SUMMARY
The Tamil (alternatively Sri Lankan/Ceylon/Jaffna Tamil) is an ethnic group in Sri Lanka, comprising about 11 to 12 percent of the country’s total population. There are also another significantly smaller (about 4 percent of the total population) Tamil group, generally referred to as the Indian Tamils, which is considered as its own distinct ethnic group.
The Tamil are traditionally highly dependent on agriculture for economic sustenance. They are predominately Hindu, with a very small part of the group being Catholic Christians, and speak the Tamil language. This separates them from the Sri Lankan ethnic majority group, the Sinhalese, which are mostly Sinhala-speaking Buddhists. The Tamils occupy the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka, and the northern town Jaffna is considered the Tamil “capital”. While the Sri Lankan Tamils share kinship ties to the Tamils in India’s Tamil Nadu province, they consider themselves wholly distinct from their kin given their own particular historical experience. This differentiation also extends to the Indian Tamil group living in Sri Lanka; unlike the Sri Lankan Tamils, this group resides in the central highlands of the country and the descendants of Tamil laborers that came from India during the 1800s. The Sri Lankan Muslims also speak Tamil, and attempts have been made to create a common identity for all “Tamil speaking peoples of Ceylon”; this has however been unsuccessful, given the religious divide between the Muslims and the Tamils. Historically, there has been considerable intermingling of particularly the Tamil and Muslim groups; for example, about one third of the Sri Lankan Muslim population lived in areas considered by the Tamils as their “homeland”. Ethnic tensions have been particularly high in the Eastern Province.
Permanent Tamil settlements were established in Sri Lanka by the thirteenth century, but may have appeared as early as the eleventh century; it is generally believed that Tamil fishing folk and merchants regularly visited and perhaps settled in northern Sri Lanka also well before this. In the 1600s, the Portuguese subdued a Tamil Hindu kingdom on the Jaffna peninsula; the Tamil was then placed under subsequent Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial rule. The Tamil ethnic group experienced exclusion and discrimination after the rise of Sinhala nationalism in the 1960s. During British colonial rule, the Tamil had been favored over the Sinhalese, which in part explained the Sinhala nationalist backlash that caused the discrimination against the Tamils. In July 1983, the Tamils were targeted by violent pogroms conducted by the Sinhalese; it is believed that as many as 1000 Tamils were killed in these attacks, which triggered the Tamil separatist conflict.
Because of the separatist conflict, the Tamil ethnic group had ties to several rebel groups, such as EPRLF, LTTE, PLOTE and TELO; serving as the primary recruitment base for these groups.
