The story
On May 18, 2009 Sri Lankan forces overran the last pocket held by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) on a narrow strip of coast at Mullaitivu, in the north-east, and killed the group's leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran. The government declared victory on May 19. It ended a civil war that had begun in 1983.
A Norwegian-brokered ceasefire in 2002 had given the island a few years of calm, but it collapsed in 2006. The newly elected president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, and his brother, the defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, pushed an offensive under the army commander Sarath Fonseka. The east was retaken in 2007, and in January 2009 the government took the Tigers' administrative capital, Kilinochchi. Tens of thousands of civilians were trapped with the Tigers in a shrinking zone, which the UN panel said the army shelled, including in declared no-fire zones, while the Tigers used civilians as a human buffer.
A United Nations panel of experts in 2011 said credible allegations indicated as many as 40,000 civilians may have been killed in the last months, and found both sides had violated international law. The Sri Lankan government rejected the figure and the report. About 300,000 people were put into camps after the war. Accountability and reconciliation remain unresolved issues, and the Rajapaksas were later driven from office, in 2022, by an economic crisis.
Why it mattered
- It ended one of Asia's longest civil wars and the Tigers' de facto state in the north and east.
- The allegations of war crimes led to UN Human Rights Council resolutions and continuing calls for accountability.
- Sri Lanka's politics were dominated by the victorious Rajapaksa family until their ouster in 2022.
- The Tamil political question, including autonomy and missing persons, was left unresolved, shaping later politics.
Sources
Drafted by AI (Claude) from the sources above and checked against them by AI; no historian has reviewed this page. Spot a mistake? Suggest a correction. How pages are made
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