Trevor Grant, veteran Australian friend of Eezham Tamils, passes away at 65

[TamilNet, Monday, 06 March 2017, 23:15 GMT]
Australian journalist and an advocate for Tamils rights, Trevor Grant, who has also written widely on SL State’s genocide against Eezham Tamils and on the complicity of the Western governments in the genocide, has passed away on Monday at the age of 65 after a courageous battle with cancer for 18 months. “As a sports journalist for 40 years, he took the mission of speaking truth to power more to heart than any of his kind,” wrote Greg Baum, the chief sports columnist and associate editor of The Age paying tribute to him in a memorial piece in the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday. In 2014, he authored a book titled Sri Lanka's Secrets – How the Rajapaksa regime gets away with Murder.

“Eelam Tamil youths should study his work on the Eelam Tamil cause and take inspiration from it,” said Dr. N. Malathy a key member of North-East Secretariat on Human Rights (NESoHR) and the author of ‘A Fleeting Moment in My Country.

In his book, Trevor exposed how foreign powers tilted the balance in favour of the Sri Lankan State. He also exposed in detail the level of complicity that Australia has in legitimizing ‘Sri Lanka’.

“There is always one thing that despots forget as they go about their business of murder and terror. You can kill thousands of people, but you can never kill the human spirit,” he wrote in the book.

In an interview to TamilNet in November 2015, Grant said: “The UN charter on genocide makes it perfectly clear that complicity in a genocide makes you just as guilty as if you perpetrated the genocide. So Australia, the UK, the US and all the other countries who have supported the Sinhalese governments over the years are as guilty of genocide as Rajapaksa, Sirisena and their predecessors.”

Living in an English Speaking western country and mostly working as a cricket commentator during his younger days, his full understanding of the Eelam Tamil cause and becoming a passionate activist for the same is a very rare thing indeed, says Dr Malathy who is based in New Zealand.

“When I met him the second time in November 2016, it was more than year since he was diagnosed with cancer. With a cushion under his arm to manage pain, he still discussed passionately about what is to be done. Here was a man who was sure of the meaning of human life in a world that tries to convert human lives into mere consumers,” Malathy told TamilNet.

In his memorial piece, Sports Columnist Greg Baum writes: “Grant accepted that he was dying, saying it comes to everyone, but to him sooner rather than later, and so until the end he displayed astonishing equanimity about it. That did not mean that was any easier for him than anyone else. It just meant that he approached dying the same way he approached living, with all the courage he had.”

Trever Grant leaves behind a son and a daughter.

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