The Sri Lankan civil war was a civil war fought in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009. Beginning on 23 July 1983, it was an intermittent insurgency against the government by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam led by Velupillai Prabhakaran. The LTTE fought to create an independent Tamil state called Tamil Eelam in the north-east of the island, due to the continuous discrimination and violent persecution against Sri Lankan Tamils by the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lanka government.
Human rights in Sri Lanka provides for fundamental rights in the country. The Sri Lanka Constitution states that every person is entitled to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, including the freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice. And, that every person is equal before the law.
TamilNet is an online newspaper that provides news and feature articles on current affairs in Sri Lanka, specifically related to the erstwhile Sri Lankan Civil War. The website was formed by members of the Sri Lankan Tamil community residing in the United States and publishes articles in English, German and French.
Taraki Sivaram or Dharmeratnam Sivaram was a popular Tamil journalist of Sri Lanka. He was kidnapped by four men in a white van on 28 April 2005, in front of the Bambalapitya police station. His body was found the next day in the district of Himbulala, near the Parliament of Sri Lanka. He had been beaten and shot in the head.
Nadarajah Raviraj was a Sri Lankan lawyer and politician who served as Mayor of Jaffna in 2001 and a Member of Parliament for Jaffna District from 2001 to 2006. A member of the Tamil National Alliance, he was shot dead on 10 November 2006 in Colombo.
The Chencholai bombing took place on August 14, 2006 when the Sri Lankan Air Force bombed what it said was a rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) training camp, killing 61 girls aged 16 to 18. The LTTE, UNICEF, the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission and UTHR all said those in the compound were not LTTE cadres.
The 2006 Trincomalee Massacre of NGO Workers, also known as the Muttur Massacre, took place on 4 or 5 August 2006, when 17 employees of the French INGO Action Against Hunger were shot at close range in the city of Muttur, Sri Lanka, close to Trincomalee. The victims included sixteen minority Sri Lankan Tamils and one Sri Lankan Muslim.
The 2008–2009 SLA Northern offensive was an armed conflict in the northern Province of Sri Lanka between the military of Sri Lanka and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The battle began with a Sri Lanka Army (SLA) offensive attempting to break through the LTTE defence lines in the north of the island, aiming to conclude the country's 25-year-old civil war by military victory.
Poopathy Kanapathipillai commonly known as Annai Poopathy was born in a small ancient Tamil village of Kiran in Batticaloa District, Sri Lanka. She was a mother of 10 and grandmother of one. During her lifetime two of her sons were shot and killed by the Sri Lankan government forces in separate incidents.
Protests in Canada against the Sri Lankan Civil War, often referred to as the Tamil protests by the media, consisted of a series of demonstrations which took place in major Canadian cities with a significant Tamil diaspora population during the year 2009 protesting the alleged genocide of Sri Lankan Tamil people in the Northern Province and Eastern Province of the island nation Sri Lanka. It was part of a global outcry by the Tamil diaspora to end the Sri Lankan Civil War, investigate acts of war crimes by the Government of Sri Lanka, and restore civil rights for Tamils in Sri Lanka. The aim was also to create awareness and appeal to leaders, notably the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, the President of the United States, Barack Obama and the Consulate General of Sri Lanka in Canada, Bandula Jayasekara, to take action in ending the conflict. Several Tamil Canadian citizens and business owners from different parts of Canada and the United States took part in major protests set up in Toronto and Ottawa, while smaller scale demonstrations took place in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.
Paranirupasingam Devakumaran also spelt as Thevakumar was a minority Sri Lankan Tamil Television journalist who reported for the Maharaja Television which operated MTV English, Sirasa TV in Sinhala and Sakthi TV in Tamil in Jaffna. He and his friend Mahendran Varadan were hacked to death in Navanthurai near Jaffna on 28 May 2008 while he was on his way home by the paramilitary EPDP.
Between 2008 and 2009, major protests against the Sri Lankan civil war took place in several countries around the world, urging national and world leaders and organisations to take action on bringing a unanimous cease fire to the Sri Lankan Civil War, which had taken place for twenty-six years. Tamil diaspora populations around the world expressed concerns regarding the conduct of the civil war in the island nation of Sri Lanka. The civil war, which took place between the Sri Lankan Army and the separatist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is believed to have killed over 100,000 civilians. Protesters and critics of the Sri Lankan government that triggered a culturally based civil war to be a systematic genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Sri Lankan Tamil minority in Sri Lanka.
The war was waged for over a quarter of a century, with an estimated 70,000 killed by 2007. Immediately following the end of war, on 20 May 2009, the UN estimated a total of 80,000–100,000 deaths. However, in 2011, referring to the final phase of the war in 2009, the Report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka stated, "A number of credible sources have estimated that there could have been as many as 40,000 civilian deaths." The large majority of these civilian deaths in the final phase of the war were said to have been caused by indiscriminate shelling of a formerly designated 'No Fire Zone' by the Sri Lankan Armed Forces.
ACT NOW is a human rights campaign group founded by former British humanitarian aid workers from Sri Lanka against human rights abuses towards Tamil people.
Graham Keith Williamson is a long-time political activist in the United Kingdom, having been active at the top levels of various far right groups including the National Front, the Third Way and Solidarity.
Eelanatham is a Tamil language newspaper. It is known for promoting a Tamil nationalist prospective and a pro-LTTE stance.The newspaper has been attacked several times, a number of its staff have been murdered by paramilitary groups and other forces.
