Burning Books

Like much of northern Sri Lanka, the world-renowned Jaffna Library was destroyed by ethnic conflict. Though it has been rebuilt, what was inside was lost forever.

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka - Before it was burned down by a pro-government mob in 1981, the Jaffna Library was a repository for rare volumes on the Tamil people and their history. Its destruction was considered an attempt to destroy a culture. The library has been rebuilt but many shelves are still empty and what filled them can never be replaced.

"We had palm-leaf manuscripts," says the library manager, S. Thanabalasingam, "books written on palm leaves, some over 300 years old. They told about the history of the Tamil people, folk medicine and culture."

A walk around the new library» View

At the time, the library had nearly 100,000 volumes and was considered one of the best collections in Southeast Asia. The mob came after midnight, according to Thanabalasingam, so no one was killed or hurt in the fire, but the destruction was devastating to much of the local Tamil population.

"The people were very sad," says Thanabalasingam, who gave me a tour of the new building, completed in 2003, after the cease-fire agreement between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels. "Much of their culture and their studies were all lost."

The new building mirrors the old Mughal style architecture. Its soaring white domes can be seen above the tree line for miles in nearly every direction.

It cost almost 120 million rupees ($1.2 million) to rebuild, nearly all donated by the international community. The library became a symbol of the effort to rebuild the Jaffna Peninsula after years of fighting between government forces and the Tamil Tiger rebels.

Inside the building, students prepare for their final exams in study rooms, while some browse the stacks. Others use the new computer room, equipped with ten computers and a 64kbps Internet connection. It's painfully slow, but for the teenagers and young men using the computers, it's a precious window to the outside world.

Rebuilt, but not replaced » View

Along with funding, many countries as well as private individuals contributed books to the new library. Thanabalasingam says the library has rebuilt its collection to almost 97,000 volumes, 30,000 of them in the Tamil language. But still, he shakes his head at what was lost is lost forever. And with renewed violence in the region and talk that the cease-fire could break down completely, the library isn't taking any chances.

"We're prepared for the possibility that it all could happen again," says Thanabalasingam. "We're keeping much of the new collection in different branch libraries throughout the region. We don't want everything in just one place, like the past. It's too dangerous."

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