Monitor Memo

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — President Anura Kumara Dissanayake telephoned Fisheries Minister Ramalingam Chandrasekar on Friday morning to ask what had caused the turmoil that brought a district coordinating committee meeting in Kilinochchi to an abrupt end a day earlier, the minister said, as the fallout from the confrontation continued to reverberate across Sri Lanka’s north. “The president called me this morning and spoke to me,” Mr. Chandrasekar said at an event in Jaffna. “Yesterday’s incident had

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — A governing-party lawmaker has publicly criticized a cabinet minister from his own coalition over the collapse of a district coordinating committee meeting in Kilinochchi, a rare public break in the National People’s Power that has drawn attention to tensions inside the governing alliance in the north. Rajeevan Jeyachandramoorthy, an N.P.P. member of Parliament from the Jaffna District, said it was wrong to remove the independent lawmaker Ramanathan Archchuna from Thursday’s

MARUTHAMUNAI, Sri Lanka — The motorcycle was still largely intact after the accident. Hanging from its handlebar was a packet of lunch that Thyagaraja Jayakrishna’s wife had prepared for him that morning. He had left their home in Pandiruppu as he did on other working days, heading to his job at the Kaluwanchikudy Divisional Secretariat. The rice packed for his lunch was still there when people gathered at the scene of the accident. Mr. Jayakrishna never reached his office. The government off

KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka — A district coordinating committee meeting in Kilinochchi ended abruptly on Thursday after a series of heated confrontations involving lawmaker Ramanathan Archchuna, prompting elected officials and senior government administrators to walk out before police intervened. The meeting, held at the Kilinochchi District Secretariat, began at 9 a.m. under the chairmanship of Ramalingam Chandrasekar, fisheries minister and chairman of the district coordinating committee. Mr. Arc

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — A senior government minister has welcomed a new political platform uniting six parties that represent Sri Lanka’s Tamil-speaking communities, casting it not as a minority initiative but as a judgment on the opposition leader, Sajith Premadasa. The parties — representing Sri Lankan Tamils, Muslims, and Indian Tamils — announced last week that they would work together on constitutional reform, the long-delayed provincial council elections, and land disputes affecting their co

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — In July 1979, as the government armed itself with sweeping new powers to confront a growing Tamil militancy in the north, two men disappeared into the custody of the security forces. Their bodies were later found near the Pannai causeway, the narrow stretch that links the islands west of Jaffna to the city. They were K. Viswaratnam and S. Selvaratnam, better known as Inpam and Selvam. Nearly half a century later, their deaths remain lodged in the political memory of the nor

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka's largest Tamil party has urged the government to resolve a series of long-running heritage disputes in the country's Northern and Eastern Provinces and to demonstrate that the state's archaeology authority operates without ethnic or religious bias. The Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) said its lawmakers had raised the concerns directly with the Director General of the Department of Archaeology, Prof. D. Thusitha Mendis, at a recent meeting, calling for fair sol

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — A video appearing to show Sri Lankan soldiers delivering vegetables cultivated on military-controlled private land in Jaffna to a wholesale collection center supplying a supermarket has gone viral on social media, rekindling longstanding resentment among displaced residents of Valikamam North, where the military continues to occupy thousands of acres of privately owned land despite the end of Sri Lanka's civil war 17 years ago. The footage, circulated widely over the past se