 The massacres took place on November 30, 1984, in two tiny farming villages in the district of Mullaitivu in north-eastern Sri Lanka.The LTTE had claimed that the North East of Sri Lanka was the exclusive homeland of Tamils, and began their campaign of ethnic cleansing in the 1980s.The Sinhalese of the Northern Province and Eastern Province of Sri Lanka suffered severe loss of lives and property as a result of numerous civilian massacres carried out by the LTTE for the purpose of ethnically cleansing the North East of Sri Lanka.