The Hindu goddess of learning is standing guard, a retired school principal is all fired up and the computers are in place.
War-weary Jaffna is ready for the reopening of a famous library, more than two decades after a mob of Sinhala police and thugs set it on fire.
"I am so very happy about that," said A. Sabaratnam, the retired headmaster.
The library, a center of learning and culture, is hugely symbolic for the country's minority Tamil community. The fire destroyed nearly 100,000 Tamil-language books, including rare palm leaf writings.
Its destruction one night in June 1981 opened an ethnic wound that rallied Tamils who wanted to join the fight for a separate homeland in the north and east of Sri Lanka.
Locals hope its reopening will help heal some of the torment from a civil war that killed 64,000 people and displaced more than one million. They also hope it will bolster a peace process backed by a 16-month-old ceasefire between Tamil rebels and the government.
The building is once more a gleaming white cultural icon, where a statue of goddess Saraswati stands in the forecourt and a new computer room is already open in the back.
But a date for the official opening has not been set because of a dispute between the government, local Tamil leaders and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Jaffna has been a Tamil center of learning for centuries and many of its schools -- run by missionaries including the great, great grandmother of one-time US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles -- were the best in Sri Lanka.
The schools even attracted students from the Sinhala south from the 1950s through to the 1970s.
The Jaffna library first opened in 1841, and was an important focal point for Tamil history by the time it moved in the mid-1950s to the building that was eventually attacked.
Sabaratnam, who joined the library in 1951, says he remembers the attack vividly.
"It was a great loss for me," he said, while looking at books in a temporary library in Jaffna's old government building.
"When the Jaffna library was burnt it touched almost the hearts of the Jaffna people because they value education very much," said Thomas Savundaranayagam, the Catholic bishop in the region.
The renovated building is still surrounded by reminders of war. Trees and bushes have grown over buildings destroyed by two decades of fighting that made Jaffna the epicenter of the ethnic bloodshed.
It is also just across the street from a sports field named after a former mayor, Alfred Durayappah, who was gunned down in 1975 and is widely believed to have been the first victim of secretive Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
The rebels delayed a planned opening in February, with residents saying the LTTE wanted more books collected and a wing built showing what happened to the library.
"They even wanted some of the holes kept to show what happened," one resident said.
Government troops captured Jaffna in 1996 but it is still seen as a rebel stronghold -- the political wrangling over the library highlights the mistrust that still exists despite a ceasefire that has mostly held since it was signed in February last year.
Head librarian S. Thanabaalasinham said there would be about 30,000 volumes when the building reopens.
"We expect more than 1,000 people a day to use it," said Thanabaalasinham, who added he sees about 200 people a day use his temporary building.
Many of the books for the new library were donated by India and other countries, and some were even given by the Sri Lankan Army, which impressed Sabaratnam.
"Especially when there are stamps [inside the books] where the army has collected money and bought the books. We feel there is good people from the other side as well," he said.
BLOODSHED: North Koreans take extreme measures to avoid being taken prisoner and sometimes execute their own forces, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Saturday said that Russian and North Korean forces sustained heavy losses in fighting in Russia’s southern Kursk region. Ukrainian and Western assessments say that about 11,000 North Korean troops are deployed in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces occupy swathes of territory after staging a mass cross-border incursion in August last year. In his nightly video address, Zelenskiy quoted a report from Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi as saying that the battles had taken place near the village of Makhnovka, not far from the Ukrainian border. “In battles yesterday and today near just one village, Makhnovka,
Some things might go without saying, but just in case... Belgium’s food agency issued a public health warning as the festive season wrapped up on Tuesday: Do not eat your Christmas tree. The unusual message came after the city of Ghent, an environmentalist stronghold in the country’s East Flanders region, raised eyebrows by posting tips for recycling the conifers on the dinner table. Pointing with enthusiasm to examples from Scandinavia, the town Web site suggested needles could be stripped, blanched and dried — for use in making flavored butter, for instance. Asked what they thought of the idea, the reply
US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen on Monday met virtually with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng (何立峰) and raised concerns about “malicious cyber activity” carried out by Chinese state-sponsored actors, the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement. The department last month reported that an unspecified number of its computers had been compromised by Chinese hackers in what it called a “major incident” following a breach at contractor BeyondTrust, which provides cybersecurity services. US Congressional aides said no date had been set yet for a requested briefing on the breach, the latest in a serious of cyberattacks
In the East Room of the White House on a particularly frigid Saturday afternoon, US President Joe Biden bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 of the most famous names in politics, sports, entertainment, civil rights, LGBTQ+ advocacy and science. Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton aroused a standing ovation from the crowd as she received her medal. Clinton was accompanied to the event by her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, daughter, Chelsea Clinton, and grandchildren. Democratic philanthropist George Soros and actor-director Denzel Washington were also awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor in a White House
RSS