Jaffna Quotes

A working-class girl who narrowly escaped assault filed a complaint,” Anjali wrote. “For her bravery and honesty, much of Jaffna thanked her with rumour.

The girls were screaming in Tamil, except for one, who was repeating the word "epa" like a loud and shrill chant. That was not how the Sinhala word was usually used, but it was an expression Mugil had ofen heard Sinhalese policeman and the army lob at civilians. Epa! when they didn't want you to sell apples by the road in Jaffna. Epa! when you tried to drive on at the checkpoint at Vavuniya. Epa! Don't! The girl's voice seemed to ring through all of Kilinochchi.

Even in Jaffna, we knew how the government had brutally killed so many members of that southern insurrection. The bodies of young Sinhalese men had floated down rivers. The state controlled what it wanted to control.

all of Jaffna will see you. The government will see you. The Indians will see you. And the movement will have succeeded in putting you where they want you.

As repositories of culture, museums and libraries are vulnerable, with the Sinhalese security forces burning the Jaffna public library, destroying “irreplaceable literary and historical documents” related to Tamil culture, and Serbian gunners shelling and destroying the National Library in Sarajevo. The Serbs cleanse the Bosnian town of Zvornik of its 40,000 Muslims and plant a cross on the site of the Ottoman tower they have just blown up which had replaced the Orthodox church razed by the Turks in 1463.15 In wars between cultures, culture loses.