At a quiet stretch of the A9 highway near Elephant Pass, a bronze statue stands beside a rusting battle tank — two artifacts of the same moment in July 1991 that altered the course of Sri Lanka's civil conflict. Together, they form the Hasalaka Gamini War Hero Monument, a memorial to Corporal Gamini Kularatne of the Sri Lanka Army, whose final act of courage saved hundreds of his fellow soldiers and earned him the nation's highest honour for gallantry.
Who was Hasalaka Gamini?
Corporal Gamini Kularatne (Service No. S/34553) was born on 4 September 1966 in Hasalaka, a village in the Kandy District. He enlisted with the Sri Lanka Sinha Regiment and served on the northern front during one of the most intense periods of the civil war. He was 24 years old when he died on 14 July 1991.
His hometown name — Hasalaka — became inseparable from his identity. To most Sri Lankans he is simply Hasalaka Gamini, a figure who transcended military rank to become a symbol of selfless sacrifice in the national memory.
What happened during the Elephant Pass Siege?
In mid-1991, LTTE fighters launched a sustained assault on the Sri Lanka Army garrison at Elephant Pass, the strategically critical land crossing connecting the Jaffna Peninsula to the Sri Lankan mainland. The siege lasted close to a month, with the garrison heavily outnumbered and under relentless pressure.
On 14 July 1991, an LTTE armoured vehicle — a converted battle tank — breached the perimeter and advanced toward the camp, threatening to overwhelm the defenders. Corporal Kularatne picked up a rocket-propelled grenade and charged the vehicle on foot, destroying it at close range. He died in the explosion. His action halted the assault and, in the assessment of military historians, was decisive in preserving the garrison.
For this act, Corporal Kularatne was posthumously awarded the Parama Weera Vibhushanaya (PWV) — the highest decoration for gallantry in the Sri Lanka Army — becoming the first soldier ever to receive it.
What can visitors see at the monument?
The memorial site sits directly on the A9 road at Elephant Pass, the main highway connecting Colombo and the south to Jaffna. Two elements define the site:
- The statue: A full-scale bronze likeness of Corporal Kularatne, positioned at approximately the spot where he made his final charge.
- The tank: The actual LTTE armoured vehicle that Kularatne destroyed has been left in place where it stopped. Weathered by decades of tropical heat and monsoon rain, it serves as an unscripted monument in its own right.
Interpretive panels at the site provide context in Sinhala, Tamil, and English. The surrounding landscape — the narrow causeway separating the Jaffna Lagoon from the Elephant Pass Lagoon — gives visitors a clear sense of the tactical geography that made this location so fiercely contested.
How do I get to the Hasalaka Gamini Monument?
The monument is located on the A9 highway at Elephant Pass, roughly 60 kilometres south of Jaffna city. Most visitors stop here as part of a road journey to or from Jaffna. The site is roadside and accessible at any hour, though early morning visits offer better light for photography and quieter surroundings.
From Colombo, the drive north along the A9 takes around seven to eight hours without stops, passing through Kurunegala, Dambulla, Vavuniya, and Kilinochchi before reaching Elephant Pass. Alternatively, visitors flying into Jaffna can reach the site in under an hour heading south on the same highway. Private transfer with a driver who knows the northern routes is the most convenient option, as public bus services stop at the monument only on request.
Why does this monument matter to Sri Lankans?
The Parama Weera Vibhushanaya has been awarded fewer than ten times since its creation. Corporal Kularatne's was the first, and it was awarded posthumously — a fact that underscores both the rarity of the honour and the magnitude of the act it recognises. In Sri Lanka, his name appears in school textbooks, military training programmes, and public speeches marking independence and remembrance days.
The monument is not a museum. There is no entry fee, no organised tour circuit, and no gift shop. It is a place where Sri Lankan families, veterans, and foreign visitors pause beside a highway and stand, for a few minutes, in the presence of a decision that was made in seconds and changed many lives. That simplicity is, arguably, what gives it its weight.
What else is worth visiting near Elephant Pass?
Elephant Pass itself has historical depth beyond the 1991 siege — the causeway has been a contested military and trade crossing for centuries, and the wider Jaffna Peninsula offers a distinct cultural landscape shaped by Tamil heritage, Hindu temples, Dutch colonial remnants, and an unusually flat terrain of palmyra palms and lagoon inlets. Jaffna city, less than an hour north, has a growing number of guesthouses and restaurants as tourism to the north continues to recover.
For travellers making a full circuit of Sri Lanka, the A9 journey north is itself one of the country's more thought-provoking road trips — passing through regions that saw some of the heaviest fighting of the conflict and are now slowly but visibly rebuilding. Sites like Colombo Lotus Tower in the capital offer a very different register of modern Sri Lanka, but the north remains the most direct way to understand the human scale of what the country has been through.