
This year marks 38 years since Black July: the anti-Tamil pogrom where thousands of Tamils were killed by brutal state-supported Sinhala mobs. It was a week of violence that saw Tamils murdered, tortured and displaced. It remains a premeditated and meticulously coordinated act of genocide. The remnants of this pogroms however, still reverberate across the island to this very day. Recent months in particular, carry concerning parallels to the period leading to 1983’s explosive violence, as Sri Lanka returns to patterns of the past with press suppression, arbitrary and racist detention, military occupation and unchecked state violence running devoid of consequence.