Trigger warning ahead:
(This is not to point fingers at any community & I would appreciate if LTTE supporting diaspora & ultra Sinhala nationalists refrain from using my story to fulfill their own personal agendas. This is shared to relate my experience to those keen to listen.)

Perspective: If you were born in 2002, you were 7 when the war ended & today you’re 18. I was 7 when the war started in 1983 & was 33 when it ended. And I still consider myself fortunate, because despite seeing death, I didn’t lose someone I loved to war, when many others did.

1983 July Wellawatte: I recall my mum coming to pick me as school closed early. She dragged me on foot in an unusual hurry. All I heard was ‘කොටි ගහලා' & I didn’t even know who the කොටි was & was fearful of an animal appearing. Parts of Galle Road was already burning.

All shops (mostly Tamil-owned) were already shut or being burnt. I could sense fear & panic everywhere. This was a time with no mobiles, few TVs & news was primarily shared by mouth. I only heard bits & pieces of my parents speaking. I didn’t know then much of what I know now.

With curfew imposed, my dad walked over to his sister’s house to protect them as she was married to a Tamil. This was the first & only time he left us & went to spend the nights elsewhere. Dad assumed no one would harm them if he confronted the mobs as a Sinhalese. And he did.

My first experience of fear & danger occurred on an afternoon that week. I recall the mobs screaming & arriving at our neighborhood armed with kerosene, crow bars & knives. They broke in & looted the 2 Tamil houses. Our neighbor, a Sinhalese, gave these 2 families refuge.

Then the mob decided to burn the house down. That’s when my mum intervened. I was crying hysterically in fear. Mum pleaded with the mobs to leave without burning the property. She convinced the goons that it’ll only endanger the Sinhala families; & they bought her story.

Few days later my mum prepared food & took me with her to school. I didn’t realize but she was taking food & clothes to a Tamil family we knew from Church. They had lost everything when their house was burnt & nuns had given them refuge. We helped them until they migrated.

That July changed us & everything thereafter. My favorite Uncle Daniel’s Bookstore was burnt to the ground. School reopened but the nuns decided to remove the Tamil medium each year in fear of a future mob attack. My classmate who’s surname was Kumar came back as Perera.

No one ever said a word of what took place in 1983. Our history books never contained it as the syllabus was already set. Our teachers didn’t speak, neither did our parents. We grew up emotionally scarred purely because most refused to talk.

In the years after, I watched ambulances with the injured & dead going across Galle Road with sirens blazing. I heard that logs were used to fill in coffins when bodies couldn’t be found. I watched a bomb being diffused by an army squad in the middle of Nugegoda junction.

I missed getting caught in the Central Bank bomb blast as a 20 year old & went inside Galadari hotel & saw the devastation it had caused. The first few bomb explosions shook us in fear. Years of explosions made us immune to it & soon it became just numbers.

In later years many of us would leave the house not knowing if we’d return back. We started to distrust each other. Neighborhoods changed. Many migrated. Stories were left untold. Hatred steadily infested. We all feel we lost something & we are very much still blaming each other.

What’s worse is those who hardly lived through this is waging verbal wars online. It pains me to see that. For me, none of this is a victory, because we have lost so much. I lost my childhood & part of my adulthood to this war. I’m just glad that the killing is over.

I hope you’ll stop your petty fights & reasonings. It’s really not worth it. Read up on history. It’ll help you to understand another person’s struggle. https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/document/massacres-sri-lanka-during-black-july-riots-1983.html