The North’s Silence on Its Own Injustice

By Faiszer Musthapha, Member of Parliament

I am a Muslim. I am also, without apology, a secular man. I believe in the equality of all citizens before the law, in the separation of faith from governance, and in the fundamental principle that justice — when demanded for one community — must be demanded equally for all. It is from this conviction, not from communal sentiment, that I write today.

Tamil politicians from the Northern Province have long been, rightly, among the most passionate voices against injustice in this island. I have stood beside them. I have applauded their courage in confronting state repression, military occupation, and the slow erasure of Tamil rights. Their cause has been just, and their persistence, admirable. But there is a silence at the heart of northern Tamil politics that I can no longer allow to go unremarked — a selective conscience that honours Tamil suffering while treating the suffering of others, committed in the very name of Tamil liberation, as an inconvenience best left unaddressed.

On the morning of October 30, 1990, cadres of the LTTE fanned out across Muslim neighbourhoods in Jaffna, ordering residents through loudspeakers to assemble immediately. Armed men moved from street to street. Families were herded to Osmania College and told they had two hours to leave the peninsula. They were permitted to take little more than the clothes they were wearing. Jewellery was stripped from women’s necks and ears. Cash and savings were seized and stuffed into sacks. In many cases, those expelled were handed a token 500 rupees before being forced onto lorries and out of the district.

By nightfall, an entire community had been erased from Jaffna. In the days that followed, the expulsion spread across the Northern Province. An estimated 72,000 Muslims were driven from their homes in what the international community and many Sri Lankan scholars have recognised as a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In Jaffna town alone, roughly 22,000 men, women, and children were uprooted from a homeland their families had inhabited for centuries — in some accounts for nearly a millennium — alongside Tamil neighbours. What disappeared that week was not only property and livelihood, but the fragile pluralism of the peninsula itself.

These were not strangers to Jaffna. They were Tamil-speaking, culturally Tamil, socially intertwined with their Hindu neighbours. They had led protests alongside Tamils against Sinhala-only language policies in 1956. Their youth had fought in early Tamil militant groups. They had voted overwhelmingly for Tamil parties. And yet, in two hours, they were turned into refugees.

The LTTE defended the expulsions by asserting that Muslims were collaborating with the Sri Lankan state as informants. Yet no publicly verifiable evidence was produced to support such a sweeping claim, nor were accusations examined through any transparent or individualized process.

Many survivors and independent observers have argued that the underlying motive was economic. For generations, Muslims had been central to Jaffna’s commercial infrastructure. They were preeminent in the gold trade, with jewellery houses such as AKS, MKS, Aparna Maligai, and New Jewel Palace setting the town’s benchmark prices and, at times, influencing rates across the peninsula. Their presence extended well beyond gold. A significant share of retail establishments in Jaffna town were Muslim-owned, and sectors including tailoring, bicycle sales, meat distribution, and textiles relied heavily on Muslim entrepreneurship.

In the months before the October 1990 expulsion, at least 36 prominent Muslim businessmen were abducted, according to community accounts. Several jewellers were allegedly tortured for information about concealed gold stocks; one businessman, MKS Abdul Kader, owner of the well-known MKS Jewels in Jaffna, died while being tortured. Ransom demands reportedly reached into the millions of rupees. Substantial quantities of gold were confiscated from shops and private homes, along with household goods, furniture, and commercial inventory. Much of it was later resold through LTTE-controlled outlets, including Ezhilagam stores.

By late 1990, the LTTE faced mounting financial pressures as the war intensified. In that context, the expulsion was not only an act widely described as ethnic cleansing; it also amounted, in material terms, to one of the largest thefts of private wealth in Sri Lanka’s modern history.

The Sinhalese of the North suffered a quieter, more gradual erasure. After the anti-Tamil violence of 1977 and the catastrophic pogroms of 1983, Sinhala families who had lived in the north — never enormous in number but genuinely embedded in the community — were chased away by fear, by threat, and by the logic of ethnic consolidation. Jaffna had a Sinhala Maha Vidyalaya. Its bakery trade was, for generations, largely in the hands of Sinhalese. These were not colonisers. They were neighbours. They too vanished, and almost no one in mainstream Tamil politics found it necessary to speak about them.

Thirty-six years have passed. The war ended sixteen years ago. Today, of the approximately twelve thousand expelled Jaffna Muslim families, only around eight hundred have returned to their homeland. Those who returned found their homes damaged and their families expanded, creating a need for more land than they had originally. They faced problems of landlessness and, at times, hostility from local Tamil bureaucrats unwilling to facilitate their resettlement. A large section of the land in Jaffna's historic Muslim quarter, Sonakar Theru, has changed hands — sold under duress during the years of displacement by families who believed, understandably but desperately, that they would never return. Poverty drove those sales. Brokers — many of them Muslims themselves — profited from the transactions. The buyers were, in most cases, Tamil families who cannot be morally blamed for purchasing legally. But the structural fact remains: land that belonged to a community expelled by force is now overwhelmingly in other hands, and the displaced community lacks the resources, legal protections, or political backing to remedy this.

When an attempt was made to resettle displaced Jaffna Muslims in Kilinochchi, an ITAK Member of Parliament opposed it, claiming it would create ethnic tensions. I want to ask that honourable member, with all due respect: what do you imagine the expulsion of seventy-two thousand people created?

Tamil politicians from the Northern Province understand, with precision and passion, the injustice of the state holding Tamil land under military occupation sixteen years after a war has ended. I share that outrage fully. No security argument can justify the permanent alienation of Tamil civilians from their homes and farms. The NPP government has begun making efforts toward land release, and this deserves acknowledgment. But the logic that condemns military occupation of Tamil land must, if it is an honest principle and not merely a communal position, also condemn the continued displacement of Muslim families from land they owned before 1990.

Justice cannot be tribal. A community cannot demand recognition of its own ethnic cleansing while maintaining strategic silence about the ethnic cleansing committed in its name. Tamil politicians carry a moral obligation to name what happened, to advocate for full and dignified resettlement, and to ensure that Tamil nationalist sentiment does not become a silent obstacle to Muslim return.

Tamil politicians have every right — and the duty — to fight for Tamil land, Tamil dignity, and Tamil political rights. But the north they envision must be a north where a seventy-year-old Muslim woman does not ask, in genuine fear, whether she will be sent away again. It must be a north where twelve thousand displaced families are not treated as a problem to be managed, but as a people whose return is both a legal right and a moral obligation.

The Tamils and the Jaffna Muslims are, as an old Jaffna saying goes, like puttu and coconut — inseparable, meant for the same table. Thirty-six years of silence have kept them apart. It is long past time for Tamil political leadership to speak.

Reconciliation is not built by remembering only our wounds; it begins when we find the courage to name the wounds we inflicted.