Valikamam East Pradeshiya Sabha passes resolution demanding international justice for Tamil genocide
The Valikamam East Pradeshiya Sabha has passed a unanimous resolution demanding international justice for the genocide committed against the Tamil people in Sri Lanka, declaring the atrocities were carried out by the Sri Lankan state.
The resolution was adopted during the council’s second session held this past Tuesday, under the leadership of Chairman Thiyagarajah Nirosh. It was welcomed across party lines, with all members of the Sabha expressing their support.
Presenting the resolution, Nirosh condemned successive Sri Lankan governments, stating that regardless of which political party held power, all had historically pursued a genocidal policy towards the Tamil people. He stressed that the genocide was not a result of sporadic violence, but a calculated, systematic campaign driven by state policy.
The ancestral homeland of the Tamil people in the North and East has been systematically occupied through state-sponsored colonisation, he noted. He went on to cite how Tamil language rights had been deliberately suppressed to further a Sinhala-Buddhist expansionist agenda.
Nirosh outlined a pattern of state-backed violence dating back to Sri Lanka’s independence, highlighting that Tamil civilians had been killed in military operations and violent pogroms with total impunity. Perpetrators, he noted, were shielded from justice, and grave human rights violations remained unaddressed through any domestic accountability mechanism.
He pointed to the mass sexual violence perpetrated by the Sri Lankan military, stating that Tamil women were assaulted, murdered, and buried in mass graves. Referring specifically to the Chemmani mass graves in Jaffna, he said these were just one example of atrocities that remain unaccounted for. Nirosh asserted that if international investigations were permitted into the mass graves still being unearthed across the Tamil homeland, they would expose the true scale of the atrocities committed.
The Chairman also condemned the historic denial of education to Tamil students based on ethnicity, and drew attention to the thousands of Tamil youths who have been detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). The legislation, widely condemned by human rights organisations for facilitating arbitrary detention and torture, remains in force. Many of these political prisoners continue to languish in prison to this day, Nirosh said.
He further criticised the Sri Lankan military for carrying out abductions, noting that many of those taken were never returned. The mothers of the disappeared continue their tireless protests on the streets, year after year demanding answers about their missing children, he added. Even Tamil schoolchildren, he stated, were bombed and massacred on school grounds during the war.
Nirosh also condemned the ongoing militarisation of the Tamil homeland, saying that Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism continued to expand its reach. Tamil lands were being seized by the Sri Lankan military without legal process, he said, and the majority remain unreleased despite repeated demands for demilitarisation.
He concluded by stating that the historical Tamil homeland had been deliberately expropriated through government institutions.
The Tamil people have endured a genocide and the path to justice must come through international mechanisms, he said.
He accused the Sri Lankan state of violating international humanitarian law, international norms, and basic human rights — not only during the final stages of the armed conflict, but throughout decades of systematic persecution.
The resolution marks one of the strongest statements yet from a local government body in the Tamil homeland and comes amid renewed calls from civil society and victims’ families for a credible international investigation into war crimes and genocide committed against the Tamil people.
