Tamil Guardian editorial, London, September 29, 2025
Remembering Thileepan’s sacrifice 38 years on | Tamil Guardian
Illustration: Keera Ratnam
An unprecedented number of events took place across the North-East last week. Hunger strikes were staged. Flames were lit and garlands laid. The elderly and children gathered together. A kavadi even procession took place, with hooks piercing the flesh of a devotee in a symbolic act of devotion. All to remember the LTTE’s Lt. Col. Thileepan – a young man who undertook a hunger strike until death thirty-eight years ago, demanding justice for his people.
The scale of commemorations for the freedom fighter were the largest and most widespread since the 2009 Mullivaikkal genocide. It underscored an enduring truth: Tamil nationalism remains the dominant political force across the North-East. Despite years of state repression, land grabs, and the suffocating presence of the military, Tamils will continue to remember their heroes. Those who fought and died for liberation have not been forgotten. Whenever even the smallest space opens for memorialisation, people will seize it.
Thileepan’s sacrifice carries a weight that reverberates across generations The significance of it is well known – including by Sri Lanka’s current foreign minister Vijitha Herath, who just a few years ago raised Thileepan’s fast in parliament. “Thileepan did a fast unto death, telling us that the PTA will eventually oppress not just those in the North, but those in the South as well,” he said. “His sacrifice told us that the Act will eventually be used against Tamils, Muslims, and the Sinhalese.”
The irony is not lost on anyone today.
While the National People’s Power (NPP) regime has permitted a limited opening for memorialisation it has, in almost every other respect, continued the policies of repression pursued by its predecessors. The Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) that Herath spoke of remains in force, despite repeated promises by the regime to abolish it. The armed forces still occupy vast swathes of the North-East, even stationing themselves on top of destroyed cemeteries, preventing Tamils from freely honouring their dead. And as Tamils lit flames, Sri Lankan representatives in Geneva smeared Tamil journalists as “terrorists,” even as the president told the United Nations that the people of the island had chosen “light over darkness.”
Such contradictions reveal the truth behind the rhetoric. More than a year into office, the NPP can no longer claim to be finding its footing. The opportunity to enact meaningful reform has long passed. Instead, the government has demonstrated that it is cut from the same cloth as the regimes that came before it, including the most extreme and chauvinistic.
With the façade cracked, the only pressure point remains concerted international action. The government’s adherence to the austerity measures of the IMF bailout package has shown that even an administration claiming to be ‘Marxist’ cannot escape the global order. This dependence provides the international community with leverage. It must be used to press Colombo on accountability for mass atrocities, to halt ongoing land grabs, and to end the military occupation of the Tamil homeland. Weak resolutions at Geneva, calling for more domestic processes, will not suffice. Global powers must act. It must sanction Sri Lankan officials implicated in genocide. It must push for referral to the International Criminal Court. It must acknowledge Tamil nationhood and the right to self-determination.
Thileepan’s demands remain painfully relevant nearly four decades later. Release political prisoners held under the PTA. Stop Sinhala colonisation. End the occupation of the North-East. Until that is done, there can be no justice, no reconciliation, and no lasting peace on this island.