Claudia Willmitzer – Jaffna

“The capital city of the Tamil, Jaffna, located at the northern Sri Lankan peninsula greatly suffered from the civil war. Following the nearly two decades of conflict, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan government signed an agreement for an indefinite ceasefire in 2009.
Sri Lanka granted independence on February 4, 1948, which followed with an ethnic dispute between the Singhalese majority and the Tamil minority as a result of discriminative laws against the latter by the former’s government. The tension broke out immediately after the Tamil protests against the discriminative laws escalated and the Singhalese began attacking Tamil communities. As a consequence, the Tamil United Liberation Front in 1976 demanded a separate Tamil State, which resulted to a civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the Sri Lankan government from 1983 to 2009. The conflicted ended with a death of over 65000 and displacement of about 250000 Sri Lankans.” – Claudia Willmitzer