Thirty-seven years to the day after gunmen from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam assassinated the Tamil leader Appapillai Amirthalingam, his son has accused the group of destroying not only his father but also the political cause it claimed to represent.
In a Facebook post marking the anniversary, Dr. Baheerathan Amirthalingam, a physician who settled in Britain after the killing, wrote that the assassination on July 13, 1989, had "turned our family's life upside down" and that its consequences had extended far beyond a single household. He said the LTTE went on to eliminate rival militant groups, kill countless fighters and civilians, alienate the foreign governments that had once supported the Tamil cause, and ultimately destroy itself — "and, in the end, destroyed our aspirations as well."
“They did not merely take my father’s life,” he wrote.
Mr. Amirthalingam, the secretary-general of the Tamil United Liberation Front, was among the most prominent Sri Lankan Tamil politicians of his generation. He became Leader of the Opposition after the 1977 general election, in which his party, campaigning on a platform that demanded a separate Tamil state, won the largest bloc of opposition seats in Parliament. He was shot on the evening of July 13, 1989, on Bullers Road in Colombo, during a meeting with Tiger emissaries convened, ostensibly, to discuss Tamil unity. A fellow party leader, V. Yogeswaran, was also killed, and a third, M. Sivasithamparam, was wounded. The three assassins were shot dead by Mr. Amirthalingam’s police bodyguards. The Tamil Tigers first denied responsibility and later admitted it.
Dr. Amirthalingam, who was 28 at the time, had flown to London the day before to begin postgraduate medical studies, expecting only a temporary stay. He learned of his father’s death as he traveled from the airport, he has said, and never moved back.
In his anniversary message, he urged Sri Lankans, and Tamils in particular, to reflect on “who bears responsibility for the helpless situation in which we find ourselves today.” Some had sought to justify the killing because the Tigers had carried it out, he wrote, while many others who believed it was wrong had chosen to stay silent. Those responsible, he added, had also worked to erase his father’s memory — a legacy he said writers had struggled to preserve under a climate of fear.
He noted that the first biography of his father, Murder of a Moderate, by the writer Sabaratnam, appeared only in 1996, seven years after the killing, when few were willing to discuss the slain leader publicly. A second, Amirthalingam Sagaptham (“The Amirthalingam Era”), by Kathir Balasundaram, followed in 2002. Efforts are now underway, he said, to republish the first book as part of commemorations for his father’s birth centenary, which falls in 2027.
Dr. Amirthalingam has made his case at greater length before. In an interview with Jaffna Monitor in March 2025, he argued that the Tigers had branded his father a traitor because they wanted to establish themselves as the sole representative of the Tamil people, and viewed the Tamil United Liberation Front, the democratically chosen voice of Tamils after the 1977 election, and the party that foreign diplomats sought out first, as the chief obstacle. By silencing moderate and experienced leaders, he said then, the armed groups had cut Tamil society off from global diplomacy and left the community with no room to negotiate.
Dr. Amirthalingam has long argued that rejecting the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord was the LTTE's greatest political mistake. The Indian-brokered agreement, which his father supported but the Tigers rejected, would have preserved hard-won Tamil political gains and spared much of the bloodshed that followed, he contends. When the accord was signed, he has noted, the war's dead numbered in the low thousands; by its end, the toll had risen to hundreds of thousands. "We achieved absolutely nothing," he said in the 2025 interview, describing the 13th Amendment to Sri Lanka's Constitution, the accord's principal surviving provision intended to devolve power to the provinces, as existing "merely on paper."
The verdict on Mr. Amirthalingam has long been contested among Tamils. A fiery orator once celebrated by Tamil youth, he helped frame the 1976 Vaddukoddai Resolution, which first declared the goal of an independent Tamil Eelam. He later moderated that stance in favor of a power-sharing settlement within a united Sri Lanka — a shift that hardliners, and the Tigers, cast as betrayal. For years after his death, some continued to justify the assassination on those grounds.
Tamil political power in the north and east, once concentrated in Mr. Amirthalingam’s party, has since splintered. Its principal successor in the north, the Illankai Tamil Arasu Katchi, has watched its dominance collapse — losing seats there even to the governing, Colombo-based National People’s Power.
Dr. Amirthalingam has turned to preserving his father’s memory in more concrete form as well, converting the family’s Jaffna house, the only property, he has said, that his father personally owned, into the Amirthalingam-Mangaiyarkarasi Memorial, named for his parents. “This is not just about remembering my father,” he said last year. “It is about ensuring that our political struggle is not forgotten by the younger generation.”
