The Story of Veeramunai: How Muslim Home Guards Carried Out the Largest Massacre of Tamils in the East!
Nestled in the Ampara District of Sri Lanka, Veeramunai is a Tamil-majority village that forms part of the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. The Eastern Province is an integral region of the Tamil homeland. For generations, this land has held deep cultural and strategic significance for Tamils. That said, the East is also a very diverse place and home to a large percentage of Tamil speaking Muslims who choose to identify themselves as a distinct group of people who consciously avoid the Tamil political and cultural identity.
Successive Sinhala governments deliberately stirred tensions between Tamils and Muslims, weakening both communities and used the “Muslim factor” as a convenient pretext to sever the bond between the North and East. In this process, much of the Muslim leadership fell in line with the state’s agenda.
This blog is part two of our series on Sri Lanka's Muslim Home Guard.
To read Part 1 click hereЁЯСЗ
It is within this climate of manipulation and division that tragedies like the Veeramunai massacre unfolded. But thanks to Sri Lankan state propaganda, the role of the Muslim Home Guards in ethnic cleansing and massacres of Tamils has been systematically downplayed or erased. As a result, even the largest massacre in the Eastern Province, the Veeramunai massacre remains largely unknown, while the Kattankudy massacre is elevated in both national and international narratives. This deliberate silencing has warped Tamil-Muslim discourse, ensuring that the suffering of Veeramunai is forgotten while Kattankudy dominates the conversation.
The Veeramunai massacre, carried out by Muslim Home Guards in August 1990, stands as one of the largest massacres of Tamils in the Eastern Province. On 12 August 1990, armed Muslim Home Guards stormed the Veeramunai village in the Ampara District and massacred over 450 Tamil civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. The attack left homes burned to the ground, families destroyed, and the surviving population displaced.
In Veeramunai 600 houses were set alight. A further 1352 houses were set alight in the villages of Malwaththa, Mallihaithivu, Newtown, Kanapathypuram, Valaththapiddy, and Sammanthurai.
Between 20.06.1990 and 15.08.1990 more than 400 people were either killed or disappeared from Veeramunai and the adjacent villages. More 2000 houses were burnt.
The August 1990 massacre was not the only time Veeramunai was targeted that year. Just two months earlier, on 20 June 1990, (a mere 43 days before the Kattankudy mosque massacre that would dominate national and international headlines) Muslim Home Guards carried out another attack on Veeramunai, killing at least 55 Tamil villagers. This earlier assault went almost entirely unnoticed by the wider world, overshadowed by the state’s narrative of the conflict and the selective outrage of the media.
Most of my Muslim brothers and sisters often try to defend the crimes of the Muslim Home Guards as a reactionary response to the Kattankudy mosque attack, but the Veeramunai massacre and the long timeline of continued massacres in the East in the three months leading up to the Kattankudy massacre proves them all wrong. These attacks were planned, systematic, and targeted against Tamil civilians, clearly reflecting a broader pattern of ethnic violence rather than isolated retaliatory actions.
The scale and frequency of massacres of Tamils by the Sri Lankan Muslim Home Guards in the months leading up to Kattankudy is staggering. (We will be documenting all the massacres carried out by the Muslim Home Guard in detail in the next part of this article series.) Some of the major attacks include:
12/06/1990 – Thuraineelavanai Massacre
21/06/1990 – Kalmunai Burning, Kalmunai Town Massacre
19–20/06/1990 – Pottuvil Massacre
20/06/1990 – Komaari Massacre
24/06/1990–03/07/1990 – Akkaraipatru Massacre
25/06/1990 – Sammanthurai Massacre
26/06/1990 – Aalaiyadi Vembil Massacre
27/06/1990 – Thirukovil Massacre
27/06/1990 – Veeramunai Massacre-01
27/06/1990 – 4aam Colony Village Destruction
27/06/1990 – Malwatthe Village Destruction
28/06/1990 – Lagugala Tribes Massacre
29/06/1990 – Pottuvil Police Station Massacre (30/06/1990–25/07/1990)
30/06/1990 – Savalaikadai Massacre
20 & 27/07/1990 – Sithaandi Massacre
01/07/1990 – Sammanthurai & Sorikalmunai Massacre
03/07/1990 – Pandiyooran Massacre
08/07/1990 – Nintavur Murugan Temple Massacre
08/07/1990 – Saagama Massacre
09/07/1990 – Kunchikudiyaaru Thangavelaayuthapuram Massacre and Raids
28/07/1990 – Sammanthurai Police Station Massacre and Burning of Tamils (40 Tamils arrested in Veeramunai were shot and then burnt)
28/07/1990 – Komaari Refugee Camp Massacre
01/08/1990 – Pottuvil Refugee Camp Massacre
02/08/1990 – Attavalla Massacre
02/08/1990 – Karaitivu Massacre, Death Toll 108 Tamils
This is just a small list of the massacres of Tamils carried out by the Muslim Home Guards. All of these massacres listed above happened within the three monrh period before Kattankudy massacre, but have you ever wondered why these massacres of Tamils by the Muslim Home Guards are not remembered or even mentioned by those who shed tears for the Kattankudy massacre?
In the Veeramunai case the cycle of violence against Tamils in Veeramunai stretches back decades. In the 1950s, the Tamil inhabitants of Veeramunai faced a brutal mob attack from Muslim villagers in neighbouring Sammanthurai. Over 75 Tamil homes were burned, families were driven from their lands, and large portions of Veeramunai’s fertile paddy fields were forcibly taken over. Many Tamils fled and resettled in nearby refugee hamlets, never to return to their ancestral lands. This early episode of mob violence set the tone for the decades of hostility that would follow.
When we look at the history of Veeramunai, a grim pattern emerges: the same communities that carried out the mob attacks in the 1950s would, over the decades, become armed, organised, and legitimised by the Sri Lankan state as the so-called “Muslim Home Guards.” What began as communal mob violence evolved into state-backed paramilitary operations, supported by the Sri Lankan military and political establishment. These forces not only provided the weapons and protection for such attacks but also ensured that the perpetrators enjoyed near-total impunity.
The Sri Lankan Muslim Home Guards carried out these attacks as part of a deliberate campaign to ethnically cleanse Tamils from Eastern villages. In Tamil, the term “Gramiya Alippu” meaning “the destruction of an entire village” is used to describe several massacres carried out by the Muslim Home Guards. Tamil villages, Tamil shops in marketplaces, and Tamil places of worship were all targeted through successive waves of violence. The systematic aim was to force Tamils out of their ancestral lands and erase their presence from strategically important areas of the Eastern Province.
Despite being the largest single massacre of Tamils in the Eastern Province, the Veeramunai massacre remains severely underreported, a casualty of deliberate erasure. The victims were Tamil, and in the state’s narrative, their deaths have never been given the attention or justice they deserve.
The Muslim polity, fully aware of the Muslim Home Guard’s direct role in this atrocity, has chosen silence. Instead of acknowledging complicity, they have carefully shifted blame onto the Tamils, rewriting the truth to protect their own. This is not an accident but a pattern: the Muslim polity has consistently stood with the powerful, never with the just. In official history, the tragedy of Veeramunai lingers as an inconvenient truth, one that exposes both the Sinhala state’s cover up, and the Muslim leadership’s betrayal.
-mrpaluvets
17/08/2025
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