This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Sri Lankan Civil War was a twenty-six year conflict between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a secular nationalist insurgency seeking an independent Tamil state in the island's north and east. It began with anti-Tamil riots and Tiger attacks in July 1983, a week of violence remembered as Black July and recorded separately on this atlas, and passed through several phases of conventional and guerrilla fighting, ceasefires and failed peace processes over more than two decades. The government's final offensive crushed the Tigers in May 2009, killing their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and ending the insurgency outright rather than through negotiated settlement.
Sinhala Buddhist monks and lay nationalist politicians were prominent in opposing power-sharing with the Tamil minority and, in the war's later years, in advocating an outright military solution, framing the conflict as a defense of Sri Lanka as a Buddhist nation against a Tamil population that is predominantly Hindu with significant Christian and Muslim minorities. Bartholomeusz's academic study traces this to the medieval chronicle the Mahavamsa's account of Sri Lanka as a dharmadwipa, an island entrusted with preserving the Buddha's teaching. The war's underlying cause was ethnic and linguistic rather than doctrinal, rooted in post-independence language and land policy, and the Tamil side fought under an explicitly secular nationalist movement; Bartholomeusz reads the religious framing as a genuine feature of how the war was justified on the Sinhala Buddhist side specifically, not as evidence that religion caused the war.