Guest Column

By M.R. Narayan Swamy “He is a cardinal, isn’t he? Why does he always talk like a politician?” No one could have put it better when describing Cardinal Albert Malcolm Ranjith Patabendige Don, known simply as Malcolm Ranjith. And those words came from a respected member of Colombo’s Catholic community. Probably because the government appears to be on his side, the Cardinal may not realise that there is widespread disgust over his unending aggression about a supposed international conspiracy be

By M.R. Narayan Swamy Realising that the war for Tamil Eelam would need a constant supply of weapons, Velupillai Prabhakaran set up in 1985 Kadal Pura, a modest sea wing in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Over the years, it grew into the formidable Sea Tigers, which threatened to overwhelm Sri Lanka’s navy. Once the fourth and final Eelam War resumed in August 2006, it became payback time. The Sri Lankan Navy rapidly sank in 2007 the LTTE’s awesome warehouse ships, left and right.

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.

By: Shankari Chandran Editor's Note: As Australian High Commissioner Matthew Duckworth presents the complete collection of Shankari Chandran's novels to the Jaffna Public Library today, Jaffna Monitor republishes this essay by the Miles Franklin Award-winning Sri Lankan Tamil author, who reflects on the burning of the library, its enduring place in Tamil memory, and the lasting power of stories against erasure. My footsteps slow when I pass a library. Any library. I am pulled inwards, to i

By: Professor G. L. Peiris D. Phil. (Oxford), Ph. D. (Sri Lanka); Former Minister of Justice, Constitutional Affairs and National Integration; Quondam Visiting Fellow of the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and London; Former Vice-Chancellor and Emeritus Professor of Law of the University of Colombo. The government, it would seem, plans to amend Article 107(5) of the Constitution to extend the age of retirement of judges of the Supreme Court from 65 to 67 years, and judges of the Court of App

By M.R. Narayan Swamy Every night before sleeping, he devoured pages from the Bhagavad Gita authored by Swami Chinmayananda. It was the last thing Ketheshwaran Loganathan read before he was shot dead by a Tamil Tiger on the morning of August 12, 2006. August 2026 would mark the 20th anniversary of one of the most despicable killings during Sri Lanka’s long-drawn war. I have met Kethesh, as he was widely known, many times – in Colombo, Chennai, and New Delhi. Most of our meetings took place wh