Sri Lankan Tamil politics

The 1956 anti-Tamil pogrom, also known as the Gal Oya riots, was the first organised pogrom against Sri Lankan Tamils in the Dominion of Ceylon. It began with anti-Tamil rioting in Colombo, followed by anti-Sinhalese rioting in the Batticaloa District. The worst of the violence took place in the Gal Oya valley after the Batticaloa attacks, where local majority Sinhalese colonists and employees of the Gal Oya Development Board commandeered government vehicles, dynamite and weapons and massacred minority Tamils. It is estimated that over 150 people, mostly Tamils, had died during the violence. The police and army were eventually able to bring the situation under control.

The Sri Lankan civil war (Tamil: இலங்கை உள்நாட்டுப் போர், Ilaṅkai uḷnāṭṭup pōr; Sinhala: ශ්‍රී ලංකාවේ සිවිල් යුද්ධය, śrī laṁkāvē sivil yuddhaya) 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 (LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers) 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.

Tamil People's Council, formed in Jaffna on 12 December 2015, is a thirty-member council consisting of academics, religious leaders, members from the Civil society and political parties. It has been formed to promote Sri Lankan Tamil people's interests. It is headed by Northern Province Chief Minister C. V. Wigneswaran and co-chaired by Dr. P. Lakshman and Mr. T. Vasantharajah.

Vaithilingam Sornalingam (September 1949 – 26 September 2001; Tamil: வைத்தியலிங்கம் சொர்ணலிங்கம், alternative spellings include Vythilingam Sornalingam; often referred to by his nom de guerre Colonel Shankar) was founder of the air wing and marine division of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and a relative of Velupillai Prabhakaran. He was educated in Sri Lanka, and worked for some time in Canada before returning to Sri Lanka and joining the LTTE.

TamilNet is an online newspaper that provides news and feature articles on current affairs in Sri Lanka, specifically related to the erstwhile Sri Lankan Civil War. The website was formed by members of the Sri Lankan Tamil community residing in the United States and publishes articles in English, German and French.

The 1977 anti-Tamil pogrom in Sri Lanka followed the 1977 general elections in Sri Lanka where the Sri Lankan Tamil nationalistic Tamil United Liberation Front won a plurality of minority Sri Lankan Tamil votes. In the elections, the party stood for secession. An official government estimate put the death toll at 125, whereas other sources estimate that around 300 Tamils were killed by Sinhalese mobs. Human rights groups, such as the UTHR-J, accused the newly elected UNP-led government of orchestrating the violence.

The 1958 anti-Tamil pogrom and riots in Ceylon, also known as the 58 riots, refer to the first island-wide ethnic riots and pogrom to target the minority Tamils in the Dominion of Ceylon after it became an independent dominion from Britain in 1948. The riots lasted from 22 May until 29 May 1958 although sporadic disturbances happened even after the declaration of emergency on 27 May 1958. The estimates of the murders range, based on recovered bodies, from 158 to 1,500. Although most of the victims were Tamils, Sinhalese and their property were also affected by retaliatory attacks by Tamil mobs throughout the Batticaloa and Jaffna districts. As the first full-scale race riot in the country in over forty years, the events of 1958 shattered the trust the communities had in one another and led to further polarisation.

Tamil Eelam (Tamil: தமிழீழம், tamiḻ īḻam; generally rendered outside Tamil-speaking areas as தமிழ் ஈழம்) is a proposed independent state that many Tamils in Sri Lanka and the Eelam Tamil diaspora aspire to create in the north and east of Sri Lanka. Large sections of the North-East were under de facto control of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for most of the 1990s–2000s during the Sri Lankan Civil War. Tamil Eelam, although encompassing the traditional homelands of Eelam Tamils, does not have official status or recognition by world states. The name is derived from the ancient Tamil name for Sri Lanka, Eelam.

The Tamil genocide refers to the framing of various systematic acts of physical violence and cultural destruction committed against the Tamil population in Sri Lanka during the Sinhala–Tamil ethnic conflict beginning in 1956, particularly during the Sri Lankan civil war as acts of genocide. Various commenters, including the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, have accused the Sri Lankan government of responsibility for and complicity in a genocide of Tamils, and point to state-sponsored settler colonialism, state-backed pogroms, and mass killings, enforced disappearances and sexual violence by the security forces as examples of genocidal acts. The Sri Lankan government has rejected the charges of genocide.

Sri Lankan Tamil nationalism is the conviction of the Sri Lankan Tamil people, a minority ethnic group in the South Asian island country of Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon), that they have the right to constitute an independent or autonomous political community. This idea has not always existed. Sri Lankan Tamil national awareness began during the era of British rule during the nineteenth century, as Tamil Hindu revivalists tried to counter Protestant missionary activity. The revivalists, led by Arumuga Navalar, used literacy as a tool to spread Hinduism and its principles.