The Sri Lankan civil war has its roots in state-sponsored discrimination against Tamils and the Tamils' resulting desire to form an independent nation. The Tamils are a strongly cultural, religiously hindu ethnic group of over 65 million that inhabit southern India and north-eastern Sri Lanka. While the Sinhalese (Buddhist, native Sri Lankans) comprise nearly 75% of the total population, the Tamils make up only 20% of the population. To add to the differences, the Sinhalese speak sinhala, while the Tamils speak their own unique language. These ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences have resulted in conflict between the two groups which culminated in government-sanctioned discrimination against the Tamils.

When Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948, ethnic Tamils were denied Sri Lankan citizenship and over 300,000 Tamils were deported by the Sri Lankan government. The Tamil language was banned, Buddhism was given direct state sponsorship over Hinduism, and Tamil lands were colonized by Singhalese settlers. In Sri Lanka, the 3rd most devout country in the world where 99% of people say religion is important in their daily lives, these harsh governmental restrictions on Hinduism prompted fierce Tamil backlash.

The Tamils began to organize into resistance movements, the primary of which was the Tamil Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant Tamil group that pledged to create an independent state in the north and east of the country for ethnic Tamils. The LTTE were a small outfit that, although funded by sympathetic Tamils in southern India, had limited military capabilities. However, the situation worsened in 1981, when the Sri Lankan government burned the Jaffna library, destroying any literature written in the Tamil language. Jaffna, a key Tamil city in the north, housed tens of thousands of important Tamil cultural documents and its library’s blatant destruction enraged Tamils nationwide.

The Tamil Tigers responded by ambushing the Sri Lankan army in 1983 at Thiruneivail, killing 13 government soldiers. Furious, the government sanctioned an ethnic rampage against Tamils known as Black July. Over 2,500 Tamils were killed in the violence as the country descended into chaos and overnight the Tamil Tigers ranks surged with new recruits. Weapons, food, and money began to pour into the LTTE’s warehouses from sympathetic Tamils in southern India. Emboldened and empowered, the Tamil Tigers declared war on the Sri Lankan government on July 23rd, 1983.

It was a bloody, decades long conflict that saw intense suicide bombing campaigns and alleged war crimes on both sides before the Tamil Tigers were finally defeated in 2009. If you're interested in reading further, I wrote an article a while ago about the Sri Lankan civil war here.

 

Sources:

Sri Lankan Tamil Nationalism: Its Origins and Development in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - A. J. Wilson

Origins of the Sri Lankan Civil War - Jesse Russell, Ronald Cohn