'Knowing friends and enemies'

[TamilNet, Tuesday, 02 December 2008, 15:14 GMT]
“Exploiting the Mumbai carnage and the mood of indignation in India, the Colombo government is calling for the collaboration of India in labeling and isolating all Tamils as terrorists, just because they demand for their rights. Mr. P. Chidambaram, the new Home Minister of India, carrying Indian as well as Tamil identities needs to be additionally alert in what has to be done”, read Tuesday’s editorial of Janasakti, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of India. Meanwhile, an Eezham Tamil foreign national and a political analyst, now living with the IDPs in Vanni, responded to TamilNet with his remarks on current development, especially after 26 November, 2008.

Edited version of the remarks follow:

"Reciprocating the timely surge of Tamil Nadu support, the LTTE leader has unequivocally reasserted the natural friendship between Eezham Tamils and India.

"The Indian leadership has to grasp the timely gesture and do the needful to keep its south fortified against the current intrigues of geopolitics. The spineless policy of loosing the natural allies by yielding to habitual blackmailers will only jeopardize Indian security eternally.

"The picture emerging from the news and deductive analysis of the Mumbai carnage negates any background of Hindu – Muslim animosities inside India, but points to a conspiracy of international dimensions to put India under a particular situation.

"Even though it is premature to say who wanted the situation, obviously what is at the core is an international phenomenon simulated by the global structure of our times.

"The world Establishment has conditioned the masses by the use of terms ‘terrorism’ and ‘war on terrorism’, but academically we are yet to be introduced with satisfactory terms to describe the phenomenon. However, no one disagrees that it is a coin having two sides.

"All indications at the moment, including what Mr. Obama foresees, make us anticipate that Afghanistan, the land of the geographical hub Pamir Knot, is also going to be the hub of tension resulting from a ‘world at war’ trial.

"It may not be possible for India to escape the vortex unless it adopts a regional and global policy of its own, rather than being carried away, and asserts to its rightful leadership as a country of one sixth of humanity.

"A vigorous domestic policy of strengthening democracy meaningful to the people of India and an international outlook sympathetic to the oppressed will go a long way to India in this respect.

"The international phenomenon of security is an altogether different issue and shouldn’t be mixed up with the national question in the south of India.

"A scrutiny of the history of security perils faced by India would show that the Eezham Tamil national question and the militant struggle of Tamils in the island of Sri Lanka, was never an international conspiracy against India. For that matter the struggle was not an international challenge to any other country either, for India or the International Community to brand it as international terrorism.

"On the contrary, it is the Eezham Tamils who are the victims of terror committed on them internationally.

"It is not the Eezham Tamils or the LTTE militants who have ever dragged India into any international complications. But the policy of the Sri Lankan state right from its inception was aiming to discredit India internationally. The story goes back to the times of the Bandung Conference of 1950s.

"Sri Lanka in the last six decades played every possible international card against India: America, Britain, China, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa and now there are a host of others.

"The Sri Lankan paranoia about India is historical and there is no cure for it whatever measures of appeasement India may undertake.

"It will be there as long as Tamils live in this island, and even if all of them are killed also it will continue."

In the past, through a historical process, a remedy was evolved to resolve the problem and that was a Tamil Kingdom to exist as a buffer between the sub-continent and the Sinhalese sovereignty. The buffer has been disturbed in the colonial times.

The historical remedy of having an Eezham Tamil nation as a buffer needs to be seriously considered by India, the Sinhalese and the International Community to avert a dangerous security situation in the south and to the benefit of everyone.

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