Demolition of Tamil genocide monument, fourth emblematic trauma since 1974: Rev Fr Sakthivel

[TamilNet, Saturday, 09 January 2021, 09:37 GMT]
Tamils experienced one of their first collective trauma when Colombo’s Sinhala police massacred nine Tamil civilians at the World Tamil Conference in Jaffna in 1974. Then came one of the worst acts of cultural and heritage genocide, the state-backed burning of Jaffna Public Library in 1981. The 2009 genocidal onslaught caused the third emblematic trauma. Now, the demolition of Mu'l'livaaykkaal Genocide Monument at the Jaffna University has triggered the fourth wave of trauma to the same extent, said Rev Fr Sakthivel, a prominent rights activist of Up-Country origin. He urged the Tamil political parties to unite and demand justice for the protracted genocide that has caused waves of collective trauma to the genocide affected Tamil nation.
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UN Rights Chief joins her predecessors in watering down collective rights of genocide affected people

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 15 September 2020, 06:37 GMT]
Without imposing a robust follow-up on the unitary state of genocidal Sri Lanka, which withdrew its support to UN Human Rights Resolution 30/1 that failed to address genocide justice, international investigations and ensure the collective rights of the people of the occupied traditional Tamil homeland in the North-East, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet was just “encouraging” the Council to “give renewed attention to Sri Lanka, in view of the need to prevent threats to peace, reconciliation and sustainable development.” Ms Bachelet was only referring to “commitments” made by the Rajapaksa regime “since it withdrew its support for resolution 30/1”.
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SL Police harasses Shivajilingam at 25th Remembrance of Navaali massacre in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Friday, 10 July 2020, 00:05 GMT]
Hundreds of people emotionally marked the 25th remembrance of 147 Tamil men, women and children who perished in SL Air Force bombing and artillery attacks when they had sought refuge at two temples at Navaali in Jaffna on 09th July 1995. On Thursday, the Sinhala police of occupying Colombo was trying to block former TNA parliamentarian and former provincial councillor M.K. Shivajilingam when he went to the remembrance event. On Wednesday, the SL Police was attempting to secure a court order against the participation of the Tamil politician in the remembrance. Mr Shivajilingam, who has been in the forefront championing the right of Eezham Tamils memorialisation events, especially after 2009, was however allowed to take part by the courts. Yet, the SL Police was harassing him at the site, irking the Tamils.
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SL military cordons off Jaffna islet with war-time like harassment, families fear reprisals

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 17 June 2020, 22:12 GMT]
The occupying SL Navy, Army and Police have completely cordoned off Analai-theevu islet off Jaffna after a group of residents confronted SL Navy personnel, whom they suspected as harassing Tamil women sexually last week. In the resulting dispute, Sinhala Navy sailors assaulted the Tamils. An SLN officer and his assistant, who tried to restrict treatment for civilians who had injured in the violence meted out on them by his troopers, was attacked outside the hospital by Tamil men who were angry at the conduct of the occupying Sinhala Navy. Following the episode on 09 June, the Tamil families are subjected to relentless harassment by the SL Navy, Army and Police who are on a hunt to arrest the suspected attackers, who have gone underground. The SL Navy is not allowing journalists in Jaffna to inspect the situation and civilian contact with the outside world remains cut off.
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Sixteenth remembrance of journalist Nadesan marked amidst harassment by SL Police

[TamilNet, Monday, 01 June 2020, 09:03 GMT]
SL military intelligence personnel in civilian clothes and SL Policemen in uniform were deployed at the entrance of Jaffna Press Club (JPC) on Sunday morning when Tamil journalists marked 16th-year remembrance of Tamil journalist, Naaddup-pattaa'lar Aiyathurai Nadesan. Around fifteen policemen and intelligence personnel were guarding the entrance of the JPC and the Stanley Road - Raasaavin Thoaddam junction for four hours, from 8:30 to 12:30, in rotation, journalists who attended the event in Jaffna said. The journalists had already gathered inside the premises and managed to proceed with the remembrance as planned.
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Break paradigm that regards Tamils as victims to achieve equitable solution: Balakumaran in 2004

[TamilNet, Sunday, 17 May 2020, 05:18 GMT]
From the colonial British Lord Soulbury to Norwegian Peace Envoy Solheim, all external interlocutors intended to render Tamils’ demand below the point of optimal compromise. Soulbury went to the extent of humiliating the then Tamil leader GG Ponnambalam in his attempt to negate the demands of Tamils. He later regretted. Now, Solheim wants to do the same, i.e., tell Tamils to drop their arms. But, he is unable to say it face-to-face because LTTE Leader has demonstrated the balance of power for the first time in the evolutional history of Tamil leaders. However, the world powers still want to weaken the Tamil side and strengthen the SL State, said KV Balakumaran, a senior leader in the armed struggle of Tamils, back in 2004. Tamils cannot achieve anything with a “victim” mindset, he said in a lengthy consultative session to TamilNet in September 2004.
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Occupying Colombo converts 6 Tamil colleges in North as quarantine centres for SL military

[TamilNet, Monday, 27 April 2020, 21:53 GMT]
Occupying Colombo’s military has started to convert a Tamil college of teachers in Jaffna and five other schools in the Northern province as Quarantine Centres for military personnel stationed in the region. Civil sources in the North have condemned it as a high-handed move disregarding the safety of Tamil civilians in the densely populated areas. The top brass of the Sinhala military has not consulted the provincial and local authorities. They have not even asked the provincial health director for advice. Nirosh Thiyagarajah, the Chairman of Valikaamam East Divisional Council, has condemned the conversion of Jaffna National College of Education (JNCOE) at Koappaay into a military QC.
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Hypersonic race, Indo-Pacific tensions escalate undeterred by pandemic

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 21 April 2020, 19:32 GMT]
In an attempt to match the recent technical weapon advancements made by China and Russia in carrying munitions at hypersonic speeds—five times the speed of sound (Mach 5)—the US tested a Common-Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB) last month, on 19 March. Russia unveiled its Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, two years ago in March 2018, and China launched DF-ZF in October 2019. The global attention on renewing the only remaining bilateral nuclear arms limitation agreement between the US and Russia has slowed down due to the spread of the pandemic. In the meantime, the US is reiterating its overtly ambitious demand for a trilateral deal to include China without extending the bilateral treaty with Russia.
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Occupying SL military instructed to prepare Secret Quarantine Centers in North-East

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 15 April 2020, 22:16 GMT]
SL Army Commander Lt Gen Shavendra Silva has instructed his commanders in the North and East to transform the secret detention camps, which the occupying SL military used in the past to torture and kill former LTTE members as undeclared Quarantine Centers (QC). The undisclosed QCs would be used for “isolation purposes” if the COVID-19 pandemic was to take large proportions in the North-East, informed ex-paramilitary sources in the North said. Already, there are military-operated, publicly-declared QCs in the North-East and the South. The openly declared QCs used to house “Sri Lankans” and foreigners, are maintained as state-of-the-art facilities by the SL military. In contrast, the proposed secret QCs are intended to be used “to keep the situation under control in a worst-case scenario”, an informed source said.
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SL military claims village-level sweeping powers over civil officers in Vanni

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 08 April 2020, 22:09 GMT]
The occupying SL Army, a predominantly Sinhala force, has brought more than two hundred Village (GS/GN) Officers and village-level Samurdhi Development officers, most of them Tamils, under its control citing instructions from SL President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to monitor the delivery of relief measures caused by the COVID-19 lockdown. The SL Army, which convened a meeting on Wednesday, instructed the village-level civil officials to accompany the soldiers on a house-to-house control operation. The public officials are severely disrupted from carrying out their work according to their priorities as they are being forced to accompany the soldiers in their surveillance-style control of civil affairs in Vanni, a group of GS officers told TamilNet.
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Shavendra-ban, COVID-19 no hindrance to SL Navy “Balanced Style” training with US Green Berets

[TamilNet, Friday, 03 April 2020, 22:23 GMT]
Members of a US Army Special Forces (Green Berets) Operational Detachment Alpha (SFOD-A) team, attached to the US Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM) have conducted a four-week-long training with two notorious wartime formations of the occupying navy of genocidal Sri Lanka in Trincomalee in March. The Green Berets providing specialised training to SL Navy has a long history. The “Operation Balanced Style” sessions went on at secret locations in the South in 1996 and 2001. After 2009, the USINDOPACOM started to conduct naval port visits, various training programmes including the latest Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET). The US military has also experimented with “temporary air logistics hub concept” as well as grooming a marine force for the unitary state in the Sinhalicised and militarised district of the capital city of the occupied country of Eezham Tamils.
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Politics of statements failing to call a spade a spade

[TamilNet, Monday, 30 March 2020, 21:51 GMT]
The latest presidential pardoning of a massacre-convicted SL Army soldier is an outcome of the Mahawansa mindset, which is the ideology triggering the specific intent (Dolus Specialis) for Tamil genocide. In the chosen island of “Sri Lanka,” it is the genocidal Mahawansa doctrine that ultimately determines the delivery of justice as well as sustaining the unitary character of the state. Any roadmap, which seeks to improve the Colombo-centric system through gradual reforms without reconfiguring the underlying state structure in the first place, only paves the way for reversing even the cosmetic outcomes of the concerned deceptive progress. Those who contribute to such an experiment, directly or indirectly — even if they intend to disprove the approach through partaking in it — are complicit in sophisticated genocide denial as long as they are not prepared to call a spade a spade.
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Monk praises Gota for releasing SLA soldier from death row, celebrates genocidaire soldier as “hero”

[TamilNet, Thursday, 26 March 2020, 23:38 GMT]
While all attention remains focused on the lethal Corona pandemic, SL President Gotabaya has chosen to silently release a Sinhala soldier, Sunil Ratnayake, who was sentenced to death in 2015 for one of the brutal massacres committed on Eezham Tamils. In a genocidal act, eight Tamil civilians, including a five-year-old child and two teenagers, were massacred by Ratnayake and five other soldiers at Mirusuvil in Jaffna on 19 December 2000. Ratnayake, a non-commissioned officer of the SL Army, was the only soldier to be punished by the court. The case was put off several times to facilitate escape routes to commissioned rank officers, except Ratnayake, whom the system intended to release at a later opportunity, as it has happened now, Tamil rights activists in Jaffna commented. In the meantime an extremist Sinhala Buddhist monk celebrated the release posting a video comment on Facebook.
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Phil Miller’s work reveals British role in dividing Tamils and Muslims in East: Dr Malathy

[TamilNet, Sunday, 15 March 2020, 18:46 GMT]
The British mercenary outfit Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), made up mostly of ex-SAS personnel, and serving the ‘anglophile’ SL President, the late Richard Junius Jayewardene by secretly training the Sinhala Special Task Force (STF) commandos against the armed struggle of Eezham Tamils back in the 1980s. The STF advised by the KMS on divide-and-rule and use of religion, recruited Tamil-speaking Muslims to commit massacres. All of this was done with full awareness of the British government, which too was worried about the solidarity between the Tamils and the Muslims, writes New Zealand based Dr N.Malathy in her book review on the recent book by UK-based Phil Miller. “Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes,” is making this vital revelation, writes the Tamil diaspora survivor of SL State’s 2009 genocidal onslaught on Eezham Tamils in Vanni.
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US, UK conduct 24-day long Bay of Bengal military ‘interoperability’ training with Bangladesh

[TamilNet, Thursday, 12 March 2020, 23:47 GMT]
The US and the UK military trainers on “small unit tactics and maritime tasks” have been training the Bangladesh Navy and Army on “counter-terrorism” and “interoperability” of all the three militaries in the Bay of Bengal, media reports from Dhaka said on Tuesday. The three countries remained committed to a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” (FOIP) concept, according to the reports that cited US Ambassador to Bangladesh and the navy officers of the Bangladesh Navy. The training programme, code-named “Operation Monogram” and “Ex Thunder Fist” launched on 16 February, concluded in Chattogram (Chittagong) on Tuesday this week. The operation was the first-ever tri-lateral exercise involving US, UK and Bangladeshi militaries, news reports from Dhaka said.
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Michelle Bachelet calls Tamils a ‘minority’

[TamilNet, Thursday, 27 February 2020, 23:23 GMT]
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, who gave an oral update on her annual report on the human rights situation in “Sri Lanka” recognised the fundamental problem in the island as that the state of “Sri Lanka” not addressing impunity for past violations. The SL State has not undertaken the security sector reforms needed to address the “drivers and enablers” of the violations, she said. The UN Rights Chief was also regretting to the SL withdrawal of co-sponsorship to the consensus UNHRC resolutions noted that the new SL government had announced a “very different approach” to the commitments previously made. However, Ms Bachelet referred to the occupied nation of Eezham Tamils with a distinct homeland in the North-East as a “minority” in the island.
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UN human rights system in Geneva lacks courage to make “Sri Lanka” a Permanent Agenda Item

[TamilNet, Friday, 21 February 2020, 20:04 GMT]
The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Resolution 30/1 adopted in 2015 was fundamentally flawed as it was based on the “Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Investigation on Sri Lanka” (OISL). The OISL was not mandated to investigate decades-long Tamil genocide as it was conceived as an “internationalised” extension of the Rajapaksa regime’s “Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission” (LLRC), a blueprint for post-2009 genocide. Now, the LLRC-inventors are back, and they are at loggerheads with the inventors of the International-LLRC (OISL). The acid test for the High Commissioner, her office, the OHCHR and the 47-member UNHRC is the notion of SL “co-sponsorship”. If the human rights regime in Geneva wants to save its credibility, it has to make the human rights situation in “Sri Lanka” a Permanent Agenda Item to the council. But, it lacks such courage.
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After Hambantota ‘clean-up’, US-India alliance expects Gotabaya to reconsider China’s ICT

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 24 December 2019, 23:48 GMT]
After getting ‘US-citizen’ Gotabaya Rajapaksa to sort out Hambantota port-related security concerns of the Quad partners, the US-India strategic partnership is aiming to contain what it considers as a risky cybersecurity infrastructure in India’s backyard. The US-India alliance is posed to ‘discipline’ the SL State to abandon or phase out China’s information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure in the island, a highly-placed Tamil source within the mobile technology sector in Colombo told TamilNet this week. India’s Minister of Defence Rajnath Singh is holding the stick, and Gotabaya Rajapaksa will be under pressure to deliver in favour of US-preferred ICT to be favoured instead of China’s ICT in the island, the source further revealed.
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Veteran political analyst faces surveillance harassment in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Monday, 09 December 2019, 22:11 GMT]
Unknown persons who entered the residence of Jaffna-based Political Analyst and Senior Lawyer S.A. Jothilingam have ransacked the place while the 64-year-old activist was away on Sunday. The ransackers have gone through his possessions in all the rooms and taken away two smartphones used by the activist. The front door and the doors of the cupboards inside the rooms have been smashed. The incident was not an ordinary theft as the intruders didn't steal the money or other valuable items. Furthermore, the episode unfolded after two other suspicious events on Friday, according to the activist and his friends who went to help him on Friday night and Sunday.
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University students, Shivaji brave SL restrictions on veneration of Tamil Eelam Heroes in Jaffna

[TamilNet, Wednesday, 27 November 2019, 10:46 GMT]
The Tamil student community forcibly opened the gate of the University of Jaffna and entered the memorial site for Tamil Eelam Heroes inside the main campus on Tamil Heroes Day braving the official ban against entering the University premises on Tamil Eelam Heroes Day. The mobilisation took place around 10:00 a.m. two hours ahead of the scheduled time. More than three hundred students entered the premises and paid tribute to the fallen Tamil Eelam Heroes at Maaveerar memorial and lit the morning flame. In the meantime, former NPC Councillor and ex-TNA parliamentarian M.K. Shivajilingam braved the harassment by the SL Army officers at the entrance to the Tamil Eelam Heroes Cemetery at Kodikaamam in Thenmaraadchi, Jaffna.
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