Sri Lanka's historic Jaffna library 'vandalised'

1 November 2010 Last updated at 12:45 ET
By Charles Haviland
BBC News, Sri Lanka

Organised Sinhalese mobs attacked and burnt the library over two days in mid-1981

The historic Jaffna public library in Sri Organised Sinhalese mobs attacked and burnt the library over two days in mid-1981

The historic Jaffna public library in Sri Lanka has been closed to tourists a week after a large group of visitors vandalised it, say reports.

The library has emotional significance for the island's Tamil minority as it serves the city usually regarded as their cultural capital.
The burning of the library by mobs 30 years ago helped trigger the Tamil Tiger insurgency.
It was reportedly vandalised by a large group of Sinhalese visitors.

Sri Lanka: Jaffna Public Library destroyed by Sinhala Police

Monday, June 2, 2008

Sri Lanka: Jaffna Public Library destroyed by Sinhala Police On the night of June 1st 1981

http://yarlphoenix.blogspot.com/

For Tamils this is only an example, albeit the most glaring, in the grand scheme of genocide in Sri Lanka. Living in a country that constitutionally displays a penchant for Nazi style mono-ethnicity and ethnic purity (in a flag, an official language, and a state religion) for the last fifty years, and having lived through multiple state-sponsored pogroms to eradicate the identity of all others (the Non-Sinhala-Buddhists), there can be no doubt that this was an act of genocide.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Remembering the Jaffna

Public Library

“A city’s public library is the eye of the city by which the citizens are able to behold the realness of their heritage, and behold the still greater greatness of their future.”

- K. Nesiah (Education and Human Rights in Sri Lanka)

On the 2nd of June every year, Tamils all over the world wake-up with sorrow and grief - over an event that took place twenty-one years ago. It started with the citizens of Jaffna waking up, that many years ago on this fateful morning, to an absolute horror.
On the night of 1st June 1981, the splendid Jaffna public library, housing 97,000 rare books and manuscripts, was burned to the ground. The shock experienced by the men, women and children of Jaffna that morning is indescribable. That day all Tamils lost a piece of themselves. It was the most magnificent piece of architecture (leave aside the treasure it contained) ever created in Thamileelam.

This act of arson was carried out, not by a bunch of nameless hooligans, but by a posse of two hundred officers of the Sri Lankan police force, taken to Jaffna by two senior Sri Lankan Cabinet Ministers (Cyril Mathew and Gamini Dissanayake, both self-professed Sinhala supremacists), ostensibly to oversee an election.
These two Sinhala Cabinet Ministers, who watched the library burn from the verandah of the nearby Jaffna Rest House, subsequently claimed that it was an ‘unfortunate incident’, where a ‘few’ policemen ‘got drunk’ and went on a ‘looting spree’, all on their own. This ‘justification’ has been echoed, and re-echoed, by many Sinhala leaders and the Sinhala media.
Let us look back.

Sri Lanka: Jaffna Public Library destroyed by Sinhala Police

http://yarlphoenix.blogspot.com/

Posted by Thavam.