Sri Lanka massacres that triggered civil war still haunt Tamils 40 years later

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Known in Sri Lanka as «Black July», the brutal violence triggered a 26-year conflict that killed about 100,000 people and set development back by decades, ending only after the Tamil rebels fighting for autonomy were massacred in 2009. The 1983 anti-Tamil mob attacks escalated on July 29, when Mohan Panneer Selvam was just eight years old. A rampaging gang torched his home in the tea-growing central town of Hawa Eliya, burning 13 people inside, including his parents, relatives and their staff. «My grandmother started to escape, they shot her and threw her body into the house,» Panneer Selvam said, breaking down while recalling the events narrated to him by his older sister.

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He and his younger brother were away at boarding school when the riots broke out, returning as orphans to the ruins of their burned home two months later. His sister, then a child of 10, was the sole survivor only because their mother «threw her out of the kitchen window,» he said. She was wounded and found «two or three days later» by police and sent to a camp for Tamils made homeless by the violence. «My sister saw the burnt bodies — they put the bodies in a municipal tractor (trailer),» he told AFP. «They dumped them somewhere.»

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Pogrom Ethnic tensions between the mainly Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the largely Hindu and Christian Tamil minority had long simmered, and worsened after ex-colonial ruler Britain quit in 1948. The conflict erupted in July 1983, when a landmine ambush laid by Tamil rebels killed 13 Sinhalese soldiers,