Jaffna Monitor - Unafraid and Unbowed

Falsely implicated: India’s top court frees Sri Lankan Tamil refugee in LTTE ‘revival’ case

NEW DELHI — India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday acquitted a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee who spent years in custody after being wrongly identified as a fugitive LTTE suspect, in a ruling that sharply criticised Tamil Nadu’s Q Branch police for what the court described as a deeply flawed investigation built on unreliable witness testimony and defective identification procedures. The judgment, which laid bare the vulnerability of stateless Tamil refugees caught in India’s counterterrorism apparatus, ove

Our Reporter

May 24, 2026 — 4 min read

Ailing Sivajilingam's Appeal Touches a Nerve

May 2026

Our Reporter

May 24, 2026 — 4 min read

Tamil Leaders Lash Out After Tilvin Silva Says Provincial Polls Will Not Be Held This Year

Guest Column May 2026

M.R. Narayan Swamy

May 24, 2026 — 3 min read

May 18: The Day the Clowns Come Out

Guest Column May 2026

Che Ran

May 20, 2026 — 4 min read

Tamil Journalist Alleges Police Pressure to Reveal Confidential Source

KILINOCHCHI — A Tamil journalist based in Kilinochchi has alleged that police attempted to pressure him into revealing a confidential journalistic source after he published CCTV footage related to an incident involving a senior medical specialist at the Jaffna Teaching Hospital. In a detailed statement posted on Facebook, journalist Murukaiya Thamilselvan said he was summoned to the Jaffna Police Station following a complaint lodged by Dr. Selvaganesh Sellakkuddy, a plastic surgeon attached to

May 2026 Monitor Memo

Our Reporter

May 24, 2026 — 2 min read

Sri Lanka Needs a New Republic, Not Cosmetic Reform

(Dr) Jayampathy Wickramaratne, President’s Counsel Sri Lanka’s constitutional journey remains marked by unresolved dilemmas: entrenched executive dominance, fragile fundamental rights, unfulfilled reform promises, and the persistent national question. These challenges have deepened inequality, strained ethnic relations, and weakened democratic accountability. The writer argues that constitutional supremacy must be firmly secured above transient political majorities, with judicial review extend

Guest Column May 2026

Dr. Jayampathy Wickramaratne

May 24, 2026 — 7 min read

May 21, 1991: The Day the LTTE Began to Lose the War

By M.R. Narayan Swamy AFP photographer R. Raveendran and I were in a taxi in the Tamil Tigers-held zone of Sri Lanka’s Batticaloa district in the mid-1990s when a young man with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder emerged from behind a tree and waved us down. When we said we were headed to Vakarai to try to meet Vinayagamurthy Muralitharan alias Karuna, the LTTE’s powerful eastern regional commander, he let us proceed. But he told a teenager to jump into the front of our cab. After realising we

Guest Column May 2026

M.R. Narayan Swamy

May 21, 2026 — 4 min read

Sumanthiran Turns Batticaloa Library Ceremony Into Call for Power-Sharing

BATTICALOA — President Anura Kumara Dissanayake on Wednesday inaugurated the newly constructed three-storey public library building of the Batticaloa Municipal Council, an event that became the occasion for a pointed public reminder from former MP and ITAK General Secretary M.A. Sumanthiran that meaningful power-sharing remains an unfinished obligation of the state. The library — a modern three-storey structure funded jointly by the central government and the Eastern Provincial Council — was or

JM Exclusive May 2026

Our Reporter

May 20, 2026 — 3 min read

Unafraid and Unbowed

Archbishop, Archbishop, why hast thou forsaken us in our hour of sorrow and slaughter?

"Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins." - Isaiah 58:1 His Eminence Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo and chief shepherd of the Catholic flock in all of Sri Lanka, has recently marked fifty years in the sacred priesthood. As the highest-ranking prelate whose dominion spans the entire island, he now stands as a mighty voice crying for justice, calling upon the nations of the earth for interv

Editorial July 2025

Kaniyan Pungundran

Jul 14, 2025 — 12 min read

Jaffna Library Burning: The Day They Burned the buddha and his dhamma

Why South Asia Reveres Books-and Fears Their Destruction Irrespective of religion, across the Indian subcontinent, books have long held an exalted status. In the indigenous spiritual traditions that emerged from this land-Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism-knowledge is not merely valued; it is venerated in the highest order. In homes, temples, and schools across the region, people treat books with profound reverence-never touching them with their feet, and if done accidentally, offering a

Cover Story June 2025

Kaniyan Pungundran

Jun 16, 2025 — 14 min read

Chemmani: Where Justice Was Buried

The dead do not speak - but the earth does A few years ago, I visited Cambodia. My original aim was to see the Angkor Wat temple complex. But, as always, my journalistic instincts led me deeper into rural Cambodia, where I found myself in quiet conversations with a few former soldiers of the Pol Pot regime, now living ordinary lives as toddy tappers, farmers, and small shop owners. One of them - a former henchman of the Khmer Rouge - opened up after a few glasses of toddy. In a hauntingly calm

Editorial June 2025

Kaniyan Pungundran

Jun 16, 2025 — 7 min read

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D.C. Aravintharaj Named Jaffna Municipal Commissioner

JAFFNA — D.C. Aravintharaj, a senior Sri Lanka Administrative Service officer, was appointed Commissioner of the Jaffna Municipal Council on Tuesday during an official appointment event held at the Governor’s Secretariat here. Northern Province Governor N. Vethanayahan handed the official letter of appointment to Mr. Aravintharaj during the event, which was also attended by the Governor's Secretary, S. Sathiyaseelan, and other senior officials. Mr. Aravintharaj entered the Sri Lanka Administra

May 2026 Monitor Memo

Our Reporter

May 20, 2026 — 2 min read

Seventeen Years Without Prabhakaran

By: A. Jathindra Thiruvengadam Velupillai Prabhakaran was a man who held Eelam Tamil politics under his control for nearly three decades. There has been no other figure in history who exercised such complete dominance over Eelam Tamil politics through the force of his own personality and authority. If the Eelam Tamil people could ever have achieved their highest political aspirations, it should have been possible during the period in which he lived and led — but that did not happen. And if res

May 2026 OP-ED

Jathindra

May 19, 2026 — 6 min read

The Boy We Never Answered For

By Che Ran Sri Lanka has a strange relationship with accountability. We adore the theatre of justice. The press conference. The dramatic raid. The minister standing behind a microphone, sleeves metaphorically rolled up, promising to finally hunt down the untouchables. Every election, another government arrives carrying a moral broom the size of Adam’s Peak, vowing to sweep corruption out of the republic. And every few years, we discover the same depressing truth. The truly powerful rarely g

Guest Column May 2026

Che Ran

May 19, 2026 — 3 min read

Letter to the Editor: Setting the Record Straight on D.B.S. Jeyaraj’s Exile

The Editor, Jaffna Monitor I read M.R. Narayan Swamy’s tribute to D.B.S. Jeyaraj with the respect it deserves. It was a moving remembrance of a journalist whose life and work were genuinely heroic. Precisely for that reason, it would be a disservice to his memory to allow two significant historical inaccuracies to pass without correction. On the reasons for his exile Narayan Swamy writes that LTTE extremists “forced” Jeyaraj into exile. That is not entirely accurate, and we know this because

Letter to the Editor May 2026