The civil war had its roots in colonial times,during which the British were seen by the Sinhalese majority as favouring the Tamil minority. When British colonial rule ended in 1948,the Sinhalese majority disenfranchised Tamil plantation workers,made Sinhala the country's official language and made Buddhism the country's primary religion (the majority of Sinhalese are Buddhist;the majority of Tamils are Hindu).
It was in this context that,in 1976,a man named Velupillai Prabhakaran formed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam,the LTTE,or Tamil Tigers,dedicated to the fight for Tamil independence. In 1983,the LTTE ambushed an army convoy. Thirteen soldiers were killed. Riots in response left as many as 3000 Tamils dead. This pogrom,known as Black July,marked the beginning of large-scale violence in Sri Lanka.
India deployed a peacekeeping mission to Sri Lanka in 1987,but it left three years later. In 1991,one Tamil Tiger suicide bomber assassinated Rajiv Gandhi,who was India's prime minister when New Delhi sent the peacekeeping force (the LTTE unexpectedly apologised in 2006). In 1993,Sri Lankan then president Ranasinghe Premadasa was assassinated;no group asserted responsibility,but all eyes turned toward the LTTE. The United States put the group on its terror list in 1997. That did not stop the LTTE:In 2001,it carried out an attack on the airport in Colombo,Sri Lanka's capital,ruining half the national airline and part of the military's aircraft.
In 2002,Norway brokered a ceasefire agreement. But in 2005,the foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar,who was Tamil but who led the effort to get the LTTE labelled a terrorist organisation,was shot by snipers. The military blamed the Tamil Tigers.