Jaffna & the North History

History

When Arab traveller Ibn Batuta visited Ceylon in 1344 he reported that the powerful Hindu-Tamil kingdom of Jaffna extended south as far as Puttalam. Over several centuries territories expanded and retreated, but even under colonial regimes Jaffna, like Kandy, remained highly autonomous. This lasted until the 19th century, when British bureaucrats decided it would be more convenient to administer the whole of Ceylon as a single unit. By independence in 1948 the idea of breaking the island into different states would have seemed preposterous to Sinhalese and Tamil citizens alike. Yet barely 50 years later, insensitive politics and two decades of ferocious civil war has almost had that effect. For the sake of peace negotiations, the LTTE now claims that it will accept autonomy within a federal Sri Lanka rather than outright independence. But the Vanni region it administers (Tamil Eelam) acts almost as a separate nation, leaving the Jaffna peninsula, controlled by the Sri Lanka Army (SLA), physically cut off from the rest of government-held Sri Lanka.