Jeevan Thiyagaraja

By Jeevan Thiyagaraja How I Came to ICES Neelan Tiruchelvam — Tamil member of parliament, constitutional lawyer, and founder of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies — was assassinated by an LTTE suicide bomber on 29 July 1999. These are personal recollections, offered on the anniversary of his death, of the years I worked alongside him and of the people whose lives that work brought together. I got to know Neelan Tiruchelvam by accident. Quadri Ismail, a brilliant writer and journal

By Jeevan Thiyagaraja Black July was not a weather event. It means something more disquieting: a set of interlocking failures — constitutional, political, institutional, moral — had been accumulating since independence, so that by the time the Thinnavely ambush of 23 July supplied the occasion, the machinery of a violent, organized pogrom was already lying to hand (Jeyaraj 2021). One caveat belongs at the front of this account. As in 1958, so in 1983: many officers in uniform attempted, at the

By Jeevan Thiagarajah Seventeen years after Sri Lanka's civil war ended, the country has run one of the world's more closely studied reintegration experiments — and left another almost entirely undone. On one side, 12,196 former LTTE combatants passed through a state-run rehabilitation programme that concluded in 2021. On the other, hundreds of thousands of state security personnel — soldiers, sailors, airmen, and police who fought the same war — returned home to no equivalent programme at all.