Comment
Sri Lanka’s South Still Smoulders
Twice, the Sri Lankan state crushed the JVP movement and preoccupied itself with the Tamil war in the north and east. In the south, conditions which gave rise to the JVP and its brand of bloody politics fester.
The worst period of political violence and terror experienced in the Sinhala-dominated southern parts of Sri Lanka unfolded between 1987 and 1989, in the attempted take-over of state power by the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (jvp, the People´s Liberation Front) and the government´s counter-insurgency campaign. That period of terror has now become part of the collective history of violence in South Asia.