Black July and the start of the Sri Lankan Civil War

On July 23, 1983 the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ambushed an army patrol near Jaffna and killed 13 soldiers. In the following days, from July 24, mobs in Colombo and other towns attacked Tamils, burning homes and shops and killing people while the security forces were slow to intervene. Estimates of the dead range from several hundred to a few thousand, and well over 100,000 Tamils were displaced. In prison, 53 Tamil detainees were killed in Colombo's Welikada jail. The riots are known as Black July.¹

Ethnic tensions had built up since independence in 1948. That year the Citizenship Act left most Tamils of Indian origin, who worked on the tea plantations, stateless. In 1956 the Sinhala Only Act made Sinhala the sole official language, and there were anti-Tamil riots in 1958 and 1977. Tamil leaders demanded a separate state in the 1976 Vaddukoddai resolution, and the burning of the Jaffna library in 1981 deepened the anger. The LTTE, formed by Velupillai Prabhakaran in 1976, was only one of several armed Tamil groups, but after Black July thousands of young Tamils joined, and many families fled abroad, forming a diaspora that funded the fight.²³⁴

India under Indira Gandhi gave sanctuary and training to Tamil groups, and then sent a peacekeeping force in 1987 under the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. The Eelam wars that followed lasted until 2009, with the Tigers using suicide bombers, taking control of much of the north and east, and the government finally defeating them.¹