Jaffna Library Burned

On the night of 31st May 1981, the Jaffna public library, which housed 97,000 rare books and manuscripts and was the biggest library in South Asia, was burned to the ground. That day all Tamils lost a piece of themselves. This act of arson, which we now call cultural genocide, was not carried out by a bunch of nameless hooligans. Yet by a posse of 200 Sri Lankan police officers, taken to Jaffna by 2 senior Sri Lankan Cabinet Ministers (Cyril Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake, both self-professed Sinhala supremacists) of the (then) UNP government. There has never been accountability or justice for the destruction.

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