JM Exclusive

By: Aruliniyan Mahalingam This profile first appeared in the Jaffna Monitor at the time of Maheswaran’s death. It is republished, lightly revised, to mark the second anniversary of his passing. Thambapillai Maheswaran, one of the earliest figures in the armed Tamil struggle and the founder of the Tamil Eelam Army (TEA), died of a heart attack in Jaffna two years ago. He was among the first to bring a certain audacity to the movement — the raids, the jailbreaks, the vehicle bombs that prece

For three decades, the state’s answer to the families of Jaffna’s disappeared has been that it does not know. A report released this week argues that it has always known — and has spent thirty years making sure that nothing could be done about it. The report, published by the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP), a London-based group that has documented Sri Lankan war crimes since 2013, lands as excavators returned to the Chemmani salt flats on Tuesday to resume a dig that has already

By M.R. Narayan Swamy About a month before his assassination, Appapillai Amirthalingam was told by his elder son in London about a strong rumour in the UK that he had been killed. “This is what some people expect to happen,” the Tamil political stalwart responded. “If that happens, I wouldn’t mind.” What was rumoured did indeed happen on the evening of Thursday, July 13, 1989. Tamil Tiger assassins shot dead an unsuspecting Amirthalingam, 61, and his colleague, V. Yogeswaran, 55, at their Colo

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka has prohibited the import of any goods produced wholly or partly through forced labour, under an order that took effect on July 10 as the government moves to avert a proposed United States tariff of 12.5 percent that would leave its exporters at a disadvantage to regional competitors. The order was issued by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake in his capacity as Minister of Finance, under the Imports and Exports (Control) Act. It requires importers to submit documents to the

COLOMBO / JAFFNA — On 6 July, the University of Moratuwa, one of the country's foremost engineering schools, sent its students home and moved teaching online for two weeks, after a cluster of more than fifty dengue infections spread through a campus where examinations were still underway. Several of those students, the university acknowledged, had sat their papers while feverish. It was the third campus disrupted in a matter of weeks. The University of the Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo h

JAFFNA — The Diocese of Jaffna has a new bishop, and many within its clergy are questioning how he came to lead it. On June 29, Pope Leo XIV appointed Anton Ranjith Pillainayagam, until then the Auxiliary Bishop of Colombo and Apostolic Administrator of Batticaloa, as the next Bishop of Jaffna. Almost immediately, northern clergy noted another aspect of the appointment. Bishop Anton Ranjith is widely regarded as a close confidant of Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the Archbishop of Colombo. Word of t

NEGOMBO, Sri Lanka — At around one o’clock on Sunday afternoon, in a prison built for a fraction of the men it holds, a rumour spread through the wards: that an inmate had informed on a drug-trafficking operation running inside the walls. Over the next twenty-four hours, as many as 25 people were killed and more than 100 injured. Some of the dead were beaten so badly that they could not immediately be identified. Once again, failures that the country has long documented and long ignored were ex