DMK chief lists out multifaceted structural genocide beginning from toponyms

[TamilNet, Sunday, 20 January 2013, 16:14 GMT]
The DMK chief Mr. M. Karunanidhi, in a letter dated 19 January sent to the Indian Prime Minister, has drawn his attention to Sri Lanka “carrying out an intensive and systematic programme of erasing the Tamil language, culture, religion and diluting the concentration of Tamils in areas where they had historically been predominant.” Beginning from the renaming of Tamil villages, the letter listed out the various facets of the structural genocide committed on Eezham Tamils by the Sinhala State. Citing India’s moral obligation to stop this atrocity immediately, Mr. Karunanidhi requested suitable action.

Beginning from the renaming of Tamil villages, the DMK chief’s letter listed out the redrawing of village, district and town boundaries; demolition of Hindu temples; non-allocation of funds to resettle and rehabilitate internally displaced Tamil families, schools, hospitals and other infrastructure; promoting Sinhala settlements on Tamil land and Sinhala takeover of the economic life of Tamil areas, and the deployment of the SL army camps.

There are many more tactics employed by the Sinhala government, the letter said.

Annexing a list of villages, Mr. Karunanidhi said that 89 Tamil villages have been renamed into Sinhala and 367 Hindu temples have been demolished.

In the Mullaith-theevu district alone there are 148 mini and 13 major SL military camps, the letter said.

Even while Mr. Karunanidhi was writing on Mullaith-theevu, a water-surrounded place (theevu) that gained its name from a shrub called Mullai in Tamil (an edible green peculiar to the North and not jasmine), the Sinhala media, the English media run by the Sinhalese, SL official records and other sources in the South have already started writing the name as Muladiva or Mulativu, and in their ‘interpretation’ it is a Sinhala name meaning the corner island.

Ironically they are ignorant that even the word Mulla (corner) in Sinhala, a cognate of Moolai in Tamil, is a word of Dravidian etymology (DED 5044). Such is the paranoia that commits the multifaceted genocide on Eezham Tamils, and neither ‘reconciliation’ nor ‘reaching out’ could cure it, commented Tamil activists in the island.

The list of 89 is only a small fraction. There are several hundreds if the Eastern Province in full and the North Western Province were taken into account, the activists said.

The toponymic genocide that gives the final touch to all the other facets of structural genocide was going on for the last several decades. But, appearing only in the Suthanthiran Weekly of the Federal Party in the 60s and 70s, only the Eezham Tamils read it and helplessly sulked about it. Now it is happening in a hitherto unprecedented way and speed, Tamil activists in the island said.

Good that Mr. Karunanidhi now internationally registers the issue by writing to the Indian Prime Minister. It will answer to some international groups who ask Tamils to prove the genocide and the on-going genocide. In fact they can even learn from the Sinhala State the art of conducting genocide for decades, hoodwinking an entire world, the Tamil activists in the island further said.