COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — A Tamil member of Sri Lanka’s Parliament accused the director of a government hospital in the country’s east on Wednesday of discriminating against Muslim employees.
The lawmaker, Ramanathan Archchuna, an independent representing Jaffna District, said nine Muslim women employed as health assistants had been prevented from working at Kalmunai North Base Hospital because of a dispute over their attire and were subsequently transferred to the nearby Ashraff Memorial Hospital.
Assurances from Muslim lawmakers and government officials that the matter had been settled were misleading, he said.
“The problem has still not been resolved to this day,” Mr. Archchuna told Parliament during debate on a bill to dissolve the Shrama Vasana Fund, a state labor welfare body.
In the Eastern Province, Tamils and Muslims live in close proximity, and long-running disputes over land, local administration and political representation have periodically hardened into communal friction.
Mr. Archchuna accused the hospital’s director, Dr. Sugunan, of being “a very serious racist” and of engaging in politics. He said the doctor had once been aligned with Karuna, the nom de guerre of Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, a former senior Tamil Tiger commander in the Eastern Province, and later with former President Ranil Wickremesinghe. Medical professionals familiar with both men said their differences predate Mr. Archchuna’s entry into electoral politics and described a longstanding personal dispute between the two doctors, adding another layer to the lawmaker’s public accusations.
Mr. Archchuna cast his intervention as an obligation to speak up when he believed Muslims were being mistreated by members of his own community.
“If one ethnic group suppresses another, racism cannot be eradicated from this country unless someone from the group doing the suppressing speaks against it,” he said. “I am happy that during my final week in Parliament, I am speaking on behalf of a brother community.”
He also attacked President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s government as “spineless” over Muslim representation, noting the absence of a Muslim member in the cabinet and, he said, on a committee overseeing electoral delimitation.
Mr. Archchuna invoked the late M.H.M. Ashraff, one of the most influential Muslim politicians of Sri Lanka’s post-independence era, saying Mr. Ashraff had defended the rights of Tamil women during the presidency of Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga.
“If stones are thrown at your community by people from my community, our hearts will bear those stones,” he said, before urging Muslim lawmakers to confront anti-Tamil rhetoric within their own community.
A Contested Seat
Mr. Archchuna’s references to his “final week” come as his eligibility to remain in Parliament is being challenged before the Court of Appeal.
The petition was filed by Oshala Herath, chairman of the Abhinawa Niwahal Peramuna, a small political party, who contends that Mr. Archchuna was still a government medical officer when he filed nomination papers for the November 2024 general election and was therefore disqualified from contesting. Mr. Archchuna, a physician, has disputed the claim. The Attorney General’s Department has told the court that he remained interdicted from government medical service. Arguments are scheduled for Aug. 31.
He has raised the prospect of his departure before. In July, he told Parliament that he was spending his “last days” in the legislature and expected to remain for only about two more weeks, citing the same case. He has not resigned, and the court has not ordered his removal.
Wartime History
Mr. Archchuna’s remarks on Wednesday ranged well beyond the hospital dispute.
He pledged that if he were to take control of the Northern Provincial Council, his first development priority would be Bommaiveli and Kakkaitheevu, two areas of Jaffna associated with the resettlement of Muslims who were expelled from the north by the Tamil Tigers in 1990. He described sanitary conditions there as severely deteriorated and criticized what he portrayed as episodic charity financed by the Tamil diaspora in place of sustained public investment.
“I say this as a Tamil: when I take charge of the Northern Provincial Council, the first areas I will develop will be Bommaiveli and Kakkaitheevu,” he said. He added that he intended to introduce a special parliamentary motion concerning Muslims, describing the community as being as close to him as “flesh and blood.”
He then entered the contested history of Tamil-Muslim violence during the civil war. Referring to killings of Muslims in the east, Mr. Archchuna asserted that members of Tamil militant organizations, including the Eelam Revolutionary Organization of Students, had carried out some attacks for which blame ultimately fell on Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
The LTTE itself, however, has been widely held responsible for some of the war’s most notorious massacres of Muslim civilians, including the 1990 attacks in Kattankudy and Eravur. Muslim armed groups and individuals aligned with state security forces were also implicated in killings and abuses against Tamil civilians during the conflict, part of a cycle of violence that left lasting divisions between the two minority communities.
Mr. Archchuna said that killings committed by “a few Muslims” had contributed to the estrangement between Tamils and Muslims that persists today.
Mr. Archchuna closed with further criticism of Muslim lawmakers aligned with the government, saying they aired their concerns privately to opposition politicians but would not do so publicly.
“It is only when they come and talk to us in the parliamentary canteen that we understand,” he said. “It is based on what they tell me that I am speaking here.”
