The Tamil genocide refers to the framing of various systematic acts of physical violence and cultural destruction committed against the Tamil population in Sri Lanka during the Sinhala–Tamil ethnic conflict beginning in 1956, particularly during the Sri Lankan civil war as acts of genocide. Various commenters, including the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal, have accused the Sri Lankan government of responsibility for and complicity in a genocide of Tamils, and point to state-sponsored settler colonialism, state-backed pogroms, and mass killings, enforced disappearances and sexual violence by the security forces as examples of genocidal acts. The Sri Lankan government has rejected the charges of genocide.
History
Pogroms
There has been a series of virulent anti-Tamil pogroms in Sri Lanka, the most infamous of which is the 1983 Black July pogrom in which over 3,000 Tamils were killed. The International Commission of Jurists described the violence of the 1983 Black July pogrom as having "amounted to acts of genocide" in a report published in December 1983. A number of other scholars have also described the pogrom as genocidal. Although initially orchestrated by members of the ruling UNP, the pogrom soon escalated into mass violence with significant public participation. Till date no one has been held accountable for any of the crimes committed during the pogrom.
Massacres and killings
Over 100 massacres of Tamil civilians were committed by the Sri Lankan security forces throughout the civil war, resulting in the deaths and injuries of tens of thousands. It was estimated that by 1986, the security forces "had been killing an average of 233 Tamil civilians every month or about 7 a day". During a 1990 reprisal against the Tamil population of the eastern province, 3,000 Tamil civilians were massacred and hundreds of Tamil males were rounded up and burned alive over a span of only a few weeks in just two districts. In December 1984, over 1200 Tamil civilians were massacred by the military in just one month. In 1994 the genocide scholar Israel Charny used the concept of "genocidal massacre" to describe the Sri Lankan government's round up and execution of some 5,000 Tamil civilians.
Enforced disappearances
Within months of the Sri Lanka military returning to the eastern province in June 1990 following the resumption of war, thousands of Tamils disappeared in the custody of the security forces. Between 1995 and 1996, over 600 Tamils disappeared in Jaffna, hundreds of whom were said to have been buried by the Sri Lankan Army in mass graves in Chemmani. Sri Lanka became the country with the highest number of disappearances reported to the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances between 1996 and 1997. In 2008, Human Rights Watch accused the Sri Lankan government of being responsible for "widespread abductions and disappearances" of hundreds of Tamils since the war resumed in 2006, with most feared dead. Since 2006, Sri Lanka once again became the country with the highest number of disappearances reported to the UN Working Group. A report by the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the International Truth and Justice Project found that at the end of the war between 17 and 19 May 2009, an estimated 503 Tamils, including at least 29 children, were subjected to enforced disappearance after surrendering to the Sri Lankan Army around Vadduvakal Bridge in Mullaitivu. The report stated that they represented "the largest number of disappearances in one place and time in the country's history."
After visiting Sri Lanka in 2013, Navi Pillay, then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, highlighted the plight of Tamil families with missing persons by stating she had "never experienced so many people weeping and crying," and "never seen this level of uncontrollable grief". In 2020, then Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa stated that more than 20,000 people who disappeared during the war were dead.
The Permanent Peoples' Tribunal included the abductions and enforced disappearances of displaced Tamils as an example of the state's calculated policy to "physically eliminate Eelam Tamils on the basis of their group identity." Bruce Fein, an American lawyer who specializes in international law, described the frequent disappearances of Tamils as among the "exemplary genocidal events". Lutz Oette, an international law specialist, examined the reported cases of enforced disappearances of thousands of Tamils between 1984 and 1997 and stated that they fell within the definition of genocidal acts.
Mullivaikkal massacre
Mullivaikkal massacre was the mass killing of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians during the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war ending in May 2009 in a tiny strip of land called Mullivaikkal on the northeast coast of the island, which is part of a larger region known as the Vanni. The Sri Lankan government designated several No Fire Zones (NFZs) in Mullivaikkal where it had encouraged civilians to concentrate. It then proceeded to shell using heavy weapons three consecutive NFZs killing large numbers of civilians despite having foreknowledge of the impact through information provided by its UAVs, as well as by the UN and the ICRC. According to the UN, an estimated 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed, with the majority of casualties being the result of indiscriminate and widespread shelling by the government forces. UN staff had been quoted as saying that by May 2009, up to 1,000 Tamil civilians were being killed each day by the military. In a later internal review, the UN stated that there was credible information that over 70,000 people are unaccounted for. The International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) estimated that up to 169,796 Tamil civilians could have been killed in the final phase of the war. In February 2009, the Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, brother of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, justified killing Tamil civilians by stating that hospitals operating outside the designated NFZs were legitimate targets; civilians were all "LTTE sympathizers"; and that distinction could not be made between combatants and civilians.
In 2014, an international team of investigators for the International Crimes Evidence Project (ICEP) and in 2015 the Report of the OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka (OISL) both found that large numbers of civilians, mostly women and children, queuing at food distribution centers were deliberately killed by government shelling despite there being no LTTE activity and the government having knowledge of the time and location of the distributions. ICEP found reasonable grounds to believe the shelling of NFZs amounted to crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts. The government was also accused of denying humanitarian assistance by deliberately understating the number of civilians in the conflict zone which resulted in the shortage of food and civilians being starved to death. During the final days of the war, the Sri Lankan Army also engaged in indiscriminate executions of Tamils, civilians as well as fighters who surrendered waving a white flag. Indiscriminate massacres of surrendering civilians, including children, were also carried out at the end of the war on 18 May 2009.
A military whistleblower accused government forces of a subsequent cover-up with bodies being buried in mass graves and chemicals being used to dissolve skeletons. Commenting on the systematic destruction of mass burial sites by the government, William Schabas, a professor of international law, stated that "when people destroy evidence it's because they know they've done something wrong".
A panel of genocide scholars of the Permanent Peoples' Tribunal described the mass killing in the final stages of the war as the "climax" of the genocidal process. Spanish lawyer Carlos Castresana Fernandez, who coordinated a war crimes lawsuit by human rights groups against former Sri Lankan general Jagath Jayasuriya for overseeing abuses in the last phase of the war, described the crimes as "one genocide that has been forgotten". Francis Boyle, an international lawyer who helped file the Bosnian genocide case, cited the World Court's 2007 Bosnian Judgment to argue that the "extermination" of Tamil civilians in the Vanni in 2009 numbering many times that of the Srebrenica massacre "also constituted genocide". Drawing on the parallels between the Srebrenica and the Vanni cases, human rights lawyer Anji Manivannan argued that the Sri Lankan government leaders and military commanders possessed specific intent of genocide in targeting a substantial part of the Tamil population of the Vanni in 2009 for destruction, namely, its numeric size, significance and the presence of the group's leadership; and committed three acts of genocide, namely, killing by intentional shelling of the UN hub, hospitals and food distribution lines; "causing serious bodily or mental harm" by maiming around 30,000 civilians and using sexual violence against hundreds of women and girls; and "deliberately inflicting conditions of life to bring about the group's physical destruction" by denying humanitarian aid.
Professor Jude Lal Fernando situated the genocidal intent and actions of the Sri Lankan state during the Mullivaikkal massacre within the historical context of a majoritarian nation-building process, and argued that the Sri Lankan state is motivated by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism which underpinned its intent to destroy the Tamil ethnic group in part. Fernando cited statements from Sri Lankan military and political leaders who claimed the island as a Sinhalese country and denied the civilian status of Tamil civilians trapped in the war zone by describing them as "just the relatives of the Terrorists" as reflecting the genocidal intent of the state.
Tamil human rights group PEARL published a report in September 2024 arguing that there was a sufficient legal basis to describe the massacre as a genocide. It stated that the Sri Lankan government was guilty of the first three acts of genocide as listed in the Genocide Convention; and that they were committed with genocidal intent to destroy in part the Tamil people. It argued that the targeted part, Tamils of the Vanni, constituted a "substantial part" of the whole Tamil population in Sri Lanka; and based on the UN and ITJP figures, it estimated that 1.3 and 5.5 percent, respectively, of the whole Tamil population (incl. Indian Tamils) in Sri Lanka and 13 and 57 percent, respectively, of the whole Tamil population of the Vanni itself were killed in the massacre. Following the precedent set by ICTR, ICTY and UN Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, it argued that genocidal intent can be inferred from circumstantial evidence, such as disproportionate and systematic use of force against Tamils in the Vanni and statements of Defence Secretary conflating civilians with combatants.
Research scholar Karthick Ram Manoharan argued that the Sri Lankan state adopted genocide as a counterinsurgency strategy against the Tamil population and its genocidal intentions were rooted in Sinhalese nationalism that claims the entire island as an exclusive Sinhalese property and seeks to assimilate Tamils through "Sinhalization". Former UN staffer Benjamin Dix, who had worked in the Vanni between 2004 and 2008, stated it was a "very fair" assessment that the Sri Lankan Army committed genocide, describing the final offensive as "destruction of the Tamil community". Several other authors and journalists have also described the massacre as a genocide.
Eyewitness accounts
On 18 May 2010, Channel 4 News broadcast interviews with two Sri Lankan soldiers who claimed that they had been given orders from "the top" to summarily execute all ethnic Tamils, civilians as well as fighters. A senior commander claimed "the order would have been to kill everybody and finish them off...It is clear that such orders were...from the top". Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa was said to have given direct orders to army commanders at the battle front. The commander also claimed that Velupillai Prabhakaran's 12-year-old son Balachandran was interrogated by the military before being shot dead. A front line soldier said, "our commander ordered us to kill everyone. We killed everyone". The soldier claimed that the Tamils were tortured before being executed. Numerous photos taken by Sri Lankan soldiers showing dead bodies and Tamil prisoners were also shown in the broadcast.
One of the soldiers who served in the 58 Division of the Sri Lankan Army tearfully recounted the heinous crimes committed by fellow soldiers in 2009: