> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Tamil Society Cannot Confront Its Past Until It Acknowledges Its Own Victims - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/tamil-society-cannot-confront-its-past-until-it-acknowledges-its-own-victims/ - Published: 2026-09-07T03:55:48.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-07T05:07:31.000Z - Author: Jeevan Thiyagaraja - Tags: Guest Column, September 2026 **By: Jeevan Thiyagaraja** The recent public statement by PLOTE leader [Dharmalingam Siddharthan ](https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/telo-killed-my-father-siddharthan-confronts-the-bloody-past-behind-todays-tamil-alliances/)perfectly illustrates the central tragedy of the Tamil militant struggle in Sri Lanka: the transition from armed groups that eliminated their own people. Speaking at a memorial for his father, V. Dharmalingam, a former Member of Parliament, Siddharthan publicly accused the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO)—a group that now sits in the same political alliance as his own—of carrying out the assassination 41 years ago. "There is no confusion whatsoever," he said. "Those responsible for his death were members of the TELO. Everyone knows that." His family, he noted, had known the identity of the killers within half an hour of the abduction. To understand how we arrived at this moral precipice, we must tear away the veil of romanticism that often shrouds the early days of the militancy. This culture of lethal impunity did not begin with the double murder of Dharmalingam and M. Alalasundaram in 1985\. It began exactly a decade earlier, on July 27, 1975, with the assassination of Jaffna’s Mayor, Alfred Duraiappah, by a young Velupillai Prabhakaran. That single bullet was a historical rupture. It was the moment the Tamil militant movement decided that the gun trumped the ballot. More dangerously, it established a horrific precedent: a Tamil could be executed by other Tamils for "treason" without any due process, without a trial, and without public recourse. By the time the fratricide of 1980 to 1983 erupted in Jaffna, the rules of engagement had fundamentally degraded. As multiple militant groups—TELO, PLOTE, EPRLF, EROS, and the LTTE proliferated, they turned on each other. We must be honest about this: the early killings were rarely about deep, noble ideological divides between Marxism and Tamil nationalism. They were driven by personality clashes, ego, and brutal turf wars. They fought for hegemony over Jaffna’s streets, control over extortion rackets, and dominance over the limited funds flowing from the diaspora. To eliminate rivals, groups like the LTTE set up courts, trying fellow Tamils for "treason" and executing them to project an image of revolutionary justice. Under the universal conventions of International Humanitarian Law, specifically Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, these courts were not merely revolutionary theater. They were egregious war crimes. The conventions universally prohibit the passing of sentences and executions without a regularly constituted court, a law that bound the militant groups just as strictly as it bound the state. During the 1980s and 90s, Jaffna operated on a terrifying system of "open secrets." Everyone knew who was killing whom. Everyone knew which group ran which extortion racket or executed which rival. But out of profound fear, or a misplaced sense of protecting the "movement," these truths were buried. Avoiding the question of "who killed whom, when, and where" became a survival mechanism, but it also birthed a culture of absolute impunity. The cost of this silence was the total destruction of Tamil civil society. By killing moderate politicians like Dharmalingam and Alalasundaram, and earlier figures like Duraiappah, the militants systematically destroyed the Tamil political middle ground. They eradicated the voices that advocated for negotiation, leaving only the language of violence as the sole medium of political expression. But the victims were not just parliamentarians. The list of the dead is long, filled with the names of ordinary Tamil youths who were attracted by the rhetoric of liberation, only to be executed by a rival faction over a dispute about extortion money or a leader’s bruised ego. For the mothers and fathers of these nameless youths, the agony was twofold: not only did they lose their children, but they were forced into a suffocating silence, unable to publicly mourn or demand justice lest they invite the wrath of the very groups claiming to protect them. A movement that is willing to slaughter its own members over personality clashes will inevitably turn its weapons on the civilian population. The fratricide of the early 1980s was the direct training ground for the authoritarianism that later consumed the North. The tragedy of this era is perhaps best encapsulated by the imagery of the recent memorials. Dharmalingam and Alalasundaram were abducted on the exact same night, by the exact same group of men, and killed within hours of each other. Yet, 41 years later, they were commemorated at separate ceremonies. There is no unified collective memory. When a society is grappling with a legacy of internecine killings, disappearances, and unmarked graves, the international community universally demands a framework known as the "Right to Truth," enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances. Under universal conventions, an enforced disappearance is not a closed chapter of history; it is a continuous, ongoing crime committed every single day that a family is denied answers. This framework demands uncovering the fate of the disappeared, because families have an absolute, non-negotiable right to know what happened to their loved ones; locating unmarked graves through forensic investigation; naming the individuals and organizational structures responsible; and providing guarantees of non-recurrence and meaningful reparations. On what basis can we avoid the question of who killed whom, when, and where? There is no valid basis. This silence is not just a political failure; it is a profound spiritual betrayal. Jaffna is a deeply devout society, yet the actions of the militants in the 1980s violated the most fundamental tenets of every faith practiced on that soil. In Hinduism, to murder a man and leave him in an unmarked grave is to condemn his soul to earthly limbo, denying him the sacred Antyesti rites required for liberation. In Christianity, human life is inviolable, made in the image of God, and the body demands dignified burial; political convenience can never wash away the sin of murder without genuine repentance. Islam equally demands Haqq—the absolute truth—and warns of severe accountability for the shedding of innocent blood. Whether judged by the Hindu imperative of Satya (truth), the Christian demand for confession, the Islamic obligation of justice, or the universal statutes of International Criminal Law, which classify the systematic murder of a political group as a crime against humanity, the verdict is the same. By keeping these 'open secrets,' the militant leaders did not just break secular laws; they positioned themselves in defiance of both the divine and the international order. Until the names of the early victims are spoken aloud, and until the unmarked graves of Jaffna are acknowledged, Tamils will remain haunted by the ghosts of its own making.