Tamil Affairs

Tamil News

Latest news from and about the homeland

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A delegation from the European Union is to visit the Chemmani mass grave in Jaffna on Wednesday morning, after the Jaffna Magistrate's Court granted permission for the inspection on Monday, in the latest instance of international attention on a site where excavations continue to unearth evidence of atrocity. The visit comes amid sustained calls from Tamil families, human rights groups and…

Six Tamil and Muslim parties unite on the constitution, elections and land

Six Tamil and Muslim parties have agreed to establish a common platform to press Colombo on a new constitution, the long-delayed provincial council elections and unresolved land disputes, in what its architects call the first collective political network of the North-East, Malaiyaha and Muslim peoples in decades.

Sri Lanka’s OMP is an ‘architecture of denial’, says ITJP

Nearly a decade after Sri Lanka established the Office on Missing Persons, a new ITJP report says the body has failed to investigate enforced disappearances, failed to use existing state records and left families trapped in another cycle of bureaucracy and denial.

NPP's Tamil figures dismiss six-party platform as Colombo 'brokers'

The National People's Power's most senior Tamil figures have dismissed the newly formed six-party platform of Tamil and Muslim parties as doomed, corrupt and Colombo-bound, with a Jaffna MP branding its members "brokers", in a response that left untouched the platform's three demands, every one of them a pledge from the NPP's own manifesto.

Editorial - Whose Self-Determination? 

When Argentina's players unfurled a banner reading "Las Malvinas son Argentinas" after their World Cup semifinal victory over England this week, the British state required no time for reflection. Within a day, Downing Street had urged FIFA to investigate, ministers had denounced the gesture, and the Prime Minister's spokesperson had delivered the line that "the World Cup might not be ours, but the Falkland Islands definitely are".

Italian Tamils raise awareness of Eelam at Valdilana peace festival

Eelam Tamils took their case for justice to a multicultural peace festival in the Piedmont town of Valdilana this month, mounting an exhibition on the Tamil genocide, and drew a pledge from one of Italy's foremost peace campaigners, who participants say committed to bringing Tamil history and the genocide into Italian schools nationally.

All inmates killed in Negombo riot were unconvicted detainees

All 21 prisoners killed during the deadly violence at Negombo Prison were remand detainees awaiting trial and had not been convicted of any offence, according to Sri Lanka’s Department of Prisons.

'We are still searching' - The thirty-year cover-up at Chemmani

A new report from the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) charts thirty years of Sri Lankan state obstruction at Chemmani, where over 400 sets of skeletal remains have now been identified and not one commander has been held criminally accountable, and finds that the officers named by their own convicted subordinates were not prosecuted but promoted, some rising to the highest ranks of the Sri Lankan army.

Footage shows military selling produce from occupied Tamil land, contradicting parliament claim

Footage obtained by the Tamil Guardian appears to show Sri Lankan soldiers selling large quantities of vegetables grown on occupied Tamil land to a Keells collection centre in Jaffna, directly contradicting the deputy defence minister's assurance to parliament, just days earlier, that the military farms this land only to feed itself.

Denied even shade: Palaly families protest a fourth week under punishing sun

Displaced Tamil landowners of Valikamam North protested at Palaly Junction for a fourth week running, demanding the return of land held by the military for 36 years, as police barred the mostly elderly demonstrators from even erecting a shelter against Jaffna's punishing mid-July sun, days after the government confirmed the land would never be given back.

The road to 2028: How Sri Lanka's recovery could unravel again

With the printing presses turning again, its two great foreign-currency lifelines fraying and a fuel bill set to soar as the United States blockades the Strait of Hormuz, Sri Lanka's fragile recovery is being tested from every side, and a debt reckoning in 2028 threatens to tip the island back towards the abyss of 2022.