G.L. Peiris, in Jaffna, Revisits Federalism and Says Sri Lanka's Slide ...
This was the tsunami which struck Sri Lanka on Boxing Day, 26 December 2004. Since much of the destruction, especially on the east coast, was in areas controlled by the LTTE, there was the urgent need for a collaborative mechanism between the government and the LTTE to deliver relief and undertake immediate reconstruction.
Govt welcomes Canada's decision to retain LTTE as a terrorist entity
According to the recent review, Canada maintains that the remnants of the LTTE have an international fundraising and procurement network that still exists. The review of the WTM notes that the group continues to play a facilitating role in the LTTE's terrorist activities by fundraising on their behalf.
