Religion and the Sri Lankan Civil War

Sri Lanka's civil war, fought from 1983 to 2009 between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, was primarily an ethnic and linguistic conflict over Tamil autonomy rather than a religious one in origin, since most Tamil separatists were Hindu or Christian and most government forces Sinhalese Buddhist, but religion became entangled with the conflict as Buddhist nationalist rhetoric increasingly framed Sri Lanka as a Sinhalese Buddhist nation requiring protection, a position given constitutional expression in Article 9 of the 1978 constitution, which gives Buddhism the foremost place among religions while pledging to protect the rights of other faiths.

The war caused significant destruction to religious sites on both sides, including a 1998 Tamil Tiger bombing of the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, Buddhism's most sacred shrine on the island, and the displacement of Hindu and Christian populations from contested areas in the north and east. Since the war's end, Buddhist nationalist organizations such as the Bodu Bala Sena have periodically directed communal violence against the country's Muslim minority, notably following the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings carried out by a local Islamist group against churches and hotels, which killed over 250 people and prompted a wave of retaliatory anti-Muslim sentiment.