The Sri Lankan Civil War
Sri Lanka's civil war began in July 1983 and ran for twenty-six years, killing between 80,000 and 100,000 people. Its origin was the systematic disadvantaging of the Tamil minority after independence in 1948: the disenfranchisement of Indian Tamil plantation workers, the Sinhala Only Act of 1956 making Sinhala the sole official language, and university admission quotas from 1971 that cut Tamil entry sharply. Peaceful Tamil politics failed to reverse any of it, and militant groups formed in the 1970s, of which the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam under Velupillai Prabhakaran destroyed its rivals and became the only one. The war's start is dated to Black July. The LTTE killed thirteen soldiers in an ambush on 23 July 1983; anti-Tamil pogroms followed across the south, with mobs using electoral rolls to find Tamil homes and businesses, killing somewhere between four hundred and three thousand people over a week while the police stood by. Tens of thousands fled abroad, and the diaspora financed the insurgency for decades. The LTTE ran a de facto state in the north and east with courts, taxation, a police force and a navy, pioneered the suicide belt, used child soldiers, and assassinated Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and President Premadasa in 1993. Indian peacekeepers intervened from 1987 and ended up fighting the Tigers. A Norwegian-brokered ceasefire held from 2002 to 2006. The final offensive ended in May 2009 with Prabhakaran dead and tens of thousands of civilians killed in a shrinking coastal strip. No credible domestic accountability process has followed, and UN estimates of civilian deaths in the last months run to 40,000. The Tamil north remains heavily militarised.
- Year: 1983 CE
- Category: Civil War
