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The Lankan Civil War : Sri Lanka

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Dead insurgents ' bodies dumped in the trash, 1989. Robert Nickelsberg, Hulton Archive/Getty Images By Kallie Szczepanski
Asian History Expert

For more than 25 years in the late 20th century and into the 21st, the island nation of Sri Lanka tore itself apart in a brutal civil war. At the most basic level, the conflict arose from ethnic tension between Sinhalese and Tamil citizens. Of course, in reality the causes are more complex, and arise in large part from Sri Lanka 's colonial legacy.
Background to the Civil War:
Great Britain ruled Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, from 1815 to 1948. When the British arrived, the country was dominated by Sinhalese speakers whose ancestors likely arrived on the island from India in the 500s BCE. Sri Lankan people seem to have been in contact with Tamil speakers from southern India since at least the second century BCE, but migrations of significant numbers of Tamils to the island appear to have taken place later, between the seventh and eleventh centuries CE.
In 1815, the population of Ceylon numbered about three

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