The current population of the island nation of Sri Lanka is 17-18 million inhabitants. In 1981, when the last census was taken, the Buddhist Sinhalese accounted for 74 percent of the population, while the Tamils, most of them Hindu, represented 18.2 percent of the population. The Tamils, in turn, are subdivided into the "Jaffna Tamils" (who have lived on the island since prehistoric times and represent 12.6 percent) and the "plantation Tamils" ("imported" by British colonists and who make up 5.6 percent). Finally, the Muslims (7.4 percent) and other assorted groups (approximately 0.4 percent) complete the picture of the Sri Lankan population.

In Ceylon, as they did everywhere in the old days, the British played an industrious minority (the Tamils) off against the Sinhalese majority resistant to the colonial order. Consequently, when the country became independent (1947), the Sinhalese instituted a de facto system of discrimination in government employment, banks, teaching, etc., since they viewed the Tamils as "accomplices of the colonists."

In the early 70s, young Tamils, fired up by the revolutionary tracts of Mao Zedong, “Che” Guevara, and Regis Debray, launched a "protracted people's war," the aim of which was to establish a Tamil national homeland in the north-east of the island. They named their dream nation "Tamil Eelam." The second word is the ancient Tamil name for the whole island of Ceylon. Tamil Eelam is therefore that part of the island historically inhabited by the Tamils (who now number 2.5 to 3 million).

The other side of the Palk Strait (in reality, a channel, barely 30-km wide), which separates northern Ceylon from India, contains the "strategic heartland" of the Sri Lankan Tamil separatists: their brethren, the people of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu (now numbering approximately 60 million). The pro-independence Tamils of Ceylon have numerous sympathizers in Tamil Nadu, and from Madras, they have ready access to the sizable overseas Tamil communities in Asia, North America, and Europe. In France, for example, the Tamil community numbered approximately 60,000 in the early 1990s.