Guest Column

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 Che Ran Sri Lanka has discovered prison justice. Wonderful. Only took us forty-three years. Twenty-eight people are dead after the July 2026 violence at Negombo Prison: 20 prisoners and eight prison officials. More than 100 were injured. The government appointed an investigative committee. Police investigations began. The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka launched its own inquiry. Ministers went to Parliament. Families demanded answers. Newspapers carried photographs of grieving relati

By M.R. Narayan Swamy There is an important reason President Anura Dissanayake must be equally looking forward to a meeting on August 3 with leaders of six Tamil and Muslim parties in Sri Lanka. In the first major initiative since coming together on July 13 to flag issues of common concern, the six parties sought a meeting with Dissanayake to address a string of unresolved issues plaguing the Tamil-speaking communities. Immediately after Batticaloa MP Shanakiyan Rasamanickam sent a letter req

By M.R. Narayan Swamy It was close to midnight on July 28, 1987, when I got a tip I had been waiting for: Velupillai Prabhakaran and Anton Balasingham were in a meeting with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, ahead of his trip to Colombo to sign the India-Sri Lanka Agreement. My source was the indefatigable Shankar Rajee of EROS. This was breaking news. The Tamil Tigers, we knew, were unhappy with the proposed accord and were avoiding Gandhi. The TULF and other militants had given their approval, ev

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 M.R. Narayan Swamy Despite ideological U-turns since taking power in 2024, Sri Lanka’s dominant ruling Marxist party remains a united political force, although it is most likely to lose if fresh elections were to take place now, experts and insiders say. Most people spoken to insist that President Anura Dissanayake remains personally far more popular than his own Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) or the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition, which he leads. Dharman Wickramaratne, an acknow