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KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka — A district coordinating committee meeting in Kilinochchi ended abruptly on Thursday after a series of heated confrontations involving lawmaker Ramanathan Archchuna, prompting elected officials and senior government administrators to walk out before police intervened. The meeting, held at the Kilinochchi District Secretariat, began at 9 a.m. under the chairmanship of Ramalingam Chandrasekar, fisheries minister and chairman of the district coordinating committee. Mr. Arc

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — A senior government minister has welcomed a new political platform uniting six parties that represent Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking communities, casting it not as a minority initiative but as a judgment on the opposition leader, Sajith Premadasa. The parties — representing Sri Lankan Tamils, Muslims, and Indian Tamils — announced last week that they would work together on constitutional reform, the long-delayed provincial council elections, and land disputes affecting their co

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — In July 1979, as the government armed itself with sweeping new powers to confront a growing Tamil militancy in the north, two men disappeared into the custody of the security forces. Their bodies were later found near the Pannai causeway, the narrow stretch that links the islands west of Jaffna to the city. They were K. Viswaratnam and S. Selvaratnam, better known as Inpam and Selvam. Nearly half a century later, their deaths remain lodged in the political memory of the nor

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka's largest Tamil party has urged the government to resolve a series of long-running heritage disputes in the country's Northern and Eastern Provinces and to demonstrate that the state's archaeology authority operates without ethnic or religious bias. The Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) said its lawmakers had raised the concerns directly with the Director General of the Department of Archaeology, Prof. D. Thusitha Mendis, at a recent meeting, calling for fair sol

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — A video appearing to show Sri Lankan soldiers delivering vegetables cultivated on military-controlled private land in Jaffna to a wholesale collection center supplying a supermarket has gone viral on social media, rekindling longstanding resentment among displaced residents of Valikamam North, where the military continues to occupy thousands of acres of privately owned land despite the end of Sri Lanka's civil war 17 years ago. The footage, circulated widely over the past se

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 conseque

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — A retired army major and attorney who spent more than three years inside Sri Lanka's largest prison has offered a rare firsthand account of conditions in the country's overcrowded prison system, days after the deadliest prison riot in more than a decade left 28 people dead and intensified scrutiny of long-standing failures in the country's jails. Ajith Prasanna, who was released from prison earlier this year after serving a contempt-of-court sentence, published the account