Mass Expulsion of Northern Muslims by the LTTE in 1990

October 1990 is a cruel and unforgettable month in the history of Sri Lanka's Northern Province Muslims. It was in October 1990 that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) forcibly expelled the Tamil-speaking Muslim people from the Northern Province in an atrocious act amounting to ethnic cleansing.

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Within a few weeks, the Muslims were chased out of their homeland, where they had lived for many centuries, by their gun-toting linguistic brethren.

The mass expulsion of Muslims from the North in October 1990 was a humanitarian tragedy. Uprooting a people from their historical habitat at gunpoint and driving them away after depriving them of their cash and jewellery was despicable and unpardonable. I have often written about this tragedy in the past. I wrote in detail about the Muslim expulsion and condemned it strongly when the LTTE was active and powerful.

I now intend to revisit this mass expulsion of Northern Muslims on the occasion of its thirty-fifth anniversary. I shall be drawing on some of my earlier writings in a bid to revive memories of this mass expulsion by relating in brief the tale of this terrible tragedy and tracing the related sequence of events.

"Black October" 1990 began in the Jaffna peninsula with the expulsion of Muslims of Chavakachcheri on October 15th and ended with the Muslims of Jaffna town being expelled on October 30th. The mass eviction of Muslims on the Northern mainland began some days before it commenced in Jaffna town and concluded a few days after the peninsula was "cleansed" of Muslims.

The bulk of Northern Muslims were then living in the Mannar district. They were sent out. Apart from Jaffna and Mannar, the Muslims of Mullaitheevu and Kilinochchi districts were also sent out. The Muslims in Vavuniya were luckier as most of their villages were in the government-controlled areas. More than 50,000 Muslims were expelled from the northern mainland by the LTTE. Together with those of the peninsula, the Muslims driven out from the Northern Province numbered around 75,000 in 1990.