Tamil students at the University of Jaffna removed the Sri Lankan lion national flag and hoisted a black flag in its place at the main campus today, to highlight their continued rejection of Sri Lanka’s Independence Day.
Students said that the black flag was raised to convey that Sri Lanka’s Independence Day is observed by Tamils not as a celebration, but as a Black Day, reflecting decades of repression, dispossession and denial of justice.
The act forms part of a wider mobilisation across the Tamil homeland, where ‘Independence Day’ has long been commemorated as a day of mourning.
Alongside the symbolic act at the university, the University of Jaffna Students’ Union and the Association of the Relatives of the Enforced Disappeared jointly launched protests across the Northern and Eastern provinces. The coordinated demonstrations brought together students, relatives of the disappeared and civil activists to reiterate long-standing Tamil political demands.
Protesters raised calls for an end to Sinhalese–Buddhist colonisation of the Tamil people’s traditional lands, highlighting ongoing state-backed settlement schemes and land seizures across the North-East. They also demanded the immediate release of Tamil political prisoners and justice for those who have been forcibly disappeared, almost all of whom remain unaccounted for years after the end of the armed conflict.
Demonstrators further called for accountability for the genocide committed against Tamils during the final phase of the war, stressing that nearly seventeen years after the mass atrocities at Mullivaikkal, no meaningful justice has been delivered. The protests also renewed demands for a permanent political solution that recognises the Tamil people’s rights and addresses the structural roots of oppression.
