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.
Kumarapuram massacre also known as 1996 Trincomalee massacre or 1996 Killiveddy massacre refers to the murder of 26 Sri Lankan Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan Army soldiers on February 11, 1996. The victims included 13 women and 9 children below the age of 12. Further 28 civilians were severely injured as well. The event took place in a village called Kumarapuram, located in the eastern district of Trincomalee. It was a notable mass murder of civilians since the resumption of armed conflict between rebel forces and Sri Lankan armed forces since April 1995, as part of the Sri Lankan civil war. The then-government arrested a number of soldiers and home guards who allegedly carried out the massacre. A court case was started on 2004. On 27 July 2016 the court acquitted six former army Corporals who were accused over the massacre, after they were found not guilty.
The Vankalai massacre was a massacre of a family of four minority Sri Lankan Tamils at the hands of the Sri Lankan military personnel from the village of Vankalai in Mannar District, Sri Lanka on June 8, 2006. The victims were tortured and the mother was gang raped before her murder.
The Eastern University massacre was the arrest and subsequent mass murder of 158 minority Sri Lankan Tamil refugees who had taken refuge in the Eastern University campus close to the city Batticaloa on September 5, 1990. A witness identified Sri Lankan Army personnel as the perpetrators. The event is part of what is known amongst Sri Lankan Tamils as Black September, a series of civilian massacres. The Sri Lankan government eventually established a presidential commission of inquiry. The inquiry found evidence of illegal abductions and mass murder. It also named the responsible parties, but there is currently no evidence of any judicial follow up to the inquiry.
Mary Bastian was a Sri Lankan Tamil human rights activist and Catholic priest. He was shot and killed along with 10 other civilians on January 6, 1985, during the Sri Lankan Civil War, allegedly by the Sri Lankan Army.
The Palliyagodella massacre was carried out by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) against the mostly Muslim population of the Palliyagodella village located on border region of the northern part of Sri Lanka that were controlled by the Tigers at the time. This was the largest massacre of Muslim civilians by the LTTE to date. Village eyewitnesses claim that some 285 men, women and children, around a third of the population, were killed by a 1,000 strong force of the Tamil Tigers; however, the Sri Lankan government states that the LTTE massacred 166 to 171. All but 40 of the victims of the Palliyathidal massacre were Muslim; the rest were Sinhalese.
On June 12, 1991, 152 minority Sri Lankan Tamil civilians were massacred by members of the Sri Lankan military in the village Kokkadichcholai near the eastern province town of Batticaloa. The Sri Lankan government instituted a presidential commission to investigate the massacre. The commission found the commanding officer negligent in controlling his troops and recommended that he be removed from office, and identified nineteen other members of the Sri Lankan military to be responsible for mass murder. In a military tribunal that followed in the presidential commission in the capital city of Colombo, all nineteen soldiers were acquitted.
Eelam War I is the name given to the initial phase of the armed conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE.
Eelam War II is the name given to the second phase of armed conflict between Sri Lankan military and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The war started after the failure of peace talks between the Premadasa government and the LTTE. This phase of the war was initiated by the LTTE who massacred almost 600 Sinhalese and Muslim police personnel after they were ordered by the Premadasa government to surrender to the LTTE. The truce was broken on June 10, 1990, when the LTTE in October expelled all the 28,000 Muslims residing in Jaffna.
The 1984 Mannar massacre was the killing of 200+ minority Sri Lankan Tamils civilians by Sri Lankan Army soldiers in the town of Mannar, north-western Sri Lanka, on December 4, 1984. The attack was triggered when three Army jeeps hit a land mine, killing one soldier. In retaliation, landmarks such as the Central hospital, the post office, a Roman Catholic convent as well as villagers working in rice paddy fields and bus passengers were attacked. Villages around Mannar town such as Murunkan and Parappankadal were also attacked. Immediately after the incident, the then Sri Lankan President J. R. Jayawardene appointed a Presidential commission of inquiry. A local Roman Catholic priest, Mary Bastian who was a member of the Presidential commission was later killed in January 1985. A Methodist minister George Jeyarajasingham, who was a witness to the incident, was also killed in December 1984.
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.
The Puthukkudiyiruppu bombing was an aerial attack carried out against Sri Lankan Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan Air Force on September 15 in the year 1999 killing over 21 including schoolchildren and women as well as inflicting serious injuries upon many more.
The Cheddikulam massacre was a massacre of Sri Lankan Tamil civilians in the village of Cheddikulam, located on the border of the Vavuniya and Mannar districts. It was among the first of the series of massacres carried out by the Sri Lankan armed forces during the country's Civil War.
The 1985 Trincomalee massacres refers to a series of mass murder of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan military and Sinhalese home guards in Trincomalee District, Sri Lanka. In a succession of events that spanned over two months, hundreds of Tamil civilians were massacred and thousands were driven out by the Sri Lankan military and Sinhalese mobs in order to colonize the area. Almost every Tamil settlement in the district was destroyed during this well-orchestrated campaign to drive out the local Tamil population. Several Tamil women were also raped. In September 1985, the entire Tamil population of Trincomalee town was displaced to forests and refugee camps in an attack that wiped out the town, including the destruction of 12 temples and a mosque. Since August 16, over 50,000 Tamils who were forced to flee the town ended up in refugee camps in the Jaffna and Batticaloa districts.
Mandaithivu sea massacre was a civilian massacre of ethnic Tamils by members of the Sri Lankan Navy off the coast of Mandaitivu island of the Jaffna peninsula. 33 civilians, all of them fishermen mostly from Gurunagar, who had been fishing at sea were attacked, tortured and murdered by Sri Lankan Navy personnel.
Sexual violence against Tamils in Sri Lanka has occurred repeatedly during the island's long ethnic conflict. The first instances of rape of Tamil women by Sinhalese mobs were documented during the 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom. This continued in the 1960s with the deployment of the Sri Lankan Army in Jaffna, who were reported to have molested and occasionally raped Tamil women.
The Veeramunai massacres refers to the mass killing and disappearances of over 250 Tamil civilians by Sri Lankan security forces and Muslim home guards in 1990.
